HannahMR

When you finally get into the fancy room you realize that all these “accomplished” people are the most desperate followers that you’ve ever met. Meritocracy, its the idea that people should be in the fancy room, or not, based on their talent and effort. And in theory, I’m a huge fan of meritocracy. But in the states especially, this concept has turned into a twisted sort of status game. There is this desperation to prove one’s value by being “above” others… by getting into the room that others can’t. I was born into that culture and at times embraced it. I desperately wanted to get into that room. I was convinced that only the best of people could be there. The smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful, and that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to go to the fancy restaurants, the exclusive clubs, the biggest cities, the most expensive hotel, the VIP lounge. And then it happened. I got my name on the list, I sat at the table at the fancy dinner, I met my heroes. And it broke my heart. At first of course it was quite exciting and fun. But it didn’t take long to start to notice the cracks in the facade. All these people weren’t the most hard working, the most intelligent, the most insightful… they were the most desperate. They were not there because “the cream rises to the top” they were there because they were also desperate to prove themselves. That fancy room, it’s just a room full of people all desperate to prove that they too can be in the fancy room. Sad, and pretty sobering when you realize that description includes you. Now inclusion in the fancy room is of course very much a meritocracy, but the “merit” being tested is one’s ability to follow. It’s a test of one’s ability to pick up on what the current culture values and emulate that effectively. It’s a test of your trendiness and ability to curry favor with others. It’s one of those things where once you see it you can’t unsee it. Now when I look at the pictures from the party in the fancy room I feel a bit embarrassed for those attendees. They don’t even realize what a confession that photo they proudly posted is. The world is really a lot messier than it’s comfortable to acknowledge. There isn’t a room full of all of the smartest, the hardest working, the most insightful. The people that you will wind up having genuine respect for are scattered all around in all sorts of rooms. You are very luck when you occasionally meet those people. You might meet them in a fancy room, but you are just as likely to meet them on the bus. It’s a big letdown to realize that “the fancy room” is just a fantasy. You can’t have it, because it doesn’t exist. So I’ll just be drinking with my friends at the dive bar.

You don’t understand therapy. It’s not a pity party, it’s adulting. Two years ago it was difficult for me to just be in a car, and driving one was a gut wrenching experience. I was struggling just to drive two blocks away to the shops via side streets and parking lots. But this morning I woke up early, made a cup of tea and decided to head out for a nice relaxing drive. I got in the car and drove to the shops 30mins away on roads going 45 mph. And it was relaxing. How did I pull off that transition? Therapy. And this is why the chronic misunderstanding of therapy and mental health practices in general rather irks me. It is not self indulgent victim cosplay where we absolve ourselves of responsibility for the state of our lives. What kind of insanity would that be? Instead it is the intentional management of our mind and our thought processes. It is simply necessary maintenance for optimal health. You eat a decent diet, you try not to drink too much, you get good sleep, you stay close to your friends and family, and you consciously manage your mind. That’s some proper adulting. When I say “mind” I mean your thoughts, your ideas, your “mindset”, your perspective on yourself and the world. It’s what happens in your brain that impacts your experience. We are only consciously aware of a small percent of what’s happening in our brain. The vast majority of what we “think” throughout the day we are not consciously aware of and this creates an interesting challenge. That one weird thing your uncle said to you about relationships when you were 7 might have formed some sturdy neuropathways in your head… and still be there to this day without you being consciously aware of it! So let’s hope your uncle was a wise and loving man otherwise that old thought pattern might be causing you some trouble. You can think of your subconscious mind as the operating system that you are running. The issue is that updates don’t happen automatically. If you want to run a new and improved operating system, you have to painstakingly install a new one yourself. Sometimes one line of code at a time. There is an interesting thing about humans, we are born too early. Now this has to do with complex evolutionary things like humans learning to walk upright and the size of our hip bones and what’s optimal for walking vs what’s optimal for childbearing. Long story short, we are born too soon. Most babies in the animal kingdom emerge capable of independent mobility and communication. But humans, wow are we helpless babies. And for that first year of our life, our operating system is still being installed. Our nervous system is still forming. And this brings us to a very popular therapy trope… Tell me about your mother! That’s the cliche right? You walk into a therapist's office, lay down on the couch, and the first thing your therapist says is “tell me about your mother.” Then you describe in detail everything your mother has ever done wrong, your therapist absolves you of any responsibility for any of your errors and you both toast your success with some champagne! Right? Of course not. Questions about your early childhood, or your upbringing, and questions about your mother, or whoever raised you, are indeed very common. But here your therapist isn’t looking to find the person to blame, they are asking you, “what operating system are you running?” You see most of us get an operating system installed that is rather optimal for the environment that we were in during our early childhood. But decades later when we wind up on a therapist couch, or zoom meeting schedule, it’s almost certainly because that operating system is wildly outdated and no longer helping us. So it may very well be that you are having a problem with workplace anxiety and your therapist asks you about your mother. But of course none of this is about your mother, it’s about the operating system that your mother installed in your brain 40 years ago that desperately needs an update. This stuff is of course complex and I don’t want to do it a disservice by over simplifying it, but, I do think it’s fair to say a very big factor, and for a lot of people, the primary factor in depression and anxiety are damaging old subconscious thought patterns. Our perspective on life and ourselves, our “mindset”, our damaging old operating system. This is how “therapy” helps us improve ourselves. It is the work of determining what operating system you’re running, sorting out which parts of that are now holding you back and in need of an update, and going about updating that software. Unfortunately, most of us don’t wind up “in therapy” until something has gone very wrong in our life. Therapy is expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s difficult, and there is still some stigma around it. And so we don’t make that call until we are really suffering and desperate for a solution. And when we do finally make that call we generally have no idea what we are doing and have no idea what kind of help we need, and so we start with some good old fashioned talk therapy. Talk therapy might not be what you wind up needing, but it’s a great place to start to get an education. Comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa has a great bit about going to therapy. He says he thought that a therapist would fix him like a mechanic fixes his car, but instead he found that therapy is much less like going to a mechanic and much more like Ikea for your emotions, “where you are given some tools and materials but you have to put your sh*tty table of a personality together all by yourself.” Because talk therapy is a great place to get an understanding of which operating system you are running and in which ways it’s erroring out, but you still have to do the work of updating that operating system. For some people their operating system isn’t in need of that many updates and just talking to a therapist and installing a few new insights and perspectives will be enough of a solution. But for many others, a full upgrade may be needed, perhaps even some database migrations, and that requires some serious upgrade tools! Thankfully there are many, many options these days. Deep journaling work like the Neurocycle process, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), psychedelic assisted therapy, and many more. While all of these have their own approach, they are all essentially tools for a serious operating system upgrade. And this upgrade is hard work! This isn’t about blaming grandpa, this is about re-wiring your mind, on a physical level, one neuropathway at a time. You keep an eye on your blood pressure, you step on the scale to check your weight, maybe you use a sleep tracker! And, if you are being a responsible adult, you monitor your mind. When your blood pressure is too high you call your doc and take some pills and change your diet. And when your anxiety starts to kick up, you call your therapist, maybe take some pills, and update your operating system. Therapy isn’t a pity party, it’s not about who to blame, it’s the conscious management of your mind. It’s hard work, and it’s proper adulting.

