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Cooperative Tech

[I want to acknowledge the work of Doug Ruskoff in his book Team Human, as well as the podcast of the same name. I’ve been engrossed in both lately. These words are mine but many of these ideas are his…]

If I was going to wave a magic wand and solve one of society’s pressing problems using software development, I would focus on transforming the relationship between workers and the organizations that they work for. I am specifically referring to the organization of worker cooperatives.

If I was going to wave a magic wand and solve one of society’s pressing problems using software development, I would focus on transforming the relationship between workers and the organizations that they work for. I am specifically referring to the organization of worker cooperatives.

I don’t want to get too political here in this space, but I think it’s safe to say that shareholder growth capitalism has literally run amuck and is threatening global stability, both economically and environmentally. It’s my belief that empowering workers to make decisions regarding the way a business is run is the way to correct this. I’ve been focusing on this recently by helping protect and promote labor unions as much as possible, but the nature of work, and of companies themselves, has changed so much in the past 70 years that these efforts are having diminishing returns. (Teacher strikes in West Virginia and elsewhere being one of the shining exceptions to this.)

As we know, the tech sector has been the most disruptive force in the world’s economy the past few decades, as our brick and mortar consumer society has been transformed into an online one. Retirement may now be a thing of the past, as the likelihood of spending twenty or thirty years at the same job approaches zero. Many of today’s workers are forced to work two or more jobs to get by, and the side hustle is a mainstay of the millennial generation.

Companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others, have made fortunes for investors by turning humans into the product. Under the auspices of providing a free service, they have turned us into fuel for big data and algorithms that try to classify us and predict our behavior, nudging us toward actions that ultimately reinforce those same predictions. Instead of serving us, they serve us to advertisers, other corporations and political campaigns, based on our likes, our browsing history and our web searches.

Users of these services unwittingly train the artificial intelligence that will make these predictions more accurate, and gig workers train the AI that will replace them, as we fill out CAPTCHA after CAPTCHA, and apps on our phone record every movement and action that we take on our phone. Whereas once the web promised to democratize content and unite us across physical spaces, today’s social networks divide us and self segregate us into extreme ideologies. Nuance and centrism, which do not translate well to the binary language of machine learning, has given way to self segregation and extreme views. And gig workers and apps of the ‘sharing’ economy, are further alienated by these technologies. Rather than building communities and solidarity, between the workers of these platforms, they are isolated and exploited.

This last point is where I would wave my magic wand. A gig service that brings tech workers together, instead of siloing them. A platform where the gains are distributed back to the network participants. A system in which equity is earned by participation by those that work. A cooperative system that encourages healthy, long term growth, not one that is driven by exponential gains for early-stage venture investors.

The current systems that exist today foment a race-to-the-bottom mentality, as price pressure continuously exerts downward pressure on laborers, externalizing costs onto the consumer, (think self-checkout lines in grocery stores,) or to the commons, (i.e. environmental pollution by fossil fuel companies.) Imagine, a worker-run company, where decisions are made for the good of the workers, not the shareholders.

I fully acknowledge that there are no technological solutions to our political problems, but there may be solutions which help us reverse the damage that has been done over the past 40 years. I have big hopes for the types of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) that are possible using smart contracts like those on the Ethereum network. I am skeptical that we will get there by accident. The longer that our software developers and designers work without thinking these problems through, the harder it will be to address them down the road. We need to have these discussions, and think through the consequences of the technology that we are creating. Because ultimately, while the next generations of Zuckerbergs and Bezoses (Bezii?) may just want to change the world, what they’re ultimately changing will be us.

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Leaping

I am continuously conflicted between maintaining my anonymity and outing myself. On the one hand, I feel the need to maintain a coherent identity between daHIFI and my real life persona, which has several areas of responsibility that I maintain. On the other hand, I am continuously trying to explore my voice and come to terms with certain aspects of my life that I’m not comfortable talking about publically in this format. I’m not sure how to resolve this issue.

