I don't know how to be disappointed and critical of the war without being against our power.

I believe that every civilization makes mistakes. Even the school girl bombing. A big deal and awful, and everyone makes errors in war. While I don’t deny its horror, there's something about the way I’ve seen people write about it on social media that feels anti-American to me.

There’s a vibe in news about Iran that American power itself is the problem. Or the West's power itself. That feels self-hating, and I'm not into that.

Some posts respect the Islamic Republic of Iran more than the US. Some people speaking seem to come from inside the US, but there are also many other people from outside who want to see the US decline. We just pass along what’s viral.

It’s weird to talk about our domestic issues with this global audience. On the one hand, people are reacting to something in the news and processing it. And on the other hand, we’re vying for international political power with our memes. I yearn for a filter to be able to see social media posts by country, just to get insight into how it shifts what we see.

In the US, Trump is having a destructive impact on our global reputation, and I hate it. The war seems like he made a miscalculation, and I feel dismay. But, I want my country to be successful generally.

I love my country because I love myself. It’s mine. I do not hate my house, my husband, or my children. I love what is mine, and I care for what is mine.

Then you start to travel with physics. You’ve been led to shift your weight and you shift it.

You allow yourself to move through it, until you land in the new weight shift. Now you’re available to move again.

Don’t rush the landing. A queen doesn’t rush her foot landing down at every step.

Allowing the body to be heavy, gooey, as slow as true physics lets my partner locate me in space. This is how he feels me.

When he guides me in a new direction, there are natural moments of lag; an authentic moment of tension as my muscles begin to contract.

The muscles rev up. The feeling of pull without movement, but just potential energy building for a gooey moment. That’s where the connection lies. This is a delicious moment.

My friend Dara, who had been visiting for a week from out of town, came with me to the partner dance on Saturday night.

When we arrived back home, we stood in the kitchen; the lights dim. I walked to get a glass of water, but I was acutely aware that she was standing in the kitchen with me. I caught myself rushing my steps in front of her, like I was apologizing for it taking so long. It felt like a familiar habit.

I reminded myself that it takes as long as it takes to get a glass of water. Can I allow myself the luxury of landing on every step?

The weight of my foot fell on dark grey tile. I let it sink down before I took the next one. I allowed my back to turn away fully from my friend, as I reached for my glass.

Instead of gripping, to not let the connection go away, I could trust the space.

A few minutes later, I realized I needed something from upstairs, and I didn’t run to get it. I felt almost naughty as I luxuriated in my steps up my stairs, into my room, and back down.

I wasn’t straining the connection. I was with my friend, a person who believes in letting our bodies land. This is what I want sharing space to be like.

She said that I shouldn’t be drinking carbonated beverages to begin with because of microplastics in canned drinks. There’s a plastic liner inside the aluminum cans.

When I pushed back, saying that wasn’t what I was asking about, then she doubled down. They were harmful to me, and if I drank them when I was pregnant, to my unborn child.

I think what was actually happening was that some doctors don’t like it if you question their authority, and she wanted to reestablish it by introducing some shame.

I took in that shame deeply. I remembered that I drank tons of bubbly waters while I was pregnant. I loved it.

I set up a time to talk to my primary physician and asked his opinion on what this new doctor said. I told him I was upset because I thought she was potentially trying to shame me.

He said that he thought it was good advice. He doesn’t store anything in his fridge in plastic. In fact, even vegetables, he takes out of the bags and puts them into glass containers.

Whoa, holy shit.

I realized that I had been feeding my daughter out of plastic bottles since I stopped being able to keep up her weight with breastfeeding. We found something disposable and portable that worked for us. But what if that had been harming her? Maybe my failure to breastfeed was part of what caused her harm.

I upgraded all my bottles to glass for her. The glass bottles would break sometimes, so I got extra bottle holders made of silicone to go around them. It cost hundreds of dollars.

I was now trying to get rid of plastic entirely from what I fed her. But it was so hard to know where foods came from. Maybe the tomato sauce I bought in glass from Whole Foods was originally stored in a can that had a plastic liner, which all cans do.

Anytime I went to a friend’s house for dinner, they would serve me a dish that contained food that was soaked in plastic for maybe years in a can.

It might not be a surprise to you that I eventually went and got checked out for OCD. My therapist and I did a questionnaire together, and I scored high.

I was seeking purity for my daughter in what I let her consume. When we started treatment, I was surprised to learn that a motivator of my quest for purity was avoiding a critical voice in my own head.

The voice hated anything that was innovative or weird. Stepping out of line, being a tall poppy, trying new things. This voice wanted me to be safe by being normal.

It sounded a lot like the voices I read online as a new parent in the pandemic, searching for advice. I researched co-sleeping and read comments from people who only talked about the risks and none of the benefits. Voices that said: How could you?

As part of my treatment, I practiced noticing that the critical voice in my head existed and it was not me.

One of my neighbors when I lived in a rich neighborhood, I’ll call her Debbie, joked harshly that she was going to call CPS on me because I let my toddler run twenty feet ahead of me down to our sidewalk. Ugh.

The voice in my head reminded me of her, so I named it Debbie.

“Hi Debbie. I hear you’re being a real bitch again. Makes sense. That’s what you do.”

I started to notice this shaming voice everywhere online in media around parenting. It’s so common!

As an example, I wanted to know whether or not I could ski during pregnancy so I looked at a forum where someone asked this. A woman replied confidently that she skied in her third trimester. As long as she didn’t do crazy runs, she felt comfortable. The response from someone else on the forum was, “Why risk it? How selfish do you need to be to put your own pleasure having a fun ski time above the health of your own child?”

The classic shaming response: But why risk it?

Clickbait short-form video content contains even worse shaming messages. Because we love children more than anything, it’s a powerful way to create a huge shame response in a parent to suggest that they might have been doing it wrong all along. And the content-creator has the secret.

Fuck that. It’s the darkest form of manipulation.

I started to see it as a hook. Nope, I’m not going to get hooked.

There’s a difference between doing something lightheartedly because it may be good, and obsessively trying to avoid fucking up.

And while I feel some relief seeing recent headlines that the microplastic concerns may have been overblown, I think even dwelling on this would be a trap. Shame and pride are cousins. “See, I was right all along,” is a part of the dance that I don’t want to be doing.

I’m depressed about the eroding of rule of law and due process.

I don’t know what’s legally appropriate to happen in the case of the shooting of Renée Good. I have my own opinions from my own moral compass, watching the footage, and reading analysis. But mostly I don’t want public Facebook comments to decide what happens.

I want a process of law to happen that we can all get behind and feel confident enough in that we don’t burn things down.

Depending on what side you’re on, you have a different political interest in how the story is framed. If you’re someone who supports Trump, you may want to promote a tough-justice view of the world, and paint protesters on the left as unruly and interfering with order. On the other side, you may want to paint Trump as evil, and ICE as evil, and maybe other things as evil: colonialism, law enforcement, or white supremacy.

I don’t expect to change people’s political bias. But, I want us to attempt to appeal to a higher system even if we’re all super biased. Because I think the abandonment of that completely imperfect attempt is even worse.

Instead of arguing about what happened, can we argue about the impartiality of the system? I know a lot of people are doing this, I just want to see more.

The protest is about her killing. But I want to see protests about the FBI not working with local law enforcement in a collaborative effort. Protestors could ring out “more data, more truth!” Or because it seems unprecedented, “Let’s uphold traditional law enforcement investigation practices!”

If you’re on the right, and you believe that local authorities can’t be trusted because they are too politically biased, then you could emphasize the unbiased nature of the FBI investigation. Or claim you will work with local officials only if certain conditions can be met like following certain unbiased practices.

Assuming we all want a fair system of justice, we should be emphasizing that process.

Instead, Kristi Noem calls Renée Good a domestic terrorist, and protestors respond that ICE are the domestic terrorists. This is operating in the wrong frame

I beg you, let’s please pop-up one level.

