the snail shell on Dan Tasse dot com

I'm Right and I'm Mad

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:22:22 -0400

There’s a voice I’m noticing more and more, in myself, that I’m calling “I’m Right and I’m Mad.” It shows up all the time.

(obv not the same phrasing but a similar feeling.) Here’s what this voice says:

We’re suffering. (“we” meaning, me and all the little parts of me, I guess)
I know a way out of suffering.
Everyone should just listen to me and then we wouldn’t be suffering.
Because everyone didn’t listen to me, all this isn’t my fault.¹

Here are some simple ways it shows up, past and present:

my dad asks me to help with yard work. I feel obligated. I hate it. “we just shouldn’t be doing all this landscaping! if we didn’t have all this dumb ornamental stuff, we wouldn’t have to do any work! It’s not my fault!”
I’m playing baseball. I strike out at a key moment and I feel like I’ve let everyone down and it’s terrible. “This was a dumb idea, I don’t even want to play competitive sports, I should just quit and then I won’t suffer like this.”
we have to pay for unexpected car repairs. “This is dumb; I never even wanted to have a car. Not my fault.”
we go to the beach and sand gets everywhere. “I didn’t even want to go to the beach. Not my fault.”

A couple interesting points:

Why do I care if things are my fault?
This voice doesn’t actually have an answer for everything. E.g. “Just don’t have a car”?? with small kids in a small US city? That would make the bills a little easier and so much of life so much harder!
It might actually be worse for me to distance myself from things that happen in life.

alignment

I think about work being more or less “aligned” sometimes. Aligned with what? I don’t know, aligned with you. Aligned with what you like, want, love, care about, how you want to be, your visions, your dreams. Very aligned: a doctor who likes figuring out tricky medical cases and loves seeing people get healthier. Not aligned: a doctor who’s doing it because their parents said they should, and now they want to get rich enough to keep up with the Joneses. This is not a brilliant insight here.

But it’s relevant to me now, because the “I’m right and I’m mad” voice is inherently un-aligning. When I work in my garden now, it’s pretty aligned: I like my plants. When I worked with my dad as a kid, it was pretty un-aligned, but then I made it more so by declaring “I want no part of this.” This wasn’t my idea, I would just not have all this landscaping, forget it.

There could be a viewpoint that pushes me towards more alignment with that job: “I’m doing this as a gift for my dad, who I love. And it is nice to see these plants; it’s not a total waste of time.” That would require not pushing away the work, or the suffering; not saying “I wouldn’t set up my life like this so I shouldn’t be responsible for doing the work.”

responsibility

Just always go toward alignment! Easy as that?? Hmm. It is not easy to take a problem that you might push away, and instead make it yours.

I can’t stop thinking about “Resentment is responsibility gone rotten” (despite the therapyspeak; the core idea I mean). One natural conclusion of this whole post could be “I have to take more responsibility for my life.” No, even better: “My life will be easier if I take more responsibility for it.” Easier! What?! But that’s sort of the inevitable conclusion here. If I find myself with a problem, like my dad wanting me to do yard work, and I can transmute it into “I choose to do yard work as a gift to my dad”, I can do more work but suffer less. The feeling might be less of “stuff just happens to me” and more of “on some level, I chose this.”

That is so counterintuitive that I am both rejecting it ferociously AND actually kind of intrigued. It’s so counterintuitive that I haven’t overthought it 100 ways, which means it might actually help.

Now the only hard part is, how to actually do it. In the moment, when I have a new difficulty, how to say “yeah I actually am partially responsible for this and choose to take it on and align myself with it”, not “this sucks and if I had my way I just wouldn’t do it.”

I didn’t try to make this a Four Noble Truths joke, but here we are. I guess instead of “no-self” I just went to “100% self, I’m the best self, I know everything, I should be the king of the world.” I wonder why this makes me sad. ↩︎

Things on My Mind

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:54:38 -0400

I’m sick this weekend, which means paradoxically an easier time than most today, because T is watching our kid. Time to blog

fighting the gods

There’s a movie called the Odyssey, and for once T and I finally saw The Current Movie while it was new in theaters. It’s very good! One bit that stuck with me was when Calypso says “you have to stop fighting the gods if you want to get back home.” As that’s what Odysseus has been doing this whole time. I get it, Odysseus. I want to fight the gods - not out of pride, but anger. How could you all do this to us?

resentment

Resentment as responsibility gone rotten: “resentment comes from taking responsibility for something you shouldn’t, or not taking responsibility for something you should.” Post is about relationships and reality TV no less, but it made me think about: is Odysseus’s (… my?) resentment the same thing?

fully formed emotional product

I was expressing a feeling to someone, and cutting it off partway - something like “oh god things feel awful - well y’know not that awful - I mean it could be much worse” and they were like:

“You know, while you’re expressing a feeling, it doesn’t have to be fully formed. I’m not here to attack you. You can say e.g. ‘I’m the most cursed person to ever exist’, knowing that eventually, you’ll get through it and the fully formed logical thought will be something like ’that was a rough day.’”

People say “you have to feel your feelings or they’ll just lurk and subconsciously control you” and I say “ok, how do you do that??” and I think this is one piece of that “how”. One way you can “feel a feeling” is to express it to someone. And to express a feeling, you have to be willing to express it as it is, not just the fully formed emotional product at the end of the process.

omelas

why? man this is the stuff of Internet Discourse and I’m getting sucked in but I’m allowed because I’m sick.

Omelas, Je T’aime: Of course we can’t think straight about Omelas, because it’s a completely unnatural thought experiment. Would you trade your city for Omelas? Yes: there’s way more than one kid-in-a-hole in any modern city, we should be delighted for the suffering to be so low! No: but we don’t tolerate or condone that, we are always striving for the no-kids-in-holes city. Arghh how do we reconcile these– well, look, we don’t have to, because you can’t pick Omelas. There’s no “suffering kids -> prosperity” machine IRL, Omelas is just a fucked up little trolley problem.

But you all are missing the point! (In my opinion. Of this open-ended story with many points.) The point is “why can’t we even believe in nice things.” Le Guin sets up this utopia and then is like “but you don’t believe me, do you? sigh fine, here’s a suffering kid, do you believe it now?” Why can’t we believe in good things? Relevant SMBC - “By Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.”

(Possible counterpoint: sure we can believe in nice things, but not in the form of a story. We set up stories to have conflict or something. Being Ursula Le Guin and writing “here’s a nice city” is like a metal band with the metal band font and faces painted and dressing like Slipknot, singing “I love you, you love me” - you’re probably not just going to leave it as that.)

(Possible counter-counterpoint: if this is how all our art is, by Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.)

one feelings hack

If you find yourself saying “for the rest of my life”, you can just not.¹ Even if it’s correct, it’s not a thought pattern that is gonna lead you to happiness. I like this because it’s so concrete; those words can be a tripwire. (I have not tried this yet.)

tweet from @visakanv: ime i’ve found that people saying “gonna have to ___ for the rest of my life” is reliably correlated with despondence. and this is a pattern of thought that I’ve seen people learn to relinquish, which led to more presence and joy (even with negative thoughts and feelings!) ↩︎

Number Go Up Races

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:14:43 -0400

Things that seem related:

in art

Representations of Power and Rarity (in games)
(also mentioned in the above) idle games, like universal paperclips - the entire game is just “but what if number got even bigger
Frozen 2 should be rated R - on danger-level “power creep” in movies
Game of Thrones (House of the Dragon) where it feels like every time you turn around there’s actually another still-more-powerful foe. “Ormund Hightower, who we never mentioned until this season, now has a huge army and is infinitely brilliant and will destabilize the new queen’s rule.”

in real life

The world cup final. I don’t really follow soccer but I was kind of expecting the story to end as “and Messi caps off his run as the GOAT by winning a second consecutive world cup and scoring the most goals” etc. I just kind of expected the superlatives to continue.
“hello there the jacobian conjecture is false”¹: I would have expected this to be a triumphant paper published in the Big Math Journal, with articles about how it’s the Biggest Result Ever, but instead it’s a tweet. that includes “hello there” and “thanx.”

It’s hard to keep wonder alive. In anything. So in art we go for exponential numbers, or new colors, or convoluted backstories about how our hero is in real jeopardy from the REAL big bad now. In life… I don’t know, it’s messier². But as things get more exponential, I guess we’ll see this more and more.

tweet from __alpoge__: hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)” ↩︎
no pun intended ↩︎

The Age of Autism is over; the Age of ADHD has begun

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:44:53 -0400

Trigger warning: AI hype and worries. sorry everyone

It’s been about 9 months since I’ve been Claude Coding, and 6 since it’s been my primary mode of coding. That is, “open a terminal, tell Claude what I want to do, let it whirr away for minutes.” In early 2025 I was using Cursor to pretty good effect, writing my PRs and asking it for help on parts of it. And if Cursor was all we got, it’d still be a productivity doubler or more. But Claude Code has made coding qualitatively different. This has given me lots of feelings. In this post, I try to sort them out.

first, my preferences

Here’s what I like about making software:

Puzzle-solving: “I need this part of the app to do x. But that’s tricky; how do I do it and make it fast?”
Creating: wanting a thing, then seeing it exist in the world
Organizing: closing all the tickets, organizing all the files, putting all the bits and bytes exactly where they should go
Learning: how to make new things. Whether it’s about my current project or software in general: “how have these tools, that I’ve been using/importing/depending on, been working all these years?”

personally, this rules

It is so much more fun to work on side projects these days. Side projects always have a balance between A. the excitement of having a thing in the world that you want to exist, and B. the pain having to look up API documentation and all the other grunt work. If A > B, the project happens, but usually B > A and it doesn’t. Nowadays, B is almost zero.

I hacked together Closeness To Things in a small number of hours. Usually it would take me that many hours just to figure out what geocoders exist, try to compare them, realize there is no one best one that fits all my needs, and get frustrated and quit. Claude just implemented four different ones for me! And three routing engines! And maps and UI buttons and all the annoying little bits. The People loved it.¹ I loved it! I have the satisfaction of website out in the world, almost for free!

So, lots more creating joy; that dopamine hit in a day, not a month or year. Puzzle-solving joy has dropped but it wasn’t very high in the first place; when I start a project from scratch, usually the challenges aren’t very interesting. I don’t usually start projects to “improve Traveling Salesman bounds”; usually it’s more like “I wish there was a website that does X.” (Often I will get to an interesting problem, but sometimes all the overhead of setting up tools kills the project before then.

Organizing joy is a mixed bag: LLMs create so much more stuff that it makes me a little twitchy. But they also help me organize it; I recently did some blog migration that went fantastically well and easily. “Find the pictures, put them in this folder, sorted by year, you know, the smart way.” If a task is something I could delegate a high schooler to do, LLMs obviously nail it.

Learning joy also way up. It’s shallower and broader; now I have a sense of the geocoding and routing ecosystem while still not knowing it in detail or being able to implement a geocoder. But that’s something; before this project, I didn’t even have that; without LLMs, I probably would have gotten hung up on the geocoding before ever getting to the routing.

professionally: huh

I think it’s a blessing, but it’s more complicated. Why?

do more business, faster

Imagine you work at Toyota, and your engine supplier ToyEngineCo announces that they’ve created a Double-Good Engine. It’s twice as fast, twice as efficient, twice as everything.² Is your life better?

Not really. Pretty soon ToyEngineCo is going to sell Double-Good engines to Honda and Ford, or else HonEngineCo and ForEngineCo are going to figure the technology out as well. Then you’re in the same race you were last year, but you’re both putting out products that are twice as good. You can’t start working 20 hour weeks just because you’ve got Double-Good Engines. Your stock options probably go up in the short term, but not in the long term, because everyone will have Double-Good Engines.

Not that I’m trying to do less work; just, you’d think 10x-ing your productivity would make you super rich or successful or something. It doesn’t, because everyone else has 10x-ed too! And 10x-ing everything means you have 10x more files, 10x more features, 10x more projects to keep track of. Organizational joy way down.

I think creative joy has gone up, but it’s hard to say, because professional work never ends. We make a data warehouse; now it’s 10x bigger and better than it would have been without LLMs, but we don’t ever see the one we would have made, so it doesn’t feel like we created a “10x bigger” data warehouse, it just feels like we made the thing we wanted to make, in the time we took. Sometimes I do think about past projects and realize that I’m creating an equivalent much faster, so I feel some extra creative joy, though, so that’s some perspective. It’s not as dramatic as personal projects, though.

Claude’s eaten the meat out of the sandwich

The Decide-Execute-Deliver sandwich, from AI as Normal Technology.

Software involves these 3 tasks: deciding what to do, writing the code, and then delivering it (testing, deploying, maintaining). The middle part costs maybe 10% of what it used to. That’s great if you like the Deciding and Delivering parts, and kind of a bummer if you like the Execute parts.

I did like the Execute parts. I liked writing the code. I certainly can do the Deciding and Delivering, but the Executing was the most fun. I didn’t like writing all the code, so I’m glad to miss the bits where you had to look stuff up, but the parts where you were in flow, edit-test-debugging, that was why I got into software engineering. They’re not completely gone, and they’re often more fun (“Claude move it over there, figure out the CSS” instead of doing it myself), but there’s much less of them. Puzzle-solving joy way down.

upskill quickly

Now, when I’m trying to learn a whole new thing, I have the best learning environment: an expert I can ask, ad nauseam! In this job over the last half year-ish I’ve gone from b2c tech and internal apps to b2b data warehouse platform, and there’s no way I could have learned all that as fast as I have without LLMs. So, learning joy way up.

putting numbers on it

“How much I feel these joys” on an arbitrary 1-10 scale:

project	type of joy	pre-LLM	with LLMs	change
personal	puzzle-solving	3	2	-1
personal	creating	3	9	6
personal	organizing	5	6	1
personal	learning	5	9	4
professional	puzzle-solving	7	2	-5
professional	creating	5	8	3
professional	organizing	5	1	-4
professional	learning	4	8	4

I don’t know. The “organizing” hit is real and merging another +3000 PR without thoroughly understanding every bit of code, or pointing an agent at a whole Linear board and saying “let ’er rip” feels scary every day. I feel frazzled by the amount of context switching required by LLM life, and I don’t think we’re ever going back. I wish I had the type of mind that worked well in that kind of “ER doctor” environment.

But I do have more skills, less drudgery and a lot more possibilities, and tbh the time spent programming is probably less frustrating all in all. Problem-solving joy is gone, but creative joy is still there, so I suppose the way to flourish now is to focus on that as much as I can.

link to tweet saying “hey I made a tool if you’re considering moving: Closeness To Things. input the potential home, input all the places you might go to, see where you’ll want to walk and bike, see what that’ll feel like and your average time traveling (green: walk, blue: bike)”. It has 6k likes which is my all time high. ↩︎
I will never stop making car analogies despite knowing very little about cars ↩︎

Why Isn't There a Healthy Tanning Bed?

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:15:58 -0400

Epistemic status: talking with Claude, and some guy’s thread on Twitter.¹

The sun gives you cancer, but also nitric oxide and vitamin D². The benefits of these two probably outweigh the all-cause mortality risks of cancer³, so it’s worth getting regular sun exposure⁴. But in the winter, in most places including where I live, there’s not enough sun.

My claim: we should be able to fix this with Technology, approximately today. Probably with small tweaks on existing tanning beds. Someone please make this business so I can pay you money.

more background

(Remember my epistemic status here)

The sun produces UVA and UVB light. UVA hitting your skin produces nitric oxide, which lowers your blood pressure. But too much UVA causes skin cancer (melanoma, the bad kind) and skin aging. UVB produces vitamin D, but too much causes sunburn and skin cancer (carcinoma and melanoma). UVA is what I care about here, because vitamin D also comes in a pill.⁵

UVA is what’s in many tanning beds. People thought it was safe because it doesn’t burn you much without the UVB, but it turns out it still causes cancer and skin aging. So, still don’t go to a tanning salon.

but why not a better tanning bed?

If some amount of UVA is good, it can’t be the case that tanning beds are unilaterally bad! Claude’s explanation is:

you can’t tell how much UVA you’re getting
the beds are set to produce a tan fast, so you’re probably getting way too much
who knows they might be cheap and give you UVB too

To which I say, skill issue. Make a bed that gives you 20 J/cm^2 of UVA at whatever speed is safe! Include a UV sensor that shuts off when you’re done! Hell, include a SAD lamp with more lux while you’re at it. Franchise in every city in Europe and the top half of the US. I would like to be less sad and have lower blood pressure in the winter.

yeah I feel a little weird about this. But I still feel comfortable posting it. I guess it’s because it’s some combination of “just an idea” and can’t be that far off. I guess I should lose a couple credibility points if this is too far wrong. ↩︎
so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not, ↩︎
and here’s where I quote Some Guy On Twitter. Here’s the thread again. But ok he’s a dermatologist at least and abstract-scanning his papers checks out, idk ↩︎
plus, and more to my interests, it may make you less depressed? theoretically that’s visible light but I don’t know, sun good ↩︎
maybe you, like me, remember vaguely “vitamin D pills don’t work”. I think this intuition came from studies where vitamin D pills don’t improve all cause mortality, but sun exposure does. This is because of (among other things) the nitric oxide from UVA! But vitamin D is still worth getting: it helps your body absorb calcium and build bones, and maybe has some anti-autoimmunity effect. ↩︎

Why Hold On To Pain

Sat, 23 May 2026 21:48:17 -0400

I have two pressing psychological issues recently:

anxiety
holding on to pain

Anxiety is both macro level¹ and micro level. But that’s unsurprising. Holding on to pain is sort of weirder, but I think I recently made a big jump in untangling it.

“Holding on to pain” is what I’m calling it when something bad happens and then I complain about it too much. Complaining happens in real life (if we’ve hung out IRL I have probably complained about parenting; sorry), online (sorry discord friends; I promise I am cycling through multiple venues to get support and yes I’m still complaining this much in our discord; sorry), and internally. Sometimes it’s just one part of me complaining to another part! Sometimes it’s the Innie saying “listen, Outie, you have to remember this! I don’t know why! but you have to!”

This does not seem like a good strategy. It seems designed to, and indeed it does, keep me thinking about whatever painful situation happened and wallowing in a spiral of how I’m such a tragic figure. So why am I doing it?

Simple: it gives me a handicap. If I convince myself and everyone around me that I’m playing life on difficulty level 20, then it’s okay that I’m mostly failing and miserable. If I were on level 1 and still failing, I’d just be embarrassing. If I were on level 1 and unhappy, I’d be ungrateful. But if I’m on level 20 and unhappy, well, of course I am. So: dear self and everyone around me: witness me², life is so hard for me, see I’m on level 20.

But this is dumb, though. First, everyone who cares about me is supporting me regardless of what level I’m on. Second, … it’s kind of pathetic? I mean, some people go through life with all these excuses for why they’re not Better, and some people just don’t bother with all that, and the latter are happier and more successful and more pleasant etc etc. Third, and this is inspired by a realization last weekend³, I don’t need a certificate proving that I’m playing on level 20 to be Good Enough.

So I’m going to cut it out. After a week it’s a little easier to connect to other sources of comfort than “look how hard life is for me” and it feels healthier. Not that I won’t complain, just perhaps more judiciously. We’ll see how it goes.

about, well… [redacted] and [redacted] ↩︎
gif of a War Boy from Mad Max Fury Road saying “witness me” as he sprays his mouth with chrome ↩︎
not like this is the first time in my life I’ve ever realized this, nor will it be the last. we think about “realizations” like you learn it once and then you’re done, like how to do long division, but when they’re about yourself and your feelings I guess you have to keep learning them. Anyway, it’s good to be reminded. ↩︎

An Hour in the Life

Mon, 04 May 2026 21:33:37 -0400

Here’s about 3/4 of the thoughts that go through my head in ~1hr of watching kid N. It is always so hard to write these down. I should have a GoPro so I can write them later. But I didn’t. So here’s what I could scribble or remember:

There’s the ice cream truck. Do we go get the ice cream truck? I guess so, it’s magic and fun. I am still wary of the “every day is a special occasion” that leads to eating sweets every day. Uh but we have to decide so let’s go
Do we run outside without shoes? Well, if we don’t, we’re going to miss it. Fine.
“N, pick out what you want!” He picks a Tweety Bird thing. It’s $4.25. I have exactly $4. I do not know how to say “sorry man, can I just give you $4?” I do not know how to tell N “can you pick something else?” What do I do, what do I do. Luckily the guy says “Just $4 is fine.” Whew.
Coming back inside, my wife wants us to take off our (now dirty) socks. Uh, that’s annoying but ok.
Now we go into the backyard to eat the ice cream and she says “wait, don’t go outside without shoes.” Wait - what? She says “going outside without shoes, then coming back in the house - it’s like wearing your shoes in the house.” I did not realize she thought this and we never discussed it. Um… I see where she’s coming from, but I do not at all want to follow that rule! But we can’t discuss it now; N is covered in ice cream. Uh, shoot, got to politely disengage and discuss it later without conceding.
(what’s actually going on here? I’m surprised she is reacting so strongly. Maybe she just always felt this and we really never discussed it? I don’t know.)
I’m outside with N and he is a mess eating ice cream. Do I get wipes or just let it go. It’s obviously going to be messy. I’ll get wipes.
Ok now… do I wipe his nose/mouth? He’s only 1/3 done. It’s going to get super messy again. I wipe his nose and mouth.
He’s dripping everywhere, do I try to contain it - like “try to drip on the ground, not on the chairs”? Or do I just let it go
Oh no, Tweety bird has gumball eyes. I think. Maybe they’re just candy? Oh shoot then they’d be like a jawbreaker candy, and that’s worse. Oh hell. Wife T is going to be scared/mad. I’m not sure which she would be more scared by. But I think he’ll make it through. He’s starting to eat it. Umm, he’s still chewing. I think it’s gum.
No he’s arguing that it’s not gum. How do I explain gum? Like, “You have to chew it and spit it out” “No I don’t!” uhh yes you do? How much do I fight about this
Ok he’s swallowed one piece of gum. That’s ok? I guess?
Tweety’s other eye is another piece of gum. Do I let him eat it? Do I argue with him? Ok he spit out the gum I guess that’s good.
Oh no he’s got brain freeze and is crying
I tell him, “Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth like this”, nope, he does not understand, ok whatever
God what an unholy mess.
Ok I’m gonna spray your hands with the hose sprayer. Shoot, I need to go turn the hose on. Uh, stay here. He follows me. “I’m gonna help you turn on the hose” uh ok. How do I let you help me turn on the hose? um ok we … both touch the knob and I turn it?
Ok sprayed his hands off. But the sprayer is too strong so I have to be careful, set it on wide spray, and just get his hands with the one side of the wide spray.
He wants to spray. ummmm uhh, ok “Let’s spray the pavement where the ice cream dripped, see there and there?” oh hell he doesn’t get it, umm now what
ooh how about watering the plants. “Hey bud, want to water the plants now?” ahh but shit the sprayer is too strong. If he just points it at a small plant it’ll blow it away. umm so I try to say “hey let’s stand back and kind of widely spray it?” ah geez I gotta get a new sprayer. Another new sprayer. Ugh. Now what do we do
Ahh right we gotta plant this plant. We bought it at the garden center. I had this cute idea that he’d pick out a plant and it’d be his plant. I don’t think he understood. But much like Tweety Bird he picked out a “bellflower.” Well, ok. “Hey bud, want to plant this plant?” He says “Ok I’ll get my bike”. What the hell? You don’t need your bike, that’s just one more complication. But I guess I just let him, :shrug:
ah geez this is going to be hard to let him plant a plant without completely butchering it. I guess I’ll basically do the work, and let him help. I dig a hole.
“Ok, N, hold this while we take the plant out.” Good. “Now put the dirt around it to fill in the hole. Ah, no, not on top of the plant, but around it. Um, no, not like that. Here, I’ll help. We get it done.
He’s riding his bike. For some dumbass reason, I think “Hey, want to try to ride your bike with pedals?” He has never done this, but he is very proficient without pedals, balance-bike style. So I get out the pedals and wrench.
He wants to help with the wrench, uh this is hard. Um, I guess I’ll mostly do it.
Oh God oh no, he’s trying to ride with the pedals and he is so so scared and mad now, shit
He keeps going “I don’t know how” and I’m trying to be encouraging, like “yeah, but that’s ok, this is how you learn!” He is not processing that. Ok let’s bail, don’t want to freak him out. I take the pedals back off.
Now he’s going “I want to go to the park!” but ugh we don’t have time and it’s starting to rain
Now he goes “Let’s spray away the rain!” I have no idea what that means but I assume it means spraying the hose, in the rain. Yep. How do I make sure he doesn’t spray me? Well, whatever, I kinda point him away from me. Sure, I guess you can spray the rain.
“Let’s put our bikes in the rain!” what? no! ugh do I fight him on this? It’s not like it’ll get that damaged from a couple minutes in the rain.
N: “Look I have an umbrella now!” (pretending) ah ok I can do this, let’s pretend. Me: “Wow, beautiful umbrella!”
He’s got the hose again. “It’s ok dada I won’t spray you.” Uh ok I guess
He immediately sprays me, right in the face. (Accidentally, at least.)
I yell out “aah!” in genuine surprise. Not even mad, just surprised. He starts crying and screaming. I guess I am consoling him now, that me getting sprayed in the face was traumatic to him.
Ok we’re moving the bike back to the door. Yesterday when I suggested he move his bike 3 feet to the side of the door, he erupted in top-of-his-lungs screams. So I steel myself for another fight and say “Can you move your bike here?” Today he just says ok.
Now we’re inside but he’s going “I want to go to the park”, screaming, crying, but it’s 7pm and we don’t have time. I just say “sorry bud, we don’t have time.” This does not connect. How do I change the mental tracks
“I want strawberries!” ah shit, exactly today they’re gone because we had a mishap with a leaky chicken package. What the hell, you never want strawberries. Uh, can I get you a muffin instead? You like muffins, right? No.
My wife comes down in a sequined dress. (She’s going to a party.) He’s picking at the sequins on her dress. Do I stop him?
He really really doesn’t want Mom to leave, yelling screaming, long long goodbye.
Ok now he doesn’t want to eat and says “I want to go for a walk” - ok I guess?
Now he’s saying he’s tired. Is that just… like is he trying to get out of having to eat dinner? Is he actually tired? Then we should just go upstairs? But he wants to go for a walk instead?
Now he’s going “Why did it rip?” and I have no idea what he’s talking about so I mostly ignore it.
Back to crying “I want to go to the park!” but maybe I can convince him to just go around the neighborhood instead?
But he’ll want to ride his bike. So we need to get his helmet. Um, how do I convince him to do this. Ok I guess he’s ok with it.
There are two steps down from the deck. He wants to walk his bike down them. He falls, screams at painful decibel levels. Ouch.
I take his bike down the stairs. Screams escalate. “I wanna do it again!”
Ok ok fine, so I move the hose at least to get rid of one more obstacle. “No I don’t want you to move the hose! Put it back!” I even try to put it back but it’s still not right. He’s screaming at max volume.
Hmm this is not gonna work, we have to break this cycle. He’s not going to go for a walk/bike ride; he’s losing it. I better intervene and stop letting him frustrate himself. Ow my ears.
What do we even do now? Used to be I’d put him in the crib but now he doesn’t have a crib. I um… try to just set him on the couch? But he gets up and runs away. Ok, I guess we’re taking a break upstairs in his not-crib bed. I guess? Change of scenery maybe? He is kicking and screaming as I carry him up. Is this right? When I say “let’s take a break” he has learned to always yell “no I don’t wanna take a break!” Maybe I have trained the wrong thing :(
Oh his pants are wet. Did he wet himself, or was that a hose spray thing? Well, we’ll get to it when the screaming dies down.
He’s in his bed, screaming. At least he’s not running away. Is he gonna fizzle out or is this doomed to be one of those 45 minute screaming sessions he used to do?
Oh shit now he’s running away. I bring him back. Luckily he doesn’t keep running away. He is fully demonic-possessed, top of his lungs screaming, this hurts my ears.
After a few minutes this dies down, in waves. Now he wants to use the potty. Ok, good! Shoot, his pants are wet. Do I get another pair? It’s like 30 min until I dress him for bed in a diaper. Ah forget it, let’s just do the diaper now.
He gets fascinated by a couple puddles of water on the floor. “What’s that water on the floor, is it pee water?” No, I think that was mama taking a shower and then stepping out of the shower. This takes a couple tries but he figures it out.
Ok now he’s ready to go down and eat dinner. And he’s mostly ok.
“I want strawberries” ah shit, still don’t have them.
Man, I had an idea we were going to go to Aldi and get groceries and save probably $40. This didn’t happen. Welp, we’ll order Whole Foods. Obv of all the things, I care the least about this one. But I care a little bit!
As he’s eating, I’m putting together a shopping list. A little self-recrimination from being on my phone, but I’ve been typing some of this for the whole hour, so, what can I do.

hoof

This is one hour. Not the best hour but not the worst. I’d say it’s maybe an 80th percentile difficulty hour.

Let’s analyze a bit. Some of these are own-goals where the answer might be “just chill out.” Like 57 (can’t do my grocery plan tonight) or 53 (put him in diaper 1/2 hr early). But it’s not that easy: the conscious part of me knows and does just chill out; I’m not mad that I can’t do my grocery plan tonight! But it still triggers something in the unconscious part of me that makes me low-level uneasy.

“Dan, do you have a sensory processing issue?” I don’t know, it’s mostly not sensory! Like 3 of these points were “ow this is too loud”; mostly it’s just “can we please stop being chaotic and forcing me to make a decision?”

What can I do here? Trying not to get so absolutely worn down by this feels like trying not to get worn down by a constant airhorn in your ear, or by someone constantly scraping you with sandpaper.

Other parents: does this happen to you too? What do you do?

Parent Math

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:45:05 -0400

A friend coined this and it’s been such a useful concept that I keep referencing it, so it’s worth writing up.

Parent Math is all the micro calculations you make while you’re with your kid. Some examples:

he isn’t eating much. has he eaten enough? should I try to convince him to eat more?
I think he’s eaten enough but my wife doesn’t. should I try to convince her that it’s ok, or should I let her take over? maybe I can do the little food-airplane and get a few more bites in?
I tried to put his shirt on, he yelled “I WANNA DO IT!” do I fight with him and do it myself, frustrating his autonomy drive? do I let him do it, demonstrating that yelling lets him get his way? uh, I guess I’ll say “please ask me nicely.” ok, he’s distracted and babbling some other nonsense. I tell him “say, ‘Dada please let me put my shirt on myself.’” he kinda murmurs “lem puh shirt dada” - do I force him to say “please”?
I said “time to use the potty”, he said “no I don’t have to!” do I think he really doesn’t have to? he’s shown that he can’t reliably regulate himself in this way. should I try to force him to? but that will create negative associations with the potty. should I just let it drop? but then he’ll pee on the couch or something, we’ll have to wash it, and nothing will be learned.
I said “please stop yelling”, he kept yelling. what do I do? do I grin and bear it, which shows that he can ignore me? do I just repeat it and pray it works a second time? we know “rewards and punishments don’t work”, only relevant consequences, so I’m not going to say “if you keep yelling you don’t get a cookie”. what could be a relevant consequence? do I say “I’m going to leave the room because you’re hurting my ears”? but does that trigger abandonment fears? maybe he needs me to just be calm and present. but I’m not sure if I can. and (30 sec pass) it doesn’t seem to be working.

I know this all sounds like overanxious parenting, but what’s the alternative? “Just do what feels natural, man”? Here’s what feels natural:

if a stranger yells at me, yell right back and leave
if an acquaintance yells at me, politely excuse myself and never talk to them again
if a friend/family yells at me, have a heart to heart discussion, voicing my feelings etc, with them understanding that that hurt me. (or if they don’t, then they stop being my friend.)

Obviously none of these work with a kid! And there’s nothing that feels natural for “convince someone they have to pee”; that’s never really come up before. The closest thing might be a dog, and that’s not that hard; feed and walk them, and they regulate themselves better than toddlers!

What’s another alternative? Read one parenting book and follow all its advice? Ugh. (If you read multiple parenting books, you will find that they conflict!) Ask “what would mom and dad do?” (if you, like me, have a mom and dad you find worthy of emulation) Well, they would:

not get so frazzled by it
use humor or some other clever technique (all the Parent Math is trying to learn their clever techniques!)

Are there other alternatives?

The Biggie Filter

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 14:21:31 -0400

This is one of the most important lessons I would tell my younger self upon entering any sort of workforce, including school.

It’s called “The Biggie Filter”, after a professor of mine we called Biggie. We called him this because his name kind of sounded like Biggie¹, and because he is perhaps the person in the world most unlike Biggie, which makes it all the funnier.

Prof. Biggie had this incredible ability to make you feel like an idiot when you talked to him. He’d often kind of turn his head sideways and squint, and maybe ask you something like “what do you mean by that?”, as if you had just said “the world is flat” and he’s trying to tell if you’re a conspiracy nut or just a garden variety fool. He had a very cooler-than-thou look, unintentionally but believably, because he was the kind of person who could reference Baudrillard or Latour in his writing and actually know what he’s talking about. One time he had us submit some homework through a google form, and upon submitting, instead of saying “thank you” or something, it said “Sereously?” [sic], and we all did a double take, because it’s the kind of thing he would actually say. And of course he was somewhere between “well-known” and “luminary” in his field, did great work, has a zillion papers and awards, etc. So interacting with him was usually a little bit ego-bruising.

But he didn’t mean it to be! I got to know him working on a project, never to the point where I’d call him “warm”, but to the point where I knew he never meant any condescension with his remarks. He was supportive of his students (those he advised and those in his classes) and earnest in his work. That’s just kinda the way he looked and talked.

So the Biggie Filter is this: Whenever Prof. Biggie says something, make it like 3 levels more positive. If he says “I think that’s a mistake”, hear it as “I don’t know; feel free to argue with me. And it’s an interesting point!” If he says “I don’t know about that”, hear “Good idea, and you’re doing great work!” It got so much easier to work with him after I installed the Biggie Filter in our conversations: more accurate communication, less anxiety.

The meta-point here, though, is: You will have to install Biggie-type Filters in so many of your professional relationships, especially with superiors. They will not always be the same as the original Biggie Filter; here are some Biggie-type filters you might have:

Boss is too positive, greenlighting everything you say. If he dislikes an idea, don’t do it; if he likes it, get a second opinion.
Boss just wants to hear that you’re earnest. If you’re struggling, phrase it as “project X didn’t work out, but I’m excited to try project Y next” or “I could use another point of view on project Z” instead of “I’m really struggling here.”
Boss is usually excited about new tech, but has a pet peeve around AI tools, so don’t tell her about AI things; find another booster for those
Boss really cares about status and schedules, so he will ask you for lots of status reports; this doesn’t mean he thinks you’re behind
Boss treats silence as failure, so tell her proactively what you’re doing every day, or she’ll think you’re goofing off.

(Not limited to bosses; you’ll need these for many coworkers! I’m just focusing on bosses here because they’re often the most fraught work relationship.)

If you have a new boss and things don’t go swimmingly from the start, and you can find coworkers who will tell you their Biggie Filters for this boss, that will be so helpful! You can’t install them as-is; they depend on both you and the boss. But they don’t vary too widely; it’s rare that a boss will be very positive to someone and negative to someone else.² It’s a good thing to try before you start jumping to conclusions and getting anxious about what the new boss means whenever you talk with them.

actually it wasn’t Biggie, but another East Coast rapper. Anonymity, you know. The effect is the same. ↩︎
if they are, or if their filter changes often, this is usually a Bad Sign ↩︎

AI Etc Links

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:26:27 -0500

Mostly just getting some links out of my head

Not about AI and work

MyTaxReceipt.org - ahh I love this, put numbers into terms people can understand. “we spent eleventy zillion on $foo” - is that good or bad, who knows? but “I personally spent $7000 to be in a country that has $foo” is a little clearer.

yimby/nimby/wellmaybeimby: A friend’s acquaintance had recently moved to $TRENDY_US_CITY and was mad that other people were moving to $TRENDY_US_CITY and building new greenfield houses (like the one he lived in). This guy did not see the irony inherent there. Now, it’s possible to have a coherent worldview there (“if a house exists, you can move into it; we just shouldn’t build new houses, since say 2000; we will accept the skyrocketing prices”) but … only barely. And if you’re advocating to make that a law, good luck; your niche position may be 1% of people, surrounded in every direction by 20% of people with worse opinions (like basic-NIMBYism). I wish there was a word for this: “opinion that, if perfectly implemented, maybe makes sense, but opinions near it are worse, so best to accept that you can’t get your exact thing and go in another direction.”

Wake up babe, new Histomap just dropped

The Rare People Who Are Solid by Sasha Chapin. There’s something here tying together two things I think about a lot:

micro-level “solid”, like when just being around someone is easy because they’re peaceful and non-reactive
macro-level “solid”, which he calls “congruent” and I’d call something like “aligned”: how powerful it is when someone’s pursuing something that’s really earnestly a true goal for them

I think Chapin’s claim is they sort of reinforce, but largely the macro drives the micro. Hard to be Spiritually Very Present … and then everyday go off to a job you hate for the paycheck.

Sort of about AI and work

“AI Fatigue is Real” by Siddhant Khare - some combination of “all I do is code review”, “everything changes too fast”, “I can’t as fully understand the system”, and “I am context switching a lot.” I feel this.

is testing as we know it going away? speaking of whiplash from everything changing so fast. do these people just … not test anymore? doesn’t this miss the sense of “I’ve run all the tests and now I know at least those guarantees hold”? eesh. at the same time, I do feel like something should change - especially because maintaining a test suite is such a productivity drag.

sort of related: ““Technical debt” is just anything you don’t like” - me, and also Chelsea Troy at stack overflow

Practical LLM tips from Jonathan Lange

Rules for Agents by Daniel Reeves

Debacterol/Oralmedic Post

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:33:04 -0500

I get canker sores. These are little sores in my mouth that last for a few days or couple weeks and hurt a lot. I have tried a lot of canker sore treatments (benzocaine, salt water, warm water, alum, triamcinolone, chamomile, oregano spirits, hydrogen peroxide, honey, B vitamins) and none of them work. Debacterol/Oralmedic does. And it’s dramatic; not “lowering from 7 days to 6 days maybe” but “massive relief immediately.”

But it’s unusual in a few ways:

it works almost instantly
it hurts a lot (but only briefly)
it actually cures the sore instead of managing the pain
nobody has heard of it

What is it?

It’s made of “50% Sulfonated Phenolics and 30% Sulfuric Acid in an Aqueous Solution.” To use it, you apply a little to a Q-tip, then put it directly on your sore. It stings terribly for 5-10 seconds, then you wash it off; the pain subsides quickly and a whitish layer forms over the sore, cauterizing it and protecting it while it heals much faster.

It’s marketed as Debacterol in the US and available via prescription, or as Oralmedic outside the US and available without a prescription. It’s manufactured by Epien Medical.

How do you get it?

Outside the US, getting Oralmedic is easy: simply order it from one of their distributors. Inside the US, Oralmedic isn’t sold, but Debacterol is available with a prescription. But getting it is a little tricky. It seems that nobody, including doctors, dentists, and pharmacies, knows that it exists.

Pharmacies

According to Epien’s customer service (customerservice@epien.com), pharmacies can order Debacterol from McKesson Drug, item #2907459, NDC 6294010103. The Epien rep I talked to said they are working to add more pharmacy suppliers, but right now it’s just McKesson. I don’t know which pharmacies can order from McKesson. Supposedly, CVS Specialty orders from McKesson, but my local CVS did not. Claude says Albertson’s and Health Mart do, Walgreens and Kroger do not. But it’s probably best to contact your pharmacy and ask.

Note that, if you find a pharmacy that can get it, you’ll need to get a prescription from your doctor or dentist. Therefore, direct ordering through your doctor may be simpler if they’re willing.