I’ve got my foot in a few other projects over the years which have been left in certain states of abandonment recently, and I’ve felt the drive to pick them up and start dusting them off. This blog, and my daily posts, are serving as a bit of a routine to get me in the habit of writing and creating again. I don’t think that, given my numerous responsibilities, that I could maintain this habit and everything else that I do, and resurrect these projects as well. One would take from the other. I would want to maintain some sort of cross-posting scheme, what search engines call the canonical link, whether I post it on one of my controlled blogs or Medium, or some other site. Call it legacy-building or what have you, but I want to have one place to point to for my body of work. Part of me is hoping that eventually I’ll have enough for a book, and can compile what I’ve put here into something. We shall see.

Of course, there’s the whole pesky ‘earning a living’ thing that I have to contend with. I’m in a bit of statis at the moment, with my day job. I don’t think I’ve gotten a raise since I went salary about five years ago, and the job provides no benefits. My wife is civil service, which provides our medical insurance. She’s been out-earning me for some time now, which doesn’t bother me, since I see the tradeoffs between the freedom that I have at my job, and what I see as the lack thereof at hers that we both contend with.

I work from home and have a great deal of freedom over both my schedule and my priorities. Although my primary role is as the sole service provider within our organization, I deal with most of the break-fix work as it comes up, and deal with projects at my own pace and schedule. I don’t take vacation as often as I should, as I really don’t need to. My schedule is light enough that I have plenty of time to relax, and since I work from home, I can take as many breaks as I need to. Whereas my wife is now attempting to design a life that she doesn’t need to take a vacation from, I’m already there for the most part. Sure, I have the odd call every few weeks that forces me outside of a reasonable schedule, but for the most part, from what I can tell, I’m working part time hours for full time pay.

That said, I’d probably handicap myself for anywhere between 30-50 percent of the salary that I would command if I did work full-time. I’m probably being conceited, but I think that if I did what I do at a government or larger corporation, I would have a thirty percent raise right off the bat, not to mention 401k and other perks that I don’t have now. But, given my history of failure with other firms, I think I’m happy right here where I am, for the most part. I can fulfil my obligations (as I see them) to my employer, maintain a healthy pace that doesn’t burn me out, and spend several hours a day moonlighting in various forms, building things until the day when I’m ready to step aside, or step up elsewhere.

There’s a saying, “people do as little work as they can to keep from getting fired, and employers pay as little as they can get away with to keep people from quitting.” That perfectly sums up the equilibrium that I have at my job. There’s another saying as well. “The thing that you want is on the other side of your fear.” And I’ve definitely been staring at that jump for some time, wavering between action and inaction. Whether this daily exercise is just me grinding my gears in an ultimately futile effort, just to give myself an excuse to keep from doing something more drastic remains to be seen.

Right now, I am just giving myself the space to think and plan out what it is I want from life, and what I will do to achieve it.

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Professionalism

Tomorrow marks the start of my last year at university, where I’ll be finishing up my bachelors degree in computer science with a computer science minor. I’m only attending half-time, and the two of the four classes I need to finish are a professional workforce development course. Obviously, this is going to take a good deal of time away from everything else that I’ve been doing, so I’ve labored to unload as many projects that I can. That said, these are writing intensive courses, and I don’t know what kind of time commitment that’s going to take. Obviously, taking thirty to sixty minutes a day is going to be hard to fit in, but I’m going to be staying on top of the assignments to be able to fit that in.

That said, there may be room for crossposting. In the past, I’ve published writing assignments from class to Facebook or Medium in the past, so I expect I’ll find ways to kill two birds with one stone. That said, one of the first tasks is to share my thoughts on what it means to be a professional. Specifically, the characteristics a true professional must have.

Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching.

C.S. Lewis

My dad taught me his work ethic, and while I’ve been slow to get going some times, I’ve I’ve never had a problem focusing on a task once I’d made my mind up to execute. Obviously, there’s a difference between personal tasks and professional ones, but I’ve always hustled my butt off. Always. Even when I didn’t have the ability, or wasn’t the best, I could still keep going, driving toward the finish line. But beyond the drive, integrity is probably the most important trait one can have. Your reputation takes a lifetime to build, but can be destroyed in an instant. And taking shortcuts, or otherwise cheating a client or task will come back to haunt you.

