November 7, 2024

s19e05: The first stage is denial

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Thursday, 7 November, in Portland, Oregon.

We have a dog now, so I walk the dog.

Sometimes -- most of the time! -- I do not look at my phone when I walk the dog.

The leaves have gone the sort of rich autumn colour and smell and texture and density that you can just imagine I wrote an incredibly evocative, emotional description that just brings you right there. They’re beautiful, when I stop to look at them.

The dog sometimes smells them.

It’s getting colder.

The sky is sort of an unreal blue. The sun is right there, right in your face.

It hasn’t been raining as much.

0.1 Events

Nothing to report at this time.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

I mean, kind of.

1.1 The first stage is denial

It’s not that I’m denying the outcome of what happened on Tuesday. Of which I don’t really want to talk about to be honest, and I’m not even sure anyone wants to hear about. But hey: you chose to subscribe to a newsletter that is, at best 95% stream-of-consciousness that might hit the landing. This isn’t for you, it’s for me, and you’ve decided to come along for the ride.

I have not chosen to go to a major news site since about 8pm on Tuesday.

I have not looked.

This is a big deal. It feels like a big deal, like a viscerally big deal to me.

I am a news junkie. I want to know all the things and be on top of all the things. I am even so proud, before my fall, that I have the slightest awareness of all the stuff that’s going on that I don’t know and am keeping on top of.

Put all that news straight into my veins. Give me all the information, I want to cosplay aleph from Ellis’ Global Frequency, help coordinate the teams around the world who are going to fix this shit. I want to be the guy in the chair, I feel great being the guy in the chair.

I can do this.

I do not want to do this.

I do not want to look.

I already feel sick and I don’t want to feel worse.

It is so jarring to be this way now. I don’t know how long it will last. I have such strong muscle memory of typing in wapo and nyt (yeah, sue me) into my browser that it felt like an unthinking reflex action.

I do not want to look.

1.2 Then anger

I am skipping anger. I am too tired to be angry. I’m exhausted.

If anything, I am slightly angry about how exhausted I am. I am fucking tired.

It appears, though, that I am writing through it. Or writing at all.

1.3 Then bargaining

There is no bargaining.

There is no quarter to be given, there is no appeasement, there is no other side for there to be both, there is no if we only did this.

There is no room for any of that. You do not bargain with the jingoistic fascist scorpion that’s been telling you it’s a scorpion and has a picture of itself in the dictionary under “scorpion”.

1.4 The fourth stage is depression

I believe the term is burnout.

I was already burnt out before Tuesday. I was already burnt out who knows how long ago.

I was talking to a friend the other day about just how tired I’m feeling, and not just the regular tired, but... a sort of different tired.

Then I wrote a little post on LinkedIn (of which the background is also a source of exhaustion) about a new kettle and the half-assed product registration flow that your company can buy as-a-service.

Time was that I would get angry about the wasteful product registration flow. I would start writing about it on Twitter. I would probably try to be a bit funny. And then I might take that and then turn it into a newsletter bit, or do the newsletter bit and then turn it into a bunch of tweets.

Handily, writing about all of that in a lot of cases would lead to work!

People would read it and share it and pass it on, and somehow, someone would email me and say: “Hey. I’ve got this problem, and maybe you can help?”

But Twitter doesn’t exist anymore.

And we’re in a pandemic that we’ve collectively decided to, I don’t know, surrender to.

And the economy kind of cratered but kind of came back but also kind of cratered, and in the sense of “you can’t go home again”, we never went home again, there’s no going back to how things were.

So now I’m led to believe that instead of posting¹ on Twitter the place where we do these things now, if part of the object is to um work on your personal brand, is LinkedIn.

It’s already exhausting, and it feels doubly exhausting to post on LinkedIn.

At least posting on Twitter was... well, not fun exactly, because it was sometimes a hellhole but of course it was our hellhole with the friends we made along the way, almost some sort of friendhole?

But LinkedIn is just one place, and while I’ve written before about it being, in general, good that we have more specialized spaces rather than one giant one where context collapse is the collateral damage of making someone’s line go up and to the right so they get more RSUs or whatever, the thing about LinkedIn is that it’s the professional place where you are supposed to be professional.

And that supposed-to-be-professional is not the part of me that I enjoyed being or showing or performing or typing on Twitter.

Part of what I like and purposefully set out to do with this newsletter was for it to be smush. It would be about the personal and the tech because you can’t separate the two, and I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I see it as a strength.

So now I have to perform in the professional space and do the networking if I am to do all the peacocking and find interesting people who have tried every which way to solve their problem and need a different approach.

I can accept it in the abstract. I don’t like it, and it feels taxing and it feels fake.

A friend pointed out that “just post what you posted on Twitter, LinkedIn is dying for that kind of stuff anyway” and yes, she’s right, I totally get that, but it also feels weird and squicky. I chose to be on Twitter in a much different way than I choose to be on LinkedIn.