Confession: I sometimes read Ryan Selkis Twitter feed just for the entertainment value. I’m rather liking this latest iteration of the white supremacist misogynists. They’ve gone so far it’s now just cartoonish.

Years ago I watched a YouTube video on anxiety where the presenter described anxiety as a security guard. You need your security guard! You don’t want to get rid of it. And ever since then I have pictured my anxiety as Lieutenant Commander Worf. Well I was talking to my therapist the other day and you know, you always try to calm your nervous system before you tell your most horrific stories and so we were thinking of calming places and the lazy river at a Wisconsin Dells water park I went to years ago came to mind… and then this picture appeared in my head. If I can’t unsee it, then neither can you!

That Welcome to Holland essay has been on my mind. This morning I went for a walk in the park and stopped at the exercise station to do some push-ups and what not. There was a very chatty older man there with his adult son. He introduced himself "I'm Juan and this is my autistic son." And his son wasn't trendy autistic, he was non-verbal autistic. We had a lovely chat about the benefits of being in nature etc and as I was getting ready to move on he asked me to take a video of him and his son working out. He helped his son on to the situp bench and assisted him through a set of crunches. You could tell this was a well practiced routine for them. And as I left it struck me how beautiful that was. Here is a dude that's really making the most of his trip to Holland 🥲🫶

You need to build on an open, decentralized, wild and untamable network… Anything else is too risky! If you’re building something meant to last, you should build on an open, decentralized network, one that can’t be quietly steered by a single entity or reshaped around any one jurisdiction’s regulatory preferences. Anything else introduces a different, and often greater kind of risk, platform risk. Some blockchain networks market themselves as “regulation-friendly” or compliant by design. That sounds convenient, but it raises a core question: compliant with whose regulations? These networks operate globally, across dozens of legal jurisdictions that often conflict with each other. Any network that can adapt itself to the policy needs of one government can, and likely will shift in ways that may not serve your interests. If you’re not the largest or most influential participant in that ecosystem, you have very little control over how those changes unfold. As the network evolves, upgrades may benefit incumbents, politically favored actors, or specific jurisdictions, while leaving others with new constraints or technical burdens. Even if no single entity can change everything unilaterally, systems with centralized governance structures or foundation-controlled roadmaps tend to drift toward the priorities of their most powerful stakeholders. By contrast, truly open and decentralized networks are resistant to this kind of governance capture. They can still evolve, but no government or corporation can simply “push through” a change to suit its own regulatory agenda. Change requires broad consensus among miners, developers, businesses, and users, making protocol-level compliance updates practically unworkable. This structural resistance keeps such networks far closer to genuine neutrality. There’s no perfect platform, every system carries some risk. But choosing a network that cannot be easily reshaped to fit a specific jurisdiction’s rules removes one major category of risk: the risk that the ground shifts suddenly beneath you because a central authority rewrote the protocol. Importantly, this doesn’t prevent you from meeting your own compliance obligations. It simply means those responsibilities live at the application or business layer, where they belong, rather than being enforced deep in the network itself. You get regulatory freedom where it's appropriate, and protocol neutrality where it's indispensable.

Somehow we always wind up back here.

I mean.... there are a few people who come to mind

Boomers love saying “I’m glad we grew up before camera phones!” Millennials then spent decades terrified of compromising photos… and it was mostly just us. Now Gen Alpha can shrug and say, “that’s AI.” So yeah, we were the only generation that actually had to deal with that 😒

Danger is a part of life. What makes it tolerable is when you are proud of your decisions in managing it and when you don't have to do so alone.

You can't always control the reactions that your body has to a situation. But you can control how you interpret that reaction and the importance that you give it.

Hey it's almost like being trapped isn't good for people!

The most powerful tool an abuser has is the misplacement of shame. As such, if you can, one of the best things to do to fix these issues in the world is to speak about your own abuse without any drop of shame. Speak about it like you would about being cut off in traffic. “Seriously? Look at this idiot!” “Did you see that?!?! What the fuck is wrong with this guy?!?” etc. Refuse to carry even a drop of the shame. Put the shame, loudly, where it goes.