There are lots of other answers that people will give as an answer to this question, but I think the question is the wrong one. When people talk about characteristics, they’re really discussing a trait, or a skill. One of the most valuable lessons that I’ve learned lately is about choosing the people that I work with. Whether you’re hiring for a position, taking on a client, or choosing a new job, the most important questions that ultimately need to be asked are around values.

Values are the deep-seated beliefs that motivate behaviors; people will fight for their values, and values determine people’s compatibility with others. Abilities are ways of thinking and behaving. Some people are great learners and fast processors; others possess common sense; still others think creatively or logically or with supreme organization, etc. Skills are learned tools, such as being able to speak a foreign language or write computer code. While values and abilities are unlikely to change much, most skills can be acquired in a limited amount of time (e.g., most master’s degrees can be acquired in two years) and often change in worth (e.g., today’s best programming language can be obsolete in a few years). It is important for you to know what mix of qualities is important to fit each role and, more broadly, with whom you can have successful relationships. In picking people for long-term relationships, values are most important, abilities come next, and skills are the least important.”

Ray Dalio – Principles, #45

I’ve been at my current firm for almost seven years now, and I’ve sat on the side through a number of hiring interviews during that time. Ultimately we’ve been disappointed with those hires that we’ve taken on, and I couldn’t really understand why until I read Dalio’s principles a few months ago. Every time I sat at that table with someone’s resume in hand, I was always focused on the skills. We were hiring for a position, an immediate need. And while I may have touched briefly on some of those deeper abilities, we almost never discussed the values that drove a person. A lot of your standard interview trick questions may have been originally designed to get into some of those values, but I think they lost meaning the more they became rote. And it’s hard to get to know someone in that short timeframe.

So while we may have chosen hires that were capable of performing the skills that were needed at the time, we handicapped our future growth. We wound up with employees who weren’t motivated to keep learning new skills as business needs changed, that were using the workplace as a dating pool, or who were incapable of documenting their work properly. And make no mistake, I’m no angel myself. Most of the jobs I’ve had over the years have been failures. And this may be my privilege talking, but I’m not afraid to be fired any more. And I’m not afraid to fire a client if they don’t align with our values. I’m at the point now where I can say ‘no’. I’ve realized that a lot of what comes my way is going to distract me from what really matters, and what I’d rather be working on.

I’m forty years old and still trying to figure out what my personal mission statement is. I may not be able to spell it out, but it’s there. I think ultimately it’s about service, and passing on what one has learned to others and helping them along. It’s about building connections and community. Hoarding knowledge is ultimately futile. I think lately I’ve been thinking that if I have an idea and someone else can do it better, then by all means, let them. I’ve got to focus on the things that I can do better than anyone else. What’s my niche? If someone brings something to me, the first thing I ask is ‘am I the only one that can do this,’ and that usually determines my answer. There’s other factors to be considered, of course, but I try to stick to that as much as possible these days.

One last concept that I’ll leave here is the concept of life as a multi-armed bandit problem, where we’re always exploring and experimenting and figuring out ways to exploit that knowledge that we’ve gained. Having this framework in mind and knowing when it’s time to put in the work to experiment build those relationships and reputation, and when it’s time to focus on that one thing that is going to bring you success — that’s key.

But hey, I’m no expert yet. I’m still learning too.

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Starting is easy…

So it looks like we are slowly moving into the business of managing websites and social media accounts. This site has been around in various forms since October 2004, and here we are, 15 years later, still trying to make something of it. Wow.

My first website was called StereoNet. It was a small little thing I put together back in the late 90’s, probably around 1998-99 or so. RealPlayer, the first audio/video streaming application, had been out for a few years, and you could actually listen to music in real time for the first time. Before then it you were limited to low-fi tracker music, based on samples, or by downloading MP3s. This was before broadband was rolled out everywhere, meaning that you would spend eight to fifteen minutes downloading a three minute song. RealAudio was a major breakthrough at the time, and it was everywhere.

The experimental music site Beta Lounge was one of the first sites to really take advantage of the technology that is still around today. They’re still kicking around with their live broadcast shows, which run for 4 hours or more at a stretch. They’ve got over 22 years of shows up on their website. There were more sites out there that have fallen into the ether over the years, and escape my memory, but I spent a lot of time on them, listening to techno and dance music.