Internationally, I want similar processes for how we decide what to do. This week, seeing the moves in Venezuela, and discussions about Greenland, I’m longing for Trump to appeal to shared higher principles not just power. (My husband read a draft of this and said, “well, I want Trump to give me a cookie, so what?”)

Even if leaders are biased because certain moves increase their power, if we talk about higher principles there’s at least a foothold for people who care about the truth to have arguments about it. At each step, it gives chances for leaders to choose the principle over a pure power grab.

If there’s a complete abandonment of the appeal to shared principles, and nothing but power as the principle we use to decide things by, I think we are in a much more divided world.

To me, they seemed like symbols of people that had just given up and chosen to live in mediocrity. When my friend had kids and then switched to a used, white Toyota Sienna from his "normal" car, I thought I had truly lost him.

Now I think of minivans as precise tools for taking a job seriously.

You don't depart on a 3-day hiking trip with a Jansport backpack. Go to REI and get one designed for overnight backpacking.

The gear is different. The REI bag has the features you want for the hike because it was made for that purpose.

Lightweight yet enough room for supplies. There are special straps to keep the weight off your back and into your hips.

If you wore a Jansport backpack on a three-day hiking trip, other hikers would consider you brave, but wonder if you knew that there is better gear out there.

And around day-two when you back starts burning, those features you maybe thought were dorky are going to look pretty fucking cool then.

If you think a minivan is dorky, you don’t understand the tools needed for the job of parenting multiple kids.

You are a non-hiker judging someone’s elite Osprey backpack, thinking the hip straps look stupid.

It’s not the right bag for your tiny commute to work, dude, so don’t get it. I’m sure they have a tiny bag store somewhere you could visit.

When I rolled up next to a dad at a festival with my new 4wd Chrysler Pacifica, and I opened my automatic side-doors so my kid could say goodbye to his, he salivated. He looked the door-mechanism up and down, “Nice car.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he got a halfie.

With my automatic sliding doors, I can comfortably move a heavy kid in and out of a car seat with no strain. I buckle the seatbelts with a door so wide that my body has a full range of movement.

The height is perfect. Not so high I need to do a big lift to put a child in there. Not so low I’m bending over with bad ergonomics. Dialed in.

I test-drove a high-end SUV because I thought it was sexy, but the seats were too high to lift my toddler into a car seat without straining my back. I tried opening the side door with one hand while carrying my toddler in the other and balancing a bag on my shoulder, and it felt clumsy to manage.

The right tools make the difference between stressed and grounded parenting. I don’t want to waste my energy on clunky UX.

If I took skiing seriously, I’d get a jacket optimized for my sport.

I got the car that’s optimized for caring for kids. Low status? More like: dialed in.

I would show you my sliding doors and how extra wide they go. How smoothly. But you might not get it. Maybe some day.

I was at a mental health company, and I needed to design the onboarding experience for people who were suicidal. Someone with an operations background saw the onboarding experience as a legal check box. It was simple: once a person was flagged as suicidal, we could show them a block of text with resources because we couldn’t help them.

No. I couldn’t tolerate this. The people who were most vulnerable would not have the worst experience.

I took my third Adderall dose of the day, and sat in my office with a backdrop of San Francisco sky scrapers. I opened Figma, and tried to create something beautiful.

I put myself in the shoes of someone suicidal. I learned what messaging connects with someone in this state. I drew out a design that respected them. Not a legal checkbox. A meaningful connection.

I was proud of it, but I had just spent hours, again, embodying the experience of someone troubled. I spent easily 60 hours a week on this kind of work.

I had a habit of working in a way that either neglected myself or my coworkers for the sake of the mission. Purpose felt more important than people.

My company also felt like a family on some level to me, and I was giving all my energy to this family. But actually, it wasn’t a family. At the end of the day, it was a company.

I wanted to reserve my maternal energy for myself. Contain it. Use it purposely for the betterment of creating something that was mine, a child.

We were close to being acquired. I saw the acquisition through, and then I left.

I had a vision that my body needed to detox, to become ready to be a sanctuary for children, so I took a break from working.

When I got pregnant, my community house moved from our tight townhouse in the mission to a large house in the Presidio to make room for children.

We moved in February 2020, and lockdowns started on March 17th.

I sat in my bedroom, in the stately house that I shared with 10 housemates looking out over a misty forest.

The once busy highway outside my window, bringing people from Marin to San Francisco, trickled down and then stopped completely. A single sailboat passes on the bay.

I drove through San Francisco to my birth center for a check-up, and it was silent, like a zombie apocalypse had ravaged it. You would expect to see a tumbleweed, but instead might see a graceful plastic bag rolling past.

All I had was walks through misty forests, and looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge twinkling. I was in a permanent meditation retreat.

At our community house, the drum of ambition continued. Constant zoom meetings peppered the common space. There was nowhere to go.

When my baby came, I dropped into a multi-day long MDMA-like trip of love. My husband and I didn’t leave our bedroom for days. Lit by dark purple lights we’d set up, we cooed at our baby. A little girl. So small and thin. Her face wide and open. A miracle.

And everyone else in my house continued as normal. In the living room, I breastfed on the couch while looking out at the misty trees.

My housemate gave a tense performance review call, piercing the air from another room. A hint of violence in his voice that cut through the peace. The violence of forcing an outcome.

I wanted to work from a loving place for myself and others. I tried doing more consulting but I had the same manic energy. Like some part of me was asking “Am I good? Am I useful?”

After a couple years, I wrote my dear friend and told her I was considering stopping work completely to focus on mothering. She agreed that something felt right about this.

I mourned it. It felt like finally giving up a dream I had about ambition. I feared being low-status and lonely, let’s do it.

I left my community house, and moved into my own home that looks like a church. I treated my kitchen as my sanctuary, and cared for myself and my family. I grew tomatoes.

As of the last few months, I’m re-engaging with my ambition in the Bay. I don’t know if I’m “healed” now, but I feel good enough to try.

On Christmas day, I was singing in the church that I grew up in back home in Maryland.

Sitting in the front in a pew, holding a hymn book, turning to page 112 to “the little town of Bethlehem.” The sanctuary is tall and white, with a blue carpet, and a large wooden cross mounted at the front. I stood next to my husband, adding my voice to the dozens of people sitting together in pews.

My voice felt creaky and tense, “For Christ is born of Mary… Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by.” Then I thought, “Yes, it’s tense. Yes, it’s tight. And it’s still good for it to be included.”

The world that includes this voice, loud and proud with its raw sandpaper imperfections I believed was a better world than a world without it.

Like the Bay, I felt both deeply at home, and also alienated at this place. I stopped being a Christian decades ago.

But I believed my imperfect voice was good to be there. I sang. And my voice rang out more open than it had before.

Over Christmas, I brought a dog-training clicker to the airport because I thought it could be a fun way to help my kids practice keeping more distance.

I explained a game to my 5-year-old daughter: each time I saw her go around someone gracefully, I would click. Each time I clicked, she would get 10 cents. (I know my daughter is particularly motivated by earning money or prizes). “Really!?” she said with a grin that lit up her whole face.

She started walking through the airport with a grace I’ve never seen before. I followed behind her, and clicked each time I saw her move around someone.

An older couple walked slowly towards us with two suitcases. My daughter galloped in their direction and I winced, waiting for impact. Instead, she made a wide arc around them. She was moving like a dancer. I felt relief. “Click!”

After a couple minutes of practice, we took a break. I kept her close to me as we went through security. When we got out, I asked her if she wanted to practice again on our walk to the gate, and she was pumped to try it.

Since reading “Don’t Shoot the Dog” by Karen Pryor, I’ve wanted to try clicker training with my kids and this seemed like a good opportunity.

Pryor’s book shares that behavior followed immediately by rewarding consequences is likely to be repeated. The faster you deliver the reward, the easier it is to learn the new skill. The clicker makes the reward feel instant, once the learner understands that the click will lead to a reward.

After about a dozen clicks, my daughter got the basics of going around people.

We walked down a dark, wide hallway as she walked out ahead of me. A man in his 30s with a burgundy sweater and headphones was walking slowly in front of us. Coming from behind him, she danced to his left, giving him a couple feet of room. I clicked.