Dentists and doctors

Also according to Epien, medical professionals can order from McKesson or from Henry Schein Medical, then you can pick it up from them. I contacted two dentists about Debacterol; neither knew about it, but both looked into it and were happy to prescribe it; one of them would order it for me.

Cost

A vial with enough for about 12 treatments cost about $120. It was not covered by my insurance.

eBay

Searching Oralmedic on eBay will bring up many sellers, often from Hong Kong or Malaysia. If you’re in the US and can’t get Debacterol, or are in another country where Oralmedic isn’t available, this may work for you.

Having Real Problems

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:59:00 -0500

When I was 22-25 I lived in Seattle and worked at Google. I was making $80-140k (plus stock), I had an upward career path, I had a handful of close friends, I was active in a couple of fun things, I didn’t have a partner but I knew I’d figure that out, I had plenty of free time.

In short, I didn’t have real problems.

Here are some things that captured my attention during this time:

eating all fresh local food
surveying the prices of grocery stores
saving money on rent by moving to a cheaper apartment (from splitting a $2k 2br to a $750 1br, I know, I know)
knowing the local breweries
getting vaguely involved in politics somehow
volunteering to teach adults math because I felt like I should
planning a big trip around the world
meditation; specifically, achieving the levels described in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
using consumer-grade EEGs to help with Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
knowing local restaurants¹
Quantified Self: “maybe if I track all this data about myself I’ll … learn something”
hosting Couchsurfers
making mobile phone apps because I guess I should learn some new technology, but not really caring
reading books about philosophy and stuff
planning a yearlong voyage around the world

The whole time I felt a little unfulfilled. This is when I first sought out a therapist and considering “depression” as a thing. It’s easy to see why: I didn’t have real problems.

when you don’t have real problems you go a little nuts

None of the things in the list above were bad ways to spend my time, really. They just weren’t really fulfilling. Some of them, in retrospect, seem like what happens when you leave a border collie in an empty room: he’s got to do something. His energy isn’t being put to use; he just spirals out.

A recent tweet² points to this too. Poster Romy’s friend was despairing because, without real problems, they just got too inwardly focused. Romy’s solution was, “I was in this situation too. I got married and had a kid, and you should too.”

So you’d think I’d be in violent agreement, and I kind of am, but:

when you do have real problems you go a little nuts

I did the same thing as that poster! I got married, had a kid, and decided to care about work. (Tried academia and data science, then came back to software engineering and decided to Get Good.)

That’s three Real Problems. I mean, not problems in a bad sense, but three Real Meaningful Life Projects. Maybe 3.5, if you count “get healthy and strong”, which I’m not pursuing as fervently as the first three; maybe 3.75, if you count “build a spirituality”, which I know is important but certainly don’t dedicate as much time as I do to the first three or even my physical health. I have real problems now!

And I think I am definitely safe from Charybdis. I don’t really wonder so much about meaning.³

But I do wake up many days wondering if it’s going to be a 5/10 day or a 2/10 day, not really knowing why I’m doing the things I’m doing, feeling like I’ve been accidentally cast in someone else’s life.⁴ When it’s raining for a day or a week, you’re bummed; when it’s raining for a month, you hunker down and stock up on supplies; when it’s raining for three years you start to wonder if something’s gone wrong with the sun⁵.

what’s going on here

I don’t think Romy, or the countless other people who write similar things, are way off base. I don’t think I am either. How can these both coexist? Here are a few possibilities:

I veered too far to Scylla. That’s too many life projects and now I’m overwhelmed! This seems unlikely in general, as so many people do this, but maybe I am just particularly weak and unable to successfully juggle “family and career and health.”
This is the path for most people, but it actually isn’t the path for me; I should have searched more. I don’t think this is the case; see footnote 4.
This is the painful transformation period where caterpillar young-wandering-wastrel Dan dies and upstanding-dad-husband-careerman Dan is born. Possible. Man, what a long transformation period!
It’s the transformation period, and it’s so long because, somehow, I keep sabotaging myself. Also possible.
You can’t win, life is impossible, sorry. This one seems unlikely; too many people seem to be doing it just fine.
We can’t draw conclusions from one data point; there are too many different variables going on here.

The “no real problems” phenomenon shows up in more than just “wasting your time.” I got real mad about bike lanes for a while, like it was my own personal crusade to scream at everyone that they’re wrong and bad if they park in the bike lane. (They are, but I would have lived a much better life if I asked my city councilor to enforce bike lanes, let them write tickets, and moved on.)

Perhaps a lot of the social struggles of the 2010s were the same phenomenon. I recall being a “good gentry-ladder person” involving a lot of saying the right words, and not a lot of doing anything. You were supposed to know that you call the people whof were here before Europeans “First Nations”, not “Native Americans”, and certainly not “Indians.” You were unforgiveably bad if you accidentally misgendered someone. I remember being told to call people under 18 “youths” because it avoided the stigma of “kids” or “teens”. A lot of people online and some IRL picked up some of these as pet causes and fought for them hard, because they didn’t have real problems. Life is ok and I have free time -> I’m still mad about something -> well I can yell at people online and I am Enforcing Justice.

(It happens on the right too! “I’m still mad” -> “It’s the fault of immigrants/minorities/liberals!” And the right is much worse, as we’re seeing now! Please don’t mistake the previous paragraph!)

so what’s my advice for that friend

Anyway, back to “people who feel depressed and purposeless.”

Some people do get themselves snarled up because they don’t have real problems. I think I would also advise someone in that situation to get real problems. But I’m not sure of that, and it’s a hard road. I think the answer to their dilemma lies on the other side of Mt. Everest, but I’m only halfway up; from my vantage point you better start climbing, because a chance of finding it is better than staying where you are forever, but I can’t promise anything.

I think, actually, this in particular should be written about as a warning sign. If you care about restaurants too much, you might not have real problems. ↩︎
from @Romy_Holland, line breaks removed so it’ll fit in a footnote here, sorry: “i recently had a friend who’s going thru a hard time ask how i got out of the suicidal pit of despair i was in not so long ago. my flippant answer is that i got a husband and baby and this friend should do the same. my longer answer is something like: spending time a bunch of time focusing on yourself is a trap. you feel bad so you think you need to look inward and work on self care or whatever so you can suss out the bad feeling and fix it, but actually much of the problem is the self-focus itself. get a project that actually matters and that’s way bigger than yourself and focus on that instead. kids are the ultimate version of this, but not the only option. you will by necessity grow, and you’ll do it a whole lot faster than you would by naval gazing in the vacuum of a therapist’s office or yoga retreat or whatever. people weren’t meant to have endless leisure time. drinking your coffee in peace is only enjoyable if it’s in contrast to doing something hard during the bulk of your day. you don’t need more special you time, you need way less of it.” ↩︎
I remember reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl a couple times, thinking “Meaning is what I need. How do I get it? This is the only book I can find that’s addressing this head on!” and then being like “… so they find meaning in… suffering? the hell is this, stupid book” ↩︎
I don’t think I’ve actually chosen a terribly broken path! Sometimes I get moments of clarity that I’m absolutely on the right track; that my day to day is deluded by the -1s and -2s but I am building +1000000s. And yet. (God, wouldn’t it be funny if I was getting one-shotted in reverse.) ↩︎
ah do I have to put a disclaimer on this post that yes I know many people call this depression and yes I am managing it well and yes I do have all the support systems I need ↩︎

When to Have Kids

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:19:59 -0500

“Are people having kids too late” is making the rounds on my internetsphere again, and it makes me sad. If it makes me sad, it must be because it reminds me of my faults; otherwise I usually can keep The Discourse at a distance.

did we have kids too late

I think so. We started at 34, had first kid at 36, took off about a year and a half, and are still trying for kid 2 at 39. This is a bummer for a few reasons:

if our kids have kids at the same age as us, we’ll have grandkids at … 72 and 80?? like, I still want to toss them in the air; maybe I still can at 72?! And by the time they’re 10 we’ll be 80-90. Yikes.
it’s hard to make it happen! while you technically can have kids in your late 30s/early 40s, I do not recommend it! you may not know if you have fertility issues until you start and then it’s too late!
it’s physically harder to have young kids at 39 than at 29, sure
I’m not going to be done with young kids until my mid 40s and that is late

why did we have them so late

ok having a career is important to us both, obv, this is like reason #1 that people delay having kids
and having money helps with having kids, sure
we were in SF, so there wasn’t sort of an ambient friends-having-kids that was happening
I was really ambivalent about it (sigh maybe “husband doesn’t wanna” is reason #2 that people delay having kids. but at least a couple of transformative experiences got me to be ok with it in time
well, the aforementioned difficulty; if we had our way, we’d have them at 34 and 36 and be done

what could we have done differently

We wanted at-least-somewhat-ambitious tech careers. This sort of implies moving to SF. Having kids in SF is very hard and we didn’t wanna. So we did the whole thing; work in the data mines, then come back to a cozy small city and have kids.

But the career thing. Before we met, I worked at google from 22-25. That was probably worth it; if you don’t know where to start a tech career, not a bad place. We met at 26, and at 33-34 we finally “had good careers.” We have some wealth now that we didn’t really build much until about then, then it took off - so to cut our career off before then would have been a bit of a waste. And before then we were sort of “entry level” more than “stable.”

So 34 is as early as we could have, right? No! Why did it take us 12 years to get our careers together? Because we both spent ~5 years in grad school!

Imagine if we didn’t do PhDs: we’d be “established”, done with our time in the data mines, with years of wealth built up, ready to move back and start a family, at 29!

So: unless you are a true believer in the academic world and want to be a professor¹, don’t do a PhD.

how broadly does this apply

I don’t know. It applies in the tech world, which is probably the most functional part of our economy. Probably in finance and other high-paying fields too; “build your career for 7 years before kids” is probably a pretty common thing. And in fields where you can get to a solid career in 7 years, you can actually do the thing that many of us want to: build a career, then have kids at 30.

There are other jobs besides professor that it’s worth doing a PhD for, but they’re ~equally hard to get, so “if you really want to be a professor” is a pretty good distinguishing factor. ↩︎

Grocery Survey

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:42:42 -0500

Every year I total up what we spend on what, and I continue to be baffled by our grocery costs. There are 3 of us¹, we buy from all over but most commonly from Whole Foods, and the number just seems huge.

Before you make fun of me for shopping at Whole Foods and wondering why my groceries are expensive! Back in 2009 when I lived in Seattle and had a lot of time on my hands, I did a survey of grocery store prices. The headlines I remember are:

- Trader Joe’s is about 9% cheaper than your average grocery store (QFC, in my case). And most of their food, besides their produce, is pretty good.
- Whole Foods is only about 5% more expensive than your average grocery store. 5%! That’s nothing!

But is this still true? It would be nice to know, especially now that I buy 3x as much food!

Headlines

Giant Eagle is about 5% cheaper than Whole Foods.
Trader Joe’s is about 25% cheaper, Aldi around 33%!
Buying organic costs maybe 50% more than buying the cheapest thing.

Results in more depth

GE What I’d Buy is 95% of WF What I Buy. to be fair, GE Cheap is 91% of WF Cheap. But I care more about “What I’d Buy.”
Aldi Cheap is 59% of WF What I’d Buy; Aldi Organic is 74% of it. TJ Cheap is 70%, TJ Organic is 88%. In both cases, I’m not really clear on “What I’d Buy”, but it’s closer to the Cheap than the Organic. So, I could cut my costs by somewhere between 12-41%, which is a wide number, but probably at least a quarter. That’s a couple thousand bucks a year, I suppose that’s enough for me to do it! Still, both stores are disappointingly not quite “one stop shops”, so given that everything is hard all the time, I don’t know, man
holy cow though, if you’re trying to save, go to Aldi; compared to them you’re paying a 18% premium at TJ, 28% premium at GE, and 41% at WF. They’ve really made a dent in the market compared to 2009 Seattle.
the Community Market (“cheap Giant Eagle”) costs more than the Market District (“fancy Giant Eagle”), and has fewer things. what a waste
Organic costs a lot. I believe in buying quality food, I just don’t think the Organic label is a reliable indicator of it. And when you separate out the things that have an organic option vs those that don’t, you’re paying between 29-82% more, depending on store. It’s not that much of a difference from What I’d Buy, though, so I guess I can’t be too mad about it.

Methodology

I went to Whole Foods (WF) in East Liberty, Giant Eagle Market District (GE) in Shadyside, Trader Joe’s (TJ) in East Liberty, Aldi in Garfield, and Community Market (CM) in Bloomfield.

I picked out a “basket of food”, roughly corresponding to what we’d use in a week. This feels like the only sane way to think about food - it doesn’t really matter if the price of salt is high at one place because you’ll use about 1/50 of a container in a week. Some of these are arbitrary, like we don’t need 1lb of asparagus every week, but we would buy asparagus some weeks, broccoli some weeks, etc, so hopefully the price of asparagus would cover all this. In general, “what should be in the basket” is arguable, but I don’t care about those arguments.

For each item, I looked for up to 3 prices:

the cheapest one
the one that I’d buy
the organic one

At TJ and Aldi, I skipped “the one that I’d buy”, because there aren’t many choices, and when there are, I’d usually just buy the cheap one. At Community Market, I skipped “organic”, because they don’t have much organic food. Of course I standardized sizes/units. In the case where volume = discount, I allowed buying up to 2-3x as much (e.g. if I’m comparing 1lb of peanut butter, I’d include the price for a 2lb jar divided by 2, but not a 5lb jar). This is because pantry space can usually stretch to 2x but not 5x; buying 2lb of peanut butter is easy but buying 5lb may not be.

I mostly didn’t include meat because I don’t buy meat from grocery stores. Meat is expensive; this may affect your results.

I imputed a few missing values because stores didn’t have a couple things. This is generally risky², but in practice, there were only a few missing items: walnuts at TJ, kimchi at Aldi, and a few things at CM (but CM isn’t winning our contest anyway), so I threw in an imputed average value and moved on.

Then I calculated the cost of the basket of food, and used that to make claims like “Aldi Cheapest ($102.12) is 59% of WF What I Buy ($172.59)”.

The data

here

one of the three doesn’t eat as much but he does throw food everywhere so I’m counting him as a full person ↩︎
This is generally risky; in general you can’t really compare stores that offer different things! For example: store A: apples $3, caviar $10; store B: apples $1, caviar $20; store C: apples $2, no caviar; and a basket of (1 apple, 1 caviar). Then say we impute “$15 caviar” for store C. Store B looks more expensive than store C, but in reality B is better than C! We could imagine other imputations, like max(other stores) so store C would have $20 caviar too, but that can backfire in other ways. So maybe we should compare A-B, B-C, and A-C head to head, using only items that exist at both stores, and get a pairwise comparison instead of a strict ordering. But that muddies the conclusion. So, idk, I imputed a couple values, Community Market come at me ↩︎

Staying Ahead of the Pain

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:58:35 -0400

the principle

When my dad had cancer, he had a few operations over the years. His doctors would send him home with opioids and tell him not to be too hesitant about taking them. They told him to “stay ahead of the pain”: that if he took them when he still felt ok, he’d continue feeling ok; if he waited until he felt awful, it was a lot harder to take enough painkillers to stop feeling awful again.¹

the pain

We recently had a little fender bender. Even “fender bender” overstates it; it was literally a “fender-paint-scraper.” On our end, we will fix it with a $20 car paint kit, a 1/4" paint brush, and about 10 minutes of work; the other guy could do the same. However, we gave him our information anyway and said “sure, have your car guy look at it, whatever” as we are Doing the Right Thing.

He came back with an estimate for $1200 and a week of a car rental.

This enrages me:

I’m mad at the guy for not just letting it go.
I’m mad at his shop for not saying “we filled in the paint, that will be $20.”
I’m mad that cars are so fragile.
I’m mad that we live in cities that ~demand we drive cars.
But heck why are people are so precious about their cars that they don’t just let this go.
And I’m mad that fixing anything as tiny as a paint scrape involves consulting Professionals who never just say “don’t worry about it.”
But shoot, maybe they’re right to get worked up about it because maybe this scrape would lead to rust and worse and so on if left unchecked and maybe my little paint kit will wear off in 5 years and so on.
I never wanted any part of this, but we don’t really have a way to get away from these machines that are so fragile that one little mistake can have such dire consequences. Where can you feasibly live without one? In the three metro areas that have public transit (and an average house price of twelve zillion dollars)?
Augh but this would be much easier if this guy wasn’t such a precious twit. It’s a Jeep, which is the least reliable brand of car; therefore, this guy’s a dumbass who probably bought a huge ass car in order to feel big on the road
And his stupid car shop. He probably said “ha ha, we got some sucker on the hook, or their insurance company, run up the bill!” and the mechanic said “yeah, let’s get em!” and this kind of “not my problem” thinking is the problem with the world today!
And and and…

You see. I’m only actually mad at four things, but spending any time thinking about them gets me endlessly worked up, cycling through them in a tornado of more and more frustration and anguish.

staying ahead of it

There is no fix to this. We are going to be out $1200, one way or another (either we pay the guy, or our insurance company pays him, we pay a $1000 deductible, and then they raise our rates by $100/month forever). This is unfair and stupid; we made a $20 mistake, we should pay $20. Thinking about this traps me in the Injustice Quicksand.

Though, emotionally, there is a fix to this: we can afford it! We can just absorb this loss and not think twice. Sometimes my accountant will say “you should pay $1200 in taxes this quarter” and I shrug and say ok; how is this any different? In fact, sometimes good fortune gives me $1200 or more!² I can float above this on the Cloud of Overall Fortune.

When I first realized we were going to have a $1200 problem, I floated above it on the Cloud of Overall Fortune: I was in an interesting conversation with some new friends, life was exciting and good, and this wasn’t going to get me down. But in the middle of the night, I woke up and somehow my thoughts drifted over to the Injustice Quicksand.

Luckily I realized there is no way out of the Injustice Quicksand from within the Injustice Quicksand. Once you’re in the pain, it’s so hard to take enough painkillers to get out of it. All you can do is stay ahead of it next time. Fill your life with enough joy, perspective, and gratitude that you don’t fall in in the first place.

This is true in relationships too: once you’re in a local pit of Injustice Quicksand about your partner it’s so hard to climb out. Much easier to boost your general feeling about your partner so that you always float above these on the Cloud of Overall Fortune. Seek reasons to brag, instead of fairness.

and if you do fall in

I think quicksand is a great metaphor, because all you can do is wait to get out. Put it aside, do something else. Build up your Cloud of Overall Fortune: do something that feels physically good, get into your body. Or at least go write a blog post instead of lying in bed seething.

many people’s stories go from here into: “and then he got terribly addicted to opioids and they ruined his life.” luckily, this was not my dad’s story. (opioids didn’t ruin his life; the cancer did!) ↩︎
for example: I had a great manager at my last job who, twice, told me “you’re getting promoted! your new salary is $35k higher per year.” I did not try to get promoted; I didn’t think I was “ready” for it or anything. If not for the good fortune of him looking out for me, I would have probably waited at least a year each time. That’s $70k of good fortune right there! 50x as big as this tiny bump! ↩︎

Amazon-type Transactions Are Weird

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 11:16:16 -0400

Here are some characteristics of buying something on Amazon:

everything is one item of a SKU, which has many items
all items of a SKU are interchangeable
you can see a lot of information about each SKU, instantly, before you buy it
you can see a lot of competing items
you can see the exact price of the thing you’re buying, and the prices of its competitors
you can even compare the price on Amazon to the price elsewhere, instantly
the price on Amazon is the same for everyone and there is no haggling¹
you do not have, are not expected to have, and cannot have a relationship with the seller, beyond perhaps “I like/dislike this brand”
you can see a ton of people’s reviews of the item (though, granted, many are fake)
the item is almost always in stock, and if you don’t buy it today, you can buy it tomorrow

(we haven’t even gotten to “the prices are cheap” and “shipping is quick” because I don’t even think those are the weirdest things here!)

It’s not just Amazon; Wal-mart, Target, Giant Eagle, Safeway, even most retail stores like the Gap follow most of these rules. They’re somewhat eroded (hard to see as much information/reviews about this Gap T-shirt when you’re in person, less often in stock) but mostly there.

But compare this to all other situations where you buy and sell:

buying a house: not one of a sku, can’t see that much information, often can’t see the exact price, there is haggling, there are no reviews, they go fast
hiring a contractor: sort of one of a sku (“plumbers”) but they’re not interchangeable, can’t see a lot of information, can’t see the exact price, can’t easily compare, there may be haggling, you’ll have a relationship, and they’re not very available
hiring an employee: not one of a sku, not interchangeable, can’t see much information, can’t easily see the relevant competition, can’t know their price, tons of haggling, long term relationship, hard to see many reviews, they go fast (I think this one breaks all the Amazon Weirdness rules!)
getting a job: actually the exact same as “hiring an employee”
buying a car: unfortunately there is haggling, can be hard to compare the exact thing unless you want a very available car, not always in stock
buying a collectible thing on eBay: not one of a sku, can’t see much information or reviews
buying a specialized piece of equipment like an MRI machine: hard to see a lot of competing items, might have a relationship with the seller, hard to compare prices, not often in stock

And compare to most of human history! Until, idk, post-WWII I think this was not largely the case, and you’d do most of your shopping for “whatever was around locally”

unfortunately:

You’ll encounter Amazon-type purchases early in life; as soon as you can buy candy from the nearby drugstore, you start to think of commerce as a series of Amazon-type transactions. You only encounter non-Amazon-type transactions later.

Even more unfortunately, these “non-Amazon-type” transactions are the ones that really matter. Some of them will be in magnitude of $10k or 100k, while optimizing all your Amazon/Safeway/Target/Aldi purchases combined might make you a few thousand.

so what?

I guess just:

beware of this?
don’t over-optimize on the Amazon-type purchases, they don’t matter that much
don’t be weirded out when you have to hire a contractor, you have two options and one says $15k and the other says $20k, and then they finish the job and charge you $25k and you can’t really say no
try not to rage at the world when your most important purchases are not Amazon-type

I have unfortunately developed a new peeve, and it is when people say “bartering” when they mean “haggling.” Bartering is “I will trade you a goat for ten chickens, with no cash changing hands.” Haggling is “you’re offering this chicken for $50, will you take $40?” ↩︎

What Do We Know About Lead

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:06:10 -0400

This keeps coming up, unfortunately, so I want to write down all I can so I can contextualize the next Thing about lead I see.

How much is ok

If you sent me an article about a new contaminant, the first few things I’d ask would be:
1. Are we sure it’s bad for you?
2. In what ways is it bad for you, and do I care?
3. Is there any threshold below which it doesn’t matter? (e.g. your body flushes out N mg/day)

Because we might be able to avoid worrying about the whole thing! Unfortunately, with lead, it’s definitely bad for you in a zillion ways, and there is No Safe Level Of Lead.

aside: the “no safe level” slogan kinda sucks

It’s great that Needleman and them did all this research, and at the time, “no safe level” pointed people in the right direction. We were not worried enough about lead, so an absolutist scary phrase was valuable. However, as with (almost?) all absolutist scary phrases, it’s not really true. For example: one picogram per liter is fine! You won’t even notice it. And those who are paying attention to lead nowadays are the ones who least need to hear about it, so an absolutist scary phrase is no longer the right messaging. So it goes.

Anyway, since we can’t get away easy, let’s learn what levels matter. Some important numbers:

3.5 ug/dL in blood: the CDC reference level for kids, and the 97.5th percentile of kids. If you’re above this, the Government will take Quick Action. (I guess in theory? If you’re rich? I don’t know)
0.73 ug/dL: median US blood lead level, 2017-18
10 ppb = 10 ug/L: WHO provisional guideline for drinking water (Chemical fact sheet section, page 415), though this is “no longer a health-based guideline value” but just what they think is feasible. Turns out that is now the US EPA action level too.
1 ug/L: detection limit in water (source: WHO again)
2.2 ug/day and 8.8 ug/day: FDA Action Levels for kids and adults’ lead exposure
0.5 ug/day: California Prop 65 maximum allowable dose level of lead
1.7-5.3 ug/day: estimated mean daily exposure to lead for adults by a 2019 study
EDIT: um, or maybe the average daily exposure to lead in Europe is 0.36-1.24-2.43 ug per kg bodyweight, so like 25-86 ug per day (even ignoring the upper 2.43). Or maybe 0.68 ug/kg, so 47 ug for a 70kg person.
EDIT: maybe 114 ug/day in India in 2005, or 22 in some regions of China in 2000, 135 in others. Not that relevant here, but another bit of context.

No, you know what, screw this, and screw Consumer Reports

I was going to write a comprehensive “everything I know about lead”, but 1. no time, 2. let me be honest about why I want to write this. The most recent Thing about Lead was this post, “Protein Powders and Shakes contain High Levels of Lead”, and I am now pivoting this blog post to tear into CR instead.

I read CR’s post and thought, oh gosh, all the protein powders unsafe! Orgain (not one of the worst offenders) is 143% of “CR’s Level of Concern”! Optimum Gold Standard is 56%! Am I going to give myself lead poisoning if I drink two of these a day? Or will the net benefit from extra protein give me extra muscles and protect me in my old age? AND, if I have to worry about brands, how do I fit this dimension in with all the other dimensions (taste, saturated fat, animal welfare, etc) while trying to make decisions here?

No, look, it’s fine, CR is just another part of the ragefear machine that is the internet today. Here are CR’s sins in this article:

The MADL of 0.5 ug/day

Knowing there is “no safe level” of lead, and yet we have to proceed and live our lives, how does one contextualize any amount of lead? How do we choose “how much is enough”?

This level is based on the California Prop 65 maximum allowable dose level (MADL) for lead—0.5 micrograms per day—which has a wide safety margin built in. “We use this value because it is the most protective lead standard available,” says Sana Mujahid, PhD, who oversees food safety research and testing at CR.

They are literally are using 0.5 ug because it’s the lowest number they can find! It gives them the most eye-catching headlines! To take Naked Nutrition Mass Gainer as an example: 7.7ug of lead is not great, but “Naked Nutrition has 1572% of CR’s level of concern for lead” sounds a lot worse than “Naked Nutrition has 87% of the FDA reference level”.

(I guess as a former Californian, the mere mention of Prop 65 should have set off my alarm bells. Or rather, it should have silenced my overactive alarm bells.)

The serving sizes

Naked Nutrition Mass Gainer is the big outlier here because it’s 10 times as big as the others! The serving size is 321g/1250 calories! Again, 7ug is still bad, but put these things in context; nobody’s switching from 30g of Optimum Gold Standard Whey to 321g of Naked Nutrition Mass Gainer. Good grief.

Carelessness or malpractice

Remember this from above: “1.7-5.3 ug/day: estimated mean daily exposure to lead for adults by a 2019 study”

The dingdongs at Consumer Reports reported this 1.7-5.3 ug as “5.3 ug.” Until I found this source study, I was reading their post with an open mind, but once I realized they are committing this kind of carelessness or statistical malpractice in one place, I have no idea how much they are in other places.

What should this story say?

some of these brands are actually bad. An extra 6-7ug of lead per day (Naked/Huel) or 3ug (Garden of Life) is bad. I am honestly glad they’re doing this research.
- but Naked, for example, claims <1.6 ug. “We investigated the disparity and found…”
- EDIT: Similarly, Huel claims 1.5 and 2.2 ug per serving, not 6. “We reached out to Huel and found that…” (maybe they use a different tester or something? “we then used their tester to compare”? I don’t know.)
most of them, though, are fine. You are probably getting about 3.5 ug of lead per day; an extra 0.5ug of lead is not very noticeable.
to put it in context: the average grocery store bread slice has X ug of lead. the average Snickers bar has Y ug of lead. the average potato has Z ug of lead.

EDIT: I am even more confused

All of these tested products are in the 0.25-7 ug range. (and the worst offenders, Naked and Huel have conflicting test reports, so who knows, maybe they’re not that bad.)

But the background intake matters so much! Let’s say the “good” powders have 0.25ug lead and the “bad” ones have, idk, 3ug. I now don’t know how bad 3ug is! If our background level is 20-80ug, it’s no big deal; if it’s 1-5ug, that is a big deal!

I will say: Huel only citing 20-80ug feels disingenuous. But Consumer Reports citing 1.7-5.3ug as 5.3, and then writing their whole article comparing to 0.5, which is fantasy la-la land (aka CA Prop 65), is even worse.

EDIT EDIT: I keep getting sucked into this thing. And, screw Huel too

Ok, after a day I think I am more convinced that most people eat <10ug lead in a day, that Huel is cherry-picking data, but the CR article still sucks.

Huel claim 1

Huel claims that a normal meal of “sausages, potatoes, and vegetables” has 5ug lead, pointing to this source.

I tried to make a meal that added up to 5ug lead, and it was kind of hard, unless I included cabbage. Cabbage is listed there as 37ug/kg lead, so we could imagine a meal of:

100g beef sausages (0.6ug)
200g potatoes (0.6ug)
100g cabbage (3.7ug)

total: 4.9ug. It’s pretty hard otherwise. All foods higher than 1ug/100g:

chocolate biscuits (1.0ug/100g)
lamb (1.4)
pigs liver (1.1)
other liver (1.0)
meat-based takeaways (1.2)
shellfish (1.7)
syrup, honey, treacle, maple syrup (1.2)
cabbage (3.7)
herbs, spices (13.4)
dried fruit (1.5)
canned peaches, pears, pineapples (1.7)
other canned or frozen fruit (1.8)

That’s it. Everything else is less than 1ug/100g. So it’s not impossible to make a meal of 5ug lead, but it’s certainly not “the typical meal.”

Huel claim 2

Huel claims “most adults naturally consume 20 to 80 µg per day through everyday foods”. They link to this study (Europe, 2010), which does suggest adults consume 20-80ug per day.

But there’s also this study (US, 2019, from 2014-16 data), which says adults consume 1.7-5.3ug.

Earlier I said “I don’t know, could be either!” but now, after looking at Huel Claim 1 and the UK Total Diet Study, I think it’s really hard to claim adults eat 20-80 ug/day. Most foods were in the 2-6 ug/kg range (table 5) so, imagining eating about 2kg of food in a day, that’s 4-12ug lead. If you eat some cabbage, maybe 7-15. 20 is possible, “20-80” isn’t.

It may also be that the US has less lead than Europe or that the 5+ years between these studies made a difference. At any rate, uncritically reporting 20-80ug feels cherry-picked.

Measurement error too

Ben Shindel, who did lead testing himself for years, wrote about more problems with the CR article, and it’s worth pointing out: these measurements are quite variable; finding 6ug in one batch of Huel and 0.5ug in Optimum Nutrition might very well be the luck based on the batches you happened to test. (We don’t even know how many!)

This also explains why Huel and Naked’s internal testing show <2ug while CR’s shows them at 6 and 7; variance happens.

(This also means the big UK Total Diet Study must be riddled with measurement error too! It doesn’t change the conclusion I drew from it (that it’s hard to get 5ug per meal), though, unless the errors are correlated, and I don’t yet see any reason to believe that)

So now what

Here’s what I think now:

people eat something like 1-10ug/day of background lead.
concentrating food into powders is going to increase heavy metals (Shindel pointed this out), so yeah, we might see more lead in 100g of protein concentrate than in 100g of natural food. (And it’s not clear whether 100g of protein concentrate will give me less lead than 100g of protein from natural food!)
protein powders range from 0-7 ug per serving, almost all in the 0-2 range
we don’t have enough data to discriminate between brands, but plant proteins look to be higher in lead than wheys
based on 1-10ug background lead, I’m not really worried about even 2 or 3 servings of protein concentrates a day
comparing these all to 0.5ug is scary clickbait and CR should be ashamed.
suggesting most meals have 5ug and people eat 20-80ug is not likely and Huel should be ashamed.
both CR and Huel should be extra ashamed for taking such an authoritative stance in their articles when this all has so much uncertainty around it
as far as I can tell, you can safely ignore this whole shebang

Thoughts from a job search

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 22:52:00 -0400

Just wrapped up a search and I’ll be starting at LanceDB in October. I’m excited! It seems like a great group of people, a solid product, and a good match between what they need and what I’m good at.

If I learned one thing, it is that applying to jobs does not work at all right now. I was applying mostly to senior/staff engineering roles, focusing on frontend or full-stack (depending on what “full stack” means at each company), at small and mid sized companies (not fangmans). My salary requirements are kind of high (200k+), but I didn’t get too picky, figuring that 1. advertised ranges are starting points, and 2. There’s a big equity component that’s not included there anyway. I don’t think this was unreasonable, given my 5-15 years of engineering experience (roughly 5 eng, 5 data science (which was tbh mostly engineering so I’d count it), and 5 grad school (which… Idk, I’d count that as 1-2 years))

From 20 cold applications, I got 5 auto rejections and 15 ghosts. One of them had a coding challenge even, which I did perfectly. I wrote them all a custom (short) cover letter and I think those were apparently a waste of time.

I had 4 lukewarm applications, by which I mean “applications with a friend who works there”. Used to be that that would be enough to get at least a phone screen, if you’re qualified! It did not; this led to 3 auto rejections and one ghost.

I had 3 warm applications, from friends who knew me and the hiring managers very well. These led to phone calls and interview processes.

I had 2 very warm opportunities: former managers (both of whom I’d love to work with again) who had roles open that weren’t quite right for me. I bet I could have at least gotten a phone screen for them though.

So the surprise was on many levels:

I thought cold applications were not worth zero. I am effectively now counting them as zero.
I understand everyone’s overloaded with resumes, so I thought a coding challenge might be a useful costly signal; not enough sample size to tell but it didn’t seem to help
I thought lukewarm applications would usually get you looked at.

The search was not that long (~30 is not a ton) so maybe I would have figured out how to do it better with time. But glad that it worked out. A world in which cold applications are worth zero feels kind of sad, but hopefully it is kind of a blip before people figure out new ways to hire.

Fractured Free Time

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 21:05:38 -0400

It’s not that I don’t have free time anymore, it’s that it usually comes in chunks of 0.2-5 minutes. There’s a puzzle hunt on now, Galactic, which has always been pretty good and I think it is this year but I barely know since I’ve only tuned in for a couple puzzles. Since the beginning of August, we have 6 weekends straight of visiting family (or once friends) or having them visit us.

Some other things that have been interesting:

audio journaling; get my thoughts out easily. Curiously, I don’t seem to have many thoughts even when I think I do.
TRE¹ is kinda neat. You do a couple exercises like a wall sit for 5 minutes, and then just kinda lie there while tremors shake through your body. Shaking feels important to me; I naturally do it sometimes; there’s something there. I don’t know what though.
still taking voice lessons, sporadically. It’s still fun.
new lifting records: 165 bench (2x8), 245 deadlift (1x5), 205 squat (2x8). These are nice milestones as my own weight is about 160. Much as I kinda don’t care, and I am very much erring on the side of caution, it is always fun to see number go up.
our son’s in preschool. (pre-preschool?) it’s going as smoothly as possible, but changes are never easy at this age.

And I lost a good friend to cancer recently. You might know him; I won’t talk more on this public blog. That’s been hard.

“tension releasing exercises” or “trauma releasing exercises” depending on who you ask but I’ll stick with “tension” because gosh not everything is about trauma ↩︎

Net Better Nut Butter

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 17:31:32 -0400

I could live on peanut butter¹. I eat a lot of it. But… could it be better?

tl;dr: yes, just mix in 1.5 tsp flax oil per 100g PB.

fats

I did a little research about fats recently, and by “a little research”, I mean “talked with a friend who’s a doctor, and Clauded a bit”, coming to the following conclusions:

Fat can be saturated, polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, or trans. Polyunsaturated includes omega-3 and omega-6 (and a few others like CLA).
Saturated fat: Bad, Actually²
Polyunsaturated fat: a mixed bag. In theory, omega-3 and omega-6 are both good, and ideally you’d get a ratio of 4:1 omega-6 to omega-3. In practice, everything has a lot of omega 6 and nothing has much omega-3 so “get more omega-3” is usually in the right direction.³
Monounsaturated fat: generally pretty good?
Trans fat: just the fuckin’ worst, everyone agrees. Luckily, they’re not really in nut butter, so I’m leaving them out of this discussion.

Based on this, peanut butter feels not terribly great to eat a ton of. In 100g of peanuts you get ~49g of fat, including 7g saturated, 10g omega-6, 0g omega-3, and 26g monounsaturated.⁴ Can we increase the omega-3 and/or decrease the saturated? (Also, can it taste even better?)

let’s make nut butter

For the omega-3, I found that almost nothing nutty has omega-3. Exceptions include walnuts (4:1 omega-6 to 3 ratio), hemp seeds (3:1), flax seeds (1:3!) and chia seeds (also 1:3!)

For saturated fat, I wanted to look into almonds and walnuts too: about half as much saturated fat as peanuts.

For taste: let’s just try them all!

So I bought a bunch of nuts and ground them up. Here are some things I found:

The blender actually grinds better than the food processor⁵. It’s harder to clean, though.
Peanuts are among the best tasting nuts. Cashews and pistachios are good too. Almonds make the whole thing taste kinda dry/woody, and walnuts taste bitter.
So if walnuts are out, then flax seeds are our only source left of omega-3. But ground flax seeds make the whole nut butter kind of gummy. Better off just using flax oil.
Flax tastes kinda bitter. I wonder if omega-3 fats just taste bitter. Bummer if so. At any rate, you can usually hide up to about 1.5 tsp per 100g of nuts; above that, you start tasting the bitterness more.
Luckily, though, that’s a good amount of omega-3! 100g peanuts + 1.5 tsp flax oil gets you to an omega 6-3 ratio of 2.4, which is plenty low enough.
I didn’t get much taste benefit from mixing nuts. There may be a delicious brew out there. I didn’t find it.

So:

The Best

that I’ve found is just 100g peanuts, 100g cashews, and 3t flax oil.

Upsides: almost 4 grams of omega-3 per 100g. If you had 2 Tbsp (30g) of this, that gets you 1.2g omega-3, almost the RDA. The omega 6-3 ratio is 2.4, so (assuming the rest of your diet is more than 4:1) you’re moving in the right direction. Tastes very good; you almost don’t notice the flax.

Downsides: doesn’t help with the saturated fat; about 8.5g per 100g, 1g more than regular peanut butter. Cost is not awesome at $7.80/lb.

the second-best

well look, you can improve on both of those downsides by just making peanut butter + flax oil. 100g peanuts + 1 tsp flax oil is super cheap and high omega-3. Hell, just mix in flax oil to premade PB. But I can’t write a whole blog post and have that be the punchline.

future work

chia seeds. They’re weird little guys. I tried to grind them once but had more luck just making chia pudding. Chia pudding’s good though, and pretty easy.
hemp seeds. At 3:1, they don’t really pull the omega 6-3 ratio down too much, but they seem to be more neutral tasting than flax.
pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pecans, and macademia nuts. All widely available and potentially tasty.
toasting vs not: I tried this with walnuts, to not much effect taste-wise. I don’t know about the effect on the fats. I would imagine that the omega-3s might stick around more in a less-cooked form, but I’m just guessing
is this omega-3 even good enough? Something about how ALA (the omega-3 in flax) is not as important as DHA/EPA (the omega-3s in fish) so maybe this is all a red herring. And maybe I should just eat more red herring.

spreadsheet

Here! Have at it. If you come up with a better nut butter, let me know!

I think I first noticed this when studying abroad in The Netherlands. Peanut butter seems to be a very US centric food. Supposedly NL is the best place in Europe for PB, but even there, I had a hard time finding enough of it reliably. Which leads me to think: the rest of the world must be an absolute PB wasteland! (shudder) ↩︎
I guess this is the common wisdom. But in the past couple decades of paleo, keto, anti-seed-oil, etc, I feel like I’ve read a lot of stuff arguing that saturated fats, like in butter and coconut milk, are actually not so bad. But I guess that’s all fringe stuff and saturated fats are actually generally bad. ↩︎
I remember even Michael Pollan, in the Omnivore’s Dilemma or something, writing about how most attempts to reduce food to numbers are a waste of time… but actually the omega-6-to-3 ratio is really important, and it matches up well with “we used to eat a lot of leaves and were healthy, now we eat a lot of grains/seeds and are less healthy.” ↩︎
I don’t know why these don’t add up to 49g. Claude says it’s because they’re different measures: first you measure total fats, then you measure each subtype, so it doesn’t guarantee they’ll match. Still, we’re 6g off. This bothers me but not enough to research more. ↩︎
this might be because it’s a Vitamix. I love Vitamix. It does one job well. ↩︎

I set up a NAS and now I'm ill

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 10:23:41 -0400

…matic. ok I’ll stop, sorry

guh! I thought it’d be nice to have my one source of truth for all my data I care about. I can reference it from anywhere, and it’ll back up to The Cloud. Plus, music server.

