I've been watching Severance (I'm only on episode 5, no spoilers!) and it's really messing with my head! I'm having dreams about it every night. There is the obvious mystery of Lumon Industries, but also it brings up a shit ton of other questions. To what extent are you your memories? Perhaps there are a lot of parallels between incarnating on Earth and becoming a severed worker. Even if you don't remember something, to what extent does an experience imprint on your body and subconscious? How much does the narrative you tell yourself about your life dictate your behavior? ...I'm not sure I should watch this! lol It's really messing with me!

I don't have that much respect for Madonna, but, she did make one of my all time fav songs, The Power of Goodbye. Perhaps it was intended to be a song about the ending of a romantic relationship, but it's a song that really applies to the ending of any relationship, and I've been in a phase of my life where I am clearing out unhealthy relationships of all sorts. The song has been on repeat.

Intelligence isn't as important as we think it is. Courage matters more.

I just spent 5 weeks in Chicago, I went for a walk nearly every day. I didn’t experience even one incident of street harassment. That is wildly unusual! And given that this was consistent over 5 weeks, I don’t think it was chance, I think something is different now. The question is what? I don’t think I suddenly became unattractive. I got lots of smiles and nods, and ‘good morning’ greetings. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit older? Maybe it’s in the way that I carry myself or in the way I dress these days? Or maybe… just maybe, the culture has changed. Or is that wishful thinking on my part?

I am not a dominatrix, I am not a "dom". But, pretty often, people get the impression that I am. Why? Well I have managed to rid myself of sexual guilt. I am, at this point in my life, able to discuss sexuality without any refrain, without any pause for embarrassment. That’s unusual, especially in a woman. And often, the only other time someone may have encountered this is in a dominatrix. And this has lead me to a tragic realization. What our culture commonly thinks of as normal female sexuality... is actually shame.

While religion can bring people comfort and benefits, I am not a big fan of it for myself mostly because I have not found a religion that is not a shame based system, and a shame based mindset is wildly unhealthy for me. The particular combination that was my inherently analytical and focused mind + the shame based structure of some of the churches we were in when I was very young was an unhealthy combo for me. One of my first memories is of a Sunday night laying in bed after a long day that included a sermon at Church. The preacher was telling us that if you should, even for a moment, entertain the idea that god isn't real you would go to hell. And well, me being who I am, I couldn't not. So I laid there, terrified to do it, trying to avoid it, but I did, I, just for a moment, imagined that god wasn't real. And then I proceeded to have an anxiety attack worried that I would go to hell. Also, a few years back while dealing with depression/anxiety, I did this journaling exercise program and discovered that even in my late 30's I still had religious guilt in the back of my head. So much of my subconscious mind was shame based. I realized that, but it's a hard thing to undo. And then one day an interesting thing happened. I was in the midst of a massive wave of depression in what I call a 'should loop' or 'shame spiral'. My head was filled with thinking that I was doing everything wrong and hyper focused on what I should​ be doing. I was walking though the kitchen with 'maybe I should..., maybe I should...' playing in my head like a broken record when I heard something. Hearing voices is interesting cuz I didn't really hear it with my ears, it was more like someone hijacked my internal dialogue, and all it said was "This experience is for you." Which was wildly interesting and so, so different from where my head was in that moment. What if, what if life isn't a test, what if it's actually an experience that is for us, to benefit us? I now tell myself "this experience is for you" nearly every day. And this is my issue with religion, it views life as a punishment or a test, and not as a self directed benefit.

Communism, in small groups, is the natural state of humans. It’s built into us to care about our fellow humans, and to share with them. This helps us all. Things got complex once we started living in groups lager than Dunbar's number in villages and cities as our instinctual communism does not scale. This is when we develop money and ‘market economies’ as this does scale. As our cities have grown in numbers, they have shrunk in community and connection. There are now a lot of people who are incredibly lonely as we are living unnaturally isolated lives, and this is a big part of what fuels anti-capitalist sentiments. A lot of people who have perfectly natural and healthy human instincts make the error of trying to scale their sharing tendencies. They see ‘the state’ as their vehicle for recreating community care. These are the people who want the ‘social safety net’. And of course that is how humans are made to function, a community safety net is what we are built for. The issue, again, is with trying to scale it not only to above Dunbar’s number, but to millions of people. People who don’t know how to connect with others, for any reason good or bad, the ‘anti-social’ people, some autistic people, sociopaths, etc. tend to become “capitalists” in big part because they have less of the sharing instincts and have less ability to perceive the needs of others. Quite often the ‘bleeding heart liberals’ are the more psychologically and relationally healthy people. Their big error isn’t in their instincts, it’s in not understanding that the policies their instincts want them to support were built for small groups and don’t scale to millions. The solution here is to bring back the tight knit smaller communities, practice the natural communism in those groups, create social safety nets there, and to engage in ‘capitalism’ or ‘market economics’ with the broader world.

I’ve been thinking about the intersection of patriarchy, hierarchy, and sex. I think there is a ‘collective unconscious’ sense in our culture that being ‘on top’ during the act means that you are ‘above’ your partner in some sort of relationship hierarchy and thus better than them. And of course the reverse for being ‘a bottom’. Would you agree? Just look at the language we use around this stuff. “who f***ed who?”, “O he got f***ed”. etc, etc. It’s really kinda disturbing and sad. We say someone ‘bent over’ as a term for them being abused.

Yup, dictator. 😟

We often think of being able to code as an measure of intelligence, it’s not, it’s a question of personality type. To have enough patience to sit down for hours on end and fight with code, you need to be an analytical bitch! 😉

My daughter is talking in her sleep and apparently she is dreaming of having existential debates with people... yup, that kid is mine lol

I’ve been listening to FinTech podcasts trying to get a sense of the FinTech mindset, and geez it’s weird. Yesterday I was listening to an interview with the CEO of PayPal and he seriously said ‘we need to remember to think about the customer’… Like what else where you doing bro? Maybe this is a mega corp issue? He’s like ‘we think about shareholders, and the board, and we need to think more about our customers’… That just seems like a really embarrassing thing to admit in public to me. Ya?

I'm working on my Spanish business vocabulary! Look at the words I've learned today... Recauden, logren, desarrollar, emprendimiento, ingresos, sede, tendencias clave, liderar, pronostico, comportamiento, contraciclico, y incertidumbre!