During this time, I was under 21, and too young to go to most of the bars and dives where most of the bands in the area would play. I’d been playing guitar for a number of years by then, and had been in several ‘bands’ myself, and liked chatting and hanging out with other musicians. One day, looking at one of the free zines that covered the local scene, I got an idea to create an online calendar for the bands playing, with a page for each band and samples of their music.

I didn’t have any problems getting the bands onboard. I’d take their demo CDs, rip them to a RealAudio file, and throw them up on a page with a picture and details. Then I spent too much time toying around with pretty coding tricks to design a calendar app from scratch, and eventually lost motivation. It was a major missed opportunity.

I eventually got involved in the rave scene, and tried to replicate some of what BetaLounge was doing with the DJs and clubs that I went to. I was too undisciplined, more interested in getting drunk, doing drugs, or getting laid, and eventually began what I call my ‘time in the wilderness.’ More lost opportunities.

This name, daHIFI, is a holdover from that period: digital audio high fidelity. I hung onto the name for it’s uniqueness, but here I am at forty, looking to remake myself and rebrand, if you will. I actually let the domain lapse one year, and it quickly got bought up by a squatter. I regretted letting it go, and wound up waiting them for another year, when they let it lapse and I snagged it back up. But now, daHIFI isn’t even unique, as there’s now a Belgium dub soundsystem that goes by the name.

So I don’t know if I would call it nostalgia, or regret, but there is a part of me that is disappointed that these previous projects weren’t successful. Not that I should be hard on myself for not having the follow through and the motivation to see things through. Regrets, I’ve had a few. Ultimately I’m not looking backward though. Just digging up the past to recollect the amount of wheel-spinning and fucking off that I’ve done for most of my life. I had a roommate who told me something once that “you can either work when you’re young, and play when you’re old, or play when you’re young and work when you’re old.” I think he was using it to justify why he was working so hard, and I think I’m using it today to justify how much time I spend ‘working’ on things now.

My wife has led a sort of inverted life to this. She feels like she’s done everything she was supposed to do, went to school, got a good job that she planned to stay and retire at. We’ve got the house, the kids, but now she’s too burned out and wondering how she’s going to design a life that she doesn’t need to take a vacation from. I don’t share the same concern, cause I think that I’m pretty much doing what I want. I tell myself that at least. I don’t know if I’m kidding myself, or have just settled into this life. I want more, sure, but at the end of the day, am I content with what I have? Absolutely.

In fact, as she and I have started dipping our toes into minimalist lifestyle, we’ve realized that we have too much. Too much house, too much stuff, too much debt. We’re caught between trying to build a life where our work is meaningful, and one where we can afford the life we want. The two of us ultimately have different ideals of our rich life, and that’s something that we’ll have to reconcile as partners and parents.

So we make plans to get our business off the ground and help build networks and community. We take on additional responsibility. We learn, and we keep building.

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Labor markets and pricing your time

As someone who’s been trying to take the plunge from employee to freelancer, I spend a lot of time thinking about pricing and value. The immediate comment that one might think of is what happens when someone retires from a job in the public or private sector, and goes right back into the organization, doing the same job at twice the pay. What usually doesn’t get mentioned in that conversation is the cost of doing business that salary or hourly employees don’t have to deal with: the payroll taxes, Social Security, healthcare, and all the other regulatory and accounting steps that need to happen as cost of doing business.

I’ve done some of everything in my career. Besides the hourly/salary track, I spent several years running my own small business. (I’ll cover that in another post, I promise.) I’ve worked at small firms, a Fortune 500 company, and was the first hire at the new franchisee that I’m still at almost seven years later. Besides information technology, I’ve done construction, telemarketing, day laborer, dishwasher, and busboy. I’ve been down to the point where I was living on couches for months. I’ve been on unemployment. I’ve been evicted after it turned out that the gent I was subleasing from was taking my rent money and spending it on drugs. There are other stories to tell about those down days, but this post isn’t about them. Today I’m up to the point where I have everything I need: loving wife, two beautiful children, steady paycheck, and my health.

