March-May ‘23
Hello loves,
I’m writing this from Asheville North Carolina in the early morning.
The birds are chirping. The trees are greener than yesterday. I am breathing deeply. & something is stirring within me.
I wish a pleasant moment for you as you scan over these words.
I am doing well.
Where I’ve been:
SLC & Park City UT
Ithaca, Brooklyn, & Manhattan NY
Lake Tahoe, Santa Clara/San Jose, Santa Cruz, & Big Sur CA
Portland OR
Santa Fe NM
Costa Rica
Lima & Cusco Peru
Asheville NC
Loads of random places for 1-night car camp moments.
Growing up and going mad.
I feel like I’ve learned more about the world in the last three months than I have in the last five years (likely untrue, but the feeling is there).
Journals full of thoughts, ideas, and stories. Morning entries read like melodrama, love and war, it’s quite fun.
I’m stepping into myself I think, becoming a more honest man, living from my roots without desire to display or hide. A quiet authenticity. It’s nice, and probably illusion.
I meet interesting characters while roaming. Last night, 20 minutes into a meditation on a dock, I was approached (thought I was getting mugged) by a new friend named Fritz who lives in a bush. We passionately discussed Greca numerals and how to properly pronounce e. coli. This sort of thing happens often and textures life. Through some availability cascade, it frees me to express honestly.
I like crazy people. Serious people with unorthodox thinking that care deeply about something, anything, and then actually live out their ideas.
Something’s in the air these days, a pressure to not take anything seriously. It’s cringe to be serious, you’re a simp if romantic, try-hard if ambitious. Remain blase at all costs. The greatest sin is to set high standards for oneself and publicly, passionately strive toward greatness. Idealism has been suffocated.
The private life has been sacrificed to the public life. Internet generations are growing up in such a hall of mirrors, many don’t know how to relate to themselves and can only parse their identities socially. Performance sensitivity and irony poisoning emerge as . Anything but being direct and serious about how you feel.
Deep down we all have these beasts of emotion roaring to escape and be expressed! That’s no secret. And the best answer our culture provides is therapy and SSRIs, new powerful American industries ($300B and $21B by 2030 respectively). While I’m in therapy and my thoughts on SSRIs are inconclusive as of now (worthwhile reads), the incentives are suspicious to me.
When in image-building/curation mode, you become a caricature of yourself. You can only be loved as much as you’re willing to be seen. Images can’t receive love, only praise. The manufacturing of self bankrupts the producer and culture becomes a kaleidoscope of Proteus and Hawthorne effects. We lose ourselves.
I think that’s why I feel more at home with Fritz on a dock yelling obnoxiously about waterfront condos at the sky than with people my age virtue LARPing and playing cynic. One feels honest.
Cultural assimilation is the downhill path unfortunately, the gradient descent. The default setting is reverse, the gas must be pressed to even remain neutral.
In a culture that homogenizes (albeit indirect) disconnection, loneliness becomes the tyrant ruler.
Quick facts on loneliness:
Causes increase in high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease probability, risk of type 2 diabetes, likelihood of dementia, and overall mortality rate.
Providing lonely people access to more potential friends doesn’t fix or help loneliness, it’s cultural. Study.
Lonely people stand further away from strangers, trust people less, and dislike physical touch.
The default mode network (background chatter) becomes more active with lonely people. Study. See also: ADHD over-prescriptions in the US.
The orbitofrontal cortex gets smaller, the part of the brain associated with processing rewards. Study. See also: teens are more depressed these days.
Socialized people have bigger brains.
Lonely, elderly people have atrophy in their thalamus (processing emotions) and hippocampus (memory). Study.
People who trust each other mirror each others’ behaviors and reactions. Lonely people struggle to do this. Mirroring is how we recognize others as ourselves. There are some force multipliers buried here. See also: social anxiety at all time highs.
Hug a loved one today! Connect with someone new and attempt to make them feel seen! Celebrate the day with a good action, as Tolstoy would say.
