proof of run

Frankfurt's Theory on Bullshit: In his most famous essay (https://www.math.mcgill.ca/rags/JAC/124/bs.html) Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosopher who passed away last year, picked as a central theme the topic of… bullshit. I’m finding this topic highly compelling, because 1) I, too believe that we’re surrounded by an all-time-high pile of bullshit and 2) we’re not as conscious of this as we ought to be. In theorizing on the characteristics of bullshit and why it has become so prevalent in our society, Frankfurt starts by quoting a poem from H.W. Longfellow (and apparently a favorite of Wittgenstein’s): "In the elder days of art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere." In other words, craftsmen did not used to cut corners, things used to be of a certain quality, not just on the surface. Today it’s corners cut galore. Bullshit, Frankfurt goes on to postulate, is a result of mindlessness. Our culture has become indifferent to producing and speaking truthfully. One might theorize that this is because being truthful has become disincentivized by our social and economic dynamic: “[…] the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.” I highly recommend the full essay, but to keep things short I will say this: We should all ponder that the proverbial gods, though they’ve been in hiding, might just be everywhere after all. That bullshit, when all is said and done, is met with a steep price. And that we may be entering a phase of human history where the discipline of correctness once again pays off.

I’m pretty certain all my semi-convinced no-coiner friends are ready to ape in at 100k

As Bitcoin jumps above its previous all-time-high, I think we should all expect significant government intervention pretty quickly. The signal from Bitcoin going to 100k is just too great for them to further ignore it and view it as a severe risk.

short squeeze incoming

A Process of Elimination A while ago I wrote a post about the “Paradoxical benefits of subtraction”. I recently came across a quote by Tom Myers that applies this principle to movement and the body: “I remain unsure to this day as to whether we can truly ‘add’ anything to a person. It’s debatable. We add information, we add sensation, we encourage experimentation in movement, but in fact the best structural bodywork is more of a process of elimination — a taking away of the tensions and holding that have been imposed by their accidents, traumas, training, and the heroes they emulated. We don’t want to ‘impose’ good posture on top of that accumulation of compensations but rather progressively decompensate them to ‘expose’ the essential individual within.” This perfectly summarizes my own experience of my body. I used to hold a lot of tension, making me feel highly inadequate in the first few Yoga classes I joined. Initially I thought that I had to add an understanding of postures or new movements to make my body more pliable. Of course, the opposite was the case: It has been all about dropping tension and holding patterns through various practices. Today I still hold plenty of tension, but my body is infinitely more capable and flexible. The reason this can be a a slow and difficult process, even after becoming conscious of this principle, is that we have to work against decades of habits and compensations. It’s worth every second.

Psychosomatic Inquiry: Everything we carry in our mind or broader experience is a reflection of some part of our body, we just may be unable to discern it. Becoming increasingly conscious of this psychosomatic connection is a powerful way to resolve resistance or obstacles we encounter. Once, at a meditation retreat with Peter Ralston, I told him that I was struggling with physical tension in my body and that this was preventing me from making progress during my meditation. He laughed, paused for a moment and then said: “Your body is your mind. They’re not separate”. While I had been convinced that my body was getting in the way of my mediation, the signals from my body or my resistance to them WERE indeed the meditation. Conversely, seemingly psychological experiences are also experiences of the body, an insight best captured in Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book “The Body Keeps the Score”. One extraordinary therapist I recently reconnected with expressed this principle while he was studying my back: “Our front is what we show to the world. Our back betrays what the world has done to us”.

There is tremendous benefit in being with a teacher, therapist or coach in person. This is easily forgotten when we have grown accustomed to the comfort of connecting online. Being in person is beneficial because it facilitates an energetic transmission between teacher and student. It allows us to realize that our teacher is made of the same “stuff” as we are and consequently that whatever they are doing and whatever insight they have is accessible to us as well.

Many of my posts make references to “people” or “society” usually referring to some of the detrimental habits of life and thought we have grown accustomed to. This publication undoubtedly is contrarian but it is not misanthropic: It’s not out of a disdain for people that I write in this manner, it’s to highlight that I am convinced without the shadow of a doubt that the West is on a deeply troubled path. But more importantly, what I want to point at is that believing in something better is not utopian, it’s realistic and the path there is completely accessible, even natural. In fact, there seems to be a hierarchy of possibilities to be unlocked, for humanity to transcend its current trajectory: 1)Money — I debated whether money or consciousness should be in first place but I came to the conclusion that the former, in our current situation is even more important. The average person is not able to tap into greater consciousness while living in the current exploitative monetary system, which is causing significant economic and political distress. This is the reason why I view the introduction of sound money as humanity’s most urgent technological project, even before AI. 2) Consciousness — Once humanity is able to afford to live in more humane conditions (and yes, unfortunately this is referring increasingly to people in the West), the second most important project is stepping into a non-dualistic world-view. Descartes gave the West a great tool to accrue power, but his thinking also threw us into depression and anxiety. The movement toward Eastern practices of non-dualism has already begun but needs to be accelerated and broadened. 3) Health — I suspect that this third most important element of the next stage of human development will take care of itself as 1) and 2) are addressed. However, it’s worth calling out here, again, that our current view of human health is in a dead-end. What we need to embrace is a new paradigm of individual responsibility, holistic and preventative healthcare. In other words, when you read these posts, my hope is that they can primarily feel aspirational, rather than judgmental.