Right around the time I took my current position purchased a business license. I’d done enough odd tech work that it seemed sensible to have one, even if it was just for a sole proprietorship. I’ve kept it up over the years, even when I wasn’t doing anything, just so I would be able to point back in a decade and say that the business is ten years old. Now that I’ve started to become more and more dissatisfied with the company (and the industry) that I’m working in, I’ve been putting more and more thought into what success is going to look like moving forward for me, and how I’m going to build those relationships moving forward.

One thing that I constantly hear from the freelance world, especially the creative side, is the non-clients who try to leverage free work for the magical exposure. As someone whose skills are a bit more technical, I don’t have to worry about that so much. I do have to deal with the near constant stream of familial support requests. I’ve become much better at saying ‘no’ to these. And I’ve become much better at putting a price on my time. There’s a freedom to it, of course, being able to adjust fees for various reasons. But software development gets a bit tricky, especially when one starts dealing with open source packages for most of one’s work.

So I’m starting small, right now. Charging a modest retainer for the clients that I think will bring me toward the career that I want. Right now I’m working with a small ‘venture’ firm — more of a small scale accelerator, if you will — where I’m managing domains and infrastructure. I feel that I’ll probably get sucked into more of the support stuff eventually, but it give me the freedom to start, again and again, on project for these brand new businesses. And while the pay isn’t enough to live off of, I can work on these small projects, solving some real business problems, and earning stake in some of these nascent small businesses.

I know that the current paradigm of managed services, managing small businesses networks, providing admin and helpdesk support, is doomed. Even here in our market, there’s too many players. Too many people who think they can do it. Race to the bottom so to speak. Specialization in cybersecurity is the hotness right now, but most small businesses are loathe to take things seriously, or just don’t care. I think the big money moving forward is in business process and automation. What Celerity and others call Robotic Process Automation. A lot of the businesses I deal with are headed by boomers. Service companies, HVAC, medical and dental providers. These independent shops are starting to age out. And I don’t see the next generation rising up to fill the gap.

There’s a lot more to unpack with today’s economy, with regard to skilled and unskilled labor. People taking on more side hustles. I know for me it’s more of a creative outlet that what I’m doing now, but I see how hard it is to maintain good help with the compensation that can be afforded by some of these companies. We just had a roof put on our house last week, and the owner and most of the crew were a bunch of old, weathered men who looked like they were going to be doing it until they dropped dead. The rest of the crew were a bunch of younger hispanic guys. We’ve got generations of American’s, (myself included,) who have traditionally been taught to look down on the manual trades.

I’m not sure how things are going to turn out in the next decade, but we are rapidly approaching a point where the only ones capable of doing the job are either too old to do it, too tired to care, or too expensive to hire.

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Jack of all trades

I seem to oscillate between obsession and undecidedness most of the time. Either I have a hobby that I attack with full throated-ness, or I’m stuck flitting between one thing or the other in rapid succession. My wife jokes about my six-month hobbies, and whether she likes them or not: cooking, auto simulations, politics, crypto, and so on, &c… She says she like the cooking one the most. My mother is the same, going through phases of creativity in different projects: craft painting, stained glass, hiking, feltcraft, and so on, &c…

The problem was worse when I was a child in school. I never really had deep relationships with anyone, at least those with the opposite sex. Maybe in hindsight that’s not a bad thing, but growing up it felt like I was attracted to a number of girls and it felt like ‘going with’ someone closed the door on others, and I was always glad to be around any number of girls in school. Of course, there were always the ones that weren’t interested or otherwise unavailable that I always fell hard for. My wife, when we were in classes together, was always involved with some dude and I was like another one of her girlfriends, listening to her escapades and so on. It was part of pattern I seemed to be stuck in until my mid-twenties, when I got into pick-up culture. But that’s a story for another day.

The way in which I’ve been deeply committed to whatever obsession du jour has been has influenced my career in many ways. Since computers have been at the heart of many of them, I’ve been able to grow up with a set of skills that has benefited me greatly professionally. In a way, I still consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, as I can’t really say that there’s one thing that I excel at more so than anyone else around me. If I had to pick one, I might say that I possess a confluence of technical ability and business acumen, but I don’t really think that’s even my strong suit, given my failures in business and in technical projects as well.