Connecting with those around you literally heals the world. Many of you who read this list are warm, hospitable individuals - thank you for your heart.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
I’m too eager to be caught up in the insane where the questions asked challenge the edges of the ruliad and the wisdom of crowds dissipates. To care about things without justification and care about them deeply.
The nervous system is a canvas after all. You can train yourself to care about anything. You can train to find beauty and meaning everywhere in your life. The catch is you must practice caring about something for a long time. Both the sacred and profane are empty when mere concepts. You need to co-construct them in your daily life.
Thich Nhat Hanh, channeling Brother Lawrence, once told a Western student to wash the dishes as if each of them were the Baby Jesus.
“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”
Frame control.
Accurately perceiving the frame through which you see the world and operating within the frame are two completely different muscles.
I’ve spent much of my life focused almost entirely on the latter, these last months have been dedicated to seeing the frame.
I relate to both the elephant and the blind men.
While writing I’m feeling that it’s too early to put many of my thoughts into words on this topic. Winding down..
One thing that is clear is systemic truths and operating truths must be teased apart to have the clarity to live my day well and the vision to live my life well.
Grass between my toes and flowers in my hair.
Going from Salt Lake City (cold, icy), to New York (slightly less cold, early buds of spring), eventually to the bay area (in the midst of a superbloom) was a delight. Anticipation and desire for green and colors peaked in me then was so deeply fulfilled.
Happy summer everyone! May it make way for your courageous, loving presence.
Accelerationism.
aka - the rate of change compounds. Things change faster.
Words that end in ism are ugly to me. That’s what culture wars do to ya I guess.
Here are the main trends I’m seeing:
De-dollarization is gaining traction (too many sources to cite here).
Artificial super intelligence is inevitable.
Some other stuff for those of us in the US -
The US’s representative democracy (really an aristocracy imo) continues to follow the anacyclosian cycle into oligarchy.
The media has acknowledged the emperor has no clothes, proving the anti-scientific nature of the pro-science authoritarian schema. (covid lab leak is validated, lockdowns didn’t actually help, school closures were harmful, vax mandates were net harmful for those under 30, yada yada - stuff most of us knew but weren’t allowed to say, even the experts).
A reminder - things have never been better for humans - and so help me god will continue to get better.
Humans are more educated than ever (resulting in higher literacy)
The anarcho-nihilistic, anti-establishment thinking of our era is product of a generation inheriting the wealthiest empire in history in its wealthiest of times.
Rapid fire thoughts:
Everyone you meet has a quest for you.
Being 10x better is rarely 10x harder.
Beliefs are placebos.
Believe in the ignorance of experts.
All things are concealed in all.
The differences among races, genders, other demographics are greater than the differences between them.
What goes up actually doesn’t need to come down if it reaches escape velocity. I’m talking about how things change.
It is wise to be joyful,
If you have to cheat on your lifestyle to have fun, you haven’t thought enough about what you want.
You need to be able to perform even when there is no purpose.
The soft requires the rough to become itself.
“Seek to learn constantly while you live; don’t wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.”
“A wise man always finds some support for himself in everything, because his gift is obtaining goodness from everything.”
For most people it is more important to feel good about the decisions that they are making than it is to make wise decisions.
All really great things are happening in slow inconspicuous ways.
Waves at Matsushima by Ogata Korin (who passed away on this day in 1716)
Joe
Oh duh I should probably give life updates:
I’ve really dialed in my nutrition. I love farmer’s markets.
I’m running more, still trudging toward that marathon objective.
Work is good. We broke stock market records and are the most productive company in human history on a market cap / employee ratio basis. My team of 8 disrupted a $34B company this month, cool moment for us.
I’ll be in Montana from July - Sept. Come hang.
I really am enjoying this lifestyle and have made meaningful relationships in each place I’ve gone.
I worked from NVIDIA’s headquarters for a while, great experience. Silicon Valley via AI is again revolutionizing the way humans work, play, and interact. Fascinating to soak up the thoughts and intentions of the people behind the scenes.
here are some photos from recent -
