one wolf, got those evil feelings, that's what I said now; other wolf, gonna bring you healing, ain't in your head now

"Two Wolves"

(summary to save you a click and because links die: "grandson, there are two wolves inside each of us, one good one and one evil one, fighting forever." "which one wins, grandpa?" "the one you feed.") - when I first heard this story I dunno 20 years ago it felt trite, like "yeah ok there is good and bad, whatever." If it came up ~10 years ago, it'd feel impossible - like, you don't get to feed one or the other wolf; life just happens, and I hope you get lucky that the good wolf gets fed.

To me the wolves feel not like good and evil (because what are "good" and "evil" anyway, etc etc etc) but like hope and hopelessness. It's really easy to see the universe as a cold uncaring (cosmicismic?) place. If life is pretty pleasant for you, then fine; if not, well... you can try to have a "meaningful" life. But there's no god, which presents a problem; if you're really good at compartmentalizing, maybe you can live a happy life by convincing yourself that there is a god. (But what a heck of a compartmentalization! Wow! Staring into just infinite unimaginable darkness, just madness-inducing complexity and horror of the universe, and being like "that one's going in The Vault." Props, I guess, if you can do that!)

Sometimes, though, occasionally, maybe twice in recent memory, it felt like "hmm, maybe there's something pretty decent underneath all this; maybe we're not wired to be miserable after all."

 

I was a little hung up on "but, hope or hopelessness, which of these is truuuuue???" until someone pointed out, eh, probably neither, probably it depends on which wolf you feed. Today, it feels like, sometimes, I have a chance to choose to feed a wolf. Sometimes!

Related: on playing life on the easiest difficulty level

(save you a click: "being a straight white male is like playing life on the easiest difficulty level.") I heartily believe this! Especially when you add in also "able-bodied, reasonably wealthy, mostly neurotypical, cisgender, not very old or very young, living in the rich parts of the US, married, just happened to be interested in computers which means I'll always have a cushy office job, reasonable multigenerational wealth and privilege, etc etc." The trick my mind pulls, though, is to then say "therefore, because I'm not curing cancer, and because I feel bad a lot, I'm kind of a shit." Like, "some people are able to enjoy life even on very hard difficulty levels - I must be just terribly weak and selfish if I'm suffering on the easy levels!"

I know I'm tying my mind into knots and just making things worse; shooting a second arrow at myself, if you will. I know the answer to this is "nobody's judging you based on your life's difficulty level; it just doesn't work like that." But my mind goes: "why not?" Why doesn't it work like that? How do I get to say "I'm a decent human, even if I'm grumpy or worried or sad a lot, on difficulty level 1?"

 

I don't know, but I'm trying it out. Trying to feel out, "what if it's ok that I'm on difficulty level 1 and haven't yet cured cancer?" Sometimes it feels all right. Again, sometimes. Baby steps, here!

"Reasons to dislike reasons"

This essay pulls together so many things that I like. I'm falling back to "hmm, X feels right" a lot. (with a probably-overdeveloped sense of ways that "feeling right" can steer me wrong, don't worry!) It feels like being able to trust your feelings is part of a happy life.

also, lol

"When you browse instagram and find former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott's passport number" - I wish everything about security were written this way.

"becoming the person" vs "learning to do the thing"

At my job, performing in real time doesn't matter. I'm trying to build/do something, but it's slow and the product matters, not the performance. It's like being an author: John Grisham could be a shlubby awful incoherent dude in person, but as long as he cranks out the books, he gets paid. At the other end of the spectrum, for performers or athletes, each minute matters. We don't know what Mick Jagger or Michael Phelps do in their spare time usually, but they don't have to be creating something. They could sit around twiddling their thumbs for hours; as long as they are amazingly perfect for a few minutes, that's good enough.

Of course, performers and athletes don't twiddle their thumbs in their "off time", they practice. But they're practicing not so that they can "remember how to do something cool", they're practicing so that they are a certain person when they get on stage.

Been thinking about the gom jabbar test. (Lynch version) Isn't that the same thing? You've been training your whole life for this instant, to see if you can withstand the pain enough. There's not really any strategy you can think about to pass it, you just have to be the person who passes it.

Another way you could put this distinction is, "do you think about it cognitively, or just do it?" Like, I bet Stephen King thinks about how he's writing a lot, but I doubt LeBron is thinking much during a play. (Maybe there's some cogitating while setting up the play, but you've kinda got to just do it.) So, it's "does this thing live in System 1 or System 2", ok. But I think while talking about System 1/2 we get hung up on "how does my brain do the task", and sometimes thinking about it as "I'm becoming the person who ____" helps.

For example, confidence. Like when you're dating, say, and you're real nervous, and that's just not going to go well. But you can't really fake your way to "being confident"; you have to become the person who is confident. Likewise, a friend recently suggested, when you're presenting a big report, it may be important to have been very thorough and tracked down all the edge cases, not so that they can be in your presentation, but so that you are now confident about what you're saying.