It was more of a pain than I expected!

buying the right stuff

I searched for a NAS and bought one. Well, I thought I did. You’ll have to forgive me for thinking this first result was a NAS, given the search terms and all the rest of the results:

I guess I should have noticed it was very cheap. Alas: it was a hard drive enclosure. Well. Returned it and bought a QNAP TS-216G-US.

Luckily I did the HD just fine: a 1TB Western Digital NAS SSD¹²³.

Got a UPS with AVR while I’m at it, since our @&*$%#! grid means we lose power more often these days.

dive into bizarro software world

I didn’t really think about it, but buying a QNAP NAS is really buying a QNAP El Cheapo Computer running QNAP OS, which means you get more-or-less whatever software they have made available for QNAP OS.

Setting it up is more of a thing than I’d guessed! you connect through guessing its address on your LAN, then you can set up “MyQNAPCloud”? You have to choose all sorts of setup things like do you want a “thin volume”, “thick volume”, or “static volume” on your hard drive? Gah

Then you’re in its knockoff-Windows GUI, f’ing everything has a splash screen Wizard, and you go through their App Center stepping over 19 different Backup/Sync apps, 11 “Entertainment” apps such as “Kazoo Server”, a lil category called “Surveillance”, …

Luckily “HBS Hybrid Backup Sync”, the preinstalled backup app, let me set up the following syncs easily:

from Google Drive to NAS (real-time)
from Dropbox to NAS (real-time)
from NAS to Glacier (nightly)

access my files

On my local network at home, I can go to 192.168.1.76 and find the NAS. I don’t know why it’s .76. I don’t even remember how I found it the first time when I plugged everything in and then went “now what?”

I can get there via myqnapcloud.com. Then that gives me a “smart URL” that’s https://qlink.to/(my nas name). Most importantly, I can access it like a HD, I think, on my local network or once I set up a VPN. More on that later.

(I’m sure there’s some way I can ssh? I hope? geez I didn’t even get this far yet)

jellyfin again

Jellyfin lets you stream your music from anywhere. Plex does too, but they’re getting worse over time and charging Yet Another Subscription, while Jellyfin remains free. Alas, free also sometimes means pain in the ass.

(I originally wanted to buy from Terramaster, the #3 NAS company, because they don’t lock you in to their HDs like Synology, and they advertise Jellyfin built-in. but I figured QNAP, the #2 NAS company, would be just as good, and how hard can installing software be? alas)

Anyway someone made an app you can install for QNAP Janky OS, and it seems to work, hooray

The last bit I can’t figure out is how to get it to serve jellyfin over https or install tailscale. The jellyfin-qnap maker wrote a series of incantations that did not work, though it’s probably my fault, because I did the usual “forget about certificates for 6-12 months, let all knowledge leave my brain, then try to learn about them again.”

ach, vpn

I can skip all this https nonsense if I use a VPN!

Attempt 1: there is a Tailscale QNAP app! But doesn’t work for my NAS version! Gah.
Attempt 2: there’s the “QVPN” app which lets you set up an OpenVPN connection. Or a L2TP/IPSec connection. Claude guided me through all these settings, all the ports to open, all the troubleshooting, it didn’t f’ing work.
Attempt 3: install Tailscale from container. The only setting I had to change (thanks Claude) was to run it in “Network mode: Host.” It worked! As soon as I logged in, the logs gave me a little URL to go to to log in to my tailscale account. Then it’s a machine on tailscale just like any other. Hell yeah. So I can access it when I’m not at home, use Jellyfin without fear of exposing a public http port, and even mount it as a regular hard drive.

Why SSD? I guess I could have bought a 3.5" HDD: cheaper and bigger. But I have small data requirements (200Gb-ish), I still have it in my mind that “SSD is better”, and no spinning disks means slightly quieter I guess. ↩︎
why only 1TB? much like house storage, the amount of junk you have scales with your available space ↩︎
why not 2 drives set up as RAID? I guess I like the idea of 2 backups: one local exact copy for when the HD dies, and one on AWS in case our house burns down. but this feels maybe a bit paranoid: the odds that Amazon dies the same time my HD does seem very low. IF I do test my backup and recovery. Which I will. Of course. ↩︎

The Part That Has Cancer

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 05:45:24 -0400

When you suffer, do you linger on it, or shrug and move on?

Linger:

you have to process your feelings. if you think you’re not lingering, maybe you’re going to feel the same thing, just spread out over time
take steps to make sure you don’t suffer next time
The Body Keeps The Score

Shrug:

sometimes there’s no feelings to process!
you start feeling sorry for yourself
are you inventing trauma when there could just not be any there?
that study where people who play Tetris immediately after a traumatic event have less lasting trauma

	You should linger	You should shrug
You linger	Feelings processed	Invented trauma
You shrug	Trauma lasts forever	No problem 🤙

how do you know

argh how do you know

obviously this is a feeling question, not a thinking question. it’s only correlated with the objective thing that happened; two people can both be in an earthquake but only one has lasting trauma. depression goes down in wartime. clearly not only “what happened” but also “how does it feel” and “what does it mean to you” all matter. is the answer just “you have to learn this over time”? oof

why is this important

typing happily at my computer on a pleasant day, I can’t really tell you. but when I’m suffering, I absolutely can. it means the world to have someone (perhaps myself) helping me through it. sometimes that’s consoling me, commiserating, talking, even (maybe primarily) just being there.

there are a million slings and arrows every day. you’ve got to learn to shrug. maybe the “everyone’s in therapy, everyone’s on SSRIs, everyone’s still depressed” modern world is partially a result of inability to shrug.

but also: 1/3 of us are going to get cancer. you love your spouse? it’s more than half, 5/9 that one of you will. you have two kids you love: 80% chance one of you will.

maybe it’s not that bad; maybe that includes the “easily cut it off and you’re done” minor skin cancers, I don’t know. but maybe it’s worse: lump in every other disease that’s “as bad as cancer.” good chance you undergo significant suffering in your life. if nothing else, when you die: maybe a lucky few of us get the “hit by a meteor” death where one second you’re there and the next you’re gone, but most of us will have a hard time of it. and when you’re there, you hope your loved ones, and especially you, have learned to linger.

Code for People is Organization

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 22:10:00 +0000

“Code for the machine” vs “code for people”

Some code is for the machine. That is, maybe you write code to compute a big numerical optimization, or to predict whether AAPL will go up or down, or to multiply a zillion matrices and tell you whether this photo contains a bird.

Some code is for people. You want to let people share their photos online. You have a chat client that has complicated rules about whether to notify you. You want to give people access to your internal apps, but only people in department X get to see app Y, and so on.

(This is, of course, a dubious binary, but at least I’m not saying “one is good and one is bad.”)

The primary skill in “code for people” is organization

Your application exists to do “business logic”; it has 400 layers of Frameworks around it to enable it to (run on the web/run on your phone/store data/control a robot arm/etc), but the reason for your app’s existence is that business logic. Most of the difficulty in “software engineering” is to make the right business logic available at the right time.

(This is why software is so goofy; if you build houses or something, at least you’re interfacing with wood and concrete and nails. If you build software, it’s as close to “just complexity” as you can get. Besides maybe law or accounting.)

Anyway, it’s kind of weird that people study Computer Science and then go on to write “code for people.” You need a dash of algorithms and data structures, big-O notation, databases, graph theory, networks, sure. But there should be a series of classes in the Computer Science curriculum with problems like:

You want to store these 500 spices and pickles and things in your pantry; how will you build shelves?
You’ve inherited an old library, a fire destroyed the card catalog, and you can’t use Dewey Decimal, what do you do?
You’re coordinating an amateur theater load-in; you have 50 people with different skills, you don’t know what their skills are and neither do they, and the stage has to get built by midnight; how do you do it?

DJ and Cooks' Knowledge Data Structures

Mon, 26 May 2025 15:26:34 -0400

There’s a kind of knowledge that involves:

finding things quickly
decades of built-up knowledge
“what feels right to come next” being a key question

One example: DJs. Imagine a DJ just spinning what feels good. A track is coming to an end. The DJ must come up with a next track to play that not only matches the BPM well enough, but most importantly, feels right. They may have thousands of records, but they can search that out. I bet every song they play, they know it well enough to hum it pretty accurately.

Another example: cooks. Cooking involves knowing enough things you can make that you can pick one out that uses what you have, matches everyone’s food requirements, and fits everyone’s tastes and mood.

(A third example might be improvisers, both musical and comedic. But I’ll focus on DJs so I don’t have to repeat everything 3 times.)

How do they/we do it? I’m probably a crap DJ, but I’ve had the experience of “I know what we should hear next” and it felt pretty right. There was no explicit “data structure” in my mind - I wasn’t saying “ok this sounds kinda new-disco, now we need a classic-disco song to come next, let’s sort by BPM, ok that one”, I just thought “oh yeah this would sound good.” (Indeed, when I try to data-structure it, it gets worse!)

Part of it has to be years of practice - I’ve got a wider music vocabulary than some, because I make more than zero effort to seek it out, but real professional DJs’ vocabularies must be much wider!

But that doesn’t really answer the question of “what’s going on in those years of practice.”

why

Yes, of course behind this inquiry is an Angle: what if we can at least partially speedrun this??

Before you get all mad at me for optimizing everything! I would love to speedrun mental music storage because DJing is fun. Even just for yourself. But it feels so opaque and impossible because I only have, idk, 3k songs I know well enough to DJ.¹ So if I could boost that to 10k in less than, say, 4 more decades, that would be nice.

It would also be fun to write a cookbook with this in mind, one that answers the actual hard questions of: 1. what do I buy, 2. what do I cook. Without getting too stiff about either one. Because “here’s a list of recipes” sure isn’t it - but every time I try to think about “what is it, then?” my head explodes with all the things you have to keep in mind to cook reasonably.

and even those, I’d probably be surprised to learn some of them have quirks that mean I’m not quite ready to DJ them yet. eg to pick a random song from my library: “The Tide is High” by Blondie: it has about 6 seconds of drum fill at the start that would bring any dance floor to an awkward stutter if I didn’t compensate for it ↩︎

So What About Twitter

Sun, 25 May 2025 21:47:13 -0400

My journey of using twitter had a couple phases:

maybe it’s good to Follow the News and stuff
hmm, maybe not, but it’s got a couple more niche uses like tweeting about a conference as it happens
hmm, maybe not, well it’s a social network that some of my friends are on that’s less bad than Facebook
wait, no, it’s also for following people you don’t yet know and making friends

Phase 4 has been roughly 2020-present. It’s been the most fascinating by far! Thanks to the bird site, I have:

met probably a dozen new people in person around Pittsburgh, locals and travelers
gone to this camp thing twice?
met at least one discord that I’m now quite active in which has been fun and exciting in its own right
have a feed full of stuff like:
- here are some fun ways to play with AI
- school doesn’t have to be so blah
- that parenting thing you’re going through, you’re not crazy
- there’s a whole world in the images your mind creates
- all sorts of wild things around psychedelics and meditation
- all sorts of wild things about bodywork
- perfume is fun
- what if everything is latches in your blood vessels
- you can do jhanas without decades of practice, probably

The best part about this is that it’s not even just like finding information about these things, it’s finding people who care about these things. I sort of know where to go to find out more about any of them.

but

I’ve also spent countless hours scrolling. It’s not the worst kind of scrolling, I’m good at avoiding that. But it’s kind of a time- and attention-sink. Especially because most of my tweeting is dumb jokes. is it worth it?

always finding my people

so here’s the thing. during the times in my life where I felt aligned with my work, I managed to feel part of a community. these were: college, grad school, and the first few years at stitch fix.

what did that look like? I knew:

some people I admired
who knew each other
who also admired me

I crave this. We all do, but I think I have a higher need for it than most. I currently have a lot of great friends, but many of them don’t know each other, and all our life paths are sort of diverging in a sense where I’m often not inspired by the things that they are. Remote work adds to the isolation; kids do too, because all us parents are either running around keeping them alive, visiting family, or getting sick.

So Twitter, in the couple minutes here and there: is it a way to help find my people?

Well, yes, in a sense, in those connections I’ve made. But it’s also frustrating: after 5 years, I have met a few acquaintances. I thought maybe Vibecamp would help, meet them in person, but it’s only once a year, and so after the past two, I don’t think I’m going this year. Might be “stopping digging just before you hit diamonds” but also, idk, it feels like another big cost with low and uncertain payoff. (Ironically, it’d be nice if I lived in a place with a bunch of these folks and could have more regular meetups, like I did until 2022)

There’s also a parasociality to it. Part of this is, twitter publishes follower counts, so you know who’s “big on twitter” - you feel like you’re meeting a celebrity if their Number is much higher than yours. Extreme version of the Friendship Paradox. You’ll meet some old scene folks, and you can’t actually make friends with them because they’re quite naturally busy hanging with their other old friends.

So maybe that’s it: there’s this fantasy that I’m in a global ingroup (hah) where everyone’s more amazing than the next, which keeps it shiny and exciting, but I’m not actually building any community within it. To do so would require ongoing getting-to-know-people, which, idk, I can’t do one tweet at a time¹. (and is hard to do in Pittsburgh besides the mighty ~6 of us who live here, and it’s hard to take off work and baby care² to fly out to one-off events!)

So I’m building a global network of like-minded acquaintances. Which, don’t get me wrong, is incredibly cool. But there’s another need it’s not filling, and I wonder if I’m displacing finding that need.

I think it’s at least neutral; a lot of the “lost time” is little minutes in between here and there. But it does make me wonder.

meanwhile, I also need to perform

I get a kick out of making dumb jokes on the internet! I don’t know! I get very excited about this! I’m sort of embarrassed to admit it! But at least it’s all online and you can just not follow me if you find it grating!

side note: sigh, elon

much has been said about how this guy owns the site and aren’t I ashamed for still being there? no, any more than you should be ashamed for using facebook or amazon or oracle databases or u-line boxes. I can’t stand the guy, but we can’t live our lives based around “do I agree with the CEO of this product.”

is twitter different, because it’s warping my mind? I don’t think so; if I were doing twitter dumbly, sure, but I’m not, so getting off it for ideological reasons feels like throwing away your tv because some channels are fox news.

it does continue to spiral downhill, as a functioning website, though, welp

“skill issue”, maybe! I guess some people have built real relationships from tweeting back and forth, DMing, calling, etc ↩︎
tweet from @made_in_cosmos: “me when all my childless Twitter friends go to yet another awesome meetup” and there’s a video of a bunch of goats jumping over a fence while a sheep is stuck unable to jump ↩︎

What a Weird Underworld

Tue, 20 May 2025 15:04:46 -0400

I got “Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease”. I guess this happens to parents. Some things I learned:

often kids don’t get it so bad but parents do!
once you get it, the first time is bad, but future times are not so bad (like a mild cold)
it’s one of the rare diseases that can give you sores on your palms and soles of your feet.

In my experience:

I had a fever Thursday, recovered Friday, Saturday mostly ok but getting sores and a sore throat, Sunday-Monday the worst sore throat of my life
the sores aren’t so bad! my face is a little itchy
they look like hell though, so I’m nervous to even show my face outside. like I’ll have to convince everyone that I don’t have leprosy or something.

The sore throat though! It’s so bad! Here are some characteristics of a sore throat that’s 7-8 on the Defense and Veterans Pain Scale:

it looks like a bunch of sores/pimples in the back of my throat, unlike Strep, which looks like your throat is covered in milk
it’s actually kinda ok for 9 out of every 10 seconds, until I need to swallow
I’ve been keeping a cup at my desk as a spittoon so I have to swallow less frequently. Yes, this is weird.
sometimes the pain is a little bit dizzying when I do swallow
none of the throat meds¹ work at all
tylenol/acetaminophen, aleve/naproxen, and CBD/THC seem worthless, ibuprofen sort of touches the pain and sometimes brings it to about 5.
the pain causes a little anticipatory tensing and pain around the times I swallow
sleep is hard but doable if I time the ibuprofen right
talking hurts, esp more than a couple minutes
being with people is mostly irritating
other pain or challenge is unmanageable because it stacks on top of this
it’s really painful to eat anything unless it’s bland and hot². Sometimes very cold water feels ok, sometimes it’s not. Anything acidic or sweet is right out.

So I’m in this weird underworld: I can do some stuff, as long as it’s not involving anyone else, not painful or challenging, doesn’t require talking or eating…

I fixed a fence. I did some computer work. I can type this post. I feel like I should be able to take care of my kid, and I can for like an hour, but it involves talking, pain, and irritation, which are hard to handle. I feel fine 90% of the time, and I’m right in the same old world, it’s just really hard to interact with it!

Tweet: The “sore throat meds” meta seems wide open. On the shelf: Benzocaine, Dyclonine, Hexylresorcinol, Phenol (spray), Menthol… What works? Why would you pick one over the other? ↩︎
the Chris Evans diet ↩︎

Pokemonization

Fri, 02 May 2025 16:02:03 -0400

Compare these two lines of cars. Honda:

Lexus:

Now close your eyes and try to do the following for each company:

name 4 of their cars
name one that’s SUV shaped
name one that’s a small car
name one that might be good on rugged terrain
you’ve just won a free car, and you can pick any of these! which one do you want?

I bet you can do all of these better for the Hondas. Why? Because Honda models are Pokemonized.

what is pokemonization?

Giving everything in the group a name that is:

pronounceable
distinct
3-12 letters
maybe related to something in the real world
customization-free

For example: Pikachu, Charmander, Blastoise. These fit all of the above criteria; even if you didn’t know which one was the fire one and which one was the little mouse, you could probably guess. And if I said “Blastoise”, you’d know exactly what I mean; it’s not like there’s Blastoise, Blastoise v2, and Blastoise-X.¹

The Hondas fit this almost perfectly². They’re easy to pronounce in 1-3 syllables. None of them are in danger of being confused with each other. I can guess what they each are from their names: “Ridgeline” sounds like a rugged truck, “Brio” and “Jazz” are cute, “Civic” is middle of the road.

Lexuses? The names are unpronounceable. (sure, you can say them, but “GS F” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue). They all sound the same, and they tell me nothing. If my friend was excited about his Lexus NX, I wouldn’t know whether he’s going camping or track racing. And the first time you buy spare tires for the GS only to find that they’re actually for the GS F, you will wish that there was only one Lexus GS.

Now that it’s been a minute or so, try to name the Hondas and the Lexuses again. Here, I’ll wait 60 seconds and try real time: Brio Jazz E:ns1 Accord Civic Ridgeline Odyssey, and um, IS CS LS GS GSF CX NX EX? 7/8 Hondas and 4/8 Lexuses with 4 false positives.

pokemonize your set

If you’re trying to sell something, this seems like a no-brainer to me. It will stick in people’s heads, interoperate cleanly, and even have personality.

If you’re Printercorp and you sell 3 printers, and they’re called Rolfus, Flurbo, and Sneepy, wouldn’t that be nicer than Printercorp x300, 274q, and 274i-1? I’d gladly buy a Flurbo printer and then Flurbo replacement ink, without worrying if it’s the right version of Flurbo.

If you’re making a software package called Glorf, telling people “install Glorf” will work way better than “install GSP (Glorf Software Platform)”.

Can you imagine people doing this if Bidoof was instead called Pokemon 118.24?

An earlier version of this post used Charizard here. But reader C S pointed out to me that there are in fact two versions of Charizard: Mega Charizard X and Y! And a whole slew of Charizards if you’re counting the card game. Probably a ton of Blastoise cards too. Well, god damn. Even Pokemon is bad at pokemonizing sometimes, the real world (or the pokemon world) is infinitely complex, and we can’t have nice things. ↩︎
Except the “e:NS1”, welp. ↩︎

2 Focus 2 Positive

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:11:02 -0400

a few obvious things

most people seem to think life is pretty good
life is also pretty complex
every day has a million good things and a million bad things
whichever of those you focus on is your reality

how is this relevant now

When I’m in the muck, nothing seems good. the positive voices seem like Pollyannas. I can’t change it once I’m there. it’s like Severance. the miserable innie doesn’t want to listen to the outie who’s living the good life.

Unlike in Severance, the innie would rather not exist. he doesn’t like being miserable. being miserable and heard is better than being miserable and ignored, but not being there is better than both. So maybe the deal that outie-me can strike with innie-me is: if we, together, can focus on the upsides more, you (innie) don’t have to exist as much

But it’s also hard talking with him without treating him as an object or a problem, and I assume either of those stances will make him shut right down, and I wouldn’t blame him.

a friend blogged this a while ago, and the phrase stuck with me. I do this a lot:

particular thing is bad
I do not focus on that but instead say that a much larger thing is bad
that makes me feel like the world is collapsing

An example:

project at work was frustrating because I was working with an old system that nobody’s really maintained
I had to leave and on the way home I was grousing about how I hate my job
wait, I don’t actually hate my job, I just hate this one part of this one project. I’ve made myself a victim of metonymy!¹

so now what

Ok, I have a little more energy right now and life seems hopeful. Current practice, then, includes “stop being victim of metonymy, befriend innie, focus on the positive.”

“focus on the positive” is too much to bite off, though, so I’m starting with “orient”: just focus on the outside world, feel my senses, feel connected with it all. I think this is basically the same thing that most everyday practices point at: Alexander technique, meditation practice off-the-mat, “stop and smell the flowers”, “take a deep breath.” Life is a little easier if you just chill out right now.

I’m gonna get so good at it.²

usually, including in this case, it’s “victim of synecdoche”, but using “metonymy” instead is a synecdoche I can live with ↩︎
comic by owlturd.com where B says “hey type A friend, stop and smell the flowers” and the type A friend gets so aggressive and tries to become the #1 flower smelling champion ↩︎

Micro-frustration

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:37:50 -0500

I was going to write about how frustration is the most common emotion I feel these days, but I’m not sure. Exhaustion is right up there. They’re kind of the same.

Here’s a feeling that happens a lot: I’m under little pressure, but I become frustrated because any single move is impossible, and I am rewarded with the sonic and emotional equivalent of intermittent electric shocks.

Here’s a concrete instantiation of that feeling: kid and I go to the playground. It’s 5 blocks away; let’s walk! On the way, the following things happen:

he refuses to hold my hand, and I have to judge whether it’s worth it to insist; he’s on the sidewalk, he’s not the kind of kid to make a break for the street, and I could catch him if he did, so I decided not to
he sees a rusty gas meter on someone’s house and just keeps touching it; is that ok? I guess?
he opens someone’s gate and walks up to their front steps. I tell him not to (idk? I guess if they’ve got a gate they don’t want us to just randomly open it? there’s no dog, but maybe it’s for a dog?) and guide him back out to the street. He fights me a bit but doesn’t melt down.
he runs his hand along the paint on someone else’s house. It’s old and flaking and probably full of lead. Well, he’s not eating it :shrug:
he sees a stop sign and goes “a stop sign!” “ooh a stop sign!” about a dozen times
while we’re crossing a street, he refuses to hold my hand. That’s not an option, I hold tight to his hand, and he yells and cries once we get to the other side.
he wants to run. He starts running and I walk fast to keep up with him. He says “dada run??” so I kinda half-jog so it looks like I’m running. He seems content with this. After about 30 feet he stops.
he sees a Little Free Library box. He opens and closes the door 5 times. He points at each book and goes “what’s that?” Each time I tell him, “a book.” He picks one up “ooh a book” and then tries to put it back but it’s hard to fit it back on the shelf (pages facing in; the pages kinda splay out around other books). So I help him a bit. He repeats a few times. He takes the book out and “flips through it”, bending it a little in the process, but at least not ripping it. I suggest “want to put it back and go to the playground?” He ignores me. Eventually he does put it back. We walk away. A couple steps away he runs back to the library box and picks the book out again. A few times I have suggested “want to put the book back and move on?”; he has always ignored me. Eventually it catches, though, and he does so.

A more zen person than me would realize that we are just killing time so who cares if it takes a while? And I am kind of like that; most of these things, I don’t force him to move on, I just let him explore and take his time. But it is exhausting for me. Exhausting because we are changing directions multiple times a minute. I just get started walking this way… and now we’re walking that way. (And if I try to get him to walk this way again, he’ll either ignore me or start screaming and crying.)

I wish there was a word for this. Micro-frustration. Everything’s a yak shave. It feels like if you had allergies, but every so often when you went to wipe your nose, it didn’t work and an airhorn came out of your nose instead, so you had to gently coax your nose back to working.

The frustrating thing is that the answer doesn’t seem to be psychological. It’s not like “I just have to let go of my anxiety around ___” or “realize that I don’t have to control ___.” It feels like being a little bit on fire, and the only solution is to “just get ok with being a little bit on fire.” That feels like a much harder adjustment to make, than to update some thinking patterns.

Some Claims About Our Present World

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:25:36 -0500

I keep struggling to write anything about the present state of the US, but it seems important to, so it’s blocking me writing anything about anything else. The block is something like: once I make A Claim, then I have to Substantiate It, and each of these would take hours to do well and I don’t have that kind of time or energy.

So, to unblock myself, I’m just going to throw these out there:

There are no cartoon villains. People who do bad things have reasons. These reasons are usually not as dumb as “I want to get rich” (though sometimes they are)
The News wants you to keep reading and clicking. They don’t care if they work you into a state of terrified aggression every day, as long as they get their clicks.
Those in power want you to feel scared, demoralized, and pwned. Some of their actions are purely symbolic, aimed at achieving this
- therefore, when you hear about a new “Trump administration plan”, probably just ignore it, as the reality will be nothing like what they claim.
Still, this all sucks.
The left went partially off course in the culture wars, aiming for symbolic victories and feeling smart/righteous rather than improving the world.
The right, ascendant, actually has a chance to undo some of these smug missteps. They will spend 5% of their time doing smart things like reinstating plastic straws, and that will be good. They will then veer wildly off course themselves, “owning the libs” rather than improving the world.
You don’t have to pay attention to any of this. It’s better if you don’t.
You should absolutely stay friends with your friends who happened to vote for the wrong guy. Consider it sports teams, not holy wars.
- I used to advocate the opposite of this. I was wrong. It doesn’t help, it makes you feel worse, and really almost anything that severs human connection should be viewed with much skepticism
Most of this, you can’t do anything about. Or, you can’t do much about without radically changing your life. I guess you can do a little (donate money! call your congresspeople!) with a little, uncertain payoff, if you want to. I’m not going to stop you. But it’s ok to round that to zero if that’s how you’re inclined, I think.
- I used to say the opposite of this. I’m not sure if I was right or wrong. But I wasted a lot of effort without much benefit, I think.
Be careful how much of your mental space this takes up. Be careful of falling for conspiracy theories or things that are not quite true because they happen to match up with a story you like.

Spending

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:29:26 -0500

Every year I total up all the stuff we’ve spent. This is useful for getting at least to Tier 2 and thereby being at least kind of able to think smartly about money.

I just saw Jeff Kaufman’s spending update and this makes me want to make a public post of my own. Mostly as a public service: it’s so helpful for me to read the results of someone who I feel at least kinda similar to.

so what do we spend money on

thing	approx cost in $1000s
nanny	63
mental and physical health	20
groceries	15
restaurants	9
helping out friends	9
kid supplies, babysitters, activities	8
house (paid off)	8
hobbies	7
wills/trusts	5
coworking space	4
home decorations/furniture	4
family travel	3
vacation	3
car (paid off)	3
new bike	3
new fence	3
coffee shops	3
life insurance	2
pharmacy	2
gym	1
total	196

(I know that doesn’t add up; I forgot a lot of “little things” here I’m sure. Don’t count this as a total pie chart, but as some anecdotes of “how much stuff costs for us.”)

can I feel less bad

This also always makes me feel bad. I always think “I should be spending less” - either because I should be saving for the future, or I should just be less destructive to the earth or something.

This year I did an exercise: “what’s different from 2010 Dan?” 2010 Dan lived alone in an apartment in Seattle and spent $30k/year. That didn’t seem wasteful. Why am I not like that now? Have I lifestyle-inflated that much?

But, ok:

2010 Frugal Dan spent 30k/year. About 9k was rent.
So, besides rent, 2010 Frugal Dan spent 21k/year
in 2024, Frugal Dan + T should spend 42k/year + housing
in 2024 dollars that’s 61k + housing
housing costs are about 8k now, in a paid-off house: property tax, insurance, and maintenance. (Curious that that’s similar to my rent back then - though after inflation that rent would be like 13k - and we have a 4br house now vs a 1br apt then)
So Frugal Dan + T would spend 69k/year
But once we have a kid’s expenses, and we have accepted that we hired a nanny, that adds 71k - so we’re at 140k already
Add in the following:
- car (~necessary)
- helping out friends (not necessary but we’re glad to be able to; what good is wealth if not for this)
- coworking space (~required by my job)
- wills/trusts/insurance (smart to do as we get older)
- new fence (smart for our house; we could bundle this with the house)
- new bike (ok, a luxury)
- and everything we’ve spent on our physical and mental health (all seems smart)
and we’re at 190k.
our actual total spending was 196k.
So Frugal-Dan-and-T would have saved 6k, out of a budget of 60k.

Conclusion: we have lifestyle-inflated (all our groceries, coffee, travel, etc) about 11% since 2010. But mostly just, kids and other side effects of aging cost a lot of money!

This is reassuring. It’s still a ton of outgoing cash but I’m not worried that we’re leaking huge amounts in every area of our lives.

Parenting Snapshot

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 11:47:04 -0500

Feels valuable to have a “snapshot of life” every so often. I guess some people do this with photos or videos, but I like words. This is mostly about parenting.

N just turned 2. We spent a few days with each family; mostly overwhelming, though we are lucky to have families that love him (and us) so much.

We’ve broken the streak of “every month is easier than the last.” I don’t know if it’s the Terrible Twos or Teething or Oh My God I Just Acquired Consciousness And Now I’m Mad All The Time. (Don’t worry, bud, I’m told that only lasts 60 years or so.) But with this induction into dual awareness, this Will Smith “Welcome to Earth” punch in the face, has come regular demonic possession.

This means that every time we try to change his direction even a tiny bit from what he was trying to do, he’ll fight us, and at least once a day it’ll turn into full-on The Exorcist screaming and wailing and flailing. Again, sorry bud; you will get better at this with time. We hit a new record of 5x yesterday; only one so far today, but the day is young. We had to set up the old pack-and-play crib so he has a safe place to fizzle out again on the first floor because we need it so often.

Food is still a toss up; often he’ll refuse everything, sometimes he’ll eat everything, who knows. He likes running around and climbing, usually, which is harder in the winter. Still in diapers; I guess this is the year for potty training, but I don’t know how to do that and I’m not looking forward to it. He can say a lot of words and often short sentences, like “open the door” or “I’m sleeping”.

His nanny has been helpful, and we plan to start him at day care in the fall. Not looking forward to the ensuing localized epidemic, but inshallah, we’re getting some of it over with. We each got “walking pneumonia” in November and have been on and off sick ever since. There’s circles of hell here, and we’ve mostly stayed in the outer ones (one parent healthy, or a grandparent around to help), but the inner circles (two parents sick, someone gotta take care of energetic kid, and it’s winter) are just a skip away.

Oh, and he mostly doesn’t like me. Loves other family members; loves his mom. He’s ok if Mama’s not home and he’s stuck with me for a while, but if we’re both home he cries every time she leaves a room. Yesterday after his nap, I’d go check on him every 15 minutes and he kept saying “seeyoulater! seeyoulater!” and getting agitated until I left; I assume he was hoping that if I leave maybe Mama will come in the door next? shrug I hear this is typical too, and I’m not taking it personally.

What about the rest of my life? Well, I make time to do puzzles once a week, and the rest is work (not doing awesome at it, but hopefully treading water successfully) and maintenance (exercise, ~therapy, doctor appointments). We’re watching a good TV series called Dark (2017). It’s got time travel; otherwise don’t read too much about it beforehand. Still a lot of Slay the Spire; my free time is so sporadic (e.g. while I’m waiting for him to stop telling me “seeyoulater”) so phone games allow me 10min at a time, and it’s still the best phone game.

most positive take

I wonder why it feels important to me to make these snapshots on bad days. Given my last post about noticing the positive, how else could I put this?

I’m managing! I’m juggling all the demands of baby and job, and have time for fun too. T and I feel good together usually, I can still do puzzles and in fact am going to Mystery Hunt next week. I’m improving at my job, our house is nice and cozy, I can grow plants, I keep developing new reliable recipes, I’m reading good books, and I’m still fit as hell. Hell, I’m almost never in pain, which is a miracle itself.

(I didn’t feel terribly fake writing that last paragraph. Hmm. On the other hand, a cup of coffee just hit my bloodstream, and stimulants are a reliable mood booster for me.)

Noticing What's Good

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 15:03:28 -0500

One big question in my life for the last two years¹ has been: my life is so good, so why am I so mad?

I keep trying stuff, as much as I can. I can’t say I’m an incredible Tim Ferriss self-experimenter, but I’ve been in and out of meditation, therapy, medicine both conventional and unconventional, exercise, philosophy, movement, heck even starting a family. There’s been benefits: like, I’m glad I lift weights now, it makes life 10% easier². But 10% easier takes you from “baseline -5” to “baseline -4.5”, and that’s … not enough. There’s also been explored search spaces: for example, the whole “trauma” story³ doesn’t really help me, but now I know that.

But… what’s going on, if all that hasn’t helped?

One thing I notice: the default loop of my mind is “find something that’s wrong.” When I’m not really focusing on guiding my thoughts, I’ll keep noticing problems (ideally fixing them but usually just spinning). What if it wasn’t like that? Like, what if I default went to “what’s good about the present moment?”

That feels both plausible (I’ve never really changed this) and powerful enough (attention is all you need). This feels like what neuroscientists and airport psychology books call the “default mode network” and what Buddhists call tanha⁴.

It also feels impossible. Like, that event loop is running 1000 times a minute. If I notice, maybe I can turn one of those from negative to positive, which leaves 999 left. Then the next minute, I’ve got 1000 negative again.

On the other hand, according to a reliable source (someone on twitter), the distance between a life worth living and wanting to die really is, like, one minor amusement a day.⁵ I’m working with someone right now who’s convinced this shift is very possible, and I mostly believe her. The shift may not be direct: you don’t change those 1000/minute by wrenching one grumpy moment into a smile, then another, etc. … I’ll update if I figure it out.

really the last 15 years, but especially strongly since baby ↩︎
especially with a kid! hoo boy I would absolutely tell anyone having a kid to get strong first, it helps a lot. ↩︎
by “the trauma story” I mean “all your problems are a result of childhood trauma.” This is obviously true for some people, but it’s probably non-obviously true for some others, and I guess I thought maybe I was in that latter class? But after lots of exploration, now I’m pretty sure I’m not. ↩︎
“tanha” - “the fast grabby feeling” - that feeling that constantly goes “life is not ok right now.” Leads to dukkha - “suffering” or “hard to bear-ness.” Not super confident, IANAB ↩︎
tweet says: “i love the “never kill yourself” genre bc it captures the slippery truth that the distance between a life worth living and wanting to die really is, like, one minor amusement a day. that’s why it’s imperative to go outside and look at things and try to like them.” It’s quoting a tweet that says “snowing in new york. deli had Hello Kitty toilet paper. Demi Moore has a Golden Globe. never kill yourself.” ↩︎

Bragging Over Fairness

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:52:21 -0500

This blog post starts with “This particular lesson has shifted my worldview significantly”, and that sounds grandiose, but it’s been a good lesson for me too.

In short: author has lived in shared houses where they assign chores, and that’s always been kind of miserable; in their current configuration they instead just brag about all the great things they do for their house and it works much better.

(It’s very well written, so worth reading, though.)

Some sublessons:

it doesn’t matter if everyone does “the same amount of work”, it just matters that everyone’s happy
letting people specialize is nice, it gives them agency over the work they choose
bragging, in the spirit of “I love this shared commitment and am proud to support it” is very Good Actually
even if you’re motivated to grump, sometimes you can manually turn it into a brag in a way that feels fake but actually works still

An example of this last one: I felt like I was washing the dishes too much. I was about to say “T, I’m washing the dishes too much; can you wash the dishes more please?” But instead I said “Let me brag: I’m so good at washing the dishes the last couple days!” And everyone actually felt better even though I basically did a find-and-replace on words I was saying.

Further, letting people choose their work is, IMO, one of the key differences between life that feels meaningful and fun, and life that feels like drudgery.

Brag more, assign chores less, it’s good.

2 Types of Therapists

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 20:12:01 -0500

I’ve been wondering a lot about therapy: how many people should be doing it? Should I be doing it? With what goals? For how long? What type?

I do not have good answers for these. But I came up with a nice dubious ontology that nevertheless helps me think about this: there are strategy therapists and tactics therapists.

If life were a baseball game, the strategy therapists would be teaching you when to keep a pitcher in or when to take him out, when to shift your fielders, how to run on anything when there’s two outs but be more cautious on fly balls with 0 or 1 outs, how the infield fly rule works, and so on. The tactics therapists would be teaching you how to hit the ball.

Strategy therapists include most talk therapists. They’re good for big-picture framing problems, like “I’m not lazy, I have ADHD” or “am I gay but too afraid to even realize it” or “I’m struggling with alcohol because my dad did too and it trained these patterns in me”. These are a lot of the “therapy success stories” you hear about, because they’re easy to tell. If you make big progress on your problem, and you can explain that progress in words, it was probably a strategy problem.

Tactics therapists are more varied. Some things that I’d consider tactics therapy:

exposure therapy/ERP for OCD (slowly get you closer to the thing you fear)
IFS, or anything that involves some kind of improv (sorry if this is misunderstanding IFS, I just mean like, talking to different parts of yourself as if they’re there, not thinking through your problem)
bodywork/massage/cranio-sacral/etc; progress in these is usually less linear but sometimes your body just feels better and that lets you solve the problem
- certainly anything where you e.g. release a muscle knot and the tension around your problem dissolves is tactics
EMDR, probably?
Begrudgingly, CBT - but I think tactics that go through thoughts are usually less effective than ones that go through feelings or body sensations
psychedelics can be both, but I’d guess they’re more often tactics, based on how hard it can be to put their lessons into words.

Tactics solutions sometimes can be put into words, like: “when someone criticizes something I did, I take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s not a criticism of me” or “I stopped tensing my shoulders so much.” Sometimes the result can be put into words, but not much of a reason: “I just feel more at ease” or “I’m not so afraid of spiders - I always knew they’re mostly safe, but now I really know it.”

Both are good and have their places, of course, but I’m finding myself gravitating more towards tactics therapies. They seem generally higher value; sometimes they bubble up into a fix for a problem, or sometimes they dissolve the problem because it’s no longer relevant. And at least, when they’re good, they provide some targeted support. But this may be because I already overthink everything, and I can tell you a pretty good and coherent narrative of my life.¹ As a result, I’m a little bummed that strategy-therapy seems to be the default. Well.

Said narrative has a lot of “well, I don’t know why, but I started succeeding at X and failing at Y, so I did X more” or “I just don’t like Z so I structured some things to get away from Z”. I don’t have it all figured out. But there’s a lot of known unknowns, and I’d be really surprised if someone strategied me into “whoa, this thing actually is about this or that childhood trauma” or something. ↩︎

The Experience Machine Private Beta

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 21:48:30 -0500

(Hugo set the disappearing message time to 1 day)

Tom! Great to hear from you. I’m so glad you got into the beta. Ok, I’ve got to give you all the scoop I can. Of course you know you cannot tell literally anyone this. Not even Sandy! I know, I know. Listen, I can’t tell anyone this. But… while I do believe this is the most important project in the world, it’s really playing with fire, you know? I can’t just let you waltz in there unprepared.

thanks man! yeah I’m excited!