I’m not a Christian but appreciating the Easter posts today

Is it correct that @primal doesn’t have bookmarks?

nostring from a plane right now… feels good

Burnout and Freediving In freediving a shallow water blackout is when you almost complete your dive, but as you approach the surface, you run out of oxygen (hypoxia) and lose consciousness. One of the dangerous paradoxes about the sport is that, at depth the diver actually feels sufficiently oxygenated but as he approaches the surface this oxygenation proves to be partly illusory. The reason for this is that the diver’s lungs compress upon descent, the partial pressure of oxygen increases and hence there is a feeling of sufficiency. Upon ascending, the lungs expand and there is suddenly a much lower partial pressure of oxygen to go around. I think there is an interesting inverse parallel to the increasingly more common phenomenon of burnout at work: Working hard and ascending the career ladder can be highly compelling. In fact, the higher we go, the more we can feel like what we’re doing is satisfying and meaningful. But as our energy is depleted and we sober up, we come to realize that what we were doing was not nearly as meaningful as we thought and that we’ve been running on fumes for way too long. Our body collapses and insists that we fuel up on energy before proceeding in any way, shape or form. The only way to avoid this risk of burnout, it seems, is by finding work that is deeply aligned with our being and therefore practically effortless.

Almost every optimal state in matters of human affairs is characterized by balance. Balance of new and tried-and-true. Balance of stress and relaxation. Balance of haste and slowness. Balance of order and chaos. Balance of discipline and creativity. Therefore, in any debate or argument, you can recognize a bad take by its one-sidedness.

The danger of quick fixes in human health: The way our society has learned to approach health is through quick fixes. There’s a simple and logical reason for this: Quick fixes generally alleviate the immediate symptoms a person is struggling with. And our healthcare system is primarily incentivized to alleviate symptoms. Future consequences are exponentially less relevant to a pharmaceutical company or a doctor. This is because we simply have a very poor understanding of long term cause and effect in the human body. As an example, it’s just very hard to know what unique combination of genetics and external stressors have caused cancer in an individual. If you build a house and the house collapses 10 years later, it’s still relatively easy to investigate who the culprit was and to hold them accountable. This level of accountability is difficult with a complex system like the human body and exponentially more so the further in the future the consequences. Whether consciously or not, our system has internalized this principle. Doctors simply do not have the time to really worry about the holistic health of their patients, they are incentivized to see as many patients as possible, relieve their symptoms and not kill them in the short term. And they do not have time to question whatever new treatment science funded by big pharma has most recently been recommended to them. In brief: Your wish to live a long and healthy life is not aligned with the incentives of the system. Awareness of this problem is the first step towards a solution.

The only way… everything else is hot air View quoted note →

Hot Chocolate Cocoa has been hot recently: prices have already more than doubled since the beginning of 2024 (up 250% in the last year), making the metric tonne more expensive than copper. As a chocolate gourmet, my initial reaction is concern, nay outright worry that I may get priced out of the volume of dark chocolate required for my daily fix. The main reasons for the rally are 1) crop shortfalls in Western Africa, the most important cocoa producing region in the world and, 2) the fact that cocoa is not a plantation business, meaning a significant portion of the supply stems from unsophisticated individual farmers, who get hit particularly hard by less than ideal weather conditions. What to make of it beyond bittersweet dark chocolate? While the above conditions may be relatively unique to cocoa, we seem to be in the segment of the economic cycle where commodities prices, which have long stagnated (or at least not benefited from asset price inflation to the same degree), are poised to go higher, simply because demand remains very strong. This means that inflation is very likely here to stay and this decade may see echoes of the highly inflationary 1970s.

The magic between inbreath and outbreath A couple of years ago my brother and I visited Maui and decided to seize the opportunity to try out freediving. I had been drawn to the sport for a while, due to its natural synergies with meditation and my love for the ocean. Even during the first few dry exercises under Lahaina’s Banyan tree, I felt I had hit gold. Working through our instructor’s exercises almost immediately allowed us to hold our breath for much longer than we had previously thought possible. The real magic of freediving, however, occurred to us when we jumped in the water a short boat ride offshore, surrounded by nothing but blue and a few errant fish. On the first day I was able to go down to 20m (65ft), a depth I thought would be much more elusive. However, the maximum depth, while important, quickly becomes secondary once you get into freediving. What feels much more important is the peace to be experienced between inbreath and outbreath, suspended at neutral or negative buoyancy, sounds subdued, body relaxed, thoughts on pause. There’s a reason some meditation traditions prompt you to familiarize yourself with that gap between breaths. Extending it through relaxation, rather than brute force, opens up a whole new world of play.

Feeling embodied: I used to live in my head, I didn’t know another way. Living outside of it can still be intimidating, but I am now increasingly familiar with an embodied experience of life. So much so that I feel a lack when I’m back to my (over)thinking ways. One way this still happens is on long-haul flights. There is something naturally ungrounding about being in the air and airplanes add to this through other artificial factors: highly processed or preserved food, bad air quality and visual entertainment overkill. I can feel my energy creep up into my head during the course of a flight. Getting back to ground can take days. Yoga, breathing exercises and good food are some of the easiest ways to put down roots again. Increasingly though, I’m looking not just for remedies after the fact, but for ways to stay here independent of obstacles thrown at me.

Everyone should just recognize that libertarianism is the only reasonable form of politics. It’s ok to be left or right of center, but at least recognize that you’re there not because you’re right, but because you care primarily about yourself.