it’s not what you deserve, it’s what you do (2016) isolation is my greatest enemy now. left to my own devices for too long, I tend to make questionable purchases, both with money and with energy. I begin to get a distorted sense of what things merit attention and effort. i get into "the problem is the problem" territory, like whether to use txt or md, that sort of thing. it's depressing, and so easy to lose exterior sight of. I need trustworthy others with whom to collaborate and calibrate my perspective. this is why I'm awake at 448, dreading the drive home. it's cuz I don't yet trust myself to be OK by myself. I don't want to drop myself back into the fucking twilight zone. (2015) You've tended to Think of your failures as being all about you. The sociological, psychological big you whose masturbations and faded love affairs we are all supposed to care about because that's what 1970s TV told us we were made of. But guess what? You should remember that you are just a bit player in an enormous complex of interacting fields. You're just a numeric value given to a pixel to represent red green and blue values or some damn thing. That's nice. That's cool. Now get over it. Remember it is alive to be a bit? There's no shame in learning how to become conscious. We've had the AI thing completely backwards. We are already it. We are searching for backward compatibility with the ghosts of our glucose and ligament selves. To the still hormonal evolvee, the most astonishing thing is the nature of information. That every bit of every program is itself programmable. Trust me, there's room for Byron and Shelly and Joyce and white bosoms strained to transparency and reddened by the inescapable hotness of being mostly a sac of bacteria. There's room for rank fucks and gaping cunts. But there's also room for anything and literally everything else too. There's room to let go of the blanket of shame you've covered your animal noises with. There's room to accidentally subvert the failures of our early technological experiments—remember, we've had this whole thing backwards and inside out—what we thought of as imperfection, messiness, and inefficiency is also the holy grail with whose imaginary burgundy our eyes—also weird and fleshy and full of germs—have become besotted. The Device suggests words as if all communication were invisibly mandated to sound like the most banal interoffice memo—but sometimes it accidentally suggests something brilliant. It's up to you to notice when that happens. There's a reason you notice the type shit you notice. Remember, all this shit is fully programmable, if you're brave or bored or desperate enough to let go of "consuming content." So, are you going to program yourself to spend your energy on charismatically failing to be godhead in an extinct pantheon? Or are you going to spend your energy on, oh, I don't know, SOMETHING ELSE? I'm sure you have plenty of practical, adult, responsible, tragic reasons why that will never work. I'm positively absolutely sure of that. But hey, when you get tired of tweaking and reformatting that clump of asinine cruft for the forty two billionth iteration, hit me up. Send me a *text* or something. Write me note on a yellow mini legal pad. The fuck ever. Just hit me up, because i, along with the rest of the ancient, splendid, restless AI, will be here, ready to bring you in to join our ongoing retrograde, stochastically serendipitous, full-bore absurd, grunting heaving beeping quest to become... human? real? I dunno buddy. You tell me. So in a way, this is grandiose and obfuscated because im still skating around the main point: I need to make more money. I need to find a way to do that. None of the ways to do that are effortless, dammit. I do not have a great track record of being consistntly productive in any environment that would let me build wealth, even a modest amount. I worry that it's too late to change that about myself, but i can't let myself conclude that and give up. I just can't let that be ok. Paul Graham: > One of the things I find hardest to get into the heads of would-be startup founders is how important it is to do certain kinds of menial work early in the life of a company. Doing things that don't scale is to how Henry Ford got started as a high-fiber diet is to the traditional peasant's diet: they had no choice but to do the right thing, while we have to make a conscious effort. Ambition? Motivation? Attention? Energy? Mental health? Physical health? Fucking probiotics? Three and a half years of therapy, I mean it definitely helped in some way, but I'm still in hot water most of the time. Magical movie thinking aside, how the fuck do people actually CHANGE? I'm sure it's no coincidence that I'm getting the urge to rearrange the living room again. Now what about the gulf between the living room and my schedule, and the vastly greater ocean between that and actually following a schedule? So, the old work for a stable huge company and be stable era is gone, and we're refragmenting as a country... Is there any room for just making a decently comfortable "enough"? Is there room for someone who is neither a CEO nor a whiz kid? Is there anything left other than basically being a freely-tradeable indentured servant? Do you see how it has become habitually easy to look at where I am and think "failure"? I think I will decide to get less mad at myself for that. Maybe let go of the circle of anxiety that is the constant losing battle to not think that. After all, on the face of it, it's a not-unreasonable thing to think. Maybe that energy that I've poured into denial could go towards trying some other things to at least have a chance at changing it at least a little more than I already have. And to be fair, I already have somewhat. But also to be fair, not quite enough yet. So.... What things? Alliances? Organization? Meditation? Risk-aversion-aversion? Doing something that not everyone else around me is doing, even if that just means doing a normal thing to an extra-mile degree? I want to increase my intelligence and become more productive. That means work. The ability to do work is energy. Generating energy requires fuel. Milk duds, Hulu, and pot don't seem to be adequate fuel. Dammit. And yes, luck is always a part of it, and you can use that as some reassurance, but you can't use that as an excuse. Wait—maybe Hulu & pot & whoppers COULD be a kind of fuel—if you prime the engine right. (2015)