Ok, they’ve told you the basics, right? You come in for “a day” of subjective time, about 80 minutes objective time. And you choose the valence, 0-10. 5 is absolutely neutral, a very ok day. 6-10 are better, 0-4 are worse. And we pay you, or you pay us, exponentially: going through a 5 day gets you $0, going through a 4 day pays $20, a 3 pays $200, 2 pays $2000, and so on. We pay you more to help us test out the low levels here; otherwise everyone would just bliss out. And you pay us if you want an especially nice day: $20 for a 6, $200 for a 7, and so on. AND THEN we give you $20 for your time - so you actually break even on a 6, and make $40 total for a 4. Make it worth your while to test the mid levels too.

how the hell do you get the levels right?

I know, right? I KNOW. Well, first of all, that’s why we’re doing all this testing; we don’t wanna have someone come in expecting a 3 and get a 0. But second of all, we evaluate it with the participants in the debrief and … it just works. Remember when LLMs Just Worked and everyone lost their minds? This is bigger than that. It has pretty good access to most of your brain activity and so it figures out what “7” means for you and then pipes that right in. Of course, it took a lot of work to simplify things that much - but that’s roughly where we’re at. It can sense content too, so if you come in thinking about basketball, you’re going to get a day where you’re playing basketball, so keep that in mind. It takes in the latent content vector and our valence parameter and generates the experience around that.

ok ok so … just think of puppies and kittens?

Well, sort of. That’s the content, but the valence is the valence. If you think about puppies, an 8 day might be frolicking in the fields with puppies, while a 2 day might be your puppy dying, or you getting attacked by a dog.

that’s only a 2??

Yeah. Well, so yeah. Here’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Think hard about the valence you pick. I’ve got lots of stories.

ok, hit me

4, 5, and 6 are pretty safe. You’ll have a day. Definitely recommend that first time. You’ll get to come back, I’m sure; most people do. And you’re more … psychonautically adept than most.

lol

Some of the repeat 6ers are pretty sad though tbh. You know we’re trying to recruit a cross section of people - so we do get some people who are, shall we say, down on their luck. They’ll sit there and run 6s as much as we’ll let them. They break even on $ and they’re having a decent time. I think if we let them they might live out their lives at 6. And I don’t know if I can blame them - given what they have to go home (or “home”) to. But I digress, sorry. What were you going to pick?

I mean, I thought a 2; I can take it and I wouldn’t mind $2000

You probably can. Most people can. You know AGE’s Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain, right? Our valence scores are inspired by that - it’s what leads to the exponential payments, but it’s also necessary in order to capture the full breadth of human experience. And we’re sort of re-deriving those scales - if people would pay $200 for a 7 and $2000 for an 8, then we have a good bit of evidence that our “8” is 10x as good as our “7”. Sorry, I wandered off again. You could take a 2. But it’s 10x as bad as a 3, which is 10x as bad as a 4; take a “meh” bad day you’ve had recently and multiply it by 100. That’s why maybe a dog attack or pet death might be there.

huh. yeah I never really thought about it like that

And communicating that is a thing we have to get better at. God, when we first started, we had people going straight for the 0. We warned them, but $200k was hard to pass up.

oh god

Yeah, it … listen, I told you I seriously believe this is the most important project in the world, right? That’s what keeps me going. But after Jason Mickleman, we …

who?

Oh, thank god our PR team is so good. Listen - guy did a 0 unprepared, got PTSD (or who knows, just intense T), killed himself 2 days later. Between the mountain of forms he signed and our lavish outreach, I don’t think his family blamed us, incredibly. I mean, the guy did have problems already. I shouldn’t even tell you this. Again, stops here. But that’s why nowadays you have to do 3 2s before you try a 1, and 3 1s before a 0. And we do have someone watching you now - we can’t really understand much of what’s going on, but we can have a fuzzy sense, and we can tell when someone’s going completely haywire - kind of like a comatose hospital patient with all the monitors.

so what did go through his head on his 0?

We don’t know. But: for all the insane mental landscape you could be traversing, somehow it’s usually pretty mundane. We very rarely hear of people flying through space or being tortured by demons; more often it’s very normal life stuff. Probably wasn’t Star Trek, more like Breaking Bad. Loss of family and friends, abandonment, guilt, shame, hopelessness, rage, sickness.

why aren’t people flying through space?

A question from a true DMT aficionado! Look, you (particularly you) may meet the cactus person and the big green bat. But most of the time, we think, the generative algorithm rejects anything that’s too far out in qualia-space because the valence wouldn’t match. Put you in 6 dimension harlequin world and you’ll glitch out, and that really doesn’t match a “3” or a “7”. Now, on the 0s and 10s, the bets are off.

i’m quite comfy in 6 dimensional harlequin world

(Now I know you are fine in 6d harlequin world)

Jinx. Hah! But you know what I mean.

why do you do the 0s anyway? why anything <10?

It’s important! Have you read our namesake’s works?

your namesake pff

He is! Ok, I realize branding as “Nosic” does sound very Silicon Valley, but well, we are where we are, and he didn’t exactly endorse us.

are you… are you building the torment nexus?

No! No, listen. Mickleman aside, for a lot of the 0s, it’s a transformative experience in their lives. They go through hell and they survive. They know that they’ve tasted the worst it can get, and that gives them tremendous power and security. This might be you at some point: your medicine adventures, your meditation practice, all your bodywork; you might be up to it, and that might help you. But I’ll leave that to you. Just, don’t dive right in.

yeah, gotcha. what about the 10s?

Ironically, that’s also a transformative experience in their lives. Remember MDMA for PTSD? This is way better. Way better. Most people have never known love like this. Knowing that that’s possible changes things for them. It’s hard to be dour when a 10 experience exists. And especially if it’s easily integrable: those who experience very ordinary 10 days go home and notice everything, the birds chirping, every beautiful thing their spouse does, the awe and wonder of their kids. They just got an expert course in how extraordinary those things are.

they stop and smell the flowers, right :P

Well yeah, but … look, you’ve told me about some of your “10” experiences! I’ve heard you, in 45 minutes you’ve dropped off those heavy weights of grief and guilt you’ve been carrying, you’ve realized that you are loved and you do love and your heart is a raging furnace full of energy that you must get back out into the world!

ok, fair. yeah. sorry

Nah it’s cool, it’s a long way between those states and here. But it doesn’t have to be. Imagine you spend an hour a day doing this at 10; how much better would those other 23 be?

sure, if I had $200k to blow every day

We’re working on that, yeah. Clearly it can’t stay that way forever. But it costs an insane amount of compute. Thank god we’re not burning fossil fuels anymore or we’d be pariahs. But it’s expensive, and we are burning investor money for sure, on everyone but the 9s and 10s.

ok, so will I get addicted?

That… we don’t know. That’s the dark side of an Experience Machine in every house. Like Nozick, we wonder: will everyone just zonk out forever?

how is it now?

We have had some worrying behavior. I told you about the 6-addicts. We do have a couple of 10-addicts - really rich guys whose names I absolutely cannot mention. We’ve also got some 8 and 9 “addicts”, though I’m not even sure if that’s the word - people scraping together money repeatedly to get a fraction of the 10 experience. But maybe it’s less “addiction” and more like massage therapy or a sauna. Let your mind relax; these are very good days. Remember that the world is a beautiful place, even if it’s been beating you down recently.

huh. ok. yeah ig I can work with this. uhh I’ll try a … 3? maybe a 7 next time?

Love it. Start slow. I’ll do what I can to make sure they invite you back.

I'm Tired

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 21:43:27 -0500

(well I’ve been sick for most of this week, that’s a big part of it. nevertheless,)

There’s no “spark” left. whenever I think about going out and Doing Something New, there’s a huge ugh field, like the activation energy required is infinite. like being in crisis mode: “no I can’t bake croissants for fun; I don’t even have enough wheat to survive the winter.”

Having a kid is just endlessly demoralizingly difficult. Two parents both wiped out for 4-7 days with a toddler who’s doing fine is one of the worse circles of hell, and we only dodged that bullet thanks to my mom who’s a hero and has watched him for most of a week. I don’t know what we do when this happens next time. Hope we keep dodging bullets.

And people talk about it like they talk about minor annoyances. “Oh yeah, it’s the worst when everyone’s sick.” No, casual “oh yeah, it’s the worst” is like when you get too many telemarketer calls. Sick-with-a-kid is a kind of Bad that we should maybe talk about in hushed tones or euphemism around it so as not to awaken whatever spirits are in charge of it.

(am I being melodramatic? like, ok, it’s not “family member murdered” kind of bad. there are worse things. but I do feel like most parents, and non-parents for that matter, underrate how hard this is!)

Maybe this is why this election just feels like “:shrug: whatever”. back in 2016 I got super bent out of shape, made a bunch of calls, donated to a bunch of causes, went to protests, started my own dang email newsletter. Didn’t do an ounce of good. Do you think I persuaded Nancy Pelosi¹ to “fight whatever bad thing Trump did that day”? This year, I can’t seem to care:

For all the stupidity, not all that much happened in 2016-2020²
We can’t do anything about it anyway. Maybe call Nancy Pelosi a couple more times.
A lot of “caring” just means “getting mad because someone posted something without doing anything”; again, please unfollow everyone who pisses you off, unfollow everyone who makes you feel anxious, please

she was my rep at the time, I wasn’t just picking her out as a famous public figure ↩︎
yeah I know: Roe, the judiciary more broadly, border children, Jan 6, lots of smaller things. These are all quite bad! But we were worried about N*zi marches in the street ↩︎

Newbies, Journeymen, and Surfer Dudes

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 21:07:22 -0400

or, “I first called this Stage 1-3 but I could not bring myself to post a concept as miserably-named as Type I/II Error or Kahneman’s System 1 and 2”

It seems that most activities one chooses to do, broadly speaking, go through about 3 stages:

Newbie. You don’t like the thing yet. You can’t even do the thing, you feel like an impostor, you fall on your face, it’s not fun.
Journeyman. You can do the thing, kind of. You have to psych yourself up to go do it. You enjoy it, kind of, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.
Surfer Dude. You just do it effortlessly. If anyone ever says “want to do X?” and you don’t have to be doing something else, you say hell yeah.

Stage	Activation Energy Required	Enjoyment
1. Newbie	High	Low
2. Journeyman	High	Variable
3. Surfer Dude	Low	High

Obviously, it’s great to be a Surfer Dude! In as many activities as possible! Notice when you are that, and treasure it! If you have a chance to go from Newbie to Journeyman or Journeyman to Surfer Dude, take it!

How does one do that? I don’t know, and that’s a bummer. I think I’m a Surfer Dude in only a couple things: puzzles, some video games (like Slay the Spire), maybe cooking. Even in activities that I like and value, like biking, lifting, meditating, I’m Journeyman at best. And this suggests that it’s not about raw hours doing the thing: I’ve spent literally thousands of hours on some of these! How am I not a Surfer Dude yet? And puzzles was a pretty quick ascent to Surfer Dude; they are shaped just like my brain is.

Some hypotheses:

it helps if it’s social. I’ve talked Slay the Spire with at least 3 groups of friends, for years, which helps it remain a Surfer Dude activity for me. I also really like Super Mario World, but nobody plays that anymore, so eh.
it’s probably part innate? Like I mentioned, I ~instantly fell in love with puzzle hunts.
it helps if it aligns with your self-image. like, I have friends who enjoy driving fast cars; that would be a long road to surfer-dude for me.
relatedly, it helps if it makes you feel good about yourself. I didn’t actually instantly fall in love with puzzle hunts; I did them back in college and felt incompetent and never got beyond Newbie. But in my 30s, because of the social situation, and a little respect even from solving a puzzle here or there, I quickly got to Surfer Dude status there.

side notes

This is not about how good you are. If you suck at chess and lose constantly, but you love it, you can still be a Surfer Dude. Indeed, actual Surfer Dudes were not necessarily “the best surfers” - they just really like it. Of course, it tends to correlate, because if you really like doing the thing, you’ll probably get good at it.

I guess I should also bring up one more side stage: Addict. Maybe this is stage 3a. It’s just like Surfer Dude, but instead of High enjoyment, it’s Low. (the prototypical example is scrolling on social media, or bingeing bad TV, or gambling or smoking or whatever people get addicted to.)

This is also not a value judgment of the activities. Hell, you can be a Surfer Dude at reality TV. But the reason people don’t talk like a Surfer Dude about “low status” things like reality TV is not about the status, but that they tend to lead you to Addict, not Surfer Dude.

I've stopped meditating again

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:48:45 -0700

I really gave it a good go this time! Alas

a brief history

of Dan meditating (this is for my own sake, tbh):

2007-08: a guy taught “zen meditation” at college. Sounded cool. None of us had any idea what we were doing. One guy burst into class one day declaring he was enlightened and never came back. Ok.
~2010: saw a “Buddha Dome” at burning man. They had a chanting practice. I sat with them and then they connected me with a Seattle group. They were friendly enough but I didn’t like their beliefs: “prosperity gospel megachurch but Buddhist”. Soka Gakkai, a mostly pretty chill cult.
~2010-11: found another local group, Bodhiheart Sangha. Lovely folks. Sat with them weekly and on my own daily for a while. Read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, got real excited.
2011-12: traveled a bunch. Did some retreats in India, incl a 10 day Goenka, and Netherlands.
2012-14: grad school, depressed, off and on. Retreat at Bhavana Society. Disillusioned, mostly quit.
2016-19: met Kenneth Folk, got taught by him for a bit. Daily practiced. Eventually got disillusioned and quit.
2021: Jhanas got popular on Twitter! Meditated daily for 4 months through force of will trying to get there. Disillusioned, quit.
2023-24: Brightmind and coaching from Toby Sola. Daily practice. Disillusioned, quit.

Looking at this list, I feel like an alcoholic who keep trying to quit, but instead of alcohol it’s “not-meditating.”

now

At any rate, I’m not-meditating again. A couple weeks ago, paraphrased:

Me: Come on, I’m still at the same place I was a year ago, this sucks and I hate it, what the hell
Toby: Yeah, that’s true… why are you doing this? Is it possible it’s not helping you you right now?
Me: It’s absolutely not helping! What the hell!
Toby: Er… right? You don’t have to meditate.

(I mean this entirely complimentarily to him; he’s been a great support and I’d recommend him, and from an outside point of view I think he’s probably right!)

And I think this was the permission I needed: someone who knows his stuff telling me “nah, this isn’t going to magically start working for you right now.” (I wonder if this is what Kenneth was thinking too - I got back in touch with him in 2021 and had one call with him, then he ghosted me. :shrug:)

so what’s the problem

Why am I even doing this? What am I trying to get out of it? Answered this in a chat a couple weeks ago:

stream entry (and beyond?)
reliable access to jhanas
whatever Shinzen Young’s got¹
whatever it is that psychedelics do, without drugs
not be depressed

Ultimately these all boil down to #5. Life is so painful! I don’t want it to be!² Right now I see a couple ways out:

feel good, then the questions of meaning don’t come up
feel like your life is meaningful
idk get enlightened?

I can do #1 if everything is going well and my life is easy enough. Obviously, perhaps, that’s unstable. My life is not easy enough right now. Drugs can give you #1 but they’re not good enough. I don’t know if I can do #2. Some people seem to have a career that gives them meaning, or deep connections to their family that are enough for their life to feel meaningful, or a relationship with God, or something? I just don’t and I don’t know how I would. So that leaves #3.

So why not just meditate a lot? I just can’t seem to. It’s so painful. And I say this not as someone who’s just trying it and “ohh sitting still is so hard”, I mean, I’ve got between 1000-2000 hours sitting. It’s so painful because it feels like so much work for nothing. Almost absolutely nothing. There’s never been any payoff. I would have more payoff if I had been watching reality TV the whole time (except, then I couldn’t make this exact complaint).

I don’t do well learning/practicing without feedback. I can do weights: number goes up! I can do guitar: I used to not be able to play something, now I can. I can’t do “repeat daily for years, assume that it’s working, even though it never feels like it.”

So, I guess I’m getting off path 3, “meditate a lot”, again. Feels bad, but staying on it feels worse.

“If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer–I’ll take the one day of enlightened living. IT’S THAT GOOD, DUDE.” - and if I had a dollar for every time I footnoted this quote… ↩︎
I guess there’s also the reason: “If it is that good, then I’m really missing out!” but I guess that’s pretty related to reasons 1-5 here. ↩︎

Life Satisfaction: a Wrinkle

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 10:06:57 -0400

I keep trying to figure out how to measure “how good is your life.” (e.g. here, here, here.) My current best idea is: your life is good iff¹ you want more of it; your life is bad iff you want less of it.

So instead of rating your life (or day, week, month) on a scale where “1 is bad and 10 is good and everyone will always say 7”, we can go from -5 to 5. 0 means “if I knew tomorrow would be as good as today, I would be indifferent about living it vs. magically fast-forwarding through it.” +1 means “I would rather live that day than fast-forward”, -1 means “I would rather fast forward. And then beyond that, we can measure how good or bad those days are by what you would give up to live or not live them.

How do we measure what you’d give up? Can’t be money/possessions, or human connections, or whatever, because those are all different for different people. But we all start life with the same amount of time. So I propose: +2 means “I’d give up one day of my life, e.g. die one day sooner, in order to live this day.” -2 means “I’d give up a day of my life to avoid living this day.” Then it’s roughly exponential: maybe +3 is “I’d give up 2 days”, +4 is “I’d give up 4 days”, +5 is “I’d give up 8 days”, and similarly for the negatives. (I guess the scale goes on to +6, +7, and beyond, though they’d be pretty rare)

But there’s a problem with this: as your life gets consistently better, the days you’re giving up get better too. If my days were all +5, I’d never give up 8 days of my +5 life to live a +5 day!

Hmm, back to the drawing board. I do like the concept that you’ve got to compare to something, otherwise you just get “+3 is really good, +4 is super duper good, +5 is incredibly amazing” and everyone will converge on +3 again.

(Money’s pretty natural, and maybe it’s decent within a short period of time: “would you pay $100 or $1000 to live this day again?” can compare today vs last week or last month. But you can’t compare your current $1000 day as a professional (very very good!) to a $1000 day when you were a poor student (has to be the best day ever!), and you can’t compare across people.)

“iff” means “if and only if” ↩︎

Parties

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 12:55:40 -0400

A sad thing about being late 30s is I haven’t been to a *party in a while.

I don’t know what I mean by “*party” but to give you a vibe: Fred Again.. rooftop set. Apparently Fred, a very famous DJ, just invited all his longtime friends to a London rooftop party. Such a beautiful setting and great music!

Here are some characteristics of a *party:

some people you know and some people you don’t
you by-and-large respect the people there and they respect you
some sense of losing yourself (this is often, but does not have to be, dancing)
some sense that you’re the coolest people in the world

It seemed easy as hell to host a *party in college; we were young ambitious successful young people in college, of course we were the coolest people in the world. And you could have a good mix of people you do and don’t know, you’d always be losing yourself (maybe dancing, maybe sneaking into some building on campus or playing some prank or even just walking around at night).

Some examples, besides college parties, that either made it or just missed:

Our wedding. Failed #1 but we didn’t care.
We threw exactly 3 parties in our house in grad school. They all met this bar.
I saw Dan Deacon play last weekend. It failed #1 and maybe #4
One time Broken Social Scene was playing at our school, and some of them knew a friend of a friend and so that person threw a party and we hung out with them
Academic conference parties, surprisingly. As you’re trying to grow in a professional field that’s networking , you have 1, 2, and 4 almost by default. 3 is the only one lacking.
Similarly, tech company holiday parties, surprisingly. Fails 3.
Burning man is close. For me, because I went with like 4 friends, it failed 1 and I’m not sure about 2.
I went to Vibegala, basically a bay area house party, once. Failed 1 (I knew ~nobody) and 2 (~nobody knew me)

I don’t know if this is a wholesome impulse from my soul or just ego tripping. Certainly when there’s celebrity or money involved, that helps, and that makes it feel fake. But there’s a part of me that feels like I Matter when I’m in a scene like that, and there’s a part of me that needs the magic of such a *party. Maybe it’s even wholesome ego tripping.

How Did I Get Here?

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:08:22 -0400

In our team meeting/update, we sometimes have a “fun” question. Last week was “what would you call your autobiography?” and I said “Well, how did I get here?”

Everyone kinda laughed, but I mean it! Here are a few other ways to say this:

things just kind of happen
your life is not “your decisions”; it’s at best how you float on the winds like a hang glider but even that is generous to how much agency you have in your life
no comprehensible God
how can you have any feeling about your life besides bewilderment?

There’s a Ted Chiang story called Hell is the Absence of God that I just reread. In this world, heaven and hell are real and angels visit earth, usually causing a lot of damage like a natural disaster. Heaven is wonderful etc. Hell is ok, mostly like Earth. You get to heaven by loving God a lot. Neil, our protagonist, has a bad leg and is kind of depressed and angry his whole life. His wife, the one person he loves in life, dies in an angel visitation, making him even more depressed. She goes to heaven. He tries to love God but can’t, so he goes for the hail mary (npi): seeing divine light. (When an angel visits, divine light peeks through the heavens for a moment, and basically everyone who sees it witnesses the glory of God and they all go to heaven.) He finally does see it, though he dies shortly after.

“So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway.”

I hesitate to say this, but this feels like our world. God, or whatever is controlling all of this (physics?), is just … unknowable, arbitrary, and impossible. It’s like our health: yeah some things tend to lead to better health and some to worse, but anyone can get cancer or ALS.

And yet, most people are happy enough. How?

I’ve been tracking my moods on a 0-10 scale as I’m trying medication again¹. And this whole post is the kind of thought that comes up on a 2-4 day and goes nowhere, and mostly vanishes on a 5-7 day. So,fill up all the tanks and hang glide on the winds I suppose.

I guess I understand the “soldiers of God”, the ones who are fully dedicated to Jesus or Allah or something, the ones who in Chiang’s story are going to heaven. But how does one give oneself to God? I don’t want to, or think I can, join the zombie Cthulhu cult of God lovers in Chiang’s story.

I guess I also understand the “good enough” people. I know lots of people who don’t worry about God or whatever, they just have a pretty good life, a lot of 5-7 days, and that’s good enough. But I don’t think I can do that either; certainly my life is “good enough” by any measure and I can’t just chill and enjoy it.

Well, we’re not in Chiang’s story. There must be a better way. I hope that someday I write a better title for my autobiography.

like in this post but shifted up 5 (not sure why I shifted it). So a 5 is a day I’m neutral about reliving. 6 is a day I’d like to relive; 4 I would not. I would shorten my lifespan by a day to relive a 7, or to not relive a 3. Something like this. ↩︎

Transcendent and Worldly Modes

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 17:00:26 -0400

Here’s a thing that probably has a better name already; I’d love to know what that is.

how good is life?

People have different answers to that, and sometimes it depends on your circumstances. There’s a common-sense view that life is good if your circumstances are good: you have good family and friends, good food and housing, you’re healthy, you work on engaging things -> life is good. You’re lonely, poor, sick, etc -> life is bad. If your circumstances are +3 good, your life is +3 good. Let’s call this the “worldly view.”

And then there’s the idea that your circumstances don’t matter so much. You can “choose” to be happy, no matter your exterior world. Or, less straw-manned: maybe you can’t be +10 happy if your world is -10 bad, but you can tweak it a couple points. Maybe your world is -2 but you can, through a combination of willpower, smart mental patterns, meditation, idk, maybe you can experience it as +3. Let’s call this the “transcendent view.”

We could even say something like: your “transcendence index” is the maximum N you think it’s possible such that one’s circumstances are M but they experience them as M+N. Full transcendence would be 20 (“you could be at -10 but experience it as +10”); full worldliness is 0. (“your life is exactly as good as your circumstances.”)

examples

most people, most of the time: pretty worldly
St. Whoever the Ascetic who wrote about how much they love God despite living in a hole in the ground: very transcendent
Clayton Schwartz, author of Two Arms and a Head (review, but warning, even the review is quite grim): worldly
cluster headache sufferers: worldly
Nick C or jhana fans: transcendent
Shinzen Young¹: transcendent
A couple of people I know who came down with cancer and lots of horrendous chemo who nevertheless felt even stronger, after that, that they want to live: pretty transcendent
Many people’s experiences on many substances: transcendent
Many people’s near-death experiences: transcendent
Those same people, when they have to go back to their lives, chop wood, and carry water: maybe a step or two more transcendent than before, but pretty worldly again.

so which is it

I don’t know. It certainly feels naive to assume more than, say, 5 points of transcendence is possible. Look at Clayton Schwartz; his life is probably varying between -10 and -7 depending on the day; how could one possibly hope for him to improve to something consistently >0, something worth living?

And yet, some people survived Auschwitz, which seemingly must require transcendent hope. Living transcendently must be possible.

… how does one get there?

“If I was given the choice of living one more day experiencing life the way I experience it, or living 20 more years as a wealthy, healthy, celebrity sexual athlete, beloved by everyone but not experiencing what I experience (vis a vis enlightenment), the decision would be a no-brainer–I’ll take the one day of enlightened living. IT’S THAT GOOD, DUDE.” ↩︎

Kids and Ego

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:37:21 -0400

I just talked to a friend who said “I just have remarkably less ego now” after getting two kids up to school age and it made some things click. All the hardest parts of raising a kid are, in some sense, ego problems:

ego: I want to sleep enough. kid: you can’t
ego: this is boring. kid: I don’t care, you have to keep watching me
ego: I wish I was doing ___ with my time. kid: sorry, you have to give up so much of it to watch me
ego: I want some time to myself. kid: no
ego: I want to Accomplish More Important Things. kid: no, you have to accomplish “playing with dinosaurs with me.”

So what should we do? Parents seem happier the more they’re able to just shed their ego like a snake skin. if you’re a High Powered Career Person who used to work 80 hours a week, that’ll be hard to adapt; if your career is kinda flexible that’s easier. If you don’t care about how you sleep or eat, that’s easier than if you do. If you keep thinking “I want to be playing chess with my chess club”, you’ll be sad; if you keep thinking “rolling a ball around with my kid is the most fun thing ever”, you’ll be fine. It seems like a good argument for “minimize yourself” or “your needs become subordinate to your kids’.”

But that has two problems: 1. it’s hard, 2. it sets you up to be a depressed empty-nester. I don’t know how valid #2 is; it’s solving something 20 years in the future, and maybe the answer is more like, “learn to adapt”. Maybe the parents who navigate this the best are those who pivot from “chess club alone” to “rolling a ball” when their kids are 1, and then to “reading books with them” when they’re 6, “rock climbing with them” when they’re 13, and back to “chess club” when they go off to college.

There may be a problem 3, too, which is that “minimize yourself” isn’t actually good? Thinking of this post by David MacIver and this one by Scott Alexander. I’m sure that everyone reading this is going to rush in to say “noooo, you’re doing If-By-Whiskey; Minimize Yourself (to be a good parent) doesn’t mean the same thing as Minimize Yourself (in a bad way)”, I don’t know, maybe you’re right, in that case strike Problem 3.

But problem 1 (“Sloughing Off Your Ego Is Hard”) is a problem no matter how you slice it.

More Mental Mental Models

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 14:38:01 -0400

I keep trying to figure out my depression.¹

The right mental model seems important. For example, one mental model is “grade school science fair”: you get rewarded for how hard you try. So if you’re feeling depressed, try harder! (This is not a very good mental model.)

One model I was trying out is Fill Up All The Tanks: I need to make sure all my tanks are full of the right gas, oil, transmission fluid, whatever, then I’ll feel good.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough. Last week I was hit with an intense spat of depression out of almost nowhere. So I’m amending the mental model to also include The Weather: sometimes you just get hit with a storm for no reason.²

Also: The Uphill Climb. Harder life is harder! Here this is not normative, I’m not saying I should/shouldn’t take on this or that challenge, but I should recognize that in the more difficult parts of life, I’m going to be depressed more often.

Some mental models that do not seem to fit me:

Trauma: as in, “once you find and heal your trauma you’ll be better.” I spent a lot of time looking for trauma and … afaict, I just don’t have much
The Vitamin: “turns out you were deficient in Vitamin Q, and once you started taking it, you were fine”
The Big Unlock: “once I started (doing practice X), it really opened things up for me.” I’ve tried a lot of Practice Xs, I don’t know
Seasonal Affective Disorder: seems to happen just as much in summer as in winter

Mental models that I’m not sure if they fit me:

Bad Chemicals: “You just have a low level of serotonin, so of course you’re depressed, you need a serotonin-boosting drug”³
Purpose/Meaning: “John Doe was terribly oppressed his whole life but because he was devoted to God he was happy” It is hard to find meaning in life but with a wonderful family, friends, fine career, decent spiritual life, it’s hard to believe that I have less of this than most people

So, Fill All The Tanks, The Weather, and the Uphill Climb. It’s rather a lot of words to say “I still don’t know what I’m doing here.”

some would say this is futile, or like trying to nail jello to the wall. I get what you mean, and I’m not trying to hole up with some Nietzsche or Sartre until I Figure It Out. We’ve all got to “live in a way that doesn’t feel quite so bad”, right? So if you’re inclined to say “stop thinking and just vibe, man”, then please assume I’m “trying to learn to live in a way that doesn’t feel quite so bad” or “learning to vibe” or whatever doesn’t trip up your word filters ↩︎
Of course, not actually “no reason”, but it’s so complicated you might as well say no reason. ↩︎
I know depression is not just “low levels of serotonin”, don’t @ me ↩︎

Quick Thoughts About Parenting That Have Come To Me Recently

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 22:12:06 -0400

there are whole new colors of feelings

There are feelings in parenting that are really hard to describe unless you’ve had them. I don’t think this is necessarily unique to parenting; I’m sure there are unique feelings in mountain climbing or novel writing too. But it’s definitely true about parenting.

These feelings differ in magnitude and character from anything else. Magnitude: for me at least, it’s really opened up at least one or two orders of magnitude. (reminder about log scales of pleasure and pain¹) Character: well, they’re different.² Hard to describe how! But some candidates:

imagine a job you could never take a day off, and that happens nights and weekends too; imagine that job but you get paged in the middle of the night and you’re sick to your stomach
imagine debugging a computer, but the computer has only one bit of output that is “something is wrong”, you absolutely must figure it out, and it’s screaming at you
imagine you’re the CEO of a company, you’ve never even been a middle manager before, you have to make 1000 decisions every day and they mostly don’t matter. Your company, however, will almost definitely survive for 20 years, probably for 60-100 years, but unlike a company you will absolutely care about everything about how it turns out. So you care deeply about making sure you get those questions right.

It is telling to me that the examples I suggested are all work, and all negative. I understand there are order-of-magnitude and very-very-different positive experiences too. I’m getting there.

But as I’m writing this, I feel the need to reassure you, dear reader, that this is not the typical “dan gripes about parenting” post; there are new deep thoughts and feelings here! let me get to them…

a mom’s love is like the sun

it’s: incredibly powerful, constant, and present without trying. A dad’s love is like a 10^17x nuclear reactor: able to get to the same order of magnitude, but it’s much more unsteady and you have to build it up. But nevermind that. It’s pretty incredible to even witness a mom’s love for her kid! Sometimes as the dad, that’s part of your role.

maybe it’s time to be initiated

I struggled phrasing this section, because I want to leave all the “shoulds” out of it; they have been painful for me. But I’m getting the signal that my growth path now is like passing through an initiation. In a sense I already have (am already dad) but I’ve been kind of “reluctant dad” and maybe it’s time to accept the role of “enthusiastic dad.”³

As with most initiations, it’s a choice, but one you rather want to take. The young men in the tribe could just skip the coming-of-age ritual but that usually leads to shame and dishonor or worse. I think the fact that I’m feeling like I’m being presented with this means the decision has already been made.

How does this look externally? Probably gradual. There’s a line between “being an enthusiastic dad” and “looking like the epitome of enthusiastic dad” and I don’t think I’ll ever be the latter. But I am still figuring out what that’s like.

it’s a good thing I’m not spinning

If you have not enough energy for your life’s demands, that sucks, obviously. But if you have too much energy for your life’s demands, or rather, too few demands for your energy, I think that can lead to problems too. (see as example, maybe, the stereotypical trust-fund kid?) You need demands, and they need to be worthy demands.

Pre-kid, I didn’t have Big Purpose. I didn’t dedicate my life to curing cancer or ending racism or saving the environment. And I may have been in danger of “too few demands for my energy.”

Well, that’s not the case anymore! Now my scales have tipped the other direction. But at least I have more demands, and they are worthy!

I realize I’ve failed the “dan write something without linking to log scales of pleasure and pain challenge (literally impossible)” ↩︎
I guess it would be surprising if they weren’t: “your kid bonking his head is like opening a soda to find that it’s flat, but times 50” ↩︎
Really something like “between accepting and enthusiastic”. “Enthusiastic” is a lot of pressure. But I’ll say “enthusiastic” for the sake of this post. ↩︎

Why Do I Care to Measure Depression

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:09:26 -0400

Popular conception of measuring your life

Strawman Steve: People want to be happy, but they don’t just want to be grinning like idiots all the time. what does happiness meannnnn, idk dude, we just can’t measure it. everyone’s life is basically the same.

me: No! This is wrong!

Steve: Well, some people’s are worse if they’re in war or poverty or abuse but otherwise basically the same.

me: What if you’re depressed?

Steve: Well, I guess that’s bad, but everyone’s got some problems, idk

me: What if you’re suicidal?

Steve: Yeah ok then I guess your life is bad, even if it looks ok on the outside.

me: so there’s “ok” (most people) and “suicidally depressed”, is there anything in between?

Steve: idk man, you just can’t measure happiness, like what do you want to do, sex drugs and rock and roll?

me: sigh

You can indeed measure life-goodness

Hmm I already posted this in Levels of Depression and Fast Forward Time, but to recap: at the end of a day, imagine you could decide to re-experience the day. (either you have your memory wiped, or you have another day that is different but just as good as the first day.) It’s free, you don’t age. Would you do it? How about at the end of the year, would you re-experience the whole year? If so, your day/year was good. If not, it wasn’t.

Dialing it up a bit: would you pay extra to re-live a day? Like, let’s say you could re-live today, but you’d have to sacrifice two days of your life. You go to bed Monday night, the next day you experience Monday2, then you wake up and it’s Thursday. If so, we could call that a +2 day. Or would you pay extra to avoid re-living a day? Like, you can either have Monday2 and then Tuesday, or not have Monday2 and wake up on Wednesday. If a day was that bad, that you’d sacrifice 2 days of your life not to re-live it, we could call that a -2 day. If you’re completely indifferent on whether you relive a day or not, call that a 0-day.

At time scales of a day, that doesn’t really reflect on your whole life. But if a year goes by and you had 100 -2-days, 260 0-days, and 5 +1-days, that’s a pretty miserable year. Or we could just look at the year: was it overall a +1, +2, -1, 0 year?

Why do I care?

T asked me this very good question: why am I going on about this?

It’s because life has been hard for no good reason and I’m embarrassed.¹

We have one (1) baby right now, he’s healthy and happy and nice and sleeps pretty well now and I’ve been going on for a year and a half like I’m in one of the middle rings of Dante’s inferno. I should definitely be in the “it’s so magical” boat, at least by now.

On the one hand, dads get postpartum depression and maybe I did. And I think I’m a little autistic or something, or maybe a Highly Sensitive Person.

But man, I should be better at this! Autism/nerdiness? Even Scott Alexander (with twins!) is full of love. And I kinda don’t even think “Highly sensitive person” is a thing. Check out this Barnum test. Starts to feel like Internet mental health speak.

(While I was writing this, another another technology brother piped into my RSS reader to agree “it’s so magical.” I just keep finding this stuff.)

Anyway, I know that I’m doing all right, but I think there’s a program or programs running in the background of my brain saying “If I could say I have Level 12 Depression, then everyone would agree that, yep, that’s unusually hard and that I am a mensch for even surviving.”

I might be ashamed. I can’t always tell the difference. Nah, I think embarrassed. I haven’t done anything morally wrong, I just feel kind of weak. ↩︎

Low Agency

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 22:13:36 -0400

I’ve been feeling like I don’t have a choice in the way my life turns out. The mood of this feeling isn’t self-pitying (mostly, though we’ll get to that), more like, “how did I get here?”

An example: I don’t think I could have become a professor. After seeing what the job entails and doing the junior version of it (PhD) for ~5 years, I realized there’s no way I could do it.[^1] Some of my friends just naturally fall into the academic style of work; I don’t.

It feels about as built-in as height for a basketball player. Of course, I don’t mean to minimize all the great work they’ve done, much the same way not every 7’ guy gets into the NBA. But I felt like I was about 5'10" trying to run with these guys. I had a couple advantages, I could dribble fast, and I developed a pretty good sense of who to pass to and when, and scored a few baskets. But when the NBA draft comes around, no way I’m going to get picked. Maybe, if I loved basketball 10x as much, or if I had a gun to my head and it’s basketball or death, I could have worked 10x as hard on my dribbling and passing, and made it into the NBA as the rare short guy.

That whole paragraph seems rather one-dimensional and self-pitying. I don’t feel that way. I feel like I just learned basketball isn’t my thing. I met the people who were 7’ tall, and I met the people who thought “basketball or death”, and I realized that wasn’t me.

this has to be a balance, right

There’s upsides to feeling low-agency. If you feel yourself to be super-high-agency, like everything is your choice:

everything bad will feel like your fault; no equanimity
you’ll attempt crazy things assuming that “you can do anything if you put your mind to it” and then get really depressed when that isn’t true
you’ll end up like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” republican

But if you feel super-low-agency, like stuff just sort of happens to you:

you won’t try hard enough
you’ll feel small and hopeless
well that’s a recipe for depression isn’t it

how is this showing up

Here are some things that I “chose”, that don’t feel like my choice:

not being a professor
moving from data science back into engineering
still being a “solid engineer”, not a “all star company-leading expert kind of engineer”
(redacted)
(redacted)
moving to Pittsburgh, given that we had a baby
continuing to try to meditate, getting nowhere and banging my head against the wall, for so many years
this trip I’m taking this weekend

I’m thinking it might be useful for me to develop more agency. (It feels pretty awful, like I’d be fighting uphill the whole way, but I can’t escape the fact that it sounds like the right answer.) I wonder how.

checkpoint

Mon, 27 May 2024 23:57:19 -0400

I notice if my blog doesn’t have any posts on it in a month and that makes me kind of sad. so, mostly a mental/emotional checkpoint because that’s useful to have later.

heck of a month! not doing great! I had two bikes stolen. I’ve got insurance, but it’s a pain. wrangling a toddler continues to be difficult. so I’ve been pretty depressive: low energy, mopey, grumpy.

yesterday I had friends over to do puzzles, and that’s usually one of my favorite things, but it took all the energy we had, and then some. (T is sick, too.) It felt like a splurge, time-wise, and not just a normal thing one might do on a weekend. and that means both that I’m wanting more out of it (you don’t go to a fancy restaurant and say “well that was a pretty good spaghetti marinara”), and that I just can’t do it all the time.

which is frustrating. I feel like the things I do that give me joy just keep getting sucked away. It feels like there’s Time Inflation; like it used to be that I could buy a fancy coffee every day, and now that coffee costs $50 and I can only afford it once a month.

(what are some of those things? 1. computer art, 2. long bike rides, 3. spacious time, 4. some travel, 5. freedom of money, 6. now puzzles, I guess?, 7. a group in which we get altered and create drama¹)

none of this is T’s fault; she’s doing her best to make sure my entire life doesn’t get inflated away, and I really appreciate it. but there’s only so much a co-parent can do.