I’m getting ready to head back to school in another week, to begin the last of two semesters I need before I finish my bachelors in computer science. I’m conflicted about this whole process. When I began going back to school after a 13 year hiatus, I saw a BS as a necessary box that I needed to check off to get past hiring algorithms, to take my salary to the next level. When I decided to take a ‘semester off’ all those years ago, it was because I didn’t know what I wanted to study, let alone what I enjoyed doing. It might actually have something to do with getting fired from my first tech job and being blinded by the quick money and glamorous life that I thought I had found during the heyday of sales and telemarketing at MCI.

What’s ironic is that now, after 5 years of part time schooling and tens of thousand of dollars in debt in pursuit of this degree, I am in no way interested in working for any company that would use it as a qualifier for hiring me. I have zero interest in going to work for a large corporation or other organization where people are interchangeable cogs in a machine.

Hopefully the groundwork I’m starting to lay will pay off, and that I’m not still scattering seeds that I’m hoping will pay off in one way or the other. Since politics has almost been completely shunted to the side, I can focus on school. But I still have a day job, and am picking up additional work still. I am handing off a project that I’ve spent dozens of hours on over the past year, as I don’t feel like I’m the one to drive if forward given my other commitments. It feels like another failure to be passing it on, uncompleted, but I have learned so much from it already, and was basically working for free on it anyways. Whether the promise of equity ever materializes or comes to amount to anything remains to be seen.

I still remain committed to crypto markets, despite all of the crazy action of the last eighteen plus months, and my stack of next actions and projects continues to fill and be sorted from next to later to someday. It will be nice to be able to close a project one day. Not one of the server implementation projects that I’ve done a million times, not something I’ve had to do to repair a car or a house out of necessity, but something that I thought of and brought completely into fruition. Until then, I’ll keep tucking unfinished projects aside, abandoning ideas, and plowing forward to the next thing.

Onward.

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Deciding to keep a secret

So today marks one month since I started my one-month blog challenge. I managed to only miss two days, minus a bit of backdating posts, but for the past week or so I’ve managed to make writing a habit; one of the last things I do before I turn off the screen for the day and wind down with some reading. We really didn’t have a goal going into this experiment, if you will, but wanted to treat it more as an exercise to see what happens. Part of me is a bit disappointed that there’s bit virtually no traffic to the site, but that was never the goal in the first place. All of the content has been written in a single session, with no review or editing afterward. Of course, that limits the quality and length of what I can write, I think around a thousand words or so in an hour. I have been known to write longer pieces for certain projects, but this has been more about getting into the habit and developing a voice, or coming up with various ideas to allow time for my mind to figure out what it wants.

I’ve been struggling with the question of pseudo-anonymity, identity and privacy here. There are enough people that I’ve met IRL that know who daHIFI is. I have taken steps in the past to obscure things by removing my real name from profiles where they could be found. But since I am no longer under the public eye, so to speak, I think it’s safe for me to be honest about things without having to worry. Part of me does value the fact that I have a bit of privacy here, that I’m putting things out into the world for others to see, but that I’m not advertising it to people within my family or networks.

On the other hand, I think some of the seeds of things I am working on here have potential for further work elsewhere. I want to continue to write daily, but likely will either have to devote more time than the 30-60 minutes a day that I do now, or will have to reduce the published output to allow more time to develop something. I just don’t know what that something is yet. In the past I’ve had random pieces pop the search engines and go crazy, so you never know what will work.

For now I’ll just keep writing for an audience of one. This is a place for me to write some of the things I’ve wanted to say for a long time, to deal with stuff that I’ve never wanted to admit, either to myself or to others. Again, being able to say things without worrying who’s reading it is liberating in it’s own sense, but being limited to anonymity isn’t really as comfortable either. I haven’t figured out a way to maintain the balancing act yet, hell, I haven’t even put out the high-wire yet. In a way, I’ve always struggled at figuring out what what I want.

I know that maintaining control of the medium is important, that’s why I’ve always felt more comfortable maintaining my own site than trusting a third party with it. Recent discussions about Tumblr’s great porn purge is another example of why this is important. I like Medium as a publishing platform, but conflating this identity with my normie one there, crossposting and maintaining separate publications just seems like the wrong way to go.