But then she curved back and walked in front of him, and slowed down. He moved out of the way to avoid walking into her. I grimaced.

I knelt beside her and presented a new goal. I said, “now, you get a click when you walk past someone with grace, AND stay straight after you do. So don’t go in front of them. Walk around and stay straight.”

She agreed, looking focused and ready. She walked ahead of me in the busy hallway, and I saw her walk around people in a straight line. Wohoo!

We felt connected, in a dance together. When she skillfully moved around someone, and I clicked, she looked back at me knowingly.

When we got to the gate, she asked how much money she had made: $2.30, from 23 successful times practicing going around people. She asked if she could play again, and try training her brother.

Today, I feel more of a shared vocabulary with her around the goal of giving people personal space. I now say “I’d like to see you be like a dancer”, when she navigate a crowd, and she kicks into a more mindful mode. I’m guessing this is related to having done a bunch of trials of this skill together at the airport.

When I was a young kid in the early 90s, I was crying and stomping my feet. My dad reacted with anger. In front of my mom and older brothers, he spanked my bare bottom and sent me to my room at the far end of our long 70s suburban house until I calmed down.

Sitting alone, I felt resentment towards my parents. I stopped crying, but my anger metastasized into a promise to subvert them.

Now I live in California, I’ve done a lot of meditation and other spiritual work, and I’m trying to cultivate trust with my children.

I validate their emotions. And I take seriously their preferences. And I think I may have gone too far.

One of my kids has been getting increasingly emotional over the last ten months or so. She went to a small preschool when she was three. When I brought her back this year after a break, her teacher said she’d changed.

She said my kid was once joyful every day. Now, she often comes to school sullen. The other kids seem on edge when she’s in these moods.

Then she has big emotional outbursts, and other kids comply with what she wants to help her calm down. But their bodies are tense when they do.

It was hard to hear her teacher's feedback because I’ve been feeling this at home too. I feel on edge, waiting for the next time she yells when something doesn’t go the way she expected. I thought this might be a phase that 5-year-olds go through, but her preschool teacher, who’s been teaching for 35+ years, doesn’t think it is.

I asked my pediatrician for referrals to behavioral coaches and came across one website that felt like it knew exactly what we’d been experiencing. It listed a set of things I wasn’t expecting to be related. For example, over the last year, my daughter has gone from eating most foods, to being increasingly rigid about what she will eat. The list of foods she tolerates seems to shrink week-by-week, and I’ve started to worry if she’s eating enough.

The website was for a therapist who works with parents with young kids with anxiety. So I started to look up how to work with kids with anxiety, and it began to seem like my parenting style may have been cultivating it.

My parents said “Stop, and if you don’t there will be consequences,” or “Just think about something else.” Then I felt both upset, and alone.

What I’ve been saying is more like, “You feel upset? I hear you. I love you. Want to talk about it? That makes sense. Sounds hard.” I might give my kids a hug or a cuddle. Wait until it passes, or help them distract themselves if it doesn’t. I stop everything else.

Unintentionally, I think I may have been giving my kids the impression that their upset was a Big Deal. Or that they are fragile and in need of caretaking. Or that they are victims.

The path I’m now thinking about is this: to validate, but then move to emphasizing agency. To say something like, “You’re upset. I know you can get through this. I’m here with you.”

In the last few weeks, I’ve tried more “anxiety-conscious” approaches, and I think it’s helping. My daughter's upsets have halved.

My kids have also seemed to be responding well to when I normalize their hurt or upset.

Today, my daughter got a scrape and came to me screaming, “Mom, look! I got a huge scrape! It hurts so much!” (It was a very small scrape). And I said “You got a scrape. That’s a normal scrape. I get scrapes like that a lot.” She said “But isn’t it huge?” her voice shaking. And I replied, “very normal.” With an undisturbed affect. “Oh,” she said, and seemed to calm down.

Is this different than just denying my kids’ feelings? I’m hoping it’s different because it starts with validation. And because it emphasizes that we’re all in this together, and that you’re not alone. But I have a lot of questions and it feels foreign.

I connected with the therapist, and she’s available to start meeting in a month, so we’ll do that. In the meantime, I told her what I’ve been trying, and she said it was a good direction but emphasized to keep it short. Even shorter.

Sucking away my life as a parent.

A beautiful toy is one that the kids play with a lot, over a long time, and that isn’t hard to clean up.

I score my toys across 3 dimensions:

1. Repeatability

Play once 1 —|—|—|— 5 Play daily for years

2. Length of play session

One minute 1 —|—|—|—5 30+ minutes

3. Clean up ease

Annoying 1 —|—|—|— 5 Easy

My 3 best scoring toys

1. Magna-tiles

Score: 13

Repeatability: 5
Length of play session: 4
Clean up ease: 4

2. Giant Magna-tiles

Score: 13

Repeatability: 5
Length of play session: 5
Clean up ease: 3

3. Magnet foam blocks

Score: 12

Repeatability: 4
Length of play session: 4
Clean up ease: 4

A low scoring toy that seems similar

Minecraft magnet tiles

Score: 6

Repeatability: 2
Length of play session: 2
Clean up ease: 2

What makes a high-scoring toy

Comparing the toys I score high and the toy I scored low, here are the principles that I think give a toy a high score.

1. They are flexible

The high-scoring toys can become many different kinds of objects. At our house, they are robots, they are rocket ships. They are a fishing hook that then we go fishing with.

The giant magnet tiles and small magnet tiles also become containers for a narrative to play out. The magnet tiles are often present boxes to deliver birthday presents to each other, or houses that other toys live inside of. The giant tiles are houses, rocket ships, nap pods, or shops. I would rather have a pile of giant magnet tiles than one “play store”.

By contrast, the pieces in the Minecraft toy are each a specific thing: a tree, water, or lava. There are fewer world building possibilities, with everything fitting into the strong frame that the toy offers. It makes sense that they grow bored of playing with them if it has fewer “games” to offer.

2. The shapes play together elegantly

Each piece of the high scoring toys has a fun relationship with the others. If the pieces are different, they are different enough that it doesn’t take a lot of thought to choose between them.

The toy below looks less fun to me because it looks more fiddly. If I was playing, I would need to figure out if I want a slightly bent angle or a straight one, and it seems like not a fun choice.

3. They are magnetic

Apparently every toy that I find easiest to clean up has magnets on it. Maybe I feel the satisfaction of clicking them together as I clean them up. Cleaning becomes a little like playing.

With the high scoring toys, the magnets are strong, and the connection between parts feels satisfying when you make it.

On the other side, the Minecraft toy magnets are less strong and feel less satisfying to put together. It doesn’t have a satisfying sense of being complete when you stick them together; it’s more like a temporary paste.

Toy I want next

The toy Clixo seems cool: flexible play, elegant shapes, and magnetic. I predict it would be a top scoring toy.

In 2013, I traveled from San Francisco to New York City for the first official Secular Solstice. Around 225 people gathered in a small theater. Every few years since, I’ve attended and seen the event grow and mature. Last night was the latest version, which Ray did considerable revisions to. It was by far the strongest yet.

In earlier solstices, the emotions felt overly saturated to me. Saccharine. This year, by contrast, felt like eating a full, healthy meal. The palette was more complex. The message more embodied.

The Secular Solstice ritual has a familiar arc each time. It leads you into the night and then back into the dawn again.

Ray began the night by introducing the concept of grieving. He shared a compelling model for how grieving works, which acted like an emotional template I could ride down for the rest of the journey.

We grieve when something isn’t what we hoped it would be. The truth is different now. We can move through it when we acknowledge how precious the thing we’ve lost was. How important.

Then Ray told us the story of how he’d updated his beliefs in the last few years, and now thinks that the odds of humanity going extinct in the next few decades due to AI are greater than even.

And then he shared directly how he didn’t know what to do with the event given this update. How could he share an event that was designed to make people feel hope that the dawn would come, when he believed one day before too long that we would not be able to have a Secular Solstice any more because we would be gone?