(picture: me staring into the wind, yelling “what else do you want?” as I am eroded away)

I should mention that I’m very aware of a couple voices: “you’re playing on super easy mode” and “if you were more open/calm/wise, you would be overwhelmed with love instead of focusing on all the stuff you have to do”. but as usual they don’t help

this is shorthand for maybe another post or tweet thread or something. hypothesis is that that’s how you make the best friends ↩︎

What Are All the Tanks

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 10:51:33 -0400

since approx becoming a dad I keep asking “why is life so hard now¹, and can I do it better?” and one answer that’s formed in my mind is “yeah I absolutely can, I just have to keep all the tanks full.”

imagine I’m a fancy sports car². I have all sorts of tanks: gas, oil, uh windshield wiper fluid, engine coolant, transmission fluid, there are probably a lot of others³. Everyone does, but some people are like beat up 2007 Toyotas and they can run just fine with low oil and old transmission fluid, but I need everything to be in perfect condition. One high maintenance machine⁴.

It certainly feels like it! When I’m generally ok, I can handle all of this. when I’m not, well.

so what are all my tanks?

A non-exhaustive list that’s hopefully slightly more detailed than Maslow’s Hierarchy:

food. downside is I eat a lot, upside is I don’t have allergies or anything.
- meat might be a subset of this; I think I am healthier when I eat occasional meat than when I don’t
- maybe kind of a lot of water
exercise and movement
- biking. I can’t really get myself to do anything else cardio-wise regularly and I get sad when I’m not on a bike
- lifting? I haven’t ever really quit since I started so I don’t know how much I need this but it feels good
- walking, stretching, and general movement. it’s true that sitting for 8 hours feels bad
sleep. I don’t know what I need; I used to think 8-9 hours but maybe 7 is ok now?
feeling connected with T
nature, I think. this one is tough because I never feel like “I need nature more” but it seems to help
sun, maybe? I don’t think I get SAD but I probably need sun so I try to get it whenever I can
work with a purpose (but the purpose can be as small as “helping out a friend or acquaintance”)
pop-culture dopamine. I have only a pop-culture understanding so when I say “dopamine” I mean “the little feeling of ‘ooh I got a thing’”. Sometimes I satisfy this with video games and it actually feels right, not like just numbing
friends
- 1-1 conversations with close friends
- interactions with small groups of semi close friends
- interactions with a wider world of mostly acquaintances, like a party or conference
- meeting new people (may also be satisfied by the party/conference, or other ways)
- social status. I need to feel high-status in at least some of these interactions
puzzle solving (this may just be pop-culture dopamine + high status, not its own thing)
not too much acute stress or interruption, even if it’s unimportant - e.g. I can get overwhelmed by getting texted too many times in an hour
not too much chronic stress; this is harder to define but I notice if my job or marriage or house or whatever goes into a difficult phase
alone time: an hour or two to myself, with no responsibilities, in a quiet environment each day
(redacted)
(redacted)

really?

I don’t know. I vacillate between:

I can keep it together, if I manage all these things
I could keep it together, if I could manage all these 20+ categories, but that’s not humanly possible
this entire post is BS; what I need is unrelated, like “I need to stop trying so hard” or “I lack The Vitamin⁵” or something.

note for myself for posterity: actually this month has been really good, until approx this last week. maybe that’s why I haven’t been posting ↩︎
of course I wanted to make this about bikes instead. but no, that’s the point; cars are obnoxious high maintenance machines with 1000 tanks. bikes are simple and good. I wish I were more like a bike. ↩︎
I’m not even sure if these are all real. if you know cars and can give me a list of all the tanks you have to fill, please do ↩︎
of course, to the tune of This Year ↩︎
tumblr post: “My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out that I am severly deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency.” Reply: “Moreover, everyone gathers around to be tremulously compassionate and discreetly admiring: all this time, you lacked the Vitamin? And yet you persevered?” ↩︎

Some things I learned about antidepressants generally and Effexor particularly

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 22:41:34 -0400

Last year I went on an antidepressant. This year I’ve come off it. I’ve done this before, but I learned new things this time. Here are some of them.

background and facts

Prior experience: Prozac (fluoxetine) 20mg 2014-2019.
This year:

Feb-Apr 2023: Lexapro (escitalopram) 5mg then 10mg (I think)
May-Jun 2023: Wellbutrin (bupropion) 150mg
Jul 2023-Feb 2024: Effexor (venlafaxine) 75mg

they’re supposed to noticeably do something

SSRIs/SNRIs do something! They’re supposed to be noticeable! If they’re not noticeable, don’t bother!

I took Prozac for 5 years despite it basically doing nothing for me. If I squinted and ignored the placebo effect, I’d say, I don’t know, maybe it took me from a 3/10 to 4/10. Lexapro and Wellbutrin had the same effect. Nobody wants to promise you the moon, so I figured, well, it’s probably low-level working, maybe this is the best you can get.

But luckily, I kept trying. Effexor did something! It almost did too much; the first couple days I felt jittery, like I’d had too much coffee. But man, then it gave me a boost of like 3 points, from 3/10 to 6/10. Enough energy that I could get through each day. A little blunting - I felt a little like a robot - but better than ragedespairing.

“spin the wheel” is state of the art

I joke about the “wheel of antidepressants.” Spin the wheel, try whichever one it lands on. This is the best we’ve got.¹ I guess Lexapro/escitalopram is a common first choice because it doesn’t tend to have bad side effects. Wellbutrin goes in another direction (it works on dopamine and norepinephrine instead of serotonin) so that’s why it’s often tried next. Prozac has a longer half-life than Lexapro. Effexor is an SNRI (norepinephrine and serotonin, not just serotonin) so that might be different too. But then, I know people for whom Lexapro doesn’t work but Zoloft/sertraline does, and they’re both “just SSRIs”. So who knows.

natural remedies might work instead of SSRIs or they might not

If you talk to hippie California types, they’ll say “you’re considering SSRIs? why not microdose mushrooms, or take kanna instead?” Well I… have a close friend who tried those, and they didn’t work. By all means give them a shot, but as with the previous point, who knows.

getting off is difficult!

Nobody told me this before I started, but Effexor is among the more difficult antidepressants to taper off of! Took me a while, anyway. I kinda wish I’d known that beforehand!

why are you snickering? oh yeah, well… that’s true too. not terribly, but noticeably :-/

you can split the pills

My psychiatrist said “well, when you’re at 37.5mg, that’s the smallest pill they make, so the next step is just to stop taking them.” That was hard for me. But the pills are little capsules, you can just open them and subdivide them with a milligram scale and some pill capsules. You can make 18mg or 9mg pills. I wish she had told me that too.

I eventually did 37mg for a couple weeks, then 18mg for a couple weeks, 9mg for a couple weeks, then 0. Going to 37 and 18 was effortless, going to 9 was kinda hard, going to 0 was kinda hard. A new feeling was “brain zaps” - not actually that bad but a little weird!

I wanted to get on an antidepressant for a period of months, to get me through the hardest time of baby raising. (My reasons aren’t the kind of thing I want to blog about, ask me sometime. But they’re not the dumb macho “I want to do it myself.”) My goal doesn’t have to be your goal, and you should probably stay open to all possibilities regardless of your goal.

My psychiatrist didn’t see things that way; she saw no reason for me to get off. In fact, she wanted me to try a higher dose to see if it helped more. It is good to remember that your psychiatrist is looking at your case through a proverbial keyhole; you inhabit this brain 720 hours a month, they see you for maybe 0.5.

Your psychiatrist also probably doesn’t want you experimenting at all (e.g. reducing your dose before talking with them). So… not saying you should, but if you do, maybe don’t tell them; just present yourself as a very good rule follower.

(Hopefully it goes without saying to tread with care, though. Like, make sure you have other people checking on you who can tell if you’re going off the rails one way or another; you can’t always tell from the inside.)

this might mess up your life insurance

I was trying to apply for life insurance in the middle of this, and got denied. Weird; I have basically no other health concerns. Snooping around r/lifeinsurance, some people suggested that multiple prescriptions for depression meds might raise red flags. So, I don’t know, feeling ok is more important than life insurance, but just FYI.

as a fan of luck-based medicine, I don’t actually mind this. but it would be nice if we could pinpoint “this one will work for you!” ↩︎

Infinities

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 11:28:41 -0400

there’s a kind of low level logic behind your will to live, right

if everything feels good, you can achieve your goals, your needs are met, then it’s easy to feel motivated and optimistic and well adjusted. if you feel hopeless or stuck, it’s not. I think most people would agree with this.

one place my mind then goes is: “yeah but - look at Gaza, or Myanmar, or South Sudan, or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or global warming, or factory farms. there’s ~infinite suffering out there. how can we be happy in this world? how can all that possibly be worth it?”

this is actually not about Gaza or Myanmar, it’s about me

if I’m being honest, this is a dodge for “I feel bad right now and I want my pain to be legitimate so I’ll talk about the Whole World instead.” The real feeling is: “I feel negative infinity awful sometimes, how is this worth it?” It is embarrassing to say that because basically everything in my life is somewhere between “ok” and “amazing”. But let’s right now assume that my pain is legitimate, because otherwise we’re not gonna get anywhere. “I feel negative infinity awful sometimes, how can this all be worth it?”

infinity minus infinity

“negative infinity” here is my mind playing tricks on me. It’s my mind being overwhelmed and refusing to play. And I recognize it all the time now too:

the Republicans/Democrats did X, that’s infinitely bad, I don’t care what my side did, we must shut them down
(this artist) did X, that’s infinitely bad, it doesn’t matter how good their art is, we must destroy it all
nuclear power led to Chernobyl and Fukushima, those are infinitely bad, we must shut it all down
people park their cars in the bike lane for no good reason, they should have their tires slashed and their license revoked (oops that one’s me, nevermind)

and I guess if that was it, these people would be right. if life is just the occasional ice cream cone (+100) or pretty flower (+50) or Chernobyl (-infinity), it’d be pretty clear that this place is a kind of crap hellscape and not worth living

but… there are positive infinities too. why is it so hard to find them? here’s some:

my family loves me
my body usually works and generally feels great
there is so much boundless creativity and love in the world

(those may sound vapid, but “there’s a war in some country” or “this guy cut me off in traffic” are pretty vapid too)

Seems pretty obvious that if I believed in the positive infinities as strongly as the negative ones, I’d do fine. “I cannot reason about these huge things, brain shutdown, ehh might as well say the positives win.”

why the asymmetry

the next move here seems to be “focus on the positive things, do metta meditation, keep a fuckin’ gratitude journal, until you deeply believe that the love of your wife and kid are way more positive infinity than your temporary lack of sleep is.”

so, yeah. I’ll do that. in some form.

but why is it so hard? why do I have to climb uphill to believe the positive infinities, while believing the negatives is effortless? it’s not like I do hate-meditation or hate-journaling every day.

Some hypotheses:

The News; I’m not doing hate-meditation but our information landscape will do it for you! hate/fear/anger get clicks!
my brain is honed to “find a problem, fix it.” some of that might be engineer brain! some of it is a tactic to avoid getting overwhelmed.
maybe all our brains (2024 USA humans) are honed to “find a problem, fix it.” I remember decades of classes of Finishing Assignments and very few Playing Around or Enjoying The Moment
maybe all our brains (humans) are honed to “find a problem, fix it.” this is why “get out of your head”/“touch grass” is such standard advice. being a mammal feels good. being a human feels… well, it’s evolutionarily advantageous, but it feels less good.

3 and 4 seem like a stretch because most humans and even most 2024 USA humans are not depressed.

How Much Does Media Affect You

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 22:03:00 -0500

Epistemic status: just brainstorming, no conclusions even

Here are some things I believe:

violent video games don’t make kids violent
porn is probably fine in moderation, not good in excess
watching horror movies is in general fine
the wave of torture porn movies (e.g. Saw¹, Hostel; sorry I’m reusing the word “porn” here but I’m referring to horror movies whose main draw is gruesome things happening to people, not porn) is a little troubling²
Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and other big-budget TV shows might be peddling the same thing as Saw (essay that’s a bit extreme but in this direction)
The News makes people think the world is worse than it is
The News and Social Media cause rage and fear by rewarding it

Anyway, interesting ACX post about how, maybe when you’re sad, listening to sad music doesn’t actually help and you should just get yourself to listen to happy music. Experimental History continued speculation about set points. … Sounds like, if I may continue speculating, it’s not about the action you take, it’s about where your set point is. So like, if you want some adrenaline, you watch a scary movie, fine. You want more adrenaline, you watch a gruesome serial killer movie, you go “glad I’m not in their shoes”, your body regulates itself. The problem is if your set point for “amount of gruesome serial killers you want to watch” is too high?

But man, I don’t know; how does that explain Social Media and The News³? People have a need to get angry, The News offers them this? What happened before say 1900? Did people just get mad in public more?

Back to the core question: how much does media affect you? Maybe we can look at it in layers; imagine we’re all a cognitive, emotional, and archetypal layer (among others, I guess). Media can definitely throw your cognitive layer way off; read stories of crime every day and you think it’s everywhere. Media can sort of affect your emotional layer; certainly short term, at least. If you have to go console a friend at a funeral, maybe don’t watch Saving Private Ryan first (or Looney Tunes, for that matter). But it’s not likely to affect your long-term emotional set points. And media can’t really, hopefully, affect your really deep-seated stuff, your basic person-ness. (just walk away from the screen, like close your eyes)

ok I gotta admit, I actually kinda liked Saw. I think it gets a bad rap; most of the movie is about trying to find the killer, and the weird dilemma of: “what if he almost kills someone, but they’re grateful for it?” It’s not mostly about the killer doing gruesome things to his victims! (though there is that.) It sounds like some of the other films are much more pure torture-porn than Saw. But I gotta use it as the example here because it was kinda the biggest name in the whole 2000s torture-porn wave. ↩︎
Though maybe that was a wave that came and went? wp describes how it was mostly 2000s-early 2010s - though CW: even reading wikipedia descriptions of these films is pretty troubling ↩︎
the band was never the same after Huey Lewis left ↩︎

Budgeting: Where I'm At Now

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 16:21:59 -0500

I’ve figured some things out about budgeting. I’m not awesome at it, but I’ve learned some stuff. I hope it’s useful. It might be more useful if your monetary position is kind of like mine (always made enough money to survive and save for retirement/etc), and less so if you have to figure out how to make ends meet each month.

gosh I tried to make this into a structured post but nope it’s just gonna be a series of thoughts.

1. there are tiers

of knowledge about your money.

I don’t even know what’s happening with my money. My savings keeps going up, or maybe I’m broke, either way, I don’t know why.
I know where my money goes. I spend x% of my budget on y, etc. I can’t really do much with that though.
I know where my money goes, and I make changes based on that, and my savings reflects my changes.

I’ve spent the last ~10 years climbing from stage 1 to stage 2. I’m not yet at stage 3. In theory, stage 3 is “budgeting” while 2 is just “knowing where your money goes” but I’m gonna call this all “budgeting”, for simplicity.

It’s still worth it to be at stage 2! For example, I could decide this year that we can afford a nanny. If I were still in stage 1, I’d have to shrug and go “well, I don’t know, that’s expensive.”

2. this shit’s hard

look, I’ve been a Math Guy since I was a toddler, I’m pretty organized, I have enough time and resources to think about it, and it’s still hard. Like I said, only stage 2.

3. everything should be decision-oriented

You might say “why even make a budget?” I think the biggest reason is to be able to make decisions about your life. Decisions like:

I want to take Job X which will pay me less money; can I do so?
We’re having a baby; how much can we afford to spend on day care?
I really want to (do X/buy X) but not hurt my savings; what can I cut out in order to do that?

All budgeting should help you make these decisions! Everything you do, every bit of data, should help you with that. Draft CABs¹.

4. categorizing should be easy

If categorizing is hard, you won’t do it. Everything should be clear what category it fits in. If it’s not, perhaps you have too many categories (e.g. Mint comes with one for “Entertainment” and one for “Amusement”, wtf). Or perhaps your categories are unclear to you: what does “professional development” mean? If I buy a new desk chair, is that “professional development”? The answer doesn’t matter, but it matters that you have a clear answer. Tweak your categories until you always do.

5. you have to build your own categories

Mint and Ynab and your bank will helpfully auto-categorize your transactions. Chipotle is “restaurants.” United Airlines is “Air travel.” Then you’ll look at an end of year report and be like “uhh I spent a lot on Restaurants, maybe I should bring that down?” and you’ll have no idea how to do it. They won’t understand that, for you, Chipotle is where you buy lunch for your whole office on Tuesdays and get reimbursed, Home Depot isn’t home improvement but instead where you buy instruments for your washboard-and-jug band, and United is usually for visiting your family but sometimes for vacationing to Hawaii.

Because everything should be decision-oriented, and because categorizing should be easy, you will have to make your own categories.

Imagine you had a category for “lunch at work”, a category for “fun nights out with friends”, and a category for “restaurants/bars to support my other hobbies”. You might then see that “lunch at work” takes $5000/yr and think “it would be worth $2000 for me to pack a lunch sometimes”, or “fun nights out with friends” takes $5000 and think “why don’t I invite them to my place once a month and shave off $1000.”

6. start budgeting before you need it

Because you have to build your own categories, it takes a while before your budget is useful. If you are a Young Professional making bank, you probably don’t need a budget yet. But someday you will want to make some of the above decisions, and it’ll really help to at least know what your expenses are, and you’ll be glad you put in the 3-5 years to make good categories first.

A million dimwits online have written articles like “daily starbucks costs $5/day! if you do that every day, it costs $1500/year! if you instead saved that money, you could buy a house…”

This is dumb. It’s easy to think about, which is why people write it. (much harder to write: “visiting your family 5x/year probably costs about $4000, including all your costs; what if you only do it 4x?”) But it’s not how things work (you can’t go from daily starbucks to no starbucks, easily), and if you tell people what they should spend money on, they’ll fight you, and this whole exercise will feel forced and useless.

100% of this exercise should be empowering, not shaming.

Anyway.

7. categorize in real time

I used to try to categorize all my transactions at the end of every year. This was frustrating. First of all, a bunch of transactions are to “Amazon” or “Venmo”, and good luck categorizing those. Second, I trusted Mint with auto-categorization when possible, it was wrong a lot, and I’m sure I missed some of them.

Now I do them in Ynab whenever I think to, every few days, and there’s maybe 5 or 20 transactions, each pretty easy to understand, and I can even do stuff like open up Amazon and see what exactly I bought there. This is nice.

Mint/Ynab/etc also generate a lot of noise because they just track “all transactions”. For example, if I pay my $500 credit card bill, it’ll record a “-$500” on my bank account and a “$500” on my credit card account. Obviously neither of these is meaningful, I just shuffled money around. So I tag these as “transfer” and then just ignore all “transfers” in any report. Easier to do if I don’t wait until the end of the year.

8. here are my categories

They’re not perfect by any means but they are better than the defaults!

Fixed Housing Costs (these are very hard to change, unless we move)
- Mortgage/rent
- Property tax
- Utilities (incl Internet)
Home Improvement (these vary wildly year to year. Needless to say, it was crazy when we moved into this house)
- Hardware and fixing things
- Decoration and furniture
Well-being, normal (don’t skimp on this!)
- Doctor
- Gym
Well-being, woo (this has almost always been worth it, so don’t skimp on it either! sometimes individual instances are not so useful, like acupuncture for me, but the ability to explore woo things has led to some really big improvements)
- Bodywork/massage
- Transformational work
Therapy (haven’t figured out where to put this yet, into normal or woo.)
Daily life necessary evils (probably not worth skimping on these. e.g. I’d cut a lot of things before groceries.)
- Groceries
- Pharmacy
- Mobile phone
Family
- Travel to see family
- Gifts
Personal Care (I don’t love this category but haven’t figured out what else to do with it. Probably should combine with well-being woo and therapy)
- Hair
- Other personal care
Discretionary Fun Around Town (obviously, this is where “stuff we could cut more easily” begins)
- Coffee shops
- Alcohol and bars
- Restaurants
- Entertainment
Discretionary Buying Stuff
- TV/subscriptions
- Clothing
- Electronics & Software (this isn’t a great category actually - what is the software for?)
- Hobbies
- Amazon/target uncategorized (sometimes you can’t get em all)
Discretionary world-a-better-place
- Charity (e.g. Givewell)
- Supporting things I like (e.g. a substack writer I like or a Patreon)
Vacation
- Air travel
- Hotel
- Other vacation
Car (ideally this would be as low as possible, I just am sad all about it)
- Gas
- Parking
- Uber/lyft
- Service/parts
Bike and public transport (yay, anything I use here is fine)
- Bike and bike parts
- Bike shares
- Public transportation
Kids
- Nanny/day care
- Babysitter
- Baby supplies
- Kid activities (zoo, museum, Gymkhana, birthday party)
Other (These are mostly so I can ignore them in all reports)
- Transfer
- Interest income
- Paycheck (money in doesn’t matter, I’m interested in money going out)
- Fees (not many of these! I think only my chase sapphire reserve fee, which is probably approximately worth it.)

“CAB (Cards that Affect the Board) from MtG is such a a useful concept. The idea: draft mostly cards that are creatures or stop their creatures. Newbies otherwise end up with lots of “cool” cards that draw cards, deal damage to ppl, set up some cool effect but don’t help them win. ↩︎

How To Handle Bad Waves

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 21:39:24 -0500

Here is a mental process that happens to me a lot:

X is a problem
X is much bigger than me; I cannot hope to meaningfully affect X
X will affect me at some point in the future
(panic)

Some examples of X: housing getting ever more expensive, tech layoffs, the spread of return-to-office policies, shortage of good schools, climate change, spread of anti-abortion policies, widespread future coffee shortages.

If you think about all these disaster scenarios, it’s paralyzing!¹ But they’re real, you can’t just ignore them. Can you?

Turns out, mostly, yeah. Or at least, you can take them from the “this affects me” register into the “this is a problem that I hope the right people are working on” register. You’ll get baited into engaging, but at each step you must not engage. Hit da bricks.

an example: housing

Housing is always getting more expensive. We didn’t buy a house in the Bay; now if we ever wanted to move back, could we even? What about in Pittsburgh, what if we wanted to move to somewhere nicer, could we afford to? People will gripe about this constantly, often using the G word², and bring up examples of a house that used to be $100k that is now selling for half a million.

This is candy to the fear center of my brain. “Wait that’s growing faster than our savings! What if we can’t live where we want??” Maybe I’ll go on Zillow and look at neighborhoods I thought might be affordable to us and realize - oh no, maybe for a house of the size we’d want, they’re not affordable, actually!

But the trick for me is, I just don’t have to think about this. We’re not moving anytime soon. When we do, we’ll look at what’s out there, and it doesn’t matter what it used to cost or how much it’s gentrified. We’ll figure out what we can afford and what our priorities are, and get enough of them.

Or hell, what’s the worst case? If Evil Gentrification Genie says “all houses now cost 10x what they did last year”, we could just never move. We’re fine. We have a fine house.

I’ve got to just stop playing the game. I’m not going to browse Zillow and get spooked. I don’t really want to kvetch about gentrification with you, but even if we do, I’m just gonna zone out. I don’t need to think about this, until it’s time to move.

is this useful to you?

I have no idea. This is my own mental trick. It probably is less useful if you’re in a more dire situation (e.g. homeless), or if you’re just not prone to anxiety from Bad Waves anyway. Also, it’s not perfect - you should probably maintain a little peripheral awareness. Like, if you work in oil-and-gas, you probably shouldn’t just stick your head in the sand and pretend that Peak Oil isn’t happening.

But my problems aren’t as bad as oilmen facing the end of fossil fuels, so Just Zoning Out is working pretty well for me.

And sometimes impossible! “We have to move somewhere progressive, in case we have another kid and need abortion rights. But not somewhere too expensive; what if we run out of money that we’ll need for schools? And somewhere with jobs, but also somewhere that’s not too susceptible to climate change, and and and” ↩︎
“Gentrification”. I wonder if I can get “g12n” to catch on ↩︎

LeBron, Manziel, Atticus, Shackleton, or?

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 10:34:11 -0500

(not the sequel to Gödel Escher Bach, but I’d read that book too)

Let’s say you’re a rising star, in any field, with “a lot of potential.” Your friends and family will fill your head with visions of you becoming the next Michael Jordan or Bill Gates or Albert Einstein. As you grow up, what paths can you take?

LeBron

You fulfill all the expectations! You actually are the best!

Manziel

You flame out. Johnny Manziel was a highly hyped quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, was drafted early, partied a lot, got injured, was a big jerk, played for about two seasons, played in Canada for a couple years, retired.

Atticus

You just live your life and it’s fine. You become a mid-level Manager of Enterprise B2B SAAS or whatever, have 2.1 kids and a dog and a nice garden. Like Atticus Finch¹, you’re upstanding, virtuous, and reliable. You don’t really care that you “had a lot of potential”; it doesn’t really get to you.

Shackleton

You make your life a lot harder. This guy was a successful explorer, tried to cross Antarctica, had maybe the hardest expedition of all time.

A Secret Fifth Thing

You figure out what’s meaningful to you, get your whole self aligned behind it, and go for it. No example is provided; you’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

which way, western man?

I bet if you asked 100 “high potential” kids which of these they want to be, 100 would pick LeBron ².

The overwhelming majority of people with “high potential”, though, can’t do this. Imagine you grow up in, say, Seattle, and you’re the best basketball player in the entire metro area. You’re the best out of ~4 million! Chances are, nobody you know, even your high school coaches, has seen anyone like you. They imagine you’ll be the next Michael Jordan. But 4 million is still only 1% of the US. If you’re in the top 100 basketball players, you’ll probably make the NBA (~500 players per season), sure. But even most of those 100 won’t become a household name, let alone the next Michael Jordan. And depending on how hard you buy the LeBron story, anything less than “the next Michael Jordan” counts as failure.

So out of the 99-100 who fail at being LeBron, they’re going to be on another path. I respect those who can be Atticus; that’s a pretty good path, if you can shake this bit of identity. Likewise, I appreciate the seekers who can be A Secret Fifth Thing; I don’t really know how this works out but I’m glad that some people do.³ Nobody wants to be Manziel, but some will drift into it. I’m not making any normative claims here like “don’t be Manziel” because that’s about as useless as “be LeBron.”

Finally, there’s the (probably substantial) chunk who choose Shackleton (e.g. a grueling career) or have it chosen for them (e.g. cancer). There’s some upside to it: Shackleton, while he’s sitting in a makeshift hut, half frozen, thousands of miles from civilization, isn’t worried about whether he’s “living up to his potential.” If he can survive, he’s done enough⁴. I guess this is a thing I’m learning after the last year or so of my life: living life on harder mode can help with existential angst.

(… have I backed myself into the Man’s Search for Meaning view, that suffering can be meaningful? and why does every part of this post rhyme with one or another line of Once in a Lifetime?)

I got this example from ChatGPT. More experimentation with different prompts suggests that maybe ChatGPT just likes to talk about Atticus Finch. ↩︎
Actually, I bet like 80 would pick LeBron and 20 would pick Shackleton because they’re “non-conformist” or whatever. When their boat is crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea, 19 of them would say “shit, I wish I had picked LeBron.” ↩︎
I think the hard thing with A Secret Fifth Thing is “getting your whole self aligned behind a concept of meaning.” One failure case I think of here is The Dan Plan: a guy who said “I’ve never played golf, but I’m just gonna decide that golf is meaningful to me now, and make it onto the PGA tour.” He had a decent run but didn’t really even get close. ↩︎
ok this maybe doesn’t seem to be true of Shackleton himself, he’s a bit driven. but maybe instead assume you’re one of Shackleton’s men. ↩︎

How I think about investing money

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 21:09:23 -0500

I can’t tell if this is worth posting, but I wrote it all, so here we go. I don’t know that much; I’ve just managed my own money and read r/bogleheads and a couple books. I guess it’s what I’d tell my younger self. Here goes:

Let’s say you have a little extra money. Congrats! And maybe you’ve heard about “investing” but you don’t know how to do it, but you want to “do something smart” with it. Extra congrats! This is very smart and, especially if you do it now, you’ll get way richer almost-for-free.

scope

this is about “money you have left over that you want to invest for the long term, that you can take some risks on”. If you have a 3-6mo emergency fund set up and no debt (besides perhaps a mortgage), and still money left over, this is for you! If not, follow the reddit personalfinance flowchart. This post is “how to do the bottom left box in that flowchart.” (“max out 401k, consider mega backdoor roth IRA, then use a taxable account”)

principles

you can match wall street, and that’s worth it

If you invest in the stock market, on average, you’ll make 10% return per year. ¹ If you invest $1k in the stock market and get 10%, in 30 years you’ll have $17k. If you put it in a 4% interest savings account, you’ll have $3k. If you do nothing, you’ll have $1k. (also, everything will cost more, so your $1k will “only be worth” $550.)

you can’t beat wall street

That’s not the game here. You might think “I have a smart idea; I know Apple is a good company that always grows faster than average” - that’s not true. There’s a term “priced in”, as in “X is priced in”, which means “someone else has already done this research better than you and figured out what the stock should be worth, more exactly.”

For example: say Apple stock is selling for $100, but you are following Apple news and you hear that the iPhone 23, coming next month, will be incredible and everyone will want one, so you think “I should buy Apple.” What you mean is that you think Apple is undervalued - maybe you think Apple should be worth $110, so you’ll get a good deal by buying it for $100. (If it were guaranteed to go up to $110 next month, it wouldn’t be selling at $100 now, it would be selling at like $109.90!) But are you sure it’s undervalued? And are you more sure than a team of financial analysts whose job it is to predict Apple’s price exactly?

These analysts have some model that predicts exactly what they think Apple is worth, and they buy and sell it until it gets to that price. Say that some team at Goldman Sachs thinks Apple is worth $101 - they’ll buy it from people who are selling it at $100, and pretty soon, everyone will catch on and raise their prices until they’re selling it to Goldman Sachs at $101.

So if Apple stock is selling at $100, it’s fair to say that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and everyone else think Apple is worth about $100. And that includes their predictions about what will happen next year. Maybe because they think the iPhone 23 is going to sell very well. If Apple surprisingly canceled the iPhone 23 tomorrow, Apple stock would probably go down, because that $100 estimate included their prediction that iPhone 23 would increase sales next month. This means that the iPhone 23 release is “priced in.”

So if you think Apple stock is worth $110 and it’s currently selling for $100, there are a few options:

you know as much or less than Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, so you’re wrong
your buddy who works for Apple told you Apple is going to do something awesome, that Goldman and Morgan don’t know yet. In that case, don’t buy or sell Apple stock because you’ll go to jail for “insider trading”
you work in finance, in which case this post is way too basic for you
it turns out you’re right, just by dumb luck - but in that case, remember that it’s dumb luck!

Note that this is not only Apple stock, but every company, every commodity, every foreign currency, every cryptocurrency, everything. You, in your spare time, are not going to beat Wall Street by buying and selling things.

If you don’t understand this section, please don’t read on. You need to really internalize the fact that you’re never ever ever going to beat Wall Street.

you want to make sure you match Wall Street; or, “variance is bad”

Imagine two funds: one fund that would take in your $1000 now and give you $1100 next year, and one fund that would take in your $1000 now and then flip a coin in a year, giving you either $0 or $2200. In some sense the two funds are equivalent; they both give you the same “average payout.” But one has high variance and one has low variance. With money you can afford to gamble with, high variance is ok; with your retirement, it’s not.

So one of our goals, as individual investors, is to minimize variance. We want to get that 10% a year, but with minimal risk of getting wiped out. So we “diversify” by buying different types of stuff.

Say you start off with plan A: investing $1000 into Apple stock. That’s ok, but any one company is pretty risky. The iPhone 23 might tank, they might pull an Enron, who knows. So you switch to plan B: investing $200 each into Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. That’s better, but they’re still correlated: it might just be a bad year for the technology world, even though the rest of the economy is fine. So you switch to plan C: investing $10 each into 100 different companies across different industries. That’s pretty good, but even better is plan D: investing $0.01 into each of 100,000 different companies! Luckily, there are people who will do that for you: index funds. For a small fee, they’ll split your money among a ton of companies.

no bets are better than Wall Street, but some bets are worse, or “expense ratio is bad”

It’s easy to do worse than Wall Street. One way you can do this is by giving some of your money to a guy who says he can beat the stock market, and who charges you a fee. Assuming he gets “the average of the stock market”, he’ll make 10% but he’ll charge you a fee of 1%, so you’ll end up with 9%. He’ll say he’s making better bets, but remember: you can’t beat Wall Street. So don’t invest with him.

The most common term for his fee is “expense ratio.” If a fund has a 1% expense ratio, then they’ll take 1% of your money every year.

This is the only thing you can manage, in terms of “making more money.” You can’t make more than 10% - but you can make 9.97% in some funds with a 0.03% expense ratio, or 9.00% in funds with a 1.0% expense ratio.

so, our goals:

In one sentence, you want to match the stock market, while minimizing variance and expense ratio.

how?

401k

“investing in a 401k” is a separate decision than “investing in stocks or index funds” - you can own index funds in a 401k, index funds out of a 401k, cash in a 401k, or cash out of a 401k.

But there are tax advantages to a 401k, if you put money in now and don’t take it out until you’re 59 1/2. Plus, your company might “match” your 401k, which means they’ll give you a little extra money if you put money in your 401k. So you should do this, up to the maximum allowed amount ($23k in 2024) if at all possible.

If you’re self-employed, you can make a self-employed 401k - go to Vanguard or Schwab or Fidelity and set up a self-employed 401k.

“taxable/retail investing”

I don’t know if there’s a better term for “just regular old investing outside a 401k”. After you max your 401k, if you have money left over, you want to get it into index funds somehow. There are two ways:

buy your own funds: use an account at Vanguard or Schwab or Fidelity (or others) and buy some index funds.
let a robot do it: open an account at Wealthfront or Betterment or Robinhood and just let them invest it in whatever.

I’d advise everyone do #2. The robot will take an extra fee - like 0.15% - per year, but that’s $150 on $100k, and you don’t have to think about it. Furthermore, if you DIY, you’ll probably have blips where you forget to invest a recent deposit or something, and thereby leave more than $150 on the table. I’ve used Wealthfront and seen it do a pretty good job.

You could also have a financial advisor tell you what to invest in, but they can’t beat Wall Street, and they’ll charge for their time, so you’ll end up with a higher total expense ratio. So don’t do that.

(Financial advisors can be good for different things, like “how do I structure investments so I can comfortably withdraw $x/year when I retire at age Y”. But they are not good for the question of “how can I make my money make more money”.)

which funds

If you do want to pick your own funds, or if you’re stuck with “whichever funds your 401k provider selects”, follow the principles we’ve discussed: minimize variance and expense ratio. So I like to be in all of (domestic stock, international stock, and bonds). Some ways I’ve done this, based on 401k providers etc:

VT and VTEB
SWTSX, SWISX, and SWAGX
VTI, SCHF, and BND
VTI, VEA, VWO, and VTEB
FZROX and a couple other Fidelity Zero funds (old account, I forget their tickers)

what else

This diversifies your portfolio across stocks and bonds. That’s pretty good. What else do people invest in?

individual stocks: no! those are higher variance! If you want to, go ahead, but realize you’re gambling.
gold: this tends to go up when stocks go down, and vice versa, so that’s nice, but so do bonds, and those are easier.
other commodities: I don’t know what to do here; my impression is that they’re higher risk or difficulty without higher reward.
foreign currencies: same as “other commodities”
cryptocurrency: sigh yeah, it’s new (in the grand scheme of things), it’s hard to tell what the heck will happen with it, so I guess it’s good to buy a tiny slice just in case it takes off. I went with 1% of my investments, in bitcoin and ethereum, via Coinbase. But feel free to skip it, and don’t do anything clever; almost everything in crypto is a scam.
CDs: these can be fine if you need money in a fixed amount of time and want slightly higher interest rates than a savings account. That is rarely the case.
savings accounts: oh yeah btw some of those get about 5% interest now (Jan 2024); if your emergency fund is not in one of those, maybe it should be.

Citation needed and not provided. Sorry. If you have a good citation for this, please let me know and I can make this a more definitive blog post. ↩︎

Well, I've Made It This Far

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 14:09:49 -0500

Happy end of the year, and good riddance to the hardest year of my life. Some interesting phenomena about life after 11.5 months of being a dad:

every month is easier than the last

It’s still true. Upsides keep increasing; it’s kind of fun to take him on an errand or something. He can play with things and half-communicate. Downsides keep decreasing; his sleep is still not ideal, but mostly manageable. (one wakeup a night, and then gets up at 7am; I’d love those to be 0 and 8am, but what can you do.)

And I have more mostly-invisible skills. I don’t feel super-drained most days. I feel like I’m at Level 0 of the Dan Depression Scale most days.

passing time is an achievement

This has been true all year, and a stunning reversal from all previous years. Before 2023, when a day went by, I felt like I’m wasting my life, time was slipping through my fingertips, day by day. In 2023, every day that went by was a triumph. I’ve survived this day, I’m still alive, baby is still alive, T and I are still married, nobody’s in a terrible crisis. Incredible. (butterfly) is this gratitude?

bits of identity keep dropping off

I remember when I was 22 making a list of everything I cared about being good at. Making music, knowing my city, etc etc. The list keeps shrinking, and this year experienced a huge drop-off. In particular:

I used to see myself as, y’know, a professional software developer, but also an artist-who-codes or a coder-who-does-art in his spare time. I mean, This Person Exists or Pokemon NØ or Swot Perderder. Don’t get me wrong, I was never good at it, but I’d go to Gray Area or NØ School or something to hang out with other people who did it and I didn’t feel like a huge fraud.
I used to be an academic researcher, then a Data Scientist, but right now my job could best be described as Software Engineer. It’s lower prestige, to be sure, but I just like doing it more. I used to have some tension about this, and now I’m just fine with it. I’m happiest being an Engineer who can talk with the Data Scientists.

These two in particular are kind of sad, but actually feel good. It’s not that I feel like these paths (to be an Artist or a Data Scientist) are completely closed off, it’s that I feel free of the clinging to them. Maybe I’ll be more of an Artist or Data Scientist in the future, but if I don’t, it’s ok.

Did this happen because of my kid? If so, I don’t understand why. There’s an easy story that goes “I don’t need validation from accomplishments because being a dad is meaningful enough” but that doesn’t match my experience.

at any rate, I’m doing better

I wouldn’t say I’m unbothered, moisturized, in my lane, flourishing, but it’s been a long time since the Depression Index rose above 1, it’s usually 0. That’s pretty good. I’ll take it for now, I’ll keep surviving, and chalking it up as a win each day.

Cold Meds

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 12:32:11 -0500

It’s been so long since I had a cold! Now I do, and I forget what’s good to take for what. With some smart friends who are inclined to stay kinda up on research (but not doctors), I came up with this:

Acetaminophen/paracetamol is a good pain reliever and fever reducer (probably good to do) but not good for your liver, so take it iff you have a fever and pain. Don’t drink alcohol while taking it.
Codeine is an even better painkiller/feel-good medicine, especially at night. You can’t get it over the counter in the US though.
Dextromethorpan makes you cough less, take it if you’re coughing too much. (Also makes you sleepy) (EDIT: actually does nothing, or at least is worse than honey. (one study, meta-analysis)
Guaifenesin makes you cough/runny more, take it if you’re congested and it’s not moving. Don’t take it if you’re already coughing or your nose is running too much?
Phenylephrine is placebo, don’t bother
Pseudoephedrine is the best decongestant if you can get it. Good if you’re congested. Can cause a congestion rebound, so don’t take it if you don’t need to.
Doxylamine is an antihistamine that’ll make you sleepy; take it if you’re too runny or need to sleep
Zinc is the one thing that actually shortens colds in medical trials. Note that if you see “homeopathic zinc” in like 13mg doses, there’s probably cheaper higher-dose plain-old-zinc in the supplement section. You want to take 75-95mg/day while you have a cold. (EDIT: and make sure it’s zinc acetate like the Life Extension brand, and maybe take it in lozenges so it coats your throat instead of just gets into your system (blog post, another post)
Vitamin c, echinacea, and everything else don’t actually shorten colds. (Regularly taking C can help prevent colds though! Same with D.)
Diphenhydramine is an antihistamine, take it if you’re too runny. Also makes you sleepy. (interchangeable with doxylamine?)
Ibuprofen is good for pain and sometimes for fever, but can irritate your stomach and cause ulcers if you take too much
Aspirin is good for pain and sometimes for fever, but is a blood thinner so be careful with certain conditions.