Perhaps part of the reason I’ve been loathe to ‘promote’ this space is that I’m disappointed with the archives, or with the lapses over the years. Perhaps I’m afraid of it being ignored, and so by making sure that it’s ignored I can inoculate myself against any feelings of rejection. Who knows. Maybe there are things that I haven’t said yet that I’m not ready to write — there are — and that I’m giving myself space to grow comfortable with the idea of getting that out in the open.

So for now, we’ll do as we have with the other habits that we’ve picked up lately, and extend it out further. Maybe I can find a way to integrate this private life with my public one. Maybe they’ll stay separate and I’ll just have to accept that. Maybe no one will read these words but me and the search engine spiders. Maybe one day I’ll write a post that no one else has and that finds an audience, guiding me where to go next.

For now, I’ll just keep following my own voice, and will keep writing.

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Pity party

I was listening to James Altucher this morning while making the commute into the office this morning. I usually work from home, every two weeks or so I have to go into the office to pick up equipment so I can do an onsite job for a client. On a good day with no traffic I can make it in 25 minutes, most days the commute is about twice that, and on most weekdays, if I’m not careful to beat the afternoon rush hour, I’m stuck for an hour or more. Anyways I listen to podcasts in the car, and that’s how I happened to be listening to Altucher and Scott Galloway on the way in this morning. 

Galloway is the author of “The Algebra of Happiness”, and has a lot to say about fulfillment and meaningfulness. A lot of what he had to say made me realize what I feel like I’m lacking in my life right now, mainly the lack of meaningful relationships in my life. In the last eight weeks I’ve had maybe three conversations with people that have lasted more than five minutes. My wife and I talk, of course, and have conversations on the phone or in chat through work, but I think I dumped all my friends years ago and haven’t maintained any close social connections in a long time. 

A day ago I was re-reading When To Leave Your Job, and was just checking off the boxes:  you can no longer influence positive change? CHECK. you can no longer engage in what you do? CHECK. You’ve lost faith in the vision and direction of the company? ABSOLUTELY.  And I realized that August is here, and I had planned to be gone from this job last Thanksgiving. And this past week has just been more of the same. Frustration from the same problems. 

Not to sound like a pity party, but Galloway really had me thinking as I was listening. I realized that while I felt like I had brushed off June’s loss, I really hadn’t. I’m still mourning. I may have rationalized it or whatever to seem too cool, but I’m in that dead zone following a failed project where I’m still struggling to figure out what’s next. So I threw myself at various things: fasting, meditation, sobriety, coding. Trying to fill what’s missing with something. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe there’s some self-loathing or low self-esteem that’s still lingering from when I was a child or something that’s holding me back. I don’t know. 

Maybe I’m conflating failure with rejection. Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis. Maybe I’m just cranky from giving up the drink for a month and going on and unplanned 36-hour fast. All I can do is recognize what’s going on and try to be cognizant of my behavior. Maybe I’m on the downswing of the pendulum of happiness. Maybe I’m just being to hard on myself. 

My wife accused me of being miserable the other day as I was being Mr. Bossypants to the kids and yelling or something over something trivial. I’ve often repeated the refrain that “happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember.” I’m not sure if that’s the mind-blowing insight that I thought it was when I first heard it, or whether it’s just a load of crap that I tell myself to justify being a miserable bastard half the time. I don’t know. My usual stoicism doesn’t seem to be doing the trick. Maybe I just need to get laid. 

 

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Summer’s almost gone

I spend a lot of my reading. Most of it, in fact. I work in tech, so I’m usually always in front of a screen. I’m usually looking up things in a web browser, coding in an IDE. And when I take a break from the screen I’m usually with a book or a magazine in front of me. I spend a great deal of time on Medium and Twitter. (I gave up Facebook a long time ago.) I have several magazine subscriptions, and enjoy bringing my kids to the library weekly, where I’ll often snag a book or two from the twenty-five cent shelf, much to my wife’s dismay. In spite of the minimizing that we’re doing, books and magazines are the one exception that I’ve allowed myself.