(This line of thinking can go wrong a few ways: 1. "I just failed at X; must mean I'm just not a good enough person." 2. motivational speeches about transforming yourself or whatever. 3. being just a debate over minutia.)

other things

this overview of how GAN artist Helena Sarin works

"I had an idea"

places to buy mp3s (besides Bandcamp, which rules but doesn't have everything, or Amazon, which is Bad)

Graeber, AirSpace, MicroCovids, Rilke

David Graeber

This toot by Darius Kazemi - links to this book (which I haven't read) and these essays on flying cars and bullshit jobs (which I have read). I didn't recognize his name when he recently died, but he's indirectly had a decent-sized effect on me! Bullshit Jobs, especially, is such an important and well-written wake-up call. You can argue back (and indeed I do; mostly because it's easy to say a job is bullshit from the outside, and I think he's a little pessimistic about what percent of jobs are bullshit) but you probably can't shake the feeling that, at some level, he's probably right.

(Next question: what percent of Silicon Valley is bullshit? And how high up the ladder of abstraction do you have to go? Say your job is very effective at helping your company make money, but your company doesn't actually help anyone; can we still call all them bullshit?)

AirSpace

(y'know, how every coffee shop looks the same, every airbnb has the same ikea furniture, and every song on spotify sounds the same)

Ironic how my generation rages against AirSpace 1.0 (an Applebee's, Dave & Buster's, and Cheesecake Factory in every town, so you can travel around the US but still only eat colossal plates full of chicken parmesan) but then creates AirSpace 2.0. Further impetus for my future coffee shop to be more Fiery Furnaces/Midnight Gospel/Room of Requirement and less Apple/Everlane/Ritual Valencia.

MicroCovids

Like Micromorts, but for your chance of catching covid, not dying. I think I'd be ok with a 1% chance of catching it over the next year - which is to say I can have 10k Microcovids, which means 200/week. This means flying in a plane is 1.5 weeks' worth of risk; my d&d group eats up half my risk for a week; etc. The d&d group could go down from 100 to 50 if we sit 6ft apart, or 30 if we mask! Hmm. This is getting closer to "actually helping me make decisions."

Rilke quote

I heard some quote from him (maybe in this podcast ep?). A student asked him "how do you become a poet?" Rilke answered something like "if you can live your life otherwise, do so. If you absolutely have to, then be a poet." The more I see myself hitting mid 30s and not becoming a monk or Nat Geo photographer or Nobel winner, this is almost comforting. "Those people" are singularly driven (for some reason that's a combo of nature and nurture). Not to be judgmental - I'm not better than them for being not-pathologically-driven - but maybe for my own sanity I can start to put more achievements in the "NBA player" category: not gonna happen for me and that's ok.

This isn't new; "being ok with not winning a Nobel Prize" has been a theme for me ever since I realized that might not happen (college, I think?). But it's been coming up a little differently recently. Now I'm asking: do I care about being known in my field? (and what is my field?) Like, not even "respected professor" but maybe just "guy who gives conference talks or something." Do I even want that? If so, how do I get there? If not, how do I deal with the bad feelings that come up with accepting that?

some places you can donate money to, to avoid fascism

this was a slow thread on twitter but I think it's worth unrolling into a blog.

I want the good guys win this election. (it's more clear than it's ever been; I'm not against conservatives, but the entire Republican party has shown itself to be spineless, fascist, and corrupt to the core.) However, I am super low on emotional energy (pretty low on all kinds of energy) these days. I have some money. I can donate that money. Fine. But how much and where to?

How much?

I have no idea. It feels kind of sane to pick a number and then disperse all that, instead of trying to evaluate each thing on a case by case basis. I picked about 1 paycheck's worth. I don't know if I should do more; it feels ok enough though.

Where to?

Well, I could just give to Biden, say, and hope that the Biden org is the best at turning out voters. But I don't imagine they are, and I imagine they have plenty of money. I think that small races are better at turning out people, and then those people will just incidentally vote for Biden too. Plus, diversification of risk - if I give to 15 different races then it's not like all my money will be wasted, even if one race does badly for whatever reason.

Who should I look to to tell me where to give to?

Again, I think let's pick from a few people to diversify risk. If person A has some strategy to pick the best house races but they turn out to be wrong, I don't want all my money to go to waste.

So I came up with the following sources:

Preet Bharara's Housework 2020

Pinboard/Maciej Ceglowski's Great Slate and State Slate

Give Smart by the Future Now Fund and Data for Progress

Swing Left

Sister District

And a couple one off things, I'm not perfect. When given a bunch of equally good seeming candidates (as in Housework) I erred on the side of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina (swing states + personal connections), and I think Michigan and Arizona (swing states and a couple races going on).

List of Links

- Great Slate (US congress) 10%

- State Slate (state houses) 10%

- Swing Left Ohio fund - 10%

- Swing Left PA fund - 10%

- The Give Smart Slate - state house/senates - 10%

- Julie Slomski (PA state senate) - 5%

- Ricky Hurtado (NC state house) - 5%

- Sydney Batch (NC state house) - 5%

- Jackie Grimes (WY state senate) - 5%

- Elissa Slotkin (US congress, MI) - 5%

- Carolyn Bourdeaux (US congress, GA) - 5%

- Hiral Tipirneni (US congress, AZ) 5%

- Pam Keith (US congress, FL) 5%

- Eugene DePasquale (US congress, PA) - 5%

- the pro-housing SF supervisors - 5% (1% each)

 

anyway go give some money now; it doesn't help if you wait till November.

 

post script: Biden too

I realize as I talk about "diversifying risk" I should have diversified across "maybe the best impact is with the biggest richest org." Like, I can see that story too: Biden campaign and their Big Money are more poised to, like, buy a ton of facebook ads in a smart way or something. So I gave 10% to them too, which brings it to 110%, which is unsatisfying mathematically but feels good.