But anyway, I think this is what’s been contributing to a general sense of malaise over the last few months. I am tired and burnt out and I’m not going to say it’s mourning Twitter because enough has been said about that. It’s that my job -- the part of my job that’s showing people what I do so they can hire me to do it -- has gotten significantly less fun, too.

I have to do it in a different place now, where I have a different relationship with a different audience with different motivations. I feel like I have to pretend to be someone else.

I’m tired of it.

I also hate that it sometimes takes a good forty years to figure out who you are and who you want to be.

1.5 And then there’s acceptance

This is not about that kind of acceptance, the surrendering kind of acceptance.

I have written before -- a lot -- about what it was like to grow up feeling like you didn’t have much in common with the people around you, but when you got on the network, you found people and places where you felt like you belonged.

If that’s you, and no matter at what stage of the network’s evolution it happened, then odds are you still have ties with those people. A post went around saying GenXers are unique because they’re the first generation to have portable social networks, having seen them grow and die and grow and die, to recreate those graphs [sic] time and again.

It has always felt easier to express myself through writing, which has meant through a screen, through a keyboard that I’m lucky enough to type fast enough to keep up with my brain, and through a network where my expression reaches other people.

On some good days I’m even prepared to accept that my writing has in some way helped people, or meant something to them, or to believe people when they tell me I’m a good writer and let that praise inside.

What I’m saying is that what’s hard for me is to make friends with strangers when, like, we’re physically co-located? [sic] You know, like “in a room” and “with strangers” where it’s harder to “run away and hide”. When I can’t write a thousand or more words so you get to know who I am beforehand, so that there’s at least some self-selection.

Weirdly, the writing and exposing yourself first, in public, is some sort of double-edged rejection filter. Yes, you’re opening up to a bunch of people who might fling abuse at your direction or say that you’re wrong. But on the other side, I can say that my experience has been that the kind of people I would like to be friends with end up self-selecting themselves into, well, doing friend-type-things.

But it’s always been easier through an intermediary.

Now, though, more than ever, there’s the reminder that everything starts locally, that the thing you can do in “situations like this” is to concentrate on those around you and help those around you and, you know, be pro-social and all that stuff.

Do I have to accept that? Do I have to grin and bear it and go and meet people?

It is annoying because I know it will work. Because when I have gone to the speakers dinner or the mixer or whatever instead of hiding in my hotel room after doing the talk, I have always met someone interesting and had interesting conversations. And maybe made a friend.

But it’s hard and it’s work and it’s effort. I tell my wife when she can tell that I do not want to go to the thing, which might even include “you should at least know who some of the other parents at the school are” that sure, I can turn it on. I can pretend to be someone else. I am not entirely sure if this a mentally healthy thing to be able to do. I mean, is it not some kind of... social dissociation? Yes, I can pretend to be the kind of person who is outgoing and gregarious and makes friends at social events. I can turn that on. Is that not just a form of well-practiced masking?

But do I have to accept, now, that the way back from this hellscape, from this mask-off, base, “I want someone to tell me there’s an enemy and it’s their fault and they’re going to be dealt with and I’ll be able to afford rent and a bigger tv and my business won’t suffer and if that’s okay, then that’s what’s most important to me, and anyway this person sounded like they were going to do that more than the other person”, that the way back from that is for people to people with each other?

I suppose I might have to.

I very nearly went on a tired political rant about why what happened happened. But like I said: I’m tired.

I’m tired and I’m scared because I like to think I’m smart and I can think about potential outcomes, that because I can do that, I am good at what I do, which is handwaves (which, honestly is part of also what’s getting me down). I do not want those outcomes.

I did a Speechify on the socials the other day, when I said something like this:

Look, the institutions failed. They did not deliver what we needed to the degree of urgency and timeliness needed. They preserved a fiction and a compact that has been violated. They don’t work when that compact has been intentionally violated. “Oh, but the courts” has always been “yes, over the course of years” by which time the harm has been done, and restitution isn’t just monetary damages. Remedies are too late for those who were already hurt. Remedies don’t bring people back, they are for the future, and anyway, what is a remedy without monitoring and enforcement?

I didn’t write that much on the socials. It was shorter. The text box here is very big.

I wrote The Thing. I said:

Nobody’s coming. It’s up to us.

And then some wag on the internet replied with “there is no us”, and honestly that could have meant a bunch of things, but I am big enough at that instant to be open to consider: well, what?

And I guess there is no us.

There’s only me, and you.

Again, and again, and again. But it starts with me, and you, and maybe even a you who’s much, much closer than I wanted to consider before.

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I won’t ask how you are. I’ll just say: you can hit reply, and I always read the replies. Always.

There’s me, and there’s you. That’s where it starts.

My best,

Dan

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