Perhaps more usefully, sorted by conditions (all with caveats, check the above list):

always when you have a cold take zinc
pain: acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, or codeine
fever: acetaminophen, aspirin, or ibuprofen
coughing: honey
congested: guaifenesin or pseudoephedrine
sneezy/runny: diphenhydramine or doxylamine
need to sleep: diphenhydramine, doxylamine, dextromethorphan, or codeine

Edit: someone made a better version of this post! We mostly agree but they have more info. Read that instead of this.

The Fatherhood Bonus

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 10:42:35 -0500

Epistemic status: just feelings, n=1

Remember this? ny times business insider “Men earn more after having a kid, while women earn less.” This is two things rolled into one: 1. men earn more after having a kid, 2. women earn less after having a kid. At the time, my interpretation for both was “it’s the patriarchy again, our stereotypes are that dads are responsible but women should be in the home, ugh.” And that’s kinda still my interpretation of part 2 (women earn less); I don’t have firsthand experience so who knows.

But I do have firsthand experience of being a dad and having a kid, and I know I got way better at my job. So I’m wondering: what if dads get paid more because they’re (slightly, averaged over the population) better at work than they were before?

Here are some ways it’s playing out for me:

I know more what I wanted to work on now
I take more responsibility for my project(s)
I worry less about how I am seen
I value my time at work more (many days it is the easiest, best time of my day)
I spend less time now worrying about “is this work Good for the world”

Which are causal? #4 definitely is. #1 and 5 probably are; my world is narrowing. I seriously can’t go off and become a monk or a Doctor Without Borders now, not that I was going to anyway, but now it’s just closed off so I don’t spend time thinking about it. #3 is probably just a coincidence for me; I could imagine some dads saying “I’m no longer Just A Career Guy, now I’m Dad too, so I don’t care if people don’t think I’m amazing!” but I was already not Just A Career Guy. Not sure about #2.

Well, whatever the reason is, it’s nice to be better at my job.

Puzzle Terminology

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 13:51:22 -0500

I’ve been doing a bunch of puzzles recently. By “puzzles” I mean, in the Mystery Hunt tradition; it’s a weird world that’s not as well defined as “doing jigsaw puzzles” or “doing sudokus”. In this post, I hope to:

help define what these puzzles are
highlight/popularize some terms that help communication around puzzles
give some conceptual handles that will help people describe to themselves what they’re doing when they’re doing puzzles

the schema

Most puzzles involve something like this series of phases:

The Setup
The Break-in
The Work
Extraction

These are not always once each and linear; usually it’s something like Setup Work Break-in Work Extraction or Setup Break-in Work Extraction Work Extraction. But they tend to go in about this order.

the setup

“Getting stuff into a form you can work with it.” Usually you’ll get a puzzle as a PDF or website, which is usually not a great form: you can’t write on it or collaborate on it. If you’re doing these online, a Google sheet is usually the best form.

Sometimes this step is simple: copy/paste the puzzle into a Google sheet. But often the puzzle doesn’t copy/paste nicely. Or it has graphics or an interactive component, so you have to try to copy the relevant info in, while losing as little as possible. (Maybe this involves clicking around an interactive thing and extracting every bit of info you can.) Or sometimes the puzzle involves an origami 3d shape or something, and the Setup is printing it out, cutting, and taping it into place.

Things to know about the setup:

it’s usually pretty easy to do, so if you’re braindead or overwhelmed, it’s helpful to your team if you set up some puzzles
make sure you and a teammate aren’t both setting up the same puzzle. Having a shared Google doc helps; maybe also a chat channel. If you are, clear it up as soon as possible.
don’t skip it! It can be tempting to just do the puzzle, but with a few exceptions, you probably won’t be able to just breeze through the puzzle, you’ll need another set of eyes, and if it’s not already on a Google sheet, that’s hard.

the break-in

“Figuring out what you need to do in this puzzle.” Like I said, these aren’t as simple as “put the jigsaw pieces together” or “solve the sudoku.” This takes a bit of magical thinking.

Things to know about the break-in:

you’ll usually know it when you get it. A couple pieces will click together in a way that relates to the theme or flavor text, or something will be in alphabetical order or spell out a message.
you often can postpone it until after you Do The Work. Sometimes some of the work will be obvious, and some will be non-obvious; just do the obvious part then
if you haven’t done the break-in, though, be careful about going off too far. If you find yourself making a bunch of leaps and nothing’s clicking, maybe don’t add it to the shared doc so you don’t create too much noise
this gets easier as you do more puzzles! You see common patterns that usually result in break-ins
this feels amazing when you get it

the work

“The straightforward part.” After you’ve broken in, you know what to do, now just do it a bunch. “they’re crossword clues but the answers all rhyme with a Sesame Street character” or “it’s a logic puzzle but you have to negate all the odd numbered clues” or something.

Things to know about The Work:

it’s usually pretty straightforward. If you’re solving with a newbie, try to get them involved here; it’s often easy to make a little progress. Likewise, if your brain is fried, you can often at least Do The Work on some puzzles.
it does feel pretty good.
if you have to identify images, you don’t actually have to know what they are; Google image search or Tineye can help you figure out what the picture is of!
also, for crossword-type clues, google a lot.
a decent thesaurus can be a big help too.
if you can reduce the puzzle to a known type, solving it can be automated. For example, cryptograms, common ciphers like caesar, sudoku.

extraction

“Finding the word or short phrase to put into the box.” Often after you break in and do the work, you’ll find yourself staring at a “completed” puzzle. But the answer is almost always a word or short phrase. So you have to figure out how to distill the solved puzzle into a word.

“How to extract” could be a full college course. But some tips, and other thoughts about extraction:

Make A Big Grid. Once you have a bunch of clues and answers, the extraction is often “sort by X, index by Y”; Google Sheets’s “Create A Filter” feature helps you do this once you have a grid.
look for indexes. (numbers that could tell you “use the nth letter of each word”)
check diagonals
check thematic things (if the puzzle is called Famous Firsts, maybe the first letter of each answer?)
if you find “answ” or “sol”, the solution might be something like “ANSWER BLUEBERRY” which just means “the answer is blueberry”.
try to “do it again”; if the puzzle is clues that rhyme with Sesame Street characters, see if this could be cluing a word that rhymes with a Sesame Street character.
you don’t have to Do all the Work! Usually 80% of the Work is easy, and 20% is hard (last couple clues, obscure references, etc). Skip those and try to find a word that would fit even with a couple missing letters.
also, try to be a little flexible; you might have gotten some clues wrong along the way so it might not quite work out right.
use nutrimatic or onelook to find words that fit certain criteria
it’s usually not that out-there; if you find yourself making more than one or two leaps, scale it back
more eyes often help here. When you bring in someone else, you have to give them some context (how you solved the puzzle). But don’t tell them all the dead ends you are currently on; you don’t want them to get stuck thinking the same wrong thing as you.
extracting correctly also feels amazing

an example

This puzzle, Double Jeopardy, from this year’s Puzzle Boat (spoilers for this puzzle btw), works like so:

the setup: we copied it into a Google sheet. It was a little tricky to format because it didn’t paste straightforwardly, we had to wrangle it into the right rows and columns. (We wanted to keep the format in case it mattered; Jeopardy categories often matter.)
the work: it’s a lot of clues. We started solving the clues, often by googling (e.g. “Vander’s last name in the anime One Piece” -> DECKEN)
the break in: we noticed that some of the clues have some part bolded. E.g. “He voices a large feline bus in My Neighbor Totoro”. After noticing that the puzzle is called “Double Jeopardy”, and the flavor text is “Double What?”, we noticed that those bolded parts refer to a common “Double ____” phrase. In the “bus” case, this is “DOUBLE DECKER.” Also, these “double” answers are often one letter off from a regular clue answer (decker/decken).
the work: now, in addition to answering the questions, we also had to fill in the “double” clues, finding answers that were one off from another answer. We continued doing that until we answered all the Jeopardy questions and all the “double” clues. Each double clue (15 of them) matched to a Jeopardy clue that didn’t have a bold text, so that felt right.
extraction: now we had a big grid:

bold “double” clue"	“double” answer	Jeopardy answer that contained the bold “double” clue	other Jeopardy answer it matched with	letter that was in “double” answer only	letter that was in Jeopardy clue only
bus	DECKER	Naoki Tatsuta	DECKEN	R	N

We filled this out for all the clues, fiddled with it for a bit, and found that if you sort by the “Jeopardy answer that contained the bold double clue”, and read off the letters that are in the “letter that was in double answer only”, it spells “IT’S MAXIMAL PBIRS.” “Maximal Pbirs” isn’t a thing, but “Maximal Pairs” sounds like a reasonable phrase, so we just figured that we got one clue wrong and submitted Maximal Pairs as the answer.

love the setup and the work

Were you ever in a D&D campaign where you all wanted to be a wizard? My last one was like that. We had a wizard, warlock, bard, druid, and rogue. Especially if you hang out with Smart People, everyone wants to be a wizard. Our DM had to roll us a cleric and a fighter out of kindness so we didn’t get demolished.

Puzzle hunting can be kind of like that. If you remember key parts of a puzzle hunt, you probably remember when you, or someone else, made some impressive logical leap. These are probably break-ins or extractions. These are fun. They’re also difficult. You feel like a wizard!

But you can’t be a wizard without the setup and the work. Sometimes these are even more valuable: the skill required in a puzzle can be just cranking through crossword clues quickly or doing some Google sheets magic to make the puzzle even doable. (there’s even a type of puzzle called a Duck Konundrum that is basically all setup; just really meticulous following-directions.)

So if you’re feeling like a fool because you can’t figure out the break-in, or your brain is fried after a long puzzle, or you’re new and you can’t figure out how you’ll be able to hang with the wizards, do some setup, do some work. Setup and Work are the fighters and clerics of your D&D party; no less valuable than the wizards.

And appreciate others who are doing setup and work. Thank them for it; notice when they do it super well. Others will notice when you do it and will always want you on the team.

How Big Is "I"

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:53:53 -0500

I have almost zero innate desire to pass on my genes. There’s a couple of instrumental desires:

if I’m going to raise a kid, I’d like them to have my genes; there’s a feeling of closeness in that unchangeable marker
my genes are pretty good (no terrible genetic conditions, pretty healthy, etc) so if a kid has my genes they have as good a shot as any to have a good life

but there’s almost no innate desire. Like, I don’t really care if, after I’m gone, anyone alive has any genetic link to me.

To most people this probably seems weird. To nerds it probably seems straightforward, correct, and enlightened. But I’m wondering if I’m missing out on something.

Because of evolution, we all have traits that help us survive. But what is “us”? Imagine a trait that makes you always pick selfish choices. That would make you, your individual human body, more likely to survive, so it would pass on. But it might make your community as a whole less likely to survive; after a few generations your entire village has the selfish gene¹ and then you all die out because only one of you kills a mammoth and he doesn’t let anyone else eat.

So if “I” is a human body, the selfish gene is adaptive. If “I” is a community, the selfish gene is maladaptive.

As for the not-caring-about-passing-on-genes (NCAPOG) gene, well… for myself, my own personal survival, it might be adaptive. One less desire to have to fulfill! But imagine “I” is the set of Tasses and all my other ancestors all the way back many generations. In that view, this NCAPOG gene is terribly maladaptive! I (all Tasses) am basically killing myself!

So: given that most people care about passing on their genes (citation needed), is it the case that I’m not the enlightened one but actually a kinda deficient one? Similar to, maybe, someone who doesn’t feel hunger because trauma has cut their mind off from that part of their body? Would I feel healthier if I felt more connected to, and invested in, my ancestral line?

(Moot point, anyway, I am passing on my genes now at least. but maybe feeling into me-as-ancestral-line instead of just me-as-body would help me feel more excited about passing on my genes, and value my kid more than I already do.)

Hmm there’s a whole book called this by Dawkins, right? I haven’t read it, and I have no idea if that has anything to do with this. In this post, “the selfish gene” means “a gene that makes you selfish.” ↩︎

Time for a Links Post

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 11:47:27 -0400

the old phone browser tabs are filling up. in roughly “most interesting” to “least interesting” order

The Midwit Home, or “smart home” without apps or wifi or FANGMEN¹
make your video calls better I have done none of these but I want to
this series about anger seems good
Vimm’s Vault - uh every nintendo/sega/ps/xbox game through 2008?
Extreme Vocal Institute - how to scream without hurting your voice
Bike Insights - compare 2 bikes’ geometries, learn about bikes, etc
Cuttle - a “combat card game” with just a regular deck of cards
Quiet Mark - reviews of which appliances are quiet. (Most categories don’t have anything yet, but they’re starting.)
C. Thi Nguyen’s board game recs
Book review of The Educated Mind I usually don’t even read these but this one was fascinating.
mp3 tag editor
recording yourself all day
TRE or Trauma Release Exercises sounds like craziness but it’s kinda neat how you spontaneously shake after doing these exercises
Kingfisher Squishies - I don’t need a silicone d20, but of course I want a silicone d20.

meditation etc

the QRI folks are (a few months ago) done with their psychedelic cryptography contest - I love this because I can actually understand and describe it, unlike most of what they or their friends post (e.g. vasocomputation or autism)
still, of course I want to do their guided meditation series
rob burbea and jhanas
planetary scale vibe collapse - fascinating thoughts on duality
upon the mirror sea - I’ve read one chapter of this book and I’m hooked
more on sananga hmm if I’m having an interesting time meditating with hot peppers maybe I should look into this more. my experience so far is “burns a lot, kind of a rush, isn’t unmanageable, … helps? I dunno”
rectangles bad - yeah! this hints at Attention Restoration Theory or even just “looking at trees is nice”
MindPlace Light & Sound Meditation Systems - man I wish I could rent these; my main block from trying them is that I think there’s a 95+% chance I’ll end up with another piece of e-waste and a couple hundred dollars out of my bank account. That 5% is exciting, but not enough to make it +EV.
psychedelics and antidepressants
Psilohealth Peer Support education - I like the idea of more organized courses for everyone at all levels, not just “patients and doctors”, but like, trip-sitters or friends who can help a bit. Helps it scale out a little bit.

computers

speed changes how people use tools - not much to say but I agree
running Llama2 locally - I asked about “what’s a Small Language Model I can run on my computer” and this was it. or just a trigram model
why git is hard I dunno, yeah, it is

music

the plural of course of FANGMAN, my preferred acronym for the megatechcorps. I do not want them Gathering Data about my house ↩︎

Big Cities as Hindered Living

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 13:55:16 -0400

Or, thoughts on San Francisco one year out.

We’ve moved from SF to Pittsburgh about a year ago, or from Big City to Small City.

upsides and downsides

Everything in Pittsburgh is cheaper! Housing, the big one, is about 20-40% the cost of SF. Food and Stuff and Services are maybe 80-90% the cost. Hiring people (e.g. a nanny) is maybe 75% of the cost. These all help; especially housing.

Meeting people is easier. People are less busy, they’re more likely to say hi to you or come to your thing even if it’s nothing special.

Shopping is easier. The grocery store or the Target is never that busy. The drug store doesn’t have everything in locked cabinets.

Drivers are nicer. There’s less traffic. The city’s smaller, sort of, so in some sense walking is easier; though there’s maybe not as much within 5, 10, or 15 minutes from my door.

People don’t steal stuff as much. I’ve left my garage open accidentally and all my bikes were still there hours later. And fewer people having crises means I’m even-more-rarely scared in public.

Public transport isn’t as good. Navigation is a challenge, especially if you’re new to the city.

There aren’t as many World Class Things: museums, restaurants, shows, etc. But we didn’t go to them much anyway.

So there’s a couple downsides, and a lot of upsides, to living in Small City. So why move to Big City? My hypothesis is there are two types of people who do:

people who have to - usually for career or family reasons
people who choose Hindered Living

Hindered Living

In college, a couple friends and I came up with this idea. You know Assisted Living homes? Where people who are old and can’t quite keep up can get some help with food or cleaning or whatever? Well, what’s the opposite? It’d be Hindered Living: a home where life is deliberately made harder so that you’re pushed to get better.

Some examples were: a fridge with an electromagnet that gets harder and harder to open so you have to build stronger muscles, a grid of ceiling lights that work like a Lights Out puzzle so you have to solve it in order to go to bed. Over time, you’d naturally get stronger or quicker (at Lights Out at least) because you’re forced to. This would of course be opt-in, and probably full of young able people striving to improve.

we already choose this

Sounds comical, but people make this choice all the time: big cities are hindered living. If you don’t have to live in a big city, doing so is a sign that you’re willing to try life on slightly-harder mode.

And you do get a couple benefits of Hindered Living:

you can’t drive everywhere, you have to walk/bike/bus, so you get fitter (you can do this in small towns too, but it correlates with big cities)
everything’s expensive, so you have to be really good at your job, so you can earn a higher salary (yes 1000 asterisks here but still)
doing simple things like “getting your kid into day care” require pulling strings, networking, etc, so you get good at People Skills

Ironically though, that’s not most of the benefit; the main benefits are social. You meet other people who have chosen Hindered Living.

And if you’re the kind of person who would do this, this is a major draw! If you want to run marathons, that’s great - your friends will be marathon runners too. If you are a competitive chess player, I know you can find other chess champs who are in your league. And especially if you’re dating, if you like to go mountain climbing every weekend, it’s great to be able to find someone else who does! (or at least who won’t make fun of you that much.)

so where does that leave us

Having moved from Big City to Small City, we’re choosing a lower difficulty level for now. And I’m glad we have. Parenting a small baby is the hardest thing in the world, for me at least, so I’m glad we’ve got the ability to tell the rest of the world to chill out a little bit.

Does this hurt my self-image? As a real go-getter who can survive and thrive on Hard Mode? yes, of course… but maybe that part of me needs to relax a little as well. After all, you don’t get to go to Extra Good Heaven by being a rich charming mountain-climber.

Month 9 - I'm Blank

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 11:59:00 -0400

I don’t really have much to say. I realize that usually I can post here about once a month and it’s a recap of how life has been, roughly, that month. There just aren’t that many other thoughts going on in my head.

It’s hard to hold a conversation sometimes. Someone asked me recently “what’s important to you right now?” and I had no real answer. Weekends come and I don’t know what to do; I feel too energy-drained to plan things a lot of the time. (This results in “keep the kid busy” days, which are even more exhausting! D’oh. He needs pretty much constant entertainment or he screams a lot. I like about the first 30 minutes with him, then it’s pretty rough.) TGIM; at least at work, I’m doing something that feels sort of directional.

This is not awesome, fun, or sustainable. But it’s not awful. (for that, see my January-March posts.) It may be related to my antidepressant; I understand “emotional blunting” is pretty common. It may be related to lack of sleep, though that’s not as severe as it used to be and not really that severe overall (7+ hours every night, usually 8).

Month 8 - It's Getting Good

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 12:47:50 -0400

In this post: reflections on the first 8 months with a kid, reflections on “is life Good or Bad???”

8 months with a kid

One friend told me “about 8 months is when we turned the corner and started enjoying having a kid.” As with so many parenting stories, I’ve found this true for me too. Some reasons:

Watching him one night doesn’t mean I’m ruined the next day anymore. Most nights he sleeps from 8 until 4 or 5, I give him a bottle, I go back to sleep until 7 or 7:30 or sometimes even 8. I don’t feel awesome the next day, but it’s within the realm of “normal tired.”
I can do a lot with him. Especially anything out of the house, he generally loves. As long as he’s not bored.
I took him on his first bike ride yesterday!
During the week, our nanny gets him, I go to work, I come back and have like 1.5-2 hrs with him before bed and that’s a decent amount of time with him.
He’s very cute.
Effexor 75mg seems to be working for me¹.

Parenting is kinda about as fun as a decent hike now. Not a breathtaking Yosemite or something, but a kinda-difficult kinda-boring hike. Or playing Agricola. I’d generally rather be doing my own thing, but it’s tolerable, and there are moments of fun. (“ooh a cool bird”, “I managed to build the extra room in my house that I wanted”, etc.) It’s tiring, and I’m generally glad when we get a chance to stop.

(shit like this (“boring people find parenthood a chore and interesting people find parenthood a great adventure”) does live in my head. Response 1: guilty as charged. I’m boring, and prone to depression, and climbing my way out of it. Response 2: fuck off, different people are different and react to different things differently and that’s ok.)

But it’s worlds better than months 0-4! Holy cow. I don’t feel like an uncontrollable rage/hate/despair monster who’s forever cursed to be out of sync with this world anymore. We can laugh about it² a bit, but it’s also kind of raw, especially to hear T talk about it.

37 years with a self

Ok, so in trying to make sense of this, my story so far is something like “I got hit by a tornado called Depression for a few months, now I’m climbing back out of it.” Depression turned me into a worse person. I was angry, hateful, frustrated, despairing. People liked me less, and I liked myself less. I hardly recognize myself then (this is still true). There wasn’t much good about it.

This story is difficult, because it recognizes that anyone can get hit with any kind of tornado anytime. Tomorrow you might get cancer. Or long covid, or hit by a car, or wrongfully convicted. You go from now, where your days are between -5 and +5, to -1000. (reminder that human experience is logarithmic.) You’d then spend at least a couple months or maybe the rest of your life trying to climb back out to the state that you’re in right now. And at the end, the reward for getting through all that is… nothing. A peer may just not have any of those hardships and be just generally doing better all-around.

How can we live in such a world? How can we be optimistic, positive, hopeful, interesting when some of us just get screwed? Unpreventably, unpredictably, through no fault of their own?

Here’s a couple thought fragments:

some people do just fine pretending those -1000s don’t happen, because they don’t, to them! ok, this doesn’t seem like the healthiest way to deal with it
we can’t avoid all -1000 experiences, but we can learn to capitalize on positive experiences. Maybe -1000 is bearable if regular day to day is between -5 and 500 instead of -5 to 5.
or maybe not everyday, but some peaks. If you have a handful of experiences that convince you that life absolutely cannot be worth living, then get yourself some experiences that convince you that life absolutely must be worth living. (some ++++ experiences, maybe.³) Let the +s and -s fight it out.
you do get something from -1000s: depth. I just thought again of Fiona Apple. I didn’t, until just now, know much about her life but I googled it and it seems rough. She said, of one particular trauma: “It doesn’t get into the writing. It’s a boring pain. It’s such a fuckin’ old pain that, you know, there’s nothing poetic about it.” but I bet she couldn’t have made what she has without the depth of that pain⁴. (Not only that trauma, but OCD depression and anxiety.)

Not sure yet which of these I believe, but the baby’s waking up; time to go do some more hiking.

It does kinda make me tense. For a while it lowered my appetite, but that seems to be back. Some mild sexual side effects. I worry about long term effects of boosting my norepinephrine (as well as serotonin). But it’s better than Months 0-4. ↩︎
tweet by me: “Me to new parents: Congrats! Hey, I can listen if you have problems. I mean, the first few months I felt real bad. So feel free to vent. Yeah, I felt like absolute dog shit, worst time of my life, awful dark thoughts, psychopathic nightmare shit, wait where are you going” ↩︎
for the record, the official stance of this blog is “don’t do anything illegal.” ++++ experiences on drugs are purely hypothetical. Get some ++++ experiences meditating, maybe. ↩︎
… this train of thought goes to weird places. It’s a fine line between appreciating art that comes from pain, and celebrating pain. If life’s not beautiful without the pain, well then I’d rather never ever even see beauty again. But again, it’s unavoidable, so we make the most of it. Please don’t take this as celebration of anyone’s pain. ↩︎

Overactive Slow System

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 15:38:03 -0400

I’ve been feeling like I am weirder, lately. Like I’m having an experience that is different from most people’s, more so than usual. Different in that my Kahneman Slow System 2 is more active and my System 1 is less active.¹

Some examples:

Chidi in The Good Place unable to decide which of two hats to wear because neither one just “feels right”; he’s got to make a logical argument considering all the ups and downs of each
The typical nerd being bad at flirting because he doesn’t know “how to act”; he’s trying to analyze every interaction. “Wait, did she laugh at my joke because she’s into me? Or was it just really funny? Let me cross reference with my prior knowledge of her sense of humor, and how often people have laughed at that joke in the past, and …”
Inability to enjoy things because you’re thinking about them too much
getting “in your head”

This is exhausting. The world is so complex and coming at you so fast that your Fast System is the only system that can even remotely keep up. When your Slow System tries to take over something like “what do I do in this social situation”, you make bad decisions, slowly and awkwardly, and get tired then.

(butterfly meme) Is This Autism (spectrum spectrum²)? I don’t think so, but I think they’re connected. I heard a description of autism as “too much connection in your brain” which means more things are more overwhelming. So something like a loud noise, which might be kind of difficult to a normal brain, would just be mind-obliterating if you have more than the normal number of connections in your brain. A well-functioning System 1 can handle more louder stimulus in parallel than anything that got redirected to System 2.

“System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.” System 1 is when you look at a chess board and say “hmm, this move feels right”; system 2 is when you say “if I move here, he’ll move there, then I can move here, or if he moves there then I can move there, therefore I am sure this is the right move.” Kahneman, despite his great work, should be thrown in jail for naming these “1” and “2”, so I’ll call them “fast system” and “slow system”. ↩︎
I’m lucky enought to definitely not have “strong enough autism that it has caused serious difficulties to me” (besides the ones in this post), but I’ve wondered if I’m somewhere on the spectrum. Not diagnosed, though, all I can say is that I’m somewhere between 0 and the autism spectrum, or “I’m on the autism spectrum spectrum” ↩︎

A Little Less Everything

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 17:11:32 -0400

Baby is 7mo. This is better. He is kind of fun to play with, he is cute, he makes fewer awful distress noises, and he sleeps better. He’s at one wake-up, which is close to 0 wake-ups, which is close to having our life back (evenings free + full nights of sleep -> I don’t hate everything). I actually look forward to seeing him a little.

I am feeling better. I have a little mental space. My tank is not full but it’s not constantly empty anymore. I also feel like I have much less going on inside my head, for better and worse.

I find it really hard to connect to my more-depressed self. I cannot really connect to the version of myself who felt these things:

“I vaguely hope I don’t wake up tomorrow” (n.b. I was never suicidal)
“I’m so angry I need to go out to the garage and scream and punch trash cans”
“I want to hurt a small animal” (n.b. I never would)
“See that random stranger, I hope they suffer today” (n.b. I would never cause this)
“This thing that everyone else thinks is trivial, that I am arguing with T about, I should continue to argue about it”

It’s nice not to feel these things. Still, how is it possible that I’m the same person who, just months ago, felt these things? Inescapably? With Real Knowledge that they were Ultimately True and Would Never End? Outie-innie thing. I feel sad and scared about my Innie. I know I’ll be him again, and that’s overwhelming.

I’m on my third try of antidepressants, Effexor this time. Is it doing anything? I don’t know! It did make me feel kinda bad the first couple days, so that makes me feel like it’s doing something.

Nothing to say! Even to good friends or family or therapist. That’s not entirely true: I am obviously saying something. It just all feels… less important? Like I don’t have as many thoughts. I’m used to having a lot of thoughts.

what the hell is tpot and vibecamp

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 22:41:23 -0400

About 2 years ago I started using twitter in a different way: trying to get to know people I don’t know. This has had some good effects. It has been weird in some ways. I don’t think it’s had downsides, besides maybe wasting time.

what? how? that seems nuts

I … don’t know? All social media is weird, twitter doubly so, but it’s actually pretty nice if you use it in the right ways. And I’ve always been skeptical of forming real connections on the internet, but you definitely can.

I suppose I started by following a list of people helpfully compiled for me by the genie from Aladdin. Then just start replying to people, making good conversation, and, well, there you go.

who are they?

Usually I start with something like: you know the Berkeley rationalists? Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, etc, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex? A bunch of people read their stuff and thought, yeah it’s cool to think more rationally, but it’s not that cool, c’mon, there’s got to be more to it than that. And then some of them went into niches of therapy, some went into body-centered stuff, some into meditation, psychedelics, astrology, uh rock climbing, I dunno, there’s a pretty wide gamut of stuff that this group is into.

But they’re nerds in at least sorta the same way that I’m a nerd, I feel? Some labels people have used include “tpot” (this part of twitter), “ingroup”, and “postrats” (post-rationalists), though most people hate all these labels.

how’s it going now?

I don’t have a lot of deep friends from it, but I have some solid friends who have helped me through difficult times (mostly on a discord hosted by aforementioned genie). I have some acquaintances who do interesting things that I like to follow. I have some friends I like to post jokes with. Plus there are still my friends who I know from offline, and it’s fun to post things with them too.

vibecamp?

Oh yeah, a month or so ago, I went to a campground in Maryland with like 800 of these people. It felt like a conference, but fun: we were all interested to meet new people, it helped to bring something so you had something to talk about, there were lots of pretty neat events. I did some putting-names-to-faces and a lot more learning-new-faces. And juggling, teaching juggling, singing meditation, tai chi and qigong, singing campfire songs, swimming, drinking kava, fighting, discussing psychedelics, origami, coffee brewing, feeling your fascia, dancing with and without metta meditation, visualizing, men’s-circle-ing, tarot, talking astrology, &c. So that’s the kind of crowd.

some thoughts

it’s weird to meet people on twitter. it’s even harder than IRL to transition from “acquaintance” to “friend” I think, because you mostly interact by sending public statements.
it’s weird to be so twitter-focused while, y’know, El*n is running it into the ground. hope it survives!
it’s really nice to have a way to interact with some people I know in two minutes between other things I’m doing. makes me feel a little less isolated.
it’s weird that, being on twitter, there’s a built-in “how popular are you” number. If you interact with someone new, you immediately know if they’re a 400-follower nobody, or a 10k-follower Niche Internet Microcelebrity. This colors my interactions so much! I wish I were better at “just being cool”, regardless of people’s Popularity Score, but alas
who are all these followers? I mean dunbar’s number etc - how can there be 3k or 10k or 50k people who follow you “just for posting stuff”? and if you have, say, 3k followers, how many of them interact at all? I feel like kind of a lurker, but I must be more active than 99% of people, because I’ll be one of the, say, 50 replies on a 10k account’s tweet! It’s the internet’s 90-9-1 rule again, I guess.
but if I’ve been pretty active for 2 years and only have 400 followers… the thought keeps creeping in: “what am I doing wrong?” I just try not to think about it and just have fun doing what I’m doing. Chasing popularity, especially Goodhart-able popularity metrics, seems a recipe for sadness.
Anyway, status games aren’t anything new - academic conferences had them too! You know who’s a tenured prof, pre-tenure prof, grad student, postdoc, etc. And you know whose work is super popular and who’s squeaking by at a no-name university. I think some part of me actually enjoys status games.
Status games get more fraught, though, in nerd-spaces, because I feel the urge to show “I’m a cool nerd, not a nerd nerd.” This was activated by the lemur thread, and the constant chatter about how Vibecamp was like 80% men, but is just always present in my mind. I’m always happier when I stop paying attention to stuff like this.

6+ Months

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 10:20:07 -0400

Parenting is still a challenge.

sleep (training?)

At 3 months, he slept pretty well: one 6-7 hour block, plus a little more after. At 5-6 months, he got worse, and would wake up multiple times a night. We finally realized, despite our night doulas’ claims, that he wasn’t just going to magically get better, so we’re trying “sleep training.”

This means a million things to a million people. We’re doing Ferber-ish method? Meaning:

gradually try to get him to stop feeding at night
more routine at bedtime (feed, book, bath, bed)
when he wakes up, give him more time to try to get himself back to sleep
if we have to go soothe him, we don’t pick him up

Depending on your mental model of what’s going on here, we’re either smart or monstrous. My model is: “like breathing normally or unclenching his limbs, he doesn’t know how to do this thing yet, and we can’t really teach him, all we can do is give him the space to learn, so that’s what we’re doing.”

Is it working? well after about a week and a half he’s mostly back to one 6-7hr block + a little more later. so back to 3mo levels. uhh good job I guess

The worst part about this is that everyone has opinions and they’re contradictory and I have no idea whose to believe or why. Like, these all sound reasonable:

you don’t even need to change his diaper all night, he can survive, and changing his diaper will wake him up too much thereby messing up his ability to learn to sleep
of course you need to change his diaper, sitting in that all night is gross
feed him right before bed so he has enough fuel to last until morning
don’t feed him right before bed, his stomach will be uncomfortably full
6mo kids don’t need to eat all night
feeding him at night will make him associate bottle with comfort, which we don’t want
hell, adults have a hard time going 12hr without food, why should we expect babies to?
he should take 2 naps a day at this age
he should take 1 nap a day at this age
sleeping 6 + 2 hr is great! better than he was
he can sleep 10-12 hours straight, don’t give up
different kids need different amounts of sleep, maybe 8hr is all he does

World’s worst printer, and we have to wait a month to see if our debugging “worked.”

food

he can eat solid foods sorta! that’s fun! he’s adventurous and likes everything, that’s awesome!

and I can’t stand feeding him. he creates such a mess that it triggers a disgust response - it’s like how if I see one ant, it’s cool, but if I see a whole pile of ants I just instinctively shudder. a little mess is fine, but covering himself and his chair entirely with his food is awful

what’s this, a new parenting challenge appeared. why can’t any of these be easy

tgim

work is such a godsend these days, and that’s weird. Not that weird, because it’s objectively a pretty good job: I like my team, usually I’m getting things done pretty effectively, I have support and respect, my hours are flexible, and the pay is pretty good. Still, I’ve never had a time when my weekdays were better than my weekends, or where I’d work 7 days a week if I could. (and it’s not like, “10x! killing it! grindset!” it’s just that weeks are better than weekends.)

self-{compassion | pity}

I spend a bunch of time in this state, and I can’t tell if it’s helping or hurting. Like, I break down crying sorta randomly, maybe twice a week, because woe is me etc. Is this helping move forward the process of adjusting to my life, when I really Feel My Feelings? or am I wallowing and oughta just pick myself up and deal with it?

wheel of antidepressants

well, they’re worth a try, but they’re not doing much¹. Tried Lexapro and Wellbutrin, now on to Effexor. I’m torn between “who knows, maybe I’m just doing it wrong” and “y’all, I don’t have a ‘mysterious brain chemical’ issue, it’s just that life got a whole lot more difficult.” If I were trying to take drugs to feel better despite life getting harder, but I was using different drugs, my friends and family would be staging an intervention.

The worst part about this is that everyone has opinions and they’re contradictory and I have no idea whose to believe or why. Like, these all sound reasonable:

I just haven’t found the right drug yet
SSRIs/SNRIs/first line antidepressants won’t work for me, but weirder stuff will
none of this will work for me
me don’t have a brain problem, me have a soul/life/meaning problem
this is a phase and will come and go
this is my new normal, I better figure out my meds
psychedelics are what will actually work for me
nah those are just a “helicopter up the mountain”, I’ve gotten all you can out of it, more helicopter rides won’t help

I’m the world’s worst printer, and I have to wait a month to see if my debugging “worked.”

Tweet where I describe that I’ve been tracking when I post “good morning!” vs just “morning” in a discord that I’m in, as a lo-fi mood journal, and when I’m on antidepressants my mood is actually lower than when I’m not. correlation causation yeah yeah ↩︎

Mental Models

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 22:00:04 -0400

Epistemic status: this is obvious

sleep training

We’re sleep training our kid, ok. For the non-parents, this means “teaching him to fall asleep without us holding him or feeding him or something.” There are lots of ways to do this; here are a few:

“cry it out” or “extinction”: just letting him cry until he figures out himself how to sleep.
“Ferber” or “gradual extinction”: when he cries, wait 10 min, then go in and soothe him but don’t pick him up. Next time, wait 20 min, then 30, etc.
“pick up” or something: same as Ferber but you can pick him up
“chair method”: I don’t remember, it sounded impossible

Of course, people have Opinions. People in the more-woo corners of my life tend to think these are all bad. My normier friends usually think they’re all great, or maybe “cry it out” is a little harsh but the others are good, or something.

Both viewpoints make sense, based on your mental model of what’s going on here! If your model is: “creating a traumatic experience in which the baby learns he will not get help”, then of course these sound terrible! If your model is more like “teaching a difficult thing”, they sound fine. (one friend took a class where they compared sleep training to teaching your kid not to stick his finger in a light socket. Kid will cry when you pull him away! But it’s still obviously the right, and kind, thing to do.)

but what’s right

I don’t know, but I think most of the evidence shows that whatever you do is fine, e.g. this or this). So this is maybe a bad example for the general point, which is: having the right mental model, for anything you’re doing, is really important!

why?

because we can’t actually reason about big complex systems, and everything above 7 +/- 2 is “big”. (a child’s development is certainly “big”.) We can’t even intuit about big complex systems. Usually all we can hope to do is reduce decisions to other cases where we have already decided what the “right” thing is. (“this is like teaching your kid not to stick his finger in a socket. I know what I should do there!”)

I don’t have much more to say about this. It feels pretty mundane, like something that’d be addressed in cognitive psychology 101, but I don’t remember it. In my defense, I’m dealing with “the kid was screaming for a long time last night” brain here.

Levels of Depression

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 14:59:07 -0400

(content warning: depression, of course)

I’ve been depressed at least twice now, separately. (I might still be. This one seems to come in waves; Sep-Nov pretty bad, Dec good, Jan-Mar awful, Apr bad, May good, June bad. We’ll see about July.) I suppose that means it might come back. I would like to have the following:

a way to know if I’m depressed
a way to tell how depressed I am
a way to communicate how depressed I am

3 is especially important because some of my loved ones who aren’t depressed seem not to understand that there even are more than two levels: “mildly depressed but basically fine” and “suicidal”¹. So here’s my attempt² to describe some of the levels for me.

First, a concept: Same Valence Re-experiencing

(this section is mostly a condensed repetition of Fast Forward Time)

There’s all kinds of ways to think about feelings, and obviously “sad” is not the same as “bad.” Lots of days bring difficult emotions, but at the end of the day I’m glad to have gone through them, so I can’t just say “feeling sad means I’m depressed.” And some days are tough but bring good consequences; final exams, say. But one way I have to evaluate my current state that seems pretty hard to be mistaken about is simply: “Do I want more of this?”

A thought experiment: Let’s say you’re going to live to 90 years old. If you could have one more day, so your life span is now 90 years + 1 day, and this extra day would be tomorrow and would have the same valence and consequences as today, would you do it?

Roughly equivalently IMO: let’s say we’re all in The Matrix, and you have the option to spin up a second copy of yourself and have that copy re-experience today. Would you do it?

I think most people who aren’t depressed would say yes most of the time.

Alternately, do you want less of your life? If you could cut out the next day or week or month so that you just wake up tomorrow and it’s N days later (but not like Rip Van Winkle; you had lived normally and done normal things, you just didn’t experience it), would you?

Anyway, on to depression levels:

These are mostly cumulative - if I’m at level N, I’m experiencing most of level 1…N-1 also.

Level 1: mildly depressed, or “cold depression”

Feeling kind of blah and aimless, “what am I doing with my life?”
Feeling always tired, taking forever to wake up
Feeling like I’ve always been depressed (Superb Owl gives a great description of this)
Many days thinking “I would not Same Valence Re-experience today.”