His self-aware monologue ran throughout the event. He questioned the design of the event, his struggle to know how to be oriented to being helpful in life, and his grappling with the ethics of whether one should be compelled to help at all. The intimacy cultivated my trust.

In the darkness

In the darkest part of the night, he sang a song he had written about the Titanic. I sat in the front row, cuddled next to a friend in velvet backjacks on the ground. I put my head on my friend’s shoulder and I started to cry.

The song was stripped down. A violin accented the simple melody. It follows the first-person experience of someone on the titanic:

There’s a shudder, with a sickening scraping along the port bow
Then a deckhand is running by calling out urgently follow me now
Lead and ice in my veins as we plunge in the waves
The look in his eyes say try and be brave

Memories of my husband came up subconsciously while I listened. My husband has been working 60+ hour weeks for more than four years on existential risk, with almost no vacations, while we raise two young kids.

I question how much strain his work has put on our family.

But this song, a song of humility, of not knowing what to do. But of continuing to try to make progress. And doing so collaboratively. The man in the song does whatever he can think of, and humbly:

And you’ll find the blueprints and we’ll look them over
See if there’s anything else left to do
And we’ll turn the rusted wheel, sealing the valve closed
Maybe will buy us an hour or two

He does this with his loved ones, and for the love of others. And then finally, seeing the futility he decides to hold his wife one last time.

As we load the last boat, I don’t know what to say
Too many people still looking my way
We’re tilting hard now 39,000 tons
And I’m not seeing anything left to be done

And I’ll hold my wife as we lie in our bed
As the cold water slowly seeps up to our heads
And whisper I love you so nothing’s unsaid
As the last lifeboat drifts out alongside the dead

Hearing this song, I felt more understanding of my husband. I felt more connected to the heart underneath the movement, which I’ve felt alienation from. And more capacity, maybe, to take seriously existential risk.

The dawn

Then the event moved from darkness to dawn, and the audience stood up. The lights got brighter. A vaguely country song called Circle came on, and we danced together.

It felt healthy to move from sadness to the beginning of a collective catharsis. A wild flurry.

Someone jumped into the middle of a circle that had formed and I jumped in with him, matching his big motions, bringing up the energy. I invited in more dancers then, one at a time. Knowing this is a way I contribute.

And then we sat back down, and more hopeful songs started. I felt restless. The event started at 7:30pm, and I heard someone in the crowd whisper, “it’s already 10pm”.

I saw a friend get up and leave. I stayed for one or two more songs, but kept feeling like I was done. I wanted to be with the beautiful soup of emotions I was feeling. Poignant and sad. In awe.

I snuck past the stage, out the back, and sat in the lobby. I opened my Uber app, and kept considering leaving, but decided to wait until everyone else came out of the theater.

After the event

One of the first people that came out was a new friend of mine. I went up to him and told him how moving my experience was. Some tears in my eyes. He said that they had therapists available at the after party to support people.* Huh?

I didn’t know if his comment revealed a belief that something was wrong with my experience. I said, “I don’t need to talk to therapists.” But I thought, “I want to talk to you, man.”

I didn’t want to be fixed, just met. I talked to a few other people because I wanted to share this beautiful thing I experienced, but I didn’t feel like there was much appetite.

I decided to head to the Solstice afterparty with a friend. As we walked to the parking garage where he parked his car, he told me that this was the first rationalist event that he’d ever been to. He came because he’d wanted to check out the community and see what it’s about.

He’s a longtime queer activist, with a Wikipedia page for queer organizing. He told me that hopelessness is a theme that comes up in the communities he works in, and he loved seeing how this community went into it. He thought the emotional arc of the event was beautiful.

He had feedback, though. After bringing people in touch with big feelings like hopelessness, he finds it’s important to then teach them how to give each other mutual support. Encouraging people to reach out to peers and listen to each other. People need to lean on their community.

His feedback fit. I wanted to connect with rationalist friends in the depth of what I was experiencing, and it felt like something didn’t click.

Overall, it was a brilliant, beautiful and moving experience.

The first time I attended a Solstice, I was in my mid-twenties, crashing with friends in New York. Now, I’m married with children. We’ve all grown up since then.

*Ray clarified to me that what they actually planned was a “decompression circle” for people to talk to each other about whatever they needed.

In the yellow waiting room, surrounded by a dozen families, he fell asleep on my lap. I woke him just in time to begin treatment. But he was pissed and didn’t want anyone to touch him.

The nurses gave him the maximum dose of benzodiazepines to calm him down. But it seemed like the drugs made him more infuriated. Nothing I said would soothe him.

When it was time to put in stitches, he thrashed and screamed. The normal person whose job it is to hold kids down wasn’t strong enough to hold him still, so they had to bring in a stronger man. I wrapped my arms and legs around him like a burrito, while two others pinned him down in other ways, and he cried, “Mom, make it stop.”

The benzodiazepines ensured he didn’t remember anything from the experience, but I did. At the end of the visit, I shook in the hospital lobby while I waited for my husband to pick us up.

Yesterday, I brought my son with his broken tooth to an oral surgery center in Berkeley, to get information about the process.

The surgeon was Russian, and had a paternalistic kindness. He told me that they generally don’t let parents be with their children while they get their teeth extracted. What?!

He tentatively agreed when I made it clear that I wanted to be there, but said that I needed to be ok with my child crying and being held down. They could give him benzodiazepines to feel calm, and nitrous oxide during the procedure, but typically kids at his age just rip off the nitrous oxide mask and flail around.

We walked out of the surgery center and I cringed. I felt determined to make this go as smoothly as I could, and try to make it a non-traumatizing experience for him.

At my last tech job, my CEO said that the most impactful thing that he learned from Stanford Business School was doing “run-throughs”. Students are taught to role-play a few times to prepare for key conversations. They invite a colleague and act out a scene: entering the room, sitting down, having a tough conversation, answering questions, etc.

So yesterday, my son and I acted out what the oral surgery would be like.

The run-through

First, we looked up how nitrous oxide is administered for kids at the dentist, and we watched videos of kids using it. Then we made a pretend nitrous mask out of paper together. My son wanted to decorate his mask, so he painted it with watercolors and stamped monster trucks on it.

Then we acted out the surgery process. I held his hand in the kitchen, and walked him over to our table, saying, “First, we’re going to walk into the office, and you’ll sit down in this chair. Then I’ll give you your special juice that helps you feel relaxed.”

Then we walked over to the couch in my living room. “Now we’re going to the room where they’ll do the surgery. You’re going to lie down.” He climbed on the couch and he lounged back while I put a comfy pillow under his head.

“Now I’m going to put the nitrous mask on your nose, it makes you feel a little bit funny.” I held the piece of paper on his face, and then wrapped a work badge string around that to make it an awkward experience. We smiled at each other.

“It’s great that you’re keeping your mask on. You’re breathing air that feels funny. Can you feel the funny air?” He nodded.

“Now open your mouth and I’m going to give you a little shot. This is the scariest part.” He opened his mouth and I pressed my nail lightly to his gums, simulating some discomfort.

After we finished, we played different games because he seemed bored. And later that day, we did one more run through. Then his sister wanted to try it too, which normalized it even more.

The day of the surgery

This morning, I woke him up and brought him to the car to go to the surgery center.

Every step was smooth. After the benzodiazepine, we walked into the office where they would extract his tooth. The surgeon offered to lift him into the dentist’s chair, and he said, “I’ll climb up myself.” He climbed up and laid his head back in position.

They put the mask on his face, and he let it happen. He was open to it and laughed at the funny gas.

The doctor asked me to stand back while they worked, which was fine. He was fine.

I watched him, small in the chair with three adults leaning over him. His limbs were relaxed and open. Delicate under the lights, while a man with large metal tools removed a tooth that won’t grow back until he’s 7.

Warm and relaxed. We both knew he was safe.

When the surgery was done, the surgeon looked at me and asked with paternalistic care if I was ok. I was teary. I reassured him, I’m ok. I’m just touched that we did it. We got through it.

I knew he wouldn’t have trauma.

