Periodic reminder that my dream job is to be the in-house spiritual advisor, conflict mediator, mindset maintainer and nervous system regulator for a startup in exchange for equity. I'm dead serious, this is what I'm built for, if you know a founder who needs this connect us

Getting old is mandatory, but staying vital is a choice

The subtle but profound difference between “I apologize” vs “please forgive me” • the first is an offering • the second is a request/demand, that dictates what they should do with your offering Obviously we hope to be forgiven when mending and repairing, but…that’s up to them

Not enough talk about how yearners are often wired differently from havers and if you identify too much with the yearning it can preclude you from the actual obtaining and keeping

Kinda weird that "no filter" became a badge of honor for amateur phone photographers while real photographers are notorious for using both on-camera filters as well as adjusting their photos to a crazy extent in either apps or actual darkrooms

Perhaps this will be helpful for some of you

I haven't written long-form writing since the time I reviewed an album by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club for pitchfork.com when I was 19. Writing a full-length essay after a decade of mostly just tweeting is...really something

To give us an opportunity to learn to work with it as a vital energy that animates us but doesn't consume us

Nathan Fielder is a GREAT example of someone who has broken free from relational automaticity, very inspiring to watch. He doesn't take bait that's thrown at him, and he doesn't even flinch. Someone tells him to do something, he calmly responds "why?" In stress, he stays curious

Have you ever felt like you were working on a project that could actually change the world or at the least the lives of countless people? I feel that way about the essay I’m writing right now

THE ELEVEN WAYS THE EGO DEFENDS ITSELF, PROTECTING ITS OWN SECURITY BUT BLOCKING AWARENESS (ACCORDING TO A.H. ALMAAS) 1) Denial: Refusing to acknowledge reality or certain aspects of experience that are uncomfortable or threatening 2) Repression: Pushing painful or unacceptable thoughts and feelings out of conscious awareness 3) Suppression: Consciously avoiding or delaying dealing with distressing feelings or thoughts 4) Projection: Attributing one's own unwanted or disowned emotions, desires, or traits onto others 5) Introjection: Internalizing the beliefs, standards, or characteristics of others, often to avoid feelings of inadequacy 6) Idealization: Overvaluing a person, thing, or situation to avoid facing its flaws or complexities, as a way to cope with insecurity 7) Devaluation: Minimizing the importance or value of something to protect oneself from disappointment or threat 8) Rationalization: Creating logical or socially acceptable explanations for behavior or feelings that are actually motivated by deeper emotional conflicts 9) Reaction Formation: Behaving in a way that is opposite to one's true feelings, often to avoid uncomfortable emotions or desires 10) Displacement: Redirecting feelings or impulses from a threatening object or person to a safer or less threatening one 11) Sublimation: Channeling unacceptable or uncomfortable impulses into socially acceptable or constructive activities

Classic sign of ego rigidity: inability to suspect your own certainties. When someone’s so certain of something they won’t even hold it lightly to pose a question, and the mere premise of even questioning it triggers them, you know that’s a tightly guarded ego defending something

Watched You Can See Everything tonight, absolutely phenomenal movie, but also, I take back what I previously said about Elizabeth Holmes—granted I'm not a diagnostician (but hey, we're all playing the diagnostician right now because we love making sense of humans and their behavior)—my amateur psychological assessment of her is that along with her clear intellectual capacity is a vacancy where her sense of self disappears relationally, like a degree of self-abandonment and fawn response most of us can't even fathom, which then leaves her susceptible to exploitation by dark-triad men

Realizing I have post-rat moots and (for lack of a better term) raw-egg-slonking moots and despite proximity there’s still a never-crossed gap for many

Two relational things men do with women that seem similar but are actually opposite, come from opposite internal places, and have opposite effects on her and the relational space: • Attunement — tracking her, her pace, her comfort, what she’s ready for, where she actually is right now. The reference point is her state. • Monitoring — tracking his image in her mind. how am I coming across? am I being too much, is she losing interest, did that land, am I in jeopardy here. The reference point is my standing in her eyes. Both produce calibration; both produce “adjusting based on her”; both involve intense attention to a woman. They seem similar, which is why monitoring can be hard to catch in yourself, and why a man can spend years believing he’s being attuned when he’s actually surveilling. But here's the key: they’re opposite in effect, because of where the attention terminates. Attunement terminates in her: she’s slowing down, something just closed, the energy shifted, etc. Monitoring terminates in HIM: she’s slowing down, what did I do? am I losing this? Do I need to backtrack? etc. The first is ongoing perception. The second is perception conscripted into a threat assessment. And she'll pick up on threat assessment, because a) women are highly attuned themselves, they feel that shit, and b) because it puts her in the position of having to manage his standing while also having her own experience, and that's a task she neither wants nor will feel excited by.

Who are your favorite musicians of all time? Mine is a toss-up between Wayne Shorter and Pandit Shivkumar Sharma

I’m allergic to pretending like humans don’t need and aren’t super important to each other