Level 2: “hot depression”

“Running out of swear words” - cursing under my breath at something but every foul word I can think of doesn’t come close to expressing how much I hate it
Sometimes leaving my house to go to the garage and scream
Sometimes riding my bike to places I can scream (here’s a couple in SF³, I still have to find my scream spots in Pittsburgh)
Having an interaction with a car that goes not-awesome, and having the thought “I hope they just run me over” or “I hope they’re one of these whackos who has a gun and shoots me out of road rage.” This thought passes in a matter of minutes and I never act on it.
Upper middle back pain tends to act up somewhere between stage 1 and 2
Many days I wouldn’t Same Valence Re-experience, and I would in fact like to fast-forward.
Journaling angry things just so I don’t say them aloud

Level 3: “uncontrolled hot depression”

Picking fights more at people in cars. Like, telling someone off for parking in a bike lane or passing me too close. I don’t perform aggression besides yelling, but even that can escalate a situation more than is healthy.
Sometimes yelling in my house. Not at anyone; sometimes at an object that breaks or at an external issue. But it still makes me unpleasant, and even a little scary, to be around.
I’d like to fast forward longer periods of time; weeks or months. I would pay a lot not to Same Valence Re-experience these days (e.g. I’d give up a few days of lifespan in order to avoid doing one of these days.)
Journal starts to look like a crazy person’s writing it, lots of scratches, hard presses, streams of curses

Level 4: “beginning escapism”

Fantasies of escaping my current situation begin: “what if I quit everything and moved to Wyoming?” These are not well-thought-out; they’re kind of just soothing daydreams.
Not really thoughts of self-harm, but thoughts of “it sure would be nice if I didn’t wake up tomorrow”
I’d love to fast forward months or years, for sure.
This starts to feel cooler again - the heat of stages 2-3 is wearing off. Too worn down to be angry.
Journaling becomes mostly repetitive and exhausted stuff, not angry stuff.

This is as low as I’ve gone, thank goodness, but it’s awful! The rest is conjecture; there may be more to it than this; I hope I don’t find out:

Level 5: “no really, escapism”

actually considering suicide, or rash life decisions like moving to Wyoming

Level 6: “escape logistics”

um, “suicidal-with-a-plan”, the kind of thing where you’d get involuntarily committed depending on where you went and what you said

Level 7: “even lower than that”

god I dunno, but apparently this exists⁴

afterthoughts

That’s all the levels I can think of. Of course, the experience is not really this linear. But it at least helps me place myself, and maybe will give me some language when talking with family.

Levels 3+ start creating epicycles too; like, I’m pissed off, I yell at my wife, now I’m pissed off and now I have to deal with the fact that I yelled at her. Or, I’m talking with my mom and she gets worried in a way I don’t like, so I have to backpedal and pretend I’m not feeling as bad as I am.

I guess I’m saying, it is a huge benefit to go from level 3 to level 2, or 2 to 1. Almost like this stuff is logarithmic.

Not blaming them! I think this is how it’s described in pop culture, and if your mind, heart, and body haven’t been to this place, I can see how it’d be really hard to understand! ↩︎
This is about attempt #5 and I’m still not happy with it but I gotta get this post out there eventually! ↩︎
I guess I can’t link to tweets and count on them being accessible anymore? gosh. Gosh. well. here’s what I said in that tweet: 1. biking on a loud st (San Jose Ave btwn Bernal/Glen Park, or Cesar Chavez) 2. towards water, with few people (warm water cove park) 3. walking around SOMA, not really but kinda ↩︎
Tweet from someone I don’t know, text: “I just saw the “anti-depressants are dangerous, they come with a warning about increased suicidal thoughts” take AGAIN and it appears that people in this Year of Our Lord 2023 don’t understand that this is actually a common thing that happens when depression starts to get better. [CW suicide] People don’t understand that “I want to die” isn’t the lowest point a person can hit. There’s a level below that, which is “I would want to die if my brain could function enough to want ANYTHING” and a very dangerous stage where you rise UP TO that level.” ↩︎

Vibecamp?

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 12:32:59 -0400

So I’m going to this festival, at a campground in Maryland, to meet other people from Twitter, who I think I have some things in common with? Woo people and rat people? I don’t know.

This just feels so outside my normal life right now (of being a dad of a young kid, and writing software, and basically trying to survive doing both).

You may find yourself, etc. Here we go!

Baby Prep: Feelings

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 22:31:35 -0400

I’ve tried to write this post like 3 times already, but keep failing, because 1. it’s hard to write, and 2. uh I’ve got this baby

some feelings advice to my past self about the “fourth trimester”

“No one can ever prepare you”, right? well, I’ve been trying to do that, and I’m going to continue with the hardest bit: the … emotional side of things? Phrasing some of this as advice to my Innie, who is still stuck there, and some of it as advice to other people, because “advice” seems a pretty natural tone for a blog.¹

Content warning for depression, with hints at su*cide, throughout.

this was the hardest 4 months of my life

let me emphasize a few words:

4 months: that’s when it took a radical turn for the better. I’ll explain why later.
hardest: yes. grad school may have been harder, but because it was longer; ∫(all of grad school) was lower, but ∫(any 4 month period of grad school) was not as low. college and high school had some stressful times, but nothing made me feel quite as awful as this.
was: hell yes. I have a clear feeling of being on the other side of a phase that has passed. thank god. I’ve got a moment to come up for air, so I’m writing this during this precious time when I both feel ok and am very temporally close to when I definitely did not feel ok.

god newborns are a mess

wait but why nailed this. At 0 months they’re a “fetus that everyone can see”. At 1 month they’re half-fetus, half-baby. He says at 2 months they’re full baby but I think even 3 months is pretty generous. They’re hyperventilating and snorting, they’re scrunching in a ball and flailing their limbs, they’re sleeping not enough and at weird hours, even eating is sometimes a challenge.

you might not like this baby at all

I’ve heard that there’s a pretty wide distribution of how fast dads bond with their kids - some are smitten instantly, some take a long time. Let’s call a dad who is smitten instantly a 10, and a dad who never loves his baby at all 0.

Tim from Wait But Why talks about, in point 5, how he was like “I love my kid, but if he and my wife were falling off a cliff and I could only save one, I’m still saving my wife.” So maybe he was like an 8. I appreciate that he said this, because it seems mildly taboo to admit that you’re not a 10.

I think I was around a 2.

If that doesn’t sound so dire, it’s because you’re not really imagining it. Imagining “I don’t love the baby so much” sounds kind of like “I don’t love the new painting over our fireplace so much”; kind of a bummer, but no big deal. But being a 2/10 on this scale is really bad, because a baby is so much work and pain that is only tolerable if you love them so much.

get used to intense frustration and learn when to tap out

Maybe the worst most acute part was debugging. I called him “the world’s worst printer” for a while, because:

he’s constantly breaking
he makes a ton of awful noise and spews fluids everywhere when he does; the noise doesn’t stop until you fix whatever’s wrong
there’s zero debugging feedback, just a scream that means “something is wrong”
and yet, you absolutely must debug him, every time

This is so frustrating. I am not the most patient person to begin with, and doing the cycle of “why is he crying” for even an hour would send me to the moon.

I don’t know how to prepare for this. Play really frustrating video games? Set up StickK or Pavlok with some awful stupid goals that page you every 2 hours with real-life consequences for failure?

Maybe there is no preparing. In that case, realize that you’re in a new zone and you might need to tap out sooner than you think. You’re in the Death Zone of Mt. Everest; you might think “I can make it!” but that’s your hypoxia talking. Notice any signs that you’re going downhill: e.g. raising my voice at all is a sign for me. Tap out early and often (give the baby to your partner, or put him down in the crib and go to the other room for a few minutes). Your partner will appreciate it. And eventually you’ll learn to operate in the Everest Death Zone.

(Innie Dan: that’s crazy. I raise my voice, just a little bit, pretty often. Outie Dan: yes, I know. No judgment. You and T will both be happier if you hand her the baby every time.)

get used to loud awful noises

Similar to the above: you’ll hear terrible noises much more often than you think. Baby screams are awful. One common urban legend (maybe true?) is that the CIA plays baby screams as interrogation-torture. They are the noises that are the worst to you; you’ve evolved to hate them. I don’t know how to prepare (start listening to baby screams in your spare time? just don’t be noise sensitive?), but get ready.

(oh wait, I do know one way to prepare: buy really good earplugs or noise canceling headphones. They help a little bit.)

hire night doulas; they don’t solve everything

“sleep deprivation is the worst part”, I heard, so we threw as much money as possible at the problem to get more sleep. It is a bad part. But night doulas are kind of like buying a thick coat because the cold is the worst part of climbing Everest. The rest of you will still be freezing, and you’ll still be out of oxygen and tired and cramped and hungry.

have a baby in the spring

it sucks when it’s winter and you have a newborn and you can’t really go outside much and it gets dark at 5pm. So many days went like this:

Previous night until about 6am: Dan watches baby
6am to around 9am: T watches baby, Dan tries to sleep more (or flip our roles, depending on the night)
9am to 11am: muddle through shower/breakfast/etc while baby intermittently screams
11:30am: “ok shit we both have to get outside today or we will be sad. what’s our plan to do that?”
12-2pm, one of us goes outside, maybe to do something exciting like grocery shopping (I called this our “prison yard recreation time²”); 2:30-4:30 the other one does; then it’s dark.

you can’t even vent to your wife

Being a hetero married man is nice³: if your job sucks, you can commiserate with your wife! When your parent dies, she’ll give you as much love and attention as you need! When you’re having a hard time with your baby, she… well, she will probably not share your feelings. She carried this thing for 9 months; he is like a part of her. So if you say you don’t like him, it’s like saying you don’t like her. Obviously, this is not pleasant for either of you.

Find external support people! Get in touch with your parents or siblings and call them often! Join a dads group if you can find one. (join my dads discord! ask me about it.) Vent to all of them, and not her! This sucks because you’ll invariably screw it up sometimes, and it’s just hard to have less support than you’re used to!

don’t make life-altering changes

(details redacted; thoughts too grim to blog)

If you’re the kind of person who’s pretty good at limping along through days despite feeling pretty hopeless, keep doing that. If there’s some little joy that keeps you going through your day, go for that now. I’m sorry, Innie Dan. It’s not forever.

at least there’s food

thank god. give yourself a blank check to order the best fucking delivery food your heart/stomach/tongue desire. eat some fucking ice cream to quell the roaring emptiness inside you. buy a $45 bag of coffee. don’t drink alcohol (you’ll feel worse very quickly) but weed will actually help you. try kava - drink twice as much as you ever have before and finally you’ll understand what people see in it. this whole paragraph is advice to Innie Dan; it may not apply (and may be harmful) to others! more broadly: try to find little luxuries that make you feel good. do not, in any way, skimp on this right now.

there is a step-change improvement, I’m not sure when

Other people: oh it gets so much better after the first year and a half
Innie Dan (with newborn baby): the fuck you think I can make it to a year and a half.
Outie Dan (current): don’t listen to them, it’s not that bad. I noticed a big improvement at about 3-4 months.
Innie Dan: the fuck you think I can make it to 3-4 months.

So… I don’t know. Best advice I can give is that your life happiness falls off a cliff immediately, then starts climbing back slowly and unpredictably. So 2 weeks is better than 1 week, 1 month is better than 2 weeks, 2 months is better than 1 month.

go back to work if you can

One big step change improvement happened when I started working again. Being in a different physical place, doing a different thing, all day just really helped my mental state. I got 4 months of leave, and I took it all at once, but I wish I had taken 2 now and 2 later.

Also don’t plan to do any big work changes soon after baby! Don’t change companies! Don’t take on a big new project! You won’t have energy!

“cute” is love. maximize it

If you start off with very little love for this creature, you might wonder “how is this relationship ever going to grow?” And after a couple months when he starts smiling, you might go “well, that’s cute, but so what?”

No! Stop, Innie Dan! That is it. Pay attention to that “cute”, because that’s the seed starting to grow. That might be all you get, but that is something and you better fucking water that seed. “Cute” is (at least the first stages of) love.

(Innie Dan: But I see cute animals all the time on the internet; are you telling me that I am feeling actual love for every little puppy? Outie Dan: yes.)

though, this makes me sad. Talking about my experience in the same tone of voice as “buy this stroller, not that one!” makes my Innie sad… but it’s relatively easy to write, and never getting this post out there would make him sadder. ↩︎
I know how insensitive this is to actual prisoners. Sorry. Listen, this whole post is “I did a thing that most people love and I hated it”, of course it’s self-indulgent! ↩︎
I mean, being married is nice in general, no matter your and their gender. But this segment is rather particular to being a dad in a straight couple. ↩︎

baby stuff megapost

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:30:51 -0400

I’m an expert now, so I know all the baby things you need. Here they are, sorted roughly by room.

Nursery

Crib. Necessary. Recent parents (2yo+?) will probably be eager to give you their crib because it’s hard to resell a crib. These are perhaps the most regulated things in existence and they are a simple box, therefore every crib is basically the same and they all work fine.
Diapers. Necessary. Don’t buy many Newborns or Size-1s; they grow really fast in the beginning. Buy maybe a week’s worth.
Changing table. Almost necessary. This will likely be a little tray on top of a 3-drawer dresser, but any table that’s a comfortable height will work. You could change him in the crib but this will be very annoying.
Baby monitor. Almost necessary. There are a million of them; I guess you can get a fancy one with an app if you want but that sounds like a bad idea to me. This one works fine. The range is a little short for the far corners of our 3-story 1800-sq-ft house, so if yours is bigger, maybe search for one with more range.
Adult bed. Recommended. it’s nice to have a twin bed in the nursery so a parent can sleep there too, during the earliest days. Make sure it’s comfortable for you to sleep in. (If you are 6ft+, twin beds may be too small and your legs may stick out, so get one without a footboard.)
Rocking chair. Nice to have. it’s nice to have a comfy rocking chair to sit in while feeding the baby.
Mini-fridge. Nice to have. If your nursery is far from your kitchen, it’s nice to stock this up with bottles for overnight and then not have to go back to the main fridge. There are two types; if you are safety conscious, usually only the bigger “compressor”-type ones are guaranteed to be <40 degrees, while the “thermoelectric”-type ones are not. But do what you want; bottles of mixed formula can last 4hr at room temperature, so I imagine that if you get a cute little thermoelectric one and it only gets them to 45 degrees, you’ll probably be fine.

Nursery Closet or Dresser

Clothes. Necessary. Zipper sleepers (like these) are the best: cheap, easy to open/close, easy to wash, good for all weather except hot summer. Onesies (like these) are good for summer. Like with diapers, don’t get many/any “newborn” ones; they’ll grow out so fast. I’d get maybe 10 3mo ones to start. You’ll also get clothes as gifts; unless they are zipper sleepers or onesies, or unless money is super tight, thank the giver and then secretly donate them.
Velcro swaddles. Almost necessary, and the “almost” is only there if you don’t value your sanity. Babies don’t want to be swaddled, but they’re happier and better-sleeping when they are, and velcro helps them not wriggle out. These from Happiest Baby are my favorite. Maybe 2-3 - you don’t have to change them as often, just have one to be in the wash and one to be on him.
Merlin suit. Nice to have. After they can roll over, you’ve got to stop swaddling them, but they may not be good at just sleeping free; the Merlin suit was nice for the couple weeks of learning to sleep unswaddled.
Sleep sacks. Necessary for later. After the Merlin suit’s done, they still can’t sleep with a blanket, so a sleep sack is their blanket. (no opinion on which ones yet; so far they all seem fine)
Burp cloths. These are just a rectangle of fabric. Any is fine; cheap is nice. Turns out this is the perfect size to carry around, wipe stuff, put on your shoulder while burping baby. Kids spit up a lot; make sure you always have one in arm’s reach. I’d buy 10.

Living Room

(This assumes your house is big enough that you’ll often be spending time far from, or up/down stairs from, the baby’s bedroom.)

Second crib. Necessary if your house is big. This is not for your baby to sleep in, but for you to put him in for a few minutes and not worry that he’s going to roll onto the floor. We got a Pack’n’Play for this; it works fine and we could take it on a trip if necessary.
Second diaper changing station. Necessary if your house is big. We just used the Pack’n’Play for this, and got a little bin for diapers/wipes/Aquaphor/etc.
Toys? I don’t know? A friend gave us a couple of kits from Lovevery; they’re undoubtedly overpriced but as we didn’t know what else to get him we just subscribed to this for a “toy kit” every couple months anyway. Ugh, they got us.
Rocking bassinet/Snoo: Nice to have. We have a rocking thing; our kid never liked it. But some people swear by the Snoo. If you have money to spare, maybe try it, I don’t know. Our doula doesn’t love it, though, because (in her opinion) it conditions your kid to need a Snoo in order to sleep.

Kitchen

Bottles. Necessary. I like the Dr Brown 4oz, for a couple reasons: 1. the lid is easy to screw on/off; 2. it’s a little more than 4oz, which is nice because the recipe for 4oz formula is 4oz water + 2 scoops formula which is therefore a little more than 4oz. These have a little “anti colic” green straw doohickey, which we have removed and never used, because one more part to wash is one more part to wash. Get 6-8 of them, as you’ll have to queue them up - like make 4 for overnight.
Formula. Necessary. Even if you plan to breastfeed 100%, buy at least 1 can just in case something goes wrong. Breastfeeding is hard. All formula is super-regulated, it’s all fine, we buy whatever says “organic” and is marketed to rich hippie yuppies; it’s all fine.
- you might be wondering “should I breastfeed or do formula?” Breastfeeding is a lot more work, might feel good, might build closeness with your baby, might be really painful. Formula is also Fine. Emily Oster in Cribsheet has a great chapter about this: there are about 1000 claims of benefits of breastfeeding or harms of formula, but after reviewing the data, only like 3 hold up, they’re temporary and pretty minor. (The most major is slightly fewer gastrointestinal upsets over their early childhood.) So breastfeeding is a little better but please just do whichever one you like. This shit’s hard enough.
Bottle sterilizer. Not necessary. Just wash them with soap and water. The sterilizer doesn’t even save this step; you sterilize after you wash! Even the hospital doctors, who have got to be the most cautious people in the world, said we didn’t need a sterilizer. Welp.
Drying rack. Recommended. For all your bottles, breast pump parts, etc. Something with a bunch of sticky up poles is better than a normal dish drying rack.
Distilled water. Not necessary. Doctors will recommend it for making formula just in case there’s a bacterial outbreak somewhere in the city water supply, but if you live in a normal city with normal water, you’re fine. (Also if you get a sterilizer, you need to use distilled; another reason not to get a sterilizer.)

Somewhere in your house

Breast pump. Necessary (unless you’re going 100% formula - even if you always plan to breastfeed and never pump, it’s really good to have an option to get the milk out of you even when the baby’s asleep, because it can get painful otherwise). We got Spectra S1; it’s pretty good. Cordless is nice. There’s apparently new fancier “wearable” ones; we haven’t tried them.
Pillow to strap around yourself while you breastfeed the baby.
Places to put the baby in most rooms. These might be bouncers (little seat-type things where he can sit and bounce), your pack-n-play, a bassinet, or a “lounger” pillow. It’s a bummer when you find you can’t put him down. All of these are fine, and/or get donations, we got like 4 from friends, people have a lot of these for some reason.
Baby carrier. Highly recommended. I find this easier than a stroller, actually; try them both out. We got two: this little Evenflo one and Ergobaby 360 for when he’s slightly bigger. There’s also the Solly wrap which friends love, especially for a little baby, but I haven’t tried it.
Bassinet. Not necessary. We got a hand-me-down one. It’s not super useful, unless you need another place to stash your baby when he’s very small.

Garage

Car seat. Necessary (assuming you have a car, or plan to ever take him in a car). These are the other Most Regulated Things In The World so they’ll all be safe; spending more money just gets you convenience, easy installation, clickiness. We got Nuna Pipa RX. It’s fine.
Stroller. Almost necessary; of course there are some wackos who will never use a stroller, but that is crazy. We got the Uppababy Cruz. Yes, it’s very expensive. It has really good wheels, easy to lock/unlock, easy to fold.
Car-seat-stroller adapter. Probably necessary unless you already know your car seat and stroller interoperate without one (probably only if it’s advertised as such). We got this one; it’s fine.

Bookshelf

I have read about 8 baby books and I like about half of them. These are good:

Expecting Better and Cribsheet by Emily Oster. There’s a reason every yuppie nerd parent has read these: they serve a real purpose. The purpose, though, is not the advertised purpose of “reviewing the data to help you make informed decisions.” The purpose is “help you worry less.” If you are prone to worrying, please read plenty of Oster and realize that there’s no good data to support most of your worries, you can drop them, it’s fine.
Happiest Baby On The Block by Harvey Karp. This dude has about 5 pages of useful info that he pads out into a whole book, but it’s worth it. The 5 S’s: shush, sway, swaddle, suck, and side/stomach.
The New Father by Armin Brott. This is not that exciting, but it’s like “what might happen each month.” I use it as a rough reference.
The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin. This is a probably-too-much-depth overview of all things about childbirth, but if you have time to read it, it sure doesn’t hurt! I think I retained about 20% of it but that was super helpful.

You should get kids books too. No big recommendations here yet, but ask for them as gifts; everyone loves to give you the book they or their kids loved.

baby prep things to do megapost

Wed, 24 May 2023 15:43:32 -0400

Having just kept a baby alive for 4 months, I’m an expert now. I now have friends who are about to do the same thing! Here’s some things we did, sorted into roughly chronological order of when you have to think about them. This is geared towards dads; more disclaimers here.¹

a few months before the due date

set up your housing situation. We were debating moving cross-country pre-baby or post-baby; thank god we did it pre-baby. Ideally you’re not at month 8 going “oh huh we live in a little studio and want more than that.”
set up the nursery, or wherever the baby will sleep. Ideally this is a room with a closeable door near where the parents sleep, but all kinds of configurations can work.
do you have a car? do you want one? I hate cars so much, but they make life easier with a small baby. It can take a while to get a car these days; start shopping.
you’re probably already getting regular doctor checkups as you go through pregnancy; make sure you know what hospital you want to deliver at, and ask your doctor how to get ready for that.
do you have a therapist? do you want one? This was the hardest 3 months of my life and I’m glad I had a pre-existing relationship with one. This is always a time-consuming search. If you’re a generally pretty happy person, you might not need this, but if you’re as depressive as I am, make sure they’re at least ready to go in case you need them.
get on All The Day Care Lists, if you plan to do day care. Too bad you’re already too late. (jk! we did this and got admitted to one place in time for after our leave ended! but then we decided to hire a nanny anyway.)

a couple months before the due date

get connected with a doula (optional, highly recommended). Our hospital set us up with one! If that isn’t the case, start asking around for recommendations. Get to know them before you or your wife is in labor.
get connected with postpartum/night doulas (optional, highly recommended). These are people who will come to your house at night and watch your baby overnight so you can sleep. Cost (Pittsburgh) was like $30-33/hr = $240/8hr ~ $1100 per month for each day of the week you want them. We got 3; that seems good; at least you can sleep about every other night. Plus, in addition to giving you some much-needed sleep, they can help you learn how to help your baby sleep better in general.
think about your parental leave at work. My company gave 4 months (generous for US, par for the course in Europe, :shrug: I’ll take it) and I took it all at once; I wish I had broken it into two chunks and taken maybe 2-3 months now and 1-2 months later, just because my life went so much better after I had some daily time with adults again, and that difference wasn’t as stark for T.
get some Stuff. I think I’ll make a whole other post about Baby Stuff. This is not so critical to be super prepared in the Age of Amazon, but I mention it now because your family or friends might want to throw you a baby shower. If so, make an online registry; we used Babylist; like most software it was kind of bad.
it might be helpful to get any medications you might need. Depends on you and your doctor, but if you’ve been on-and-off antidepressants, maybe stock up a little in case you need them. Similarly, other milder herbs and stuff have been helpful for me: melatonin has been great for sleep, I’m still figuring out kava for mood but it’s amazing when it works, kanna might be helping my mood, valerian might be helping sleep, chamomile is always pleasant, and cannabis is absolutely a medicine.
set up a support network! It’d be nice to find a local support group for moms/dads, respectively; somehow (post covid I guess) we couldn’t find one that would take us. In its place, I set up a discord for all my dad friends. This was a really good decision. (if you’re a friend of mine and you want in on Dadscord, let me know.)

a month before the due date

Stop traveling about now. Here’s when babies actually arrive, relative to the due date, so if you stop traveling 1mo before then, you only have like a 2% chance of being on an airplane while your wife goes into labor.
Finalize things at work. Moms may have some time off pre-baby, e.g. in California. This is nice.
Set up appointments with a pelvic floor physical therapist for after the birth. Mom will probably need it; delivering a baby is physically pretty rough.
Any family that you want to be around after the birth, set that up with them.
If you want, set up Mealtrain to have friends and family bring you food after the birth. I would actually instead just make a google doc or something, because the Mealtrain website focuses kind of a lot on the food, which is not the important bit; the important bit is that you schedule a place where ppl can sign up to come over and see you, and it’s low effort to you. Just order takeout or something.
Find a pediatrician you think you want to go to. Maybe someone close to home. Write down their name and phone number.
Decide things about the birth, with your doula. (epidural yes/no/when? other pain meds? other practices you want to do? music/etc? who’s in the room? circumcise?)
Decide a first, middle, last name. Probably don’t tell anyone; just easier that way.
Decide whose insurance he’ll be on, if you have two choices. Make sure the hospital is on that insurance. If they’re about equal, use mom’s, it’s easier. (supposedly the baby is on mom’s for the first 30 days automatically, but in our case, they said “that’s only the case if you put him on mom’s insurance later.” We gave everyone his mom’s insurance info but then put him on mine, so I had to do a bunch of retroactive Insurance Company Calling.

after the baby’s born

go to a pediatrician within 48 hours after you come home from the hospital. They probably won’t let you make an appointment before then, but they’ll get you in quick once you have a baby.
probably see a breastfeeding consultant. AFAICT breastfeeding is always hard; different reason for everyone. If there’s a breastfeeding consultant at the hospital, you probably see them for 15 minutes and it’s useless.
get the baby on your insurance. You might use a bullshit-looking feet pic as his “birth certificate” before the real birth certificate arrives; this is goofy but it works.
keep seeing:
- pediatrician, as prescribed
- friends and family
- therapist
- night doulas
- gym/whatever fitness thing you do
- each other, without baby
- these are all to keep you sane. You probably can’t do all of them perfectly. Do your best.
survive! you’re in it now! more expounding on this state to follow!

2-3 months before you return to work

If you’re hiring a nanny through an agency, start talking to the agency. Hiring can actually happen pretty quick - in a few weeks - but better not to hurry. If you’re hiring a nanny without an agency, maybe start on the earlier end.

most of this will apply to parents who aren’t dads; I’d say it all would but I can’t honestly say how much of my experience was influenced by being a dad. This is also geared towards semi-rich people; if a step strikes you as extravagant and luxurious and out of touch, my apologies. I offer it all with the humble acknowledgement that it was tough as shit even though we had the ability to spend a lot of money. ↩︎

A Month of Metta

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:40:07 -0400

I did 31 half-hour metta meditations, near-daily. Here are some thoughts.

why

some regular contemplative practice has got to be helpful to me, right?
“being more loving” would be a really good thing in my life right now (and in general, but it especially kinda feels like the transformation I’ve got to make right now)
someone tweeted something like “if your internal monologue isn’t constantly about how you love yourself, you should do metta until it is” - I have no idea if that’s right for me, but it sort of fits. In the “sila, samadhi, pañña” three pillars (where sila is “everyday life”, samadhi is “concentration”, and pañña is “insight”), I always just assumed I had sila under control and I could move on, because I have generally loving family, good job, house, no problems, etc; but maybe not. Maybe “having sila under control” means you generally love yourself. At any rate, my internal monologue is closer to “I kinda dislike myself” than “I love myself.” So maybe metta is the ticket.

how

This guy Tasshin Fogleman publishes a podcast of metta meditations. Each one is about 30 min, no nonsense, very easy to follow.

Each one has a similar format: 1. Get comfortable. 2. Relax. 3. Smile. 4. Direct some love at yourself. 5. Think of a person/animal who’s easy to love and direct some love to them. 6. (Something different every time.)

I’d do them at night before going to bed, lying in bed. It’s very nice to just lie down and relax, and not try to maintain some kinda half-relaxed-but-actually-a-little-strained quarter-lotus/Burmese/kneeling position. I appreciated this. A few times, maybe 1/4 of the time, I’d fall asleep - no problem, I’d pick up again tomorrow.

Sometimes I’d do them under a mild dose of cannabis. My old Buddhist brain is like “ohh noo I’m getting hindranced”, but y’know what, it helps! I think usually it helped me generate love. (Sometimes it did make me fall asleep. C’est la vie.)

a couple interesting moments

one day when trying to say nice things to myself, I came up with “I love the way you smile.” That’s not something I’ve thought before, and it was nice to hear.
one time the instruction was something like “think of a loving kindness mantra” and I came up with “you are forgiven, you are worthy.” It brought me back to one of my most powerful experiences. It was nice.
I am dealing with a screaming baby sometimes now. Sometimes in meditation I would send love to my future or past self who’s trying to calm the screaming baby. Unfortunately, when I then became my future self, I couldn’t receive this love.

thoughts on “acting as if”

There’s a powerful move I’ve started to see: “act as if.” When he says something like “generate love towards your easy-to-love person”, I’d think, “huh, I really can’t.” But then, “what if I had to? how would it sound?” And then I would be able to a little more. This isn’t really limited to metta meditation - I notice it a lot of other places, likry coffee tasting, as well.

overall thoughts

most of the time I was just going through the motions. Enough that I’m not excited to keep doing it.
otoh, maybe I’m “planting seeds that will sprout later”
otooh, ugh, mannn
maybe this would be easier if I weren’t trying to do it at maybe the most difficult point of my life
but maybe the urgency brings motivation
my inner monologue is the same
but it’s a little easier than other meditations I’ve done
in conclusion, big shrug, oh well

3 Months In

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 13:15:54 -0400

… to parenting a small baby. I still can’t recommend this to anyone. But the experience is changing! Where it used to be red-orange rage and black despair, now the feeling is more gray emptiness. Not like, cool anatta emptiness, just like, I feel pretty empty.

My brain is empty: I run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. This is unusual for me. My body is ok - when everything is firing just right, when the sleep and food and exercise and caffeine are all within good windows. When one of these goes out of whack, I feel bodily hollow and blah¹. My emotions are a little blunted.

My time is much emptier than usual. Maybe 60% of it is normal; that’s the time T is watching the baby. The other 40%, where I’m in charge, is about half “active baby care”, where I’m holding a bottle or doing some other dumb mechanical task; half “watching baby on monitor”, during which my brain is mush. (It’s hard to do anything while watching baby, because you can get interrupted anytime!) So that leaves me at about 70% capacity (60% + half of 20%); and as usual maybe half of my capacity goes to keeping the sports car running.

By “the sports car”, I mean that I feel like a high-maintenance vehicle. Some people get by fine if they sleep 6 hours, or if they don’t see friends for a month, or if they’re active dawn to dusk, or if they eat McDonald’s daily; I don’t. I feel like I’ve got to have the exact right gas, oil, fluids, wheels, brakes, lug nuts, whatever; if one of those wears down, I fall apart.

Anyway, so I went from having 50% of my energy available to, y’know, do things beyond basic survival, to about 20%. It feels like my life is more than cut in half. This is tough.²

What about upsides?

baby smiles. These happen sometimes and are very cute. They are not life changing as some people seem to think they are.
walking around with baby. Status boost from this; people just automatically like me.
In my braindead time, I’ve gotten pretty good at Nonograms.

That’s about it. I can imagine this will continue to improve.

Unfortunately, this “blah” is familiar: it’s mostly the feeling of “not enough sleep.” It’s the way I spent most of grade school and high school, and the way I vowed never to return to, once I could help it! But now we have a baby, and the sleepless years are followed closely by the years during which we have to get up at Ungodly O’clock because he’s going to school. God damn. OTOH, as T pointed out, “when you moan about never sleeping again, do you just mean you’re tired right now and you feel bad?” Uh, yes, I do. ↩︎
In before “other people have it tougher”; yes, of course they do. We are parenting on basically the easiest difficulty level. (The only thing that would make it easier, and this would make it much easier, would be grandparents in town. C’est la vie.) ↩︎

How to Stay Sane and Healthy on Social Media

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 21:15:55 -0500

I like social media. I also like alcohol. Obviously, alcohol can cause problems, so I’ve established a few ground rules for myself. Similarly, social media can cause problems, so I’ve established ground rules there too. My social media ground rules have helped social media be a positive joyful force in my life, not the anger- and fear-inducing force that most people experience.

(Currently. I haven’t always done this. I’ve… Learned from past mistakes.)

This post is about “how”, not “how much”

Ground rules fall into two categories:

“how much” rules, like “don’t drink more than 1-2 drinks more than once a week”
“how” rules, like “don’t drink to avoid feelings” and “drink only in social situations”

Both are important! I’m going to focus on the “how” rules, because they’re more subtle.

Companies (facebook, twitter, snapchat, tiktok) don’t care about your mental health and well being. They optimize for users, clicks, and ad views. ¹ They are almost required to do so. They don’t want you to feel worse (all things equal, they probably want you to feel better, who wouldn’t?) but their business goals just don’t care one way or the other.

Anger and fear generate lots of clicks and ad views! So the default experience on a social media site quickly becomes anger and fear. You have to actively fight it if you don’t want to leave every session a little more furious, worried, and drained than you started.

Becoming aware of it

If you’re reading this and saying, “that’s not me!”, I challenge you: open your favorite social media and scroll for a minute, and count how many posts make you feel a little more angry or afraid. Some common offenders:

basically anything political or culture wars (including anything with “republican” or “democrat”, “Biden”, “Trump”, LGBTQ issues, gender issues, racism, “woke”, colonialism, guns, abortion, climate change - I’m not taking any positions on any of these right now, but notice how your heart rate rises even just reading these words)
fears about some chemical that’s in your house or food
fears about anything in the future (climate change, the economy, AI)
Someone Did Something Bad Somewhere posts (“Someone in Kalamazoo said a racist thing!” “There’s a serial killer on the loose in New Hampshire!”)²
anything about “culture” as a whole (“nobody gets married anymore!” “nobody respects their neighbors!”)

You might have a lot of this! If you do, congrats, you’re becoming aware of it. If it’s not so bad, then congrats too! Either way, this becomes an ongoing challenge: notice this kind of thing as it comes up and continue to take steps to get rid of it.

Fixing it

But how do I get rid of the rage and fear? (Without losing my whole social circle?) In general, Just Unfollow People. Don’t worry, if they often ragepost and fearpost, it’s not likely that you’re missing nuggets of wisdom in between. (If you do, c’est la vie; there’s plenty of other wisdom nuggets elsewhere.) If they’re real life friends, you’ll keep in touch via other means. Remember: following someone means “I like what you post”, not “I like you.”

There are more detailed solutions per platform, too. I won’t post step by step “click here” info, as that keeps changing, but these principles should be pretty static for a while.

Facebook

unfollow people! You don’t even have to unfriend them; just unfollow them, and you won’t get their rage/fear in your news feed
if your feed is all anger and rage, try News Feed Eradicator or a similar extension to let you maintain access to Facebook for friends’ contact info, Groups, Marketplace

Instagram

again, unfollow. Especially with Stories, each person you follow will take up a lot of your attention.
News Feed Eradicator works here too

Twitter

Twitter has a reputation as a terrible site where people yell at each other all day. But I think it’s actually the best, with a little work:

always always always use chronological timeline. This is “posts from people you follow, in the order they tweet them.” Never use the algorithmically curated timeline. (The names for these keep changing; right now the chrono timeline is called “Following” and the algorithmic one is called “For You”.) You follow people because you want to get posts from them; why would you also want a bunch of (probably rage/fear) posts from randos?
unfollow people. (Notice a theme?) Unfollow your friends even, if they make you mad or afraid. I give people two strikes: messing up once is ok, but if you ragepost twice in short succession, you’re unfollowed.
turn off retweets for some people. Some people are good at tweeting themselves, but keep RTing rage/fear. You can “turn off retweets” while still getting posts they write themselves.
use Tweetdeck and lists. Lists are nice if you have people you follow in a domain (e.g. I’ve got a list of artists; I don’t want every post from them clogging my timeline, but it’s nice to see some of their posts sometimes.) Tweetdeck lets you make a column for each list. It also helps if you have multiple twitter accounts.
mute keywords. E.g. “Trump” or “crypto”. You can still follow your friends, but miss their posts about certain topics.

only visit niche subreddits. When you create an account, leave every subreddit they suggest, then only join a few for small interest areas. Disc golf or cast-iron cookware? Great. “Pics” or “Facepalm” or “IdiotsInCars”? no.

TikTok

I don’t actually know! You don’t actually choose who to follow, and you don’t explicitly curate your feed, right? I guess upvote puppies and nice music, downvote anyone yelling.
Maybe I’m old, but TikTok might be uniquely bad here. Notice your feelings after using it: if you’re more angry or afraid, uninstall it.

please don’t well-actually about how platform x doesn’t count “clicks” exactly; the point is, they all monetize your attention. And I know facebook got some good press for “time well spent”; doesn’t really matter until their core business stops being monetizing your attention. ↩︎
I should probably write a whole post about Someone Did Something Bad Somewhere (SDSBS) posts. Once you start noticing them, it gets way easier to dismiss them with prejudice. ↩︎

Fast-Forward Time

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 13:43:48 -0500

in which I solve positive psychology

positive psychology

is a subfield that arose, afaict, when psychologists and philosophers talked to each other a bunch.

Psychologists: so if you have uncontrolled schizophrenia, or bipolar, or depression, or PTSD, these are all bad, so we help people get out of them
Philosophers: why?
Psych: so they can live more of the good life
Phil: what’s that?
Psych: uhh

And then we got a lot of dumb word-mashing arguments:
A: how do we help people get happier?
B: well there’s more to life than happiness
A: ok, how about helping people live the good life?
B: what’s the good life?
A: where people are happier
B: what’s happier?
A: right, ok, where we help people achieve eudaimonia
B: what is eudaimonia?
A: it’s where they’re living the good life
B: what’s the good life?
A: when people are flourishing
B: what’s flourishing?
A: when people have hedonic well-being
B: what’s hedonic well-being?
A: sigh ok, here’s a 3-part breakdown of flourishing/eudaimonia/well-being/satisfaction/whatever. or 4 parts. or 5 parts. (PERMA!) or 6 parts.
Bhutan: couldn’t help but overhearing; this sounds awesome, we’re going to measure Gross National Happiness
The entire TED conference, in unison: omg you all are enlightened wise mountain sages¹

gosh, why bother

This is exhausting. Why was there so much froth about it? Two things jump out to me as still exciting on a personal level²:

even asking about “how can people make their lives better, whatever that means”
having some kind of metric to track “how good your life is”, and “is it going in the right direction”

This “how good is my life metric” still interests me. I want to answer questions like these³:

I was on Prozac for years; did it help?
If I try a new antidepressant, is it working?
Is this job making me miserable? Is my life overall better or worse than the last job, when I spend 40 hours a week on it?

the metric

is surprisingly easy: ask myself, “Do I want more of my life?”

If I woke up tomorrow and it was Groundhog Day and I just experienced today again (“for the first time”, so I’m not bored), would I be happy about it? What if I experienced it 3 times? 100 times?

(Sci-fi fans could say “would I want to spin up a copy of myself to relive today?”)

Or, would I like to fast-forward today? Would I like to blink and it’s nighttime? If a copy of me were just spinning up and waking up this morning, and I knew it was going to re-experience yesterday once, would I prefer to let it run through the day, or would I shut it down?

some possible objections

I keep looking for ways this thought experiment fails, and it keeps not failing.