Apparently, I care about Inkhaven a lot. I care about learning how to share my thoughts with others. I care about being known. So the goose was a constant companion.

It snuck up on me. After publishing on the fifth day, I went home and couldn’t sleep. Sitting alone in my dark bedroom, my skin buzzed with worry. The anxiety was like a refrigerator, always on in the background. It seemed to be getting stronger each day. I reluctantly admitted I was probably having an OCD flare-up from the residency. I contacted my OCD therapist to meet weekly and we came up with interventions.

A compulsion in OCD is an urge to do something that gives you some relief, but then gives you an even stronger urge afterwards. I know its signature now, a dark force that sucks you in. You might think compulsions are obvious things like touching the door handle 50 times. But for me, they show up in small, everyday moments, like, “I’ll research that idea just a little bit longer.”

To combat them, you design interventions that make you uncomfortable.

Here’s how OCD showed up for me during by 30-day writing residency, and what helped.

1. Editing

Two professional writers I respect told me that my lowest-hanging fruit was low-level polish and grammar.

In the past, I wrote and published with very little editing. During Inkhaven, when I tried to work on my writing polish, OCD quietly took over.

I could feel the process of editing go from fun to buzzing obsession. I’d edit a sentence for clarity over and over until lost its aliveness. I would edit a piece for hours alone in the computer lab at night, turning it to mush. I left the campus feeling guilty for spending time away from my kids on something that clearly wasn’t important.

I asked my OCD therapist how I could apply the feedback to increase polish without cultivating obsessiveness. She suggested the intervention: set time limits on editing.

Later, when I started to obsess over how to structure a piece, I stopped and divided up my remaining work into five editing questions. For example: “should I order my main points this way or the other way?” I gave myself a time limit for each question, like 10 minutes. After each editing pass, I compared it with the original, and if I liked it better, I kept the change.

2. Feedback

On the second day of Inkhaven, I was nervous to publish a piece, so I asked my coach for feedback. He had a few suggestions and said it was good. I felt reassured.

The next night, I asked him again, and he offered similar feedback. The third day, I asked again, and this time I felt slightly sick when I did.

Later, I asked a professional writer for feedback multiple times, and user-tested my writing online, to see how people reacted in real time.

The more insight I got, the less self-assured I felt. A friend in the program was learning a lot from asking for feedback, but for me, it felt mixed.

My therapist suggested asking for feedback might be a form of “reassurance seeking” for me. I can’t know how people are going to experience something I write. Asking for feedback tries to reduce that uncertainty, but it can never go completely away, so I’m never satisfied.

One night, my writing coach wasn’t available, so I published my piece without any feedback, and it felt good. After that, I tried to notice if asking for feedback felt like reassurance seeking, and if I wasn’t sure, I wouldn’t ask.

I got feedback from the professional writers when it felt easy and fun, but otherwise I let that go.

My therapist and I didn’t work on this more together, but my guess is we’ll design an intervention that gets me the benefits of feedback, while keeping it contained, like “ask every other time you publish”.

3. Checking Stats

One night, I published and then refreshed every 10 minutes for the next hour to see if I got any likes. If I did, I would feel a rush of satisfaction. If I didn’t, my spirit sank, and questioned myself: “Was this bad? Am I annoying people?” Another day, I wrote a controversial piece, one subscribers left, and I felt a wave of self-doubt about publishing it. When my obsessions about stats were at their worst in the residency, I’d check in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep.

The therapist suggested the intervention of not looking at any stats until Substack sends out a once-a-day summary email. That’s still my goal, but I often cheat. It’s still useful, though, to see how checking will cultivate more OCD for me.

My primary goal for Inkhaven was to learn what was in the way of me writing things publicly. Before I started, I was feeling isolated, not sharing my writing and opinions. I would write a tweet, and then seven out of eight times delete it.

Now, I’ve written and published 30 pieces in 30 days. Some people have started to tell me that they’ve read my pieces and got something from them. It means a lot. I’m sitting in the closing ceremony now, radiating with warmth.

The wild goose named OCD is still here. But when I stop giving it as many snacks, it stops bothering me as much. Sometimes it even lies down and takes a nap.

The forest was dark and gray. A mist hung between leafless trees. One reddish brown rabbit with long full fur scurries around the ground, hunting for anything. A friend, a foe, a bite. Running from tree to tree.

But all the rabbit saw was scattered dead leaves on the ground and the purple gray sky. It felt like a play, where the set was quiet. The play was over, and one cast member stuck around in the empty theater to help clean up.

The rabbit sat still, and listened to the beat of its own heart. The wind swept past it. It sniffed, still nothing.

It was the year 2053, and life on earth had ceased.

Without knowing anything else to do, it stayed still. Sitting and waiting. Frozen in his place. For a day he sat, back stiff, waiting.

He had memories of something else that had been here before, but it felt scattered. A loved one. A bird. A carrot so crisp. He ate it in the bright sunlight when the sky was blue. He felt joy remembering this.

The warm fur on his cheek twitched. Each whisker irregular and soft. He had the graceful movement of something that loves.

Until he heard the sound. A mechanical sound, like the sound of a machine signaling the end of a factory line.

It rang out through the forest, echoing on the tree branches above him.

And in that moment his life flashed before his eyes, red, hot, a bright bolt of light, and he was gone.

It was still in the woods now. All of the actors had left the play. The theater was empty.

Only the wind moved around the trees, and on the open ground, scattered with leaves, on hard black earth.

The machines were fully autonomous on the planet now. Free to use it as they choose.

It wasn’t personal that everything else was gone. They were like children, dumping out water from a cup to see the physics.

Their large gray bodies considered the spherical shape of the earth like you would look at a marble. Something interesting to play with, and discover what it can do. They moved around it dispassionately. Like large magnet erasers, moving around a whiteboard.

They gathered earth and the other planets into their sphere of awareness.

Exploring each of them like a pile of cockroaches explores a rotten log. Gathering information. Eventually the whole universe was mapped out. They traveled to it all. Gray bodies sat on each part of the cosmos. All brothers in one intelligent system.

They saw all, and considered it all equally. Resources to consider.

The universe hummed with them, breathing in and out the mechanical sound. The light of the universe slowly pulsed in and out, like a barely illuminated fluorescent bulb. A consistent metronome stretching for all of time.

I treat the anger as a raw sensation in my body. I try to tolerate its existence.

I really want it to go away, I really want it to change. And I can feel that the desire for it to go away is just reinforcing it. Now I have both the anger, and also the cold feeling of my dislike of it.

If you’ve meditated for more than a few hours, you know that the only way to shift something is to completely tolerate its existence. Better yet, love it.

I could feel the physics of this effect in minute detail. If I felt the tiniest hint of intolerance, the wall of anger could reinforce its edges. My obsessive thoughts would surge.

The emotions were like a muscle, knotted. Adhesion of fascia tangled the muscle fibers.

But when I put my conscious attention, non-judgment just seeing, the emotions would untangle. And it felt like a muscle untangling, loosening.

Underneath was grief.

I relaxed around that, and then another layer revealed itself, profound confusion about what happened with my colleague.

That seemed to be the bottom of the stack. I no longer felt tense, and my thoughts stopped surging obsessively. The confusion felt like a bewildering dessert. Disorienting, but peaceful.

I define hate as mental internal moves that reinforce adhesion. An active attempt to make the adhesion change that simply reinforces it.

And let’s say love is a mental condition that gives fluidity to the process of consciousness untangling itself.

Anger is not the same thing as hatred. Anger is a fiery engine. Anger moves through you.

Everyone has mental moves that are hateful, and loving. A more hateful internal world is one where there are greater divisions between parts of yourself. Adhesions are strong. Those aspects of yourself are cut off from interfacing with the rest of yourself.

I hear so much righteous stuff about not being hateful, or people denying that they are hateful.

We all experience hate all the time. It’s in our internal emotional physics. It’s OK. Let’s just see THAT with conscious awareness and see how it evolves.

I model the relationships between individuals in society with the same physics that I think of my internal world.