This blog has been through so many iterations, and has been around for so long, that I think blogrolls were still a thing when we first started doing it. I’ve thought about adding one back to the sidebar, links to a few of the magazines and the podcasts that I ‘consume’ regularly. I’ve also considered adding reviews of the magazines, or at least a highlight of each issue. We’ll see how that goes.

I haven’t written about politics in some time. It’s been 8 weeks since the last election, and my withdrawal from the space has been pretty absolute. Besides my other normie Twitter account, I’ve managed to stay out of things completely for the past month and a half. I think that may be changing soon. I could care less about this November’s elections, and I’ve already been contacted by a candidate for next spring’s city council race that would like my help. Frankly, I’ve been enjoying not having to worry about my schedule so much that I’m not sure I want to go back to it anytime soon.

My schedule will be getting crazy very soon. School starts back up and I’ll have two classes added on to work, family, and the various side projects. I’ve got 3 weeks to wrap things up and make room on my plate to focus on that. Given how chill things have been lately, I’m going to have to drop something if I’m to maintain the same level of zen.

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I hate marketing

I’ve been wondering what to make of this blog. I’ve had it around for years, and I’m in the middle of a challenge to myself to post every day for a month. I’ve been cheating a bit, back-dating some posts to keep my streak going, but other than that I’ve been maintaining a good run. I don’t have a specific minimum word count, but I’m making an effort to type at least a few paragraph. No single link video posts or whatever as I might have done in the past.

I don’t really know what I want to do with this. I guess I’m using it as an alternative to journaling. I’m kind of interested to see what will happen at the end of the 30 days. I’m trying to keep it low-effort, not worry about SEO, analytics and all that. Still I can’t help but look at the stats from time to time, just to verify that no one is looking. It’s like my anti-dopamine to all of the like-hunting and attention seeking that I might be engaging in on other social media.

I’ve always desired to keep a bit of semi-anonymity in this place. I’ve scrubbed all the obvious places for my proper name, but as I’ve said before, anyone with the time or will could probably track me down in a few hours, if that. I like to think that I have the freedom to be honest here without having to worry about what others think, but I know that’s not true. I’m still not completely honest here either. I’m not ready to drop the wall quite yet.

Maybe that’s the point of this exercise, to give me 30 days to try and refine my voice, get some things off my chest that I’ve been meaning to for some time. And maybe I’ll have something true to say that might resonate. Who knows.

I spend a lot of time reading Medium and it seems like there’s a whole meta-category of articles from ‘professional’ content creators and tips for this, that and the other things. I’m not really sure I want to go that far into publishing and blogging, but I guess at this point it’s only natural.

I really must credit Seth Godin for giving me the inspiration to start this challenge. He told Tim Ferris that the most important thing he did for his business was to blog every day. I suppose I’m hoping to emulate his success in some way. Maybe soon I’ll be able to write more than one post a day to schedule them out and give myself a break. Right now I try to write early in the morning after meditating, but since I went to an hour it’s been a bit tougher. Especially with the wife out of town. There’s no room for oversleeping, so I find myself writing here at the end of the day.

Most of the time the biggest challenge is just figuring out what to write about. I’m keeping a clear head most of the time, but I’m going to have to start planning things out a bit more if I’m going to keep this up. Brainstorming topics and keeping a list in Airtable or somewhere that I can go to if I’m feeling a bit unenthusiastic. For now I’m happy to just sit down and hammer something out for 20 or 30 minutes, but at some point I’ll probably settle on a longer-form piece like I’ve written elsewhere. A few thousand words or something.

Next thing I know I’ll be doing SEO and going full marketing evil-genius. Testing headlines and optimizing for this and so on and on. I have a new client I’m working with that wants to do an e-commerce site on Shopify. This and the fact that I’ve been mucking around with Printsables for a small WooCommerce website I threw together quickly earlier this month is apparently enough for the YouTube algorithms to start throwing me all kinds of garbage ads in the middle of music listening. Just a bunch of annoying tech bros telling me how so-and-so made x number of dollars with this and that.

There was an infomercial that was pretty popular during the late 90s. Some MLM, most likely, but the pitch was that success and riches was all to be yours, “just by placing classified ads in newspapers.” I think the guy eventually went to jail for fraud, and Craigslist killed the classified business, but the game just moved online.