“what if you’re wrong about whether you’re happy?” … is this possible? If you love staring at trains and would Groundhog Day a day at the train station 1000 times, I’m prepared to bite that bullet and say that your life is pretty good
“what if you’re not really happy, you just go on a drug bender and think you’re really happy for a day?” I … don’t think this exists? If you’re hiding from your emotions with drugs or sex or roller coasters or whatever, you don’t really have a great time! Or, if we allow that you can forcibly bliss yourself out, we just have to extend the time window: “would you relive this week/month/year?” or, “for how many of the last N days would you relive this day?”
“even the hardest struggles become fond memories later” No they don’t. If you think this, you haven’t had hard struggles.⁴

me rn, and disclaimer

Anyway. I’m in fast forward time right now. I’d love to go to sleep and wake up in 6 months. (not like Rip Van Winkle, but like I’ve lived like my normal self and it just happens to be 6 months later.) It’s not great. But at least I have a sense of how bad it is. Worse than any time since about 2013-14 at least; probably worse than that.

That said (and maybe I don’t need to say this but I’m going to err on the side of caution) fast-forward time is not the same as being sucidal. Just because you’d rather not experience today, that doesn’t mean that you never want to experience again, and it doesn’t mean that you’d accept all the pain (physical/mental, to yourself and others) involved in sucide. Fast-forward time is any day less than 0/neutral; su*cidal is when you’re below -10.

And while I’m personally less than 0, I’m nowhere near -10, and I do have all the support networks where I feel confident I’d get the help I need if I did get that bad.

Bhutan: also all our ethnic Nepalese people are exiled. TED: sorry, we lost interest ↩︎
of course I’m steering clear professionally, I hate doing this kind of work. but I do want my life to be better. ↩︎
I’m also a little bit interested in finer-grained questions: “does taking ashwagandha make my life better?” but I think the answer to these are either a definite yes, or too hard to tell ↩︎
Not claiming I have had very hard struggles. But I’ve had struggles that were bad enough that they’re scars, not pleasant memories. ↩︎

We're at about a month

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 18:20:18 -0500

I still don’t have much that’s worth saying publicly. If you ever want to complain to me about your newborn, I’m all ears. I sort of wish I had known that newborn days are the dark time.

(I know, I know, we have everything on the easiest difficulty level; I never claimed that I was going to be good at this.)

(it’s weird that I don’t feel so bad posting this? someday he’ll grow older and maybe read this and then we’ll laugh and say “oh, babies are difficult, y’know”. I know this because I did this with my parents.)

"I Just Want to Feel Everything"

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:16:20 -0500

- Fiona Apple, “Every single night.” This lyric kept rattling around in my head, because it feels right (feeling more is healthy!) but most emotions are bad.

Most emotions are bad

I remember hearing that we basically only have happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. (Not sure if this is true; I think it came from Paul Ekman? Who is somehow amazing at getting into airport nonfiction books and google results, so I don’t trust him so much. Still, googling “emotion wheels” gives a variety of takes on “basic emotions” that are usually about 2/3 negative.)

Aside:

I know, I know, who’s to say what’s good or bad. But I’m going to say that if you could only experience sadness, anger, fear, and disgust for the rest of your life, you probably wouldn’t consider that a life worth living. (And surprise wouldn’t really help much.)

“Feeling more” is good

I have no proof for this; I am just hand waving. But when’s the last time any kind of healing involved “feeling less”? Closing your heart is generally a bad thing, right?

How to square these, a few ideas

“feeling more” is only good for people like me: people on the “autism” end of the autism-schizophrenia spectrum. If you’re dealing with schizophrenia, then absolutely please do turn down your emotions’ volume!
the number of “negative” emotions is bigger than the number of “positive” emotions, but we spend more time in the “positive” ones. So having your emotions be louder is still a net win.
there’s a built-in negative quality to life without emotions. Something like: “boredom” and “ennui” might not be on your wheel, but they’ll still swoop in and fill the space if you don’t have other emotions. So, might as well take the random wheel-spin of emotions; better than guaranteed ennui.
Paul Ekman is a huckster and a ted-talker and your emotion wheels should have more than 1/6 positive ones

Another timely post

I just happened on this guy’s experience with not feeling that seems related here. Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’m not actually arguing that I should turn down the volume on my feelings (if that were even possible); I’m just curious why I don’t believe that I should!

We Had a Baby

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:15:51 -0500

I don’t have a lot of feelings that are fit for public posting.

Our life involves a lot of feeding said baby, teaching him how to relax, carrying squares of fabric of different sizes, and moving things up and down stairs. It’s not terribly fun yet.

One thing that would make for an interesting blog post for someone besides me to write: babies have to learn all kinds of ways to relax! They don’t take deep, slow breaths. They don’t really relax their muscles - their arms and legs are almost always tensed like a rotisserie chicken. They don’t really like not sucking on something. Sleep is tough - sometimes they cry because they’re overtired, which makes them more tired, etc. In summary, the state of nature is yet again pretty stressful.

Waiting is hard and awkward

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 23:35:38 -0500

I don’t have much even to say about it. We’re waiting. I can’t do much. I can’t even think much; some of that is because I can’t plan (and therefore do) anything that requires more than like a day’s advance notice, but some is because there’s something thought-derailing about knowing that everything’s going to change in a week or less. Kind of too bad. Feels like I’m wasting a valuable chunk of free time.

What's on My Mind

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:17:45 -0500

… and how it’ll be changing soon.

I’m getting energized again. I’m engaging with life. This is nice. I credit a huge portion of this to this retreat that I went on a couple weeks ago.
Not having my dad still hurts; it’s more at a distance now. (I’m actually a little ashamed that I’m not more connected with the feeling. “shoulds”!)
I’m getting some positive feedback loops going. Not to get too into it, but: physical body, music, learning, exploring, socializing.
The Cicadas are still a challenge. It’s kind of exciting to see it now! It’s still a storm while I’m in it, but now it’s one coherent storm, My Current Challenge, instead of just “life feels too hard sometimes.”
I’m still kind of terrified of what’s to come soon. Terrified! I don’t know how my life won’t just turn into a terrible grind starting very soon. (I’m a little ashamed that I’m not more connected with the love around it.)

Being Known as Smart

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:01:29 -0500

This is just one of these posts that every “gifted” kid has to write, isn’t it.

It is remarkable how much of my childhood identity was being “smart.” I was just reminded of this when I met a ton of my dad’s old friends and relatives who, even now, frequently remarked on how smart I used to be.

Some feelings:

“Don’t make me one dimensional.” If I was a kid who was really good at basketball (but I’m not in the NBA now, say) I’d kind of like for people to know me as more than “basketball kid.” (At the same time, I recognize people don’t have that much mental storage space to devote to each kid they meet. So, ok.)
“Smart” is weirder than “good at basketball” because people think it’s virtuous. If you get bad grades, adults tell you “get good grades!” If you’re bad at basketball, adults don’t tell you “get good at basketball!”
So, when you’re fighting against being seen as one-dimensional Smart Kid, you’re also fighting against beeing seen as a Good Kid, Better than others. (while also loving it, of course - yeah, tell me how great I am! but still, you have a sense of how rotten this is.)
I don’t even think I’m that smart? Some of that is, I have surrounded myself with other Smart people, so ways that I was Special in 1st grade are now just normal. And some of that is, I feel kind of like an underachiever, like a Basketball Kid who didn’t make the NBA. So people pointing out how good I was at basketball keeps reminding me how I could have been LeBron.
Wait, if I don’t have one dimension that “defines” me, then… what am I? I’m not Smart, I’m just… me? This was a struggle even as a kid - but now it’s “huh, at 36 I should have some mastery of something”; the fact that I don’t makes me feel like I’m underachieving more.

Eh. I’m mostly over it. It was just a shock a couple months ago.

House Money

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:39:50 -0500

We bought a house and did lots of renovations. It all cost a lot of money and now I feel bad. This post is an attempt to figure out why.

the house

It’s an old house in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh, PA. It has 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. It has a small back yard that is semi-comically all concrete, and a 1.5 car garage.

Since moving in, we did the following:

all new paint and 90% new floors
redo one bathroom
turn a closet into a third bathroom, incl moving some walls
add air conditioning (incl ducts)
rewire the whole house
insulate the whole house
replace two windows and a bunch of interior doors
add a washer/dryer on the 2nd floor
replace a gas range with an induction one
reinforcing one joist
lots of smaller stuff that came up along the way

the costs

The house cost us $189k plus fees etc. The renovations also cost about that much. Total investment somewhere around $400k.

That is in some senses a lot: the most I’ve ever paid for anything, and making that much reflects multiple years of work. In some sense, it’s not that much: in the Bay it’d be, what, $2m; even in fancy parts of Pittsburgh probably $700-800k.

the feelings

I don’t want to get taken advantage of! Well, that’s ok, I’m not.
- The purchase price seems fair. It was 2018, so we’re not even paying for the post-covid bubble.
- Our contractor is fair. Our budget ballooned from $100k to $158k for the most recent chunk of work, but that’s mostly our own choices to add stuff as we went.
I don’t want to make stupid decisions that are the same stupid decisions most Americans make. Again, don’t think we are:
- Buying a big house in the suburbs, leading to sedentariness and isolation: nope, this is in a very bikeable/pretty walkable area, and at 1800 sq ft is not huge
- Buying a house we can’t afford: nope
I don’t want to make stupid decisions because of my own hang-ups.
- Maybe! Maybe instead of spending $800k for a Nice House, we spent $400k for a Kinda Nice House which will continue to bother us with e.g. a kitchen that is very cold.
- The thing about houses, it’s not really money spent as much as money set aside for a while, so if you can afford an $800k house, one could argue that it’s kind of foolish to only buy a $400k house. (kind of.)
Money leaving bank account feels bad.
- I have learned this is almost always true. Spending $4k on rent, or $40k on a car, or $400k on a house, they all feel god-awful.
- I don’t like gambling, because the losses loom so much larger than gains. Win $100? eh, cool. Lose $100? I’m a god damn moron, what the hell am I doing, why did I just set hard-earned money on fire. So my experience of gambling is an experience of losses. It’s a lurch in my stomach, a feeling of “oh god I’ve f’ed up.”
- Spending money is always kind of gambling: I had $1000, now I spent $1000 on something that hopefully gives me at least 1000 utils.
- Ergo, spending money feels like losing money.
- I should trust this lurching feeling less.

The Cicadas

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 12:35:05 -0500

I keep having this experience in altered states. (Fully legal altered states, like breathwork, of course.) Here are a few ways I’d describe the experience:

too many half formed thoughts, such that I can’t even follow one to know what the thought is
imagine you’re talking with someone but they keep interrupting you insanely quickly, multiple times per word, with a short interjection. That, but in my mind.
is this a result of anxiety?
half formed critical thoughts that have the flavor of “I’m doing something wrong”
the attention shredder
buzzing cicadas in my mind

It’s distressing because:

it’s disabling. I can’t do any other work or experience any other experience, because this mental noise is so loud.
I feel alone in this, like nobody else knows what I mean or has this experience.
it feels related to experiences in my regular life where I just can’t think of what to do, so maybe I refresh my phone or something, in a twitchy addictive way. Feels like my brain is just broken; like I’ve accidentally trained it to be so reactive that it keeps reacting to itself faster than I can even keep up.
I’ve tried to do all the “normal things to do in distressing situations.” For example, calmly breathing through it, asking it what it wants, directing love and openness to it, surrendering to it, realizing it’s impermanent, leaving the room for a minute; they don’t seem to help.

There remains some hope, though:

singing, especially low resonant songs, seems to help.
getting absorbed in a song someone else is singing, especially a low resonant song, sometimes helps.
lying on a heated bed seems to help.
dancing or shaking sometimes helps. Sometimes I can still tune in to my body and see what it wants and do that.

One of my friends helped talk me through this, mostly realizing the “hope remains” section. I’m grateful for that. I’m still curious that it doesn’t seem a common thing outside of me, because it’s so common to me. Reader, let me know if this happens to you!

Some things I miss about San Francisco

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 21:50:04 -0500

Ok obviously my friends there are #1. But besides that:

Having really easy access to a path up Twin Peaks for an everyday-ish 1hr bike ride
Or MacLaren Park for a little variety. But it’s hard to beat Twin Peaks.
Having such great access to so many long bike rides! I became a Type of Guy who’ll be like “oh yeah I just went out for a ride” and when asked be like “yep it was 80 miles”. And the culture of so many people biking, it just became easy to meet a new friend and then go on a bike ride with them.
The Mission, the most confounding and occasionally awful but mostly vibrant and diverse neighborhood I’ve ever lived in. Granted, sometimes it smells like pee, woe is me gentrification, it was better 10 years ago, your bike might get stolen, the rent is too damn high. But even so, what a place! It has most everything you’d need, it’s Actually Diverse, there’s always music and something artistic going on, every food and drink, and:
Dolores Park, what a gem. Lively anytime, great place to meet anyone, a party on sunny weekends, a nice spot to watch the city even if it’s gray.
MAPP, the Mission Arts and Performance Project, and stumbling into some guy’s workshop where he made the most amazing electronic gadgets that I’ve never seen again
Bad Walgreens (at 23rd and Mission), ok I don’t miss it, but it’s an experience
The theater scene! Going to a wide variety of plays at a dozen different theaters. Look at me being cultured.
Every band on tour will stop by SF or Oakland.
Riding into downtown with the rest of the commuters on Market st. I’m serious. It felt like we were Important and we were Part of Something.
Relatedly: going out for drinks after work; there’s a feeling of aliveness. Again, being Important People. (hah! yes, capitalism is playing us. but it’s fun to play along.)
My coworkers (at Stitch Fix and at internships) being generally really smart scientists
The weather’s always perfect, of course
Orange Sky Day was actually pretty cool, even though the rest of fire season was awful
Rainbow Grocery
Being 30 min from the airport by Bart
Knowing what shops all the good dogs live at
Ice cream, coffee, bread
The tolerant attitude (and now/soon, laws?) towards psychedelics
Being in a place that friends might just happen to visit, and being able to lend them a couch
Marin county: weird, difficult, beautiful. I guess this includes Hawk Hill, which, it’s hard to find a better 2-3hr ride if you tried.

Vices and dissociation

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:40:32 -0500

Why do people have vices? Drugs, gambling, sugar, etc. One reason is that their lives are too painful and this lets them avoid their pain for a little while. It lets them dissociate.

I’ve had this recently! Life has been painful and I’ve found myself saying “how can I dissociate for, say, an hour?” Often it’s Twitter or Slay the Spire. I’m quite aware that what I’m doing is as close to “killing time” as possible.

From the puritanical streak of the Ohio that I grew up in, you’d think I’d feel some shame about this, but I don’t really. This feels right. Dissociation is maybe what I need right now. Yes yes, roshi/lama/rinpoche, in some sense we’re trying to stay as close to the current moment as possible. But we also need to be kind to our current body/mind/ego.

(What’s wrong with vices? Mostly just that you can’t keep them up. The problem with heroin isn’t that it feels good; it’s that it costs so much to buy you that little bit of dissociation.)

If you find yourself searching for dissociation, you might get self-critical and say “nah, I’m going to Avoid Vices and go meditate instead.” Good luck! If that doesn’t work, but you’re still on a self-improvement train, maybe instead just try to improve your vices one step? Switch from booze to weed, switch from crummy video games to really good video games.

Try not to judge people whose vices are worse than yours.

Just Do Less

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 18:32:31 -0500

Do less if your dentist tells you you need lots of fillings or worse

Do less when your baby cries (and give it a french name, that’ll help :-P)

Do less with your baby overall (regardless of which of these philosophies you like)

Do less worrying about your money, about your ecological impact, about playing middle class scripts

Just do less saying “just” (ok sorry, this one is a stretch)

other things

I can’t get over this idea of “masculinity is about what you can do and femininity is about what you can get other people to do”¹. I recognize this all over the place. Is it a corollary that masculinity is more required at small companies and femininity at larger ones?² Is it even worth categorizing things in the world in this way?

ACX’s “Nick Cammarata On Jhana” is… well, it’s two closely related internet miniclusters combining. It’s cool, anyway. It’s a slightly larger venue for ideas that really fascinate me. One thing about jhana that feels appealing is: you’ll know it’s working, and it doesn’t take 40 years to get there. (well, maybe.)

Real Artifacts: these are just cool pictures that look like rendering bugs.

I like this guide to chronic and acute stuckness: it’s a little more nuts-and-bolts than most, as in, it answers “so what do I do now?” Unfortunately, I feel even more stuck than this now - it’s not like “I am stuck doing task X”, it’s like “I can’t even get my mind around to figure out what task I should be doing.” (See also: the headlines in my life now.)

How to do drugs for healing and spiritual growth while your kids are at school³: In addition to practical advice, I like his arguments against “These things can be helpful but only with a Licensed Therapist Guide or Two in FDA-Approved Settings.” If it’s $8000 and 3 days per session, it excludes most people who might need it.

How to cross post with Mastodon given that we may be in the Twitter End Of Days. Course, I’m not even doing this yet :shrug: Weird but exciting time here on the Stupid Bird Site.

is that insulting? I don’t think it is or (ofc) mean it to be; both are equally important! as always, all the disclaimers apply: everyone is some part masculine and some part feminine; they’re both equally important; saying “masculinity is like X” doesn’t mean men do X and women don’t; being more connected to one doesn’t make you less connected to the other ↩︎
notice that I absolutely did not say “hire men at small companies and women at big ones” - again, these are skills/modes that each of us can and should develop ↩︎
The Snail Shell does not condone anyone doing anything illegal, of course ↩︎

House and Kid Thoughts

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 16:16:30 -0400

legibility

Of course, simplicity is good, etc. You might think: “it’s my own house, I can learn the complicated ways it works.” But a house is rarely only yours; it belongs to your family/housemates and guests too. So even simple things like “you have to push the dishwasher door to the left in order to open it” become real problems.

All of this is to say, I bought a label maker and have been labeling everything.

bits of plastic

It’s surprising to me how much stuff in a house is held in by like, a little screw into a little bracket that sort of holds the thing on, screwed into a stud or maybe just a bit of drywall, whatever!

Do wall anchors really work?? yikes

An obvious instance of this is a door-frame pull-up bar. You can put your whole weight on this? And it’s not going to pull down your door frame? well, ok

enjoy your connections

that’s sort of what this post is about. we think we want to be more free but actually what makes us happier is being more connected. being connected feels like being bound, which makes us
(Americans at least) chafe. I suspect it’s a balance thing.

or this, about contact vs networking. When I think about it, “doing favors for people” seems nice. That suggests I’m not overburdened by people asking for favors. I’m also really really bad at saying no, though, so I’m leery of getting close to the “having to say no sometimes” line. Still, the fact that my instinct is “I’d like to do more favors for neighbors/etc” suggests I ought to edge more toward being more connected.

kids: do less

I’m reading this blog by “Teacher Tom” a lot, and as much as I’m worried about just reinforcing my biases, I like his philosophy about kids. Seems like it’s largely “fuss less.” Let them play, geez. Everyone will be happier.

Relatedly: sleep training - man I dunno, teaching them to figure themselves out seems way better for everyone than coddling them for many more months.

Some thoughts about losing my dad

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:56:44 -0400

it’s weird telling everyone. I don’t know how to segue a conversation towards that level of intensity. Especially if it comes up out of nowhere. I want to manage my friends’ reactions; I want to say “ok, bomb coming, please don’t overreact.”
- I understand everyone is different; in my case, it is helpful if you are pretty matter-of-fact, like “ok, that happened.” you don’t even really have to say you’re sorry; I know you are; as we are all sorry about death of really anyone. (it doesn’t bother me if you do say you’re sorry though.)
- I feel conflicted about pointing this out (because it’s ok!), but there’s a script: “I’m so sorry” followed by “if there’s anything I can do”. This is ok! It’s ok if your response follows this script. Still, it’s curious how we universally culturally settled on this.
- ha ha ha wow, any reactions I had in the past were woefully inadequate (sometimes to acquaintances I didn’t know that well so The Script was fine, sometimes I am wishing I said/did much more, more proactively.)
I’ve discovered the limits of my extroversion: 5 hours at a wake greeting everyone who knew my dad, followed by a funeral and lunch the next day. I feel physically ill
hard for me not to mask a lot this week! (see previous point.) I would probably do things differently if I were planning a funeral (but I might be wrong)
Grief World is a weird place. so far it feels like dark matter eating up my capacity. like, an average day you start off at 0 stress, pile on stressors throughout the day as they come up, remove stressors as they go away, and maybe end up at 50 on a good day, 90 on a bad one. Going over 100 means you lose your temper. These days, I’m mysteriously starting at 40. Not because of a stressor, just, I’m a little worse at everything.
- relatedly: my emotions haven’t been “sad” or denial/anger/bargaining/etc, they’ve just been volatile.

Here’s what I’m thinking of, about my dad, and what I said at the funeral and therefore feel comfortable sharing ~publicly:

“Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.” - Reinhold Niebuhr, more or less. My dad was good at “courage to change what must be altered” but even better at “serenity to accept what cannot be helped.”

“Look at me, I am old, but I’m happy” - Cat Stevens, and my dad. How?! (I assume the “old” helps the “happy”, and especially looking back at a life that you feel pretty satisfied with. Still. He had it harder in basically every way than I do.)

There’s much more that I don’t feel like sharing ~publicly. He was a wonderful man and dad.

The 20 Year Grand Prix

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:06:31 -0400

What is a Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix

Let me paint a picture: about 950 30yo nerdy men and 50 nerdy women, in a big echoing convention center. You arrive before 9am; at some point a bunch of paper sheets go up, telling you where to sit. You go there, meet your opponent, and play a game that’s as complex as chess or poker. Your opponent is probably polite but focused; this is not a time where you can “take back” a mistake. Not infrequently, you or your opponent will raise your hand and call “judge!” to have an arbiter walk over and issue a verdict on a tiny corner of the rules. After a best of 3 match, you’ll report the winner, wait for the end of the hour, and repeat 8 more times. Usually if you go 7-2 or better, you get to come back the next day and do it again! (If not, you can play smaller “side events” for lower stakes.) After about 7pm, you get some time off; eat dinner, see your friends. (Hope you scarfed down some breakfast and lunch in the 10 min you had between rounds. Yes, lunch was probably an awful $17 convention center hamburger.)

The 20 Year Grand Prix

Imagine you signed a contract to play a 20-year-long Grand Prix. Every day you have to do this same thing. Occasionally, if you can find and pay a substitute, you get to take a day off, but not often. There is no prize, but you have to do pretty well; and actually, if you ever are super careless and go 0-9, the most precious person to you in the world dies. Your evenings are your own! But you’ll probably be so sleep deprived, you won’t even care. Hope you like $17 crummy hamburgers.

“It’s Good, Actually”

Now, imagine everyone who was on the Perpetual Grand Prix told you it was incredible:

“You can’t imagine how great it will be.”
“Did you ever open a Pack Rat or an Umezawa’s Jitte? You’ll never know what it’s like”
“It’s impossible to describe how amazing it is to be playing round 9 when you’re both 6-2, and you get an incredible topdeck to swing for lethal”
“You’ll always remember the first time you qualify for Day 2; mine was when I drafted Spider Spawning in Albuquerque”

If It’s Not Obvious, This is a Metaphor for Kids

Hell, Grand Prixs don’t even exist anymore. But anyway, to me right now, raising kids seems harder than the 20 Year Grand Prix. At least I already love playing Magic. (I’m not someone who loves playing with kids, in general.)

But even for me, the 20 Year Grand Prix sounds awful. I’m pretty sure I’d be sick of it by about day 3. And yet, having kids is signing up for days 3-7000, for a thing that’s uncomfortable as hell, and just hoping that everyone who says it’s so great is correct.

I Know, I Know

Look, I know it is so great, somehow. When I have kids and I’m also telling you how great it is, you don’t get to say “I told you so.” And yet, it’s so hard to talk about: everyone is either on my side of the veil and is like “yep, uh, that sounds bad” or they’re Grand Prix veterans telling me “but when you play Jace the Mind Sculptor, it’s like nothing else.” I can’t think of anything else where I so totally don’t understand the other side and nothing they say helps.

post script to my kids reading this someday:

remember! this blog only preserves memories of your dad at various moments in time. now he’s on your side of the veil; he probably loves the heck out of parenting, and thinks this comparison is absurd! it’s pretty interesting how he’s changed, isn’t it?

Some Types of Guy

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 12:32:30 -0700

Here’s a few guys I’ve met inside my brain:

can’t let it go guy

this guy is fine until I’m arguing with someone who’s Wrong¹. At that point, his mind gets completly consumed by it. He’s pretty loud. Even when a bunch of the other guys are arguing against him, he’s really pulling his hardest, and he’s a big strong broad-chested square-jawed guy who’s really good at tug of war.

He might be trying to say: “This is actually important to you and we might not have a solution yet! Don’t compromise just for comfort. Also, you might be out of brain space to make decisions.”

When he arrives: Change the subject, look at it a different way, delay until later (though this is so hard!), listen to what the other person is saying or feeling more

sorry forever guy

This poor guy gets into a loop where he’s sorry, but that now’s not a great time to express that he’s sorry (maybe because he’s already been saying he’s sorry for too long), so now he’s sorry for being sorry, and boy he should really pull himself together, he knows, it’s so much, he’s so sorry

He might be trying to say: “Oh man, I’m stuck; I’m worried my friends and family might abandon me so I better make it clear that I’m not going to be like this often.”

When he arrives: Change the subject, accomplish a small thing, remember that we all receive grace, remember feeling grace, remember sometimes wallowing is just wallowing and it’s not productive and still we all receive grace

car human cannonball

He’s always just sitting in the cannon, ready to launch. When a car does something bad, the safety is taken off the cannon, but he stays in there. If the driver yells back at the biker, though this guy is fired from the cannon. He explodes at the car, yelling profanities at the top of his lungs until the driver drives away.

He might be trying to say: “Feeling oppressed by people in cars is unacceptable². I don’t know what we should do, but I’m not going to settle for it.”

When he arrives: I don’t actually know. It’s nice not to launch him in the first place; I can yell at a car once and then move on. But once a car has decided to go all Car Brain, it’s hard not to go Anti-Car Brain back. My current M.O. is “feel pretty ashamed for a few hours”, which doesn’t feel right.

banged knee guy

When I bang my knee, he comes front and center for a few seconds. He gets a little dazed at first, and then screams loud as hell, trying to rally everyone else (including the mouth and lungs) to scream loud as hell too. If they do, he is encouraged to stick around and keep screaming! But if not, after a couple seconds, he quickly retreats into the background, sometimes sending some endorphins my way to actually make it not so bad.

He might be trying to say: “Remember your self who is in pain! Sometimes you hurt so much!”

When he arrives: Just don’t yell anything for a couple seconds. I don’t really mind his visits anymore.

by Wrong I mean “wrong in my opinion, where I can’t see their viewpoint, and for reasons either practical or emotional we can’t agree to disagree.” ↩︎
oh god this is public on the internet. let me be clear that I’m talking direction of the vector, not magnitude. other oppressions are much worse than cars vs bikes. ↩︎

Anxiety and the Attention Shredder

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 18:11:42 -0700

Had a really interesting experience, so of course, later that week, ACX was about it.

This experience I’ve been calling the “attention shredder.” A bunch of thoughts kept coming up so fast that I couldn’t even direct my attention in any particular direction. I’d think “I’ll do X” and then immediately come up with a dozen reasons not to do X (followed by a dozen counter-reasons to do X after all). This is a rare but sort of familiar experience by now.

Later, I realized that this is anxiety. Anxiety isn’t specific worry about a particular bad thing happening (that’s more like fear), it’s general worry about any bad thing happening. It’s not having one story that you know is happening; it’s having too many stories that all could be the case.

Like in The Prophet and Caesar’s Wife, where the Prophet comes to a bunch of different bishops and rulers and tells them a story about why they’re living life wrong, though some of these stories seem contradictory. Imagine having that prophet in your ear all the time.

And I’ve been noticing since then that the voice is really in my ear all the time. I’ll catch myself multiple times a day with the prophet telling me one or another contradictory story about how the thing I’m doing right now will send me to hell.

Still don’t know what to do about it! But I’m getting better at noticing it, and that seems like the first step.

Cars 2: How Electric, Revisited

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 22:24:16 -0700

I said in my last post that “how electric” seems like a good early question to ask: electric car, plug-in hybrid, hybrid, or regular. The money tends to work out sort of evenly: electric cars cost more but save fuel. This means, the more you drive, the more an electric car will save you. Also, the cheaper energy you get, the more an electric car saves you. You can run these numbers yourself.

But beyond “what costs less”, there’s still some nagging guilt: “dan, the world is burning, you are buying a car, cars are very bad; you at least should get the least world-burning car.” Or, at even lesser least, I should know how much I’m burning the world.

Measuring CO2

There are more environmental harms than CO2. But I’ll start there, because it at least lets us compare.

Burning gas to go N miles produces more CO2 than plugging into a wall and getting electricity to go N miles. (thank goodness, otherwise why would we do this whole electric car thing) However, creating a giant battery produces lots of CO2 too. To compare types of cars, we should consider how much total CO2 we’re creating in construction + driving.

Battery production CO2 cost

One report in 2017 said 150-200 kg CO2 equivalent per kWh of battery. Another report said 30-200 kg¹. The same energy that made the first report made another one saying that it used to be 150-200 but now it’s 61-106 (or maybe 146). Based on all this, I’m going with 100 kg CO2 per kWh.

Batteries last maybe 100k miles (meh source 1, meh source 2, but that’s how long warranties are at least). Maybe 150k?

lol, entire car production CO2 cost

We can ignore that last section, because I just found a report telling us how much CO2 it takes to build a car: 5600 kg for a gas car, 6500 for a hybrid, 6700 for a plug-in, 8800 for an electric. That feels order-of-magnitude plausible based on the last section:

adding a 2-kWh hybrid battery to a gas car would add 200 kg CO2, plus I guess a few hundred more because it’s more complicated
upgrading to a 9-kWh plug-in battery would add 700 kg CO2, but maybe this one being low cancels out the last one being high
upgrading to an 80-kWh Tesla battery would add 7100 kg CO2. But you don’t have to make an internal combustion engine. I have no idea how much that reduces it, but 5000 kg doesn’t sound impossible. Still, maybe this underestimates electric car production costs a little.

Gas CO2 cost

9 kg Co2 per gallon

Car mileage

Let’s assume we’re comparing (numbers rounded):

Honda Civic-type car (30 MPG = 33 gal per 1000 mi)
Toyota Prius-type hybrid (50 MPG = 20 gal/kmi)
Prius Prime type plug-in hybrid (125 MPGe when using electric, 50 MPG when using gas = 8 gal/kmi)²
Chevy Bolt-type electric car (125 MPGe = 8 gal/kmi)

so

Gas or Hybrid

Let’s start with a regular gas car vs a hybrid: 6500 - 5600 = 900 kg CO2 = 100 gal gas equivalent for construction. So once the Prius has saved you 100 gal, you’re ahead. Every 1000 mi, the Prius saves you 13 gallons, so after 100/13*1000 = 7692 mi, you’ve broken even. so if you’re going to drive at least 8,000mi, buy a Prius instead of a Civic.

Hybrid or Plug-in (PHEV)

Now it’s not just about miles, but electric miles. If you’re running on gas, then the Prius and the Prius Prime are the same. So the Prime (which takes 200 kg CO2 = 22 gal gas more than the Prius) is worth it once you’ve saved 22 gal gas by driving close to home. (the battery only lasts about 25 mi, so think of electric miles as “around town” miles, not “road trip”.)

Driving 1000 mi saves you 12 gal gas in a PHEV. 22/12 * 1000 = 1833. So if you’d drive at least 2,000 miles within EV range, go for the plug-in.

Plug-in or Electric (EV)

In constructing a fully-electric car, you need to use 2100kg more CO2 = 233 gal more gas. When comparing to a plug-in, the miles you save are the non-electric miles, as electric miles are the same on each.

Then, similarly, driving 1000 road-trip miles (where the PHEV would be using gas) saves 12 gal gas in an EV. To save 233 gal gas, you’d have to drive 19416 miles. So if you’d drive at least 20,000 miles outside PHEV electric range, go fully-electric. It’s a little surprising that the only miles for this decision are road-trip miles, but it makes sense: if you’re just in the city and so always within the 25mi range, it doesn’t matter if your battery has a capacity of 8 kWh or 80.

Hybrid or EV

Driving 1000 mi saves you 12 gal here again too, so now it’s just: if you’d drive at least 20,000 miles, and your only choices are a hybrid or an EV, get an EV. But depending on your driving patterns, consider a PHEV too.

for me

These numbers may seem pretty low, but I’m hoping not to drive much. I’m picturing 1000 city miles and 2000 highway miles per year, and I want to have the car for at least 10 years.

That would suggest a fully electric, but (say it with me) range anxiety, as I explained last time. Probably if we went on a long multi-charge-distance road trip, we’d rent a car, which means ignore this whole thing.

The plug-in kind of makes sense though! They’re hard to find right now, but 2000 is not a lot of city miles, even if you drive rarely, so it’d end up being worth it.

And (sadly) we’ll definitely drive more than 8000 miles, so non-hybrids are right out.

in chart form

all numbers in thousands of kg

car	production co2	10k city + 20k road-trip miles co2	total over 30k	50k city + 50k road-trip miles co2	total over 100k
honda civic	5.6	8.9	14.5	30.0	35.6
toyota prius	6.5	5.4	11.9	18.0	24.5
toyota prius prime PHEV	6.7	4.3	11.0	12.6	19.3
chevy bolt EV	8.8	2.1	10.9	7.2	16.0

in conclusion

Outside of my own decision making, this makes me think a few things about electric cars more broadly. First, there is definitely a difference in co2 impact of production, but it is outweighed by the gas you’d spend even if you’re a pretty light driver.

Second: yes, electric cars are good, plug-in hybrids are good, regular hybrids are good. But they’re not that good.

By going electric, you can cut your carbon use in half. (Maybe not even that, if the “car total footprint” report was an underestimate; maybe more than that, if you have access to super clean energy) So it’s worth picking an electric car, if you’re going to have a car! But the real way to use less carbon is to just stop driving.

2400-16000 kg for a 80 kWh Tesla battery ↩︎
I’m using MPGe here to try to account for the CO2 of the electricity you use to charge. This can vary a lot too - if you have 100% free solar, then you have basically infinite MPGe; if you’re getting coal energy, it goes down a lot. ↩︎

Cars Research Part 1

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 21:46:02 -0700

I hate cars. But we’re planning to get one. We want to:

visit family (300-1000 mi each time, maybe 3x/yr?)
get out of the city (100mi round trip? a couple times a year?)
go on vacation (uhh say 500-1000mi? 1x/yr?)
I guess drive around the city but hopefully not much (20 mi/wk = 1000 mi/yr; maybe 40 mi/wk = 2000 mi/yr)

how electric

I spent a lot of time thinking about this. It feels like the main question when you’re car-buying in 2022, especially after incidentally reading people like Tim Bray.

Fully electric cars are cool, of course. But, range anxiety. Regular trips to see family would be difficult; notably my sister who lives in Charlotte ¹ and sister-in-law in New York ².
Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) are the next best. (imagine a Prius, but you plug it in overnight, then your first 25 miles are all-electric.) But! They would make our city driving basically all electric, and have almost no impact on our road trip driving, so the overall amount of gas saved is small ³.
Hybrids are fine, sure.
Non-hybrids don’t make any sense; why would you get one of those?

side note: gpm, not mpg

Miles per gallon is nonlinear and therefore deceptive. If you drive 1000 miles, trading a 10mpg car for a 20mpg one will save you 50 gallons, but going from 40 to 50mpg will only save you 5 gallons. Plus, nobody says “I’m gonna buy 3 gallons and see how far I get”; we pick where we want to go and then buy enough gas for the trip. So, we should instead report gallons per 1000 miles. Europe does this! Argh.

size/shape

4-seater but not too big. Hatchback/wagon shape is nice: as long as you’re taking up a given footprint on the ground, might as well make the most of it. I want to park easily in cities. But, it has to fit a family of (ideally, eventually) 4 plus our stuff.

reliability

is so important, geez I don’t want to think about this damn hunk of metal any more than I have to

awd?

It’s not safer, it just helps you get up snowy hills. Tires are more important. AWD is not necessary on-road in the continental US. It costs you a few mpg. I don’t know; it’s nice out west if you go skiing. And I have been spinning out on a hill before in Pittsburgh. But I think the thing to do is just not drive (and/or have snow tires) when it’s snowy, anyway.

of course I made a spreadsheet

here it is

given all that

Why would I not just buy a Prius? They seem to have reliability down pat, they’re the same price as all the comparables (Hyundai Ioniq, Kia Niro, Honda Insight), they have more the nice hatchback amount of storage space, everyone likes them.

Or a Prius Prime. The main tradeoff seems to be plug-in electric mileage vs. 7 cubic feet of trunk space.⁴

Here’s the call for help: tell me if I’m wrong. And/or, tell me how do I go from here to having a car. I am not looking forward to dealing with car dealers.

From Pittsburgh to Charlotte goes right over WV. It’s almost possible, sort of, but once you filter out the L1-2 stations (you need L3 for a lunch-break-charge), there’s a big gap over WV. And even if WV had some stations, and if we had a car with a 200-mi range, that’s 2 charging stops. (you can charge to about 80% in 1/2 hr; so 200 + 160 + 160 = the 450-mi trip.) ↩︎
That’s maybe a one-charge trip; you can probably make it to Harrisburg, with a half dozen L3s. Then I assume we’d park in NJ somewhere (?) and take the train in to NY, which makes the trip ~360 mi. Stretching it, but feasible. ↩︎
Ignoring road trip mileage (as it would be mostly not-electric anyway), we’re looking at 1000-2000 city miles per year. At that rate, assuming a Prius has gas mileage of 50 mi/gal when using gas, we’d save about 20-40 gal/yr of gas. That’s $100-200 (minus the cost of electricity) and the plug-ins cost ~$2000 more; we would probably not be driving enough for the PHEV to make economic sense. Does it make environmental sense? Man, I don’t know, how do you weigh a bigger battery vs. less gas? That sounds complicated. ↩︎
for comparison, a regular sedan like a Camry has 15 cu.ft.; the Prius Prime has 19, the regular Prius a whopping 27 ↩︎

Saying Grace

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 18:29:49 -0700

(epistemic status: trying it out. reserve the right to change my mind. but recent experiences have given this idea a foothold in my brain, and I want to help it grow.)

“Grace.” There we go.

I envy the Christians! The idea of grace, that “you’re already good enough”, that “you’re inherently worthy to be here”, totally rules. It’s not perfect, mostly because they pile on a couple of stories about it:

You’re born with original sin because you’re descended from Adam and Eve who sinned first
But Jesus was able to magically take on all the world’s sins and wipe us clean

I assume these stories are either a historical accident, or they actually help some people believe, but they drove me away. Neither of those stories make any sense. (They also pile on some carrots and sticks, heavens and hells, but those are dumb.)

But! I think I threw out the bathwater of salvation with the baby Jesus. The argument I’d make for grace is this:

It’s no worse than any other razor
Grace -> good works, not vice versa
It’s the only sane way to live

In my previous post, I started the post about 16 months ago. If I started it today, I think I’d leave off the first line: “having kids is a claim that your net effect on the world is positive (so theirs probably will be too).”

It doesn’t matter what your net effect on the world is. Or rather, your net effect is immeasurable; you’re a color, not a number. So you can look at all the colors and say: which of these are Good? And some rules of thumb might be “they’re all Good” or “none of them are Good” or “the bluish ones are Good” and those are all equally nonsense. You might as well say “they’re all good.”

Ok, it’s not quite that simple. We maintain some kind of ethical ladder: maybe it’s better to be a more bluish color. There are serial killers out there, and they’re worse than Mr. Rogers. But the serial killers, look at all the trauma they started with. Or, look at really solid, wonderful people, and how they describe their motivations. They started from a secure place of being Saved. It makes it easy to do good.

In fact, I’d take it farther: feeling that you’re Saved makes it possible to do good. It makes it possible to live in this world without being a constantly insecure wreck. Something about Secure Attachment here? It might be the only sane way to live.

“I’m valuable, I’m important, I matter. I’m worthy of taking up the space that I do.” I think I’m beginning to alieve that, instead of just believing it.