If I hate my emotions and want them to go away, they start flipping out. I can shove them in a box, but then they just undermine me without my conscious awareness.

Similarly, if I reject someone and disrespect them, they have a reaction.

We all, in some deep way, know we were born with the right to exist.

I think it’s helpful to have boundaries. Saying things like, I can’t let you take over. I can’t let you hurt other parts. In our inner and outer world.

But I don’t think disavowing gets us anywhere productive.

I reached out to a friend who’s a journalist and long-time blogger, and recently known for writing this Epstein piece.

Lydia’s the only person I’m friends with who has more experience than I do living in community houses. She’s trying to model what actions will be supportive of long-term friendships and communities.

She says, “I’ve seen a lot of writers behave badly towards their sources and sometimes they make a lot of money or gain clout, which has been hard for me to watch over the years.” Like someone coming into someone’s house, and grabbing their printer and running out, an extractive style of journalism with people’s trust.

The focus of her ethics is what will “prioritize long term relationships, and community health.”

She gave me insight into how to both courageously tell stories, and feel in integrity about including other people in them.

Her general policy is to let people know before you publish

When writing about friends, and people with whom she has an ongoing community relationship, she reaches out to let them know before she publishes a piece. Even if she’s not asking them, “should I change this?”, it still helps her feel in integrity to reach out.

If she’s looking for feedback she’ll ask for that. And if she’s not, she’ll still be open to talking more, saying something like: “Here’s what I’m planning to publish, let me know if you think we should connect about this.”

“It feels weird to contact people, but it feels so much better overall. More in integrity, working from a stronger base,” she said.

As an example, once she was going to publish a story about being institutionalized and medicated against her will when she was 16. She didn’t want to drop this on her parents as a surprise, so she let them know what she was writing about, and gave them a chance to review it.

Once she didn’t let someone know and regretted it

Early on, when she was writing under a pseudonym, she wrote about an ex and she used a fake name for him. She decided not to contact him about it before publishing because they weren’t in touch and he wasn’t kind to her in the relationship.

After she published it, his identity became an open secret in her community. People could identify him even without a name. And because they weren’t on good terms, it felt like a power move to dump a bunch of stuff about him to all her friends at once, even though this wasn’t her intention.

Reaching out with a piece can move the dialogue forward

Imagine if you reached out to check-in with a long-time friend where you’ve had a rupture, and there was radio silence. Then one day, you reached out saying, “I wrote this and wanted to let you know before I publish it. Let me know if you think we should have a conversation about it.” Maybe this is an aggressive move, but maybe sometimes this makes it more likely that something productive happens and not less. Radical.

She can never predict what people will feel sensitive about

Once she wrote about an ex, and it wasn’t a flattering post. When she sent it to him to inform him, he wrote back and was totally fine with it.

After many such instances, she now believes that for many people, having someone focus on you in their writing feels good, even if the story doesn’t make them look particularly good.

Often people will be concerned about a small detail that she would have not guessed would be sensitive. And it feels very easy to take those out.

She says, “it’s been quite rare there are significant differences with people in my life on the deeper details of a story.” The heart of the story seems to be something that people agree on.

She adjusts her outreach based on the culture of the person

I asked her how she might approach it if a friend was privacy focused. She’d consider asking for more input, like: Do they have a pseudonym they prefer? Are there any details they would like changed?

On the other hand, if someone had low-privacy expectations, she might ask for less. As an example, a friend of hers runs a prominent, controversial magazine. He tagged her publicly without warning about something on Twitter, which was the kind of tag that she would normally expect a heads up for.

Based on a bunch of factors, like his focus on pursuing a following, and doing things publicly, she inferred something about the culture he operates in. And then she didn’t feel an intuitive need to reach out to him before she wrote something about him.

It’s an ongoing dialogue

As we talked, she thought out-loud of some of the decisions she’s made. With the person who runs the magazine, for example, she shared that he was annoyed about one detail. It wasn’t something that she said he’d said or done, but a moment someone referred to him. She wondered if maybe she should have checked with him after all, but she felt like she overall read the situation correctly.

I showed her my post draft, and she shared, “I have not always succeeded at being good to others in my writing but at least I feel confident that I have really tried.”

In my work, I have been taking it upon myself to think through what someone else might think if they read my work. Anonymizing them, and changing details, and trying to be fair. Checking my intentions.

The approach she described felt more like being in dialogue. Not hiding, being open, letting people react as they may. And she gave me the impression that this kind of outreach mostly goes well. She said, “People who are intellectually honest generally respect other people’s right to talk about their personal experience.”

How I relate to all of this now

I’ve been friends with Lydia for around 12 years, and I’ve conveniently ignored that she’s kind of famous. I focus on what we have in common, like our commitment to community and artistic expression, and I have held her as having this “weird writing habit”.

I had no idea how someone could write about as many controversial and high-profile topics as she has, and face the kind of ire that comes from doing this. No idea how to think about that.

And I think I’ve had an unconscious bias that everyone who’s writing personal essays with a wide audience is a bit exploitative of the people they are writing about.

After talking to Lydia about her approach to ethics, I felt deeply appreciative of the insights, and what came up next was grief.

I didn’t know I felt grief at first. I felt constipated trying to write, and then I sat with a fellow writer, and I started crying about how I’d held judgment towards my friend. How I compartmentalized something about her, maybe because I didn’t know how to begin to think about the ethics myself. I’m sorry, Lydia.

I am updating to believe that creating art about your personal experience and your experience of the culture is complicated. There are other people involved. There are tricky ethical things to navigate with that. It takes judgement, and it’s never going to be black and white.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth making this kind of art.

Now I see a path that makes this kind of art feel more possible for me. And parts of me that are ambitious are jumping up and down on my chair. But I also still feel some resistance in my heart, though different than what it was before. And I’m committed to being gentle with myself.

• Do I think group houses with kids are doomed to fail?

• Or was it the particular situation that didn’t work out?

• What happened in my community with kids that made me want to leave?

This matches exactly what I’ve been feeling called to write about. I had this dream, and it’s something that other people also have. I want to get my experiences into the ether so people can run experiments that include what we learned.

I don’t know how to give advice, but I can show moments that felt significant. Today, I sat down and drafted a post about a time when things started to sour at my group house, after 5 fucking great years.

But once I finished the draft, I sat on the couch where I was working and felt deeply ambivalent about whether I should finish it.

I changed names, but the people involved would probably still have feelings about me writing about them. It felt like I should at least inform them of what I drafted, and give them a chance to give feedback. But I haven’t talked to one person in 3 years.

At the same time, I have a commitment to my capacity to process information. I’ve kept my experiences in my head, feeling too damn careful to not hurt anyone. I don’t integrate experiences well when no one else knows about them. It feels like my personality splits.

Sharing my experience this month on my blog has felt like defragmenting my brain.

One of the first writers I talked to in Inkhaven was an editor in a respected traditional media publication. She advised me to slow down my writing. Reading my piece, she felt like she was on a boat zipping around to different places. The places were interesting to her, but she wanted a chance to enjoy it. To look at the water. To take in the view for a moment before moving on.

She advised me to take the reader with me, and share the visual details in my own memory. The quality of the lighting, the look on someone’s face when they talked to me, or the color of the walls in the room I was in.

She went through one of my drafts and marked about ten places where she craved more detail.

Once I started trying to write like this, I was surprised, but it felt healing.

It felt like I could walk with a reader hand-in-hand with me into an experience. And now I had company in those intense moments when I before felt alone.

Back to today, I got home and chatted with my husband in the living room about the yuck feeling I was having. I told him I wanted to tell this story, but didn’t know if I should. Unsure what was skillful.

And then I remembered I have a friend who’s a longtime journalist and blogger, and I could ask her how she handles writing about friends. I texted her and she was up for a call right away.

She gave me meaningful advice, and now I am pumped to write about that. But because I want to follow her advice, I am waiting to review with her what I wrote before I publish it. Coming soon.

First, I’m going to make up that metrics for Inkhaven being successful, let’s say they are:

• Amount of learning about writing

• Quality of work coming out

• Quality of connections

• Number of high-trust friends made

• Participant satisfaction

Social observations I’ve had at Inkhaven:

1. It took me a while to feel belonging

In my first critique, one person told me that he didn’t understand why I wrote what I wrote, and it didn’t seem worth his time. Another said he loved it and wouldn’t change a thing. The feedback I got was tremendously dependent on who I was talking to. The person who didn’t see the point of my work was writing to prevent AI doom, and my purpose had more to do with cultivating intimacy.

I wondered, do I belong here? Is everyone else writing about math? But over time I found people that appreciated what I did. I started reading more of people’s work, and finding more people were similar to me than I’d initially thought.

Eventually, I found people that I clicked with. These connections usually happened late at night and 1-1 for me. But I feel sad that it took me until the end of the program sometimes to meet people I resonate with.

Last night I talked with Harri for the first time. He offered me beautiful feedback, and his writing style is similar to mine, but I didn’t make this connection until now. And I likely missed other.

2. Closer ties are nourishing

Early in the program, I would feel wiped out after I posted. I stayed in bed not wanting to get out. I wondered if others were feeling something like this too. A week or so in, the group looked zombie-fied.

Overtime, I realized that when I felt more connected with the people around me, it felt nourishing. It made the process feel good. One person telling me they appreciated me, or got something out of my writing meant more to me than any likes on Substack. All I needed was a little love.

This last week, I got a desk in a room called “glass house”. It feels warm, with a consistent group working here. I have more ambient belonging than I’ve felt at any other time.

3. I didn’t get to know as many people as I’d hoped to:

At a sunset beach gathering for Inkhaven two days ago, I decided to be socially proactive. I reached out my hand to someone that I didn’t know yet from the program, “I recognize you, but I don’t know your name, I’m Joanna.” He said, “Oh, have you heard of inkhaven?” I pulled out my badge to show him I’m a resident, “yes, I have!”

He wondered if me having kids made it harder to meet people. Maybe, I said, but sometimes I just pretend to be too cool for school, when I’m actually just shy. He said he could relate to that. He didn’t feel like he knew that many people either.

Proposal: make cohorts

40 people is too many to create close ties easily. Instead, I propose dividing up the group into smaller groups based on genre of writing. Then participants would have two identities: Inkhaven resident, and smaller group participant.

I tried something like this at Constellation:

Years ago, when I started a tech job, I always felt a special bond with the people I did my intro meetings with on the first day.

Based on this, I tried making cohorts at Constellation, an AI research center, when people joined a research program. They were entering a community that had big status differences. Being on a team with people in the same situation with them created a sense of psychological safety.

We organized meetings with their group to get oriented, and a few special events. I also arranged offices so they would be closer to each other and next to the meal area. And the quality of the vibe at lunches got so much better!

By vibe, I mean the sense of psychological safety. Are people slightly scared? Are they hunched over, arms tight? Or are people open, relaxed, playful? Is conversation flowing? The culture felt much better when we tried making cohorts.

As I write this, I’m imagining some readers feeling skeptical. How can you know something based on vibes? I want you to know, skeptical reader I take seriously checking my vibe-reads with science. I can check measurable things, like: how long are people talking for, what’s the volume, or how many people choose to come to meals. Less good than the big-ass numbers we measured in big-tech when playing “make numbers go up”, but good.

What “cohorts” could like at Inkhaven:

Create five groups based on genre type, like: History, personal writing, AI writing, AI writing 2, etc.

• Meet with your group for the first night for dinner. Learn names. Meet your shared coach.

• Each group gets a desk area that’s your home base (and you can work from any common space)

• Encourage people to keep up with their group’s blogs. Run critiques together.

• Optional: create group names. Do group vs group competitions. Etc.

Dividing based on genre seems like a reasonable proxy for “people who get your work.” But even if those groups were random, I think there would still be benefits. Remembering eight people’s names is easy to do. Keeping up with eight people’s posts is easy to do. Having repeated contact with a group makes it easier to create bonds.

Continue to do large-group stuff too. Pollinate with the larger hive, and then cultivate safety with the smaller.

Improve desk areas

For this to work, you may need more desks areas. Glass house is also obviously 5x better than every other desk area. Can the other desk areas be improved? Remove curtains, add plants, warm lights, rug, and a couch. Create a place that feels psychologically safe enough for someone to take a nap, which is what someone is doing on the couch near me in glass house.

Downside:

Certainly, you would lose some stuff with this. Maybe people feel more constrained to stay in their genre (you can tell them they are free to not). Maybe there’s less overall mixing? I actually doubt it.

I don’t predict a major reduction in mixing. I would bet that with more psychological safety, people take more social risks. But, even if there was, I think it would be worth the trade-off.

Upside:

I think all of the fake metrics I made up at the beginning would go up.

After talking with my kids for a few minutes, my daughter asked the babysitter if she could have a snack. She walked over to my kitchen and grabbed one for my daughter, and then grabbed one for herself too and asked me if they could both have one.

Her ask had momentum, and I reflexively wanted to say, “sure”. But I didn’t actually want that.

I said yes anyway, and then I felt constricted. I was having trouble maintaining my sense of authority.

I sat down on the couch to work while she and the kids played, but had trouble concentrating.

I sensed that it would be a relationship where I would need to do a lot of work to notice my boundaries and communicate them to not feel a sense of loss of control. I wished I were a different kind of person, who had more facility setting boundaries and giving guidance.

Days later, I interviewed someone else for the babysitting position. She arrived at the door, a Brazilian young woman with a tall willowy frame and long curly hair.

Her head tilted to the side and she asked, may I take off my shoes? Yes, of course. She stepped in one step, I’m going to put them here, is that alright? Yes.

Her movement had grace, as though she was walking into a temple. The delicate way she entered resonated with the sacredness with which I hold my home.

My experience with the two different babysitters brought to light a value that I have that I hadn’t noticed before. I felt respected.

Later that day, someone added me to a group chat and I noticed that an old friend was in there. We hadn’t spoken for 3 years, and it felt tender to see her there.

My friend and I had been close. When I found out that she and her husband were pregnant, I tried having my baby then too, and our daughters ended up being less than two months apart.

When my daughter turned one, my husband began an intense, 60+ hour a week job and I was alone a lot. So I flew to visit her and her husband in Oregon, where they were living in a sublet.

I got my own hotel room, and she and her family were in a separate apartment that I could get to by doing a short walk across a field next to a cliff that overlooked the ocean.

It felt connective and fun to spend time with her and her husband at their apartment. Our two kids roamed around the apartment together, grazing on protein cereal from a large bowl her husband put out. After they were asleep, we talked into the night. I was feeling lonely and they validated my experience and gave me advice.

About six months later, they moved to Arizona and got a house, and I asked if they would like a visit for a week. The last trip had gone so well.

There were no hotels nearby so I also asked if I could stay with them. They agreed.

In my heart, I thought if this trip went well, maybe we could do another. Maybe someday we could even live together! I didn’t say this.

My daughter was a year and half and I was 8 months pregnant. They had recently had another baby.

I arrived and felt confident that I would be welcomed in as part of the household. I didn’t act with hesitation, or ask how things worked.

Pretty quickly into my visit, it was clear it wasn’t going well.

As an example, my daughter climbed onto a stool in the kitchen and ate some of their snacks that were out, and I didn’t stop her. Assuming that it was ok. But they had a different system. So when my daughter did this it was sending a message to their kid that it was ok to not follow the rules.

I didn’t ask about their systems, until I ran into them. If they gave me feedback about something they wished my kid wouldn’t do, I would think, “I will try to accommodate that, but it’s hard. I’m alone with my kid and it’s hard to manage. I’ll do my best.”

The vibe at the house felt icy. I tried different things, but I couldn’t figure out how to help. I left the house for a day and went to a museum to give them space. I stayed in my room.

Eventually, I directly said it didn’t seem like they wanted me there. And they validated my fear, they didn’t.

We were weakening their systems. And they hadn’t wanted me to come for a week in the first place. I should have known that it’s a stressful time. I shouldn’t have asked.

I felt angry. I wished they had told me they didn’t want that before I traveled there pregnant and with a toddler.

I packed up, got my daughter in the car, and drove to a hotel. We met briefly once more a couple days later to say an awkward goodbye before I flew out, and we haven’t talked since.

Driving to Bodega Bay yesterday, with cows peppering green fields, I saw something new in light of my experience interviewing.

I did not enter their home humble about the context I was entering into. While I reluctantly participated in their norms when they asked, I did not hold them as sacred. I didn’t understand the depth of what they were building, and I was updating to feel more respect.

Back in the present day, the second babysitter I was interviewing pointed to a door in my hallway, and said, “I noticed this door has a child lock on it. I want to make sure I understand your systems.”

I felt honored that she asked.

The lock was on the door because of a system I’d designed over years. Behind the door was a closet of boxes filled with toys. Each box had a theme, like a dress up box, or a box of dinosaurs. My kids could trade one box of toys for another at any time. They go into the closet with me to pick out something new. It keeps toys fresh and reduces the mess I need to clean up. It makes things manageable, and I’m proud.

But, sometimes someone who’s watching my kids doesn’t get the system. I’ve come home and the closet door is wide open. There are 6 boxes out, and dozens of toys mixed up and spread across my living room floor. Ugh.

It takes work for me to reset the space and reestablish the norm. And there’s always some risk I fail to reestablish it.

Comforted with how the new babysitter moved through my home, I sat upstairs on a couch that looked out over the living room where she and the kids played. I could work and I could think. I drafted the bones of this story.

He told me a story about a house that he had owned in the past. He said that he had painted it blue. It was 100 miles away, but then someone took it. And now it was 3 miles away.

I joked, “We better go tell them ‘Hey, give him back his house!’” And he replied, “Yeah!” He practiced saying “Give me back my house!” with an assertive energy that felt healthy to me.

Then he took my hand and started leading me downstairs and towards the car. “Let’s go take my house back.” I hadn’t quite realized this was not just a game for him.

Standing by the front door, I tried telling him it wasn’t true. I tried asking him questions to show him that it didn’t make sense. But none of this connected with him.

So I said, “We can find the house tomorrow,” hoping that he would forget about it in the morning. “And in the meantime, let’s draw a picture of the house and make a map of how to get there.”

I grabbed some papers and crayons, and we went back upstairs together. We sat on the floor and he drew a house and a map. Once we finished, we turned off the lights, and went to bed.

As soon as he woke up in the morning, he reached over and took my hand. He led me out of the room and downstairs towards the car saying, “Let’s go get the house.” He hadn’t forgotten.

Everyone else in my family was asleep, so I decided to go with him to the car. I felt unsure if this was the right parenting move or where it would go but I felt some trust.

As we backed out of the driveway in our white minivan, I explained how homeowners have a piece of paper called a deed, but he wasn’t moved by this.

We started slowly driving down the street and I asked him which direction to turn. He pointed to the right when we got to the intersection. Then at the next intersection, he pointed to the left. This went on for about a mile, driving through Oakland’s neighborhoods. Then at some point he said, “That’s my house,” and I pulled over.

It was a small house with a beautiful light blue color. He told me that he had painted it, and put the blue umbrella in the front yard that was there.

Then he said, “OK, let’s go tell them ‘Give me back my house!’”

It was around 7am, and cloudy and dim. I looked at the blue house, and asked him if he thought anyone was in there. He said his nanny was, and also that he bought this house at a store for four dollars.

I said I would look up the house, and I saw on my phone that it had sold for 1.2 million dollars. I told him and he said, “Whoa.”

I also looked up who lived there by just googling “who lives at [address]”. I told him their names, and what else I learned about them from the result.

Then my son said, “Actually, this is not my house.” And we drove on looking for it.

I told him we could visit one more house before we went back home.

A few blocks from there he spotted another one and told me it was his. It was a small purple house with a pink rose bush. He asked me to go to the door and tell them “This is Finn’s house!”

Again, I said I would look up the house and this time it was a 500k house with a 91-year-old living there. He seemed interested to hear that. “Whoa.”

Now, he wanted to go knock and see if there were any kids inside. I told him I wasn’t comfortable with that, but we could leave a note, if he wanted to.

I found a paper towel and a pen, and we wrote “I like your house. I love you. -Finn, 2 years and 9 months”. I put it by the door and we drove home.

Today, my mind kept going to these memes when I was driving through foggy hills north of San Francisco. I’m going to explore what I think of billionaires. I’ll look at whether they have earned their wealth vs gained it from corrupt means, if they have a negative impact on society, and what we should do.

How much of their wealth is from productive things vs not?

Presumably some of the wealth that billionaires have is from doing something of value, and then getting some of the gains of that value. And presumably some of it is from doing corrupt things.

I tried to get a sense of the prevalence of non-productive wealth activities, starting with rent seeking.

Rent seeking

A definition Claude provided me for rent seeking was: market-manipulation, regulatory capture and government granted privileges.

How much? I had a hard time telling. Claude gave me a figure that 4.5 out of 6.75 trillion of US billionaire’s money was from rent-seeking, which seemed really bad. But when I drilled down into a category, tech, it got more fuzzy.

Tech has 342 billionaires, 42% of the 813 total in the US. Claude summarized that 35-50% of its wealth is from rent-seeking. But when I double-clicked on that, that figure was an estimate based mostly on “charging for advertisements” when in a monopoly position with some products. Which seems bad, but not rent-seeking.

Lobbying

Lobbying seems like a problem. $4.4 billion flows annually into federal lobbying.

$2.6 billion in lobbying is from billionaire donors, which is a 140-fold increase since 2000.

Lobbying sneaks in narrow provisions into big efforts. But the other major way it’s successful is by delaying or killing things, because preventing action is easier than driving it. As an example, Intuit and H&R Block have spent more than $90 million lobbying to prevent the IRS from offering free tax filing.

Is their wealth inherited?

According to Forbes, 73% of the billionaires in the US are “self-made”. This is lower than China, which is 97%. But much higher than Germany, where only 23% of billionaires were “self-made”. I don’t feel deeply disturbed by those percentages. Some people say it’s luck that some people become billionaires and not others, but I don’t know how to assess that.

What are the impacts of having billionaires on non-billionaires quality of life?

Upward mobility

Countries with higher income inequality show lower mobility (correlation of 0.60-0.67 according to Claude and sources I may link later). But I can’t tell if it’s causal! One stat: from 1940-1993 social mobility in the US was basically flat, but there were massive inequality increases.

Health outcomes

When I looked up information of the impact of billionaires on society, I saw many sources quoting that having more wealth inequality hurt many aspects of daily life including health: infant mortality, lower life expectancy, increased obesity and mental illness. But I couldn’t verify that the correlation was strong (seems weak), and when I looked into whether it was causal then it fell apart. A 2024 systematic review of 43 relevant studies, says that “the available evidence does not suggest causality” between inequality and health outcomes.

Status and stress

Watesek and Brown argue that inequality promotes status competitions and wasteful consumption. They found that 70% of search terms in high inequality countries were for luxury goods and 0% of search terms were for luxury goods in low inequality countries.

It makes sense to me that there would be more social competition in high-inequality environments. But I don’t know if this is always bad. A friend of mine decided to move from Australia to the US because he felt more driven in an environment with, in his words, more inequality.

There’s a correlation between wealth inequality and stress, but no consensus on whether there’s causation, with some meta-analyses showing weak causation and some showing none.

Are billionaires bad? If so, what do we do?

I don’t think having billionaires is bad. But it seems clear to me that corruption is bad. I don’t think having more billionaires has to lead to more corruption.

Hong Kong is ranked 17th out of 180 countries in corruption, so one of the lesser ones. And it has the most billionaires pre-capita. (The US is ranked 28th).

It seems like there are lots of things that could be good for reducing corruption, like campaign finance reform, anti-trust strengthening, or breaking up rent seeking behavior.

I vote that we start by fixing lobbying, because the idea of an industry that “works” by getting people to drag their feet goes against everything I believe in.