Optimizing Room for Me

 [Adapted from a ERE forum piece; intro was specific to forum, so I replaced it]

I have been thinking a lot about the roles I play in life and “what is missing” from them.  I had bottomed out at one point, got things a little better, and am trying to refine things to be ever better yet.  What happened to cause that initial “bottoming out?” (And yeah, it was bad).

So much attention is required to my child’s needs, my wife, family problems, and a social life that my wife has led us to in the denomination she grew up in (the United Methodist Church) that there just didn’t feel like much room for ... me. Or, really, I should say certain drives.  Yesterday I came up with the following “tweet” for Bluesky:

Three hungers of my soul not satisfied by the day-to-day roles I must play for others:

1. humor
2. intensity
3. curiosity

So that's what "me time" is about.

I have written some about how I have realized that humor doesn’t serve me at all.  But humor only whittles my ethos over time.  It is intensity that ruins my standing with people in an instant. Something that stood out to me from a book I recently read about how to get a job was the line “you can never be too enthusiastic.” Well, I can tell you that is absolutely bullshit.  If you’re even slightly too enthusiastic about the wrong thing, you are fucked. What would be accurate to say is “You can never be too enthusiastic about how you going to make the person doing the hiring money, or save them time if it isn’t their money... But it takes a kind of self-assuredness — sometimes bordering on delusion — to believe you’re going to get your fair share of value you might add.”

And I’ve always been a curious dude.  Maybe the one that causes me the least problems of the three, as people like talking about themselves, but asking too many questions still sends up weirdo signals. And I can’t name you a goal I have in real life that is helped by me sending up weirdo signals.

So I guess the most important thing for me about love is to be able to do it without going crazy. (And I now have more compassion for anyone who has). I am very much trying to do a Jekyll and Hyde/Civilization and It’s Discontents thing here in my life, and I am very thankful that I don’t have violent or kinky tendencies also thrown in the mix.

IT training did quite a bit to satisfy curiosity and intensity, at least while I thought there was some chance it was “going anywhere,” but after it became clear that it wasn’t, I have had to try to find other outlets. So even though I had quit Twitter years before in disgust, I joined Bluesky with two objectives 1) make sometime of my own. 2) stay out of fights. So far, so good on both counts.

... I fed a block of my most recent Bluesky posts into GPT absolute mode and asked it to guess about me and it had this to say:
 

Likely educated, literate in cultural reference and philosophical abstraction. Displays stable domestic life marked by idiosyncratic intimacy. Not performative—uses online space as lateral thinking sandbox, not identity construction. Socially functional but withdrawn from dominant status pursuits. High cognitive surplus repurposed into conceptual play, not monetization or public leverage.

To which I followed up with “In other words, I post like a total weirdo”
 

Yes. But it is principled weirdness—coherent, internally consistent, structurally motivated. Not erratic, not incoherent, not attention-seeking. You post like someone with surplus processing power rerouting through unconventional channels. It reads as eccentric to most because the default bandwidth of online expression is low-context, high-affect. You invert that.

Weirdness here is not defect but divergence—signal of an architecture misaligned with ambient demand.

It may not be much, but it helps to have somewhere that I can take a break from ambient demand.

And After the Grind?

[For John]

I’ve been going on a lot of long walks lately as I am still too heavy for jogging. It was on one those that I thought up this “tweet” for Bluesky:

To Aristotle, our wealthy would be misers.

In his "Nicomachean Ethics", Aristotle emphasizes the concept of virtue as the mean between extremes. When it comes to wealth and generosity, he sees liberality (generosity) as the virtue. Misers fall into the vice of stinginess, while the opposite vice is prodigality (wastefulness). From his view, a truly virtuous person gives the right amount, to the right people, at the right time, and for the right reasons — thus being a magnanimous man.

This liberality isn’t just about what we call charity.  I once heard Ed Cooke say in an interview that I cannot relocate that one of the best ways to be magnanimous was to throw what I believe he described as a “slamming party.”

On another walk, or perhaps it was another lap on the same walk, “magnanimous” became the answer to the question, “what am I supposed to do once I have made myself so employable that I become employed [1]?” So, instead of just being on a treadmill forever, always trying for more employment, I need another goal for my personage, including my wealth. Magnanimous.

Yet another walk, this one for sure at a different location, I imagined a magnanimous act: I should throw a party when I have kept my weight off for a year [2].  I remember the great party I threw at the end of my employment with last place I was long-term.  It was the end of the school year, and I bought everyone their first drink, and it was a great time where I could use my social skills of flitting around and knowing different thing about the people there, connecting, entertaining, being treated as the big shot by the wait staff... I walked on, got pumped (in more ways than one) -- so why not throw a party both when I get to the target wait as well? I do not have current co-workers, but I do have a Sunday school class that I am in, and men’s group within that.  Oh, it’s so on.

It is worth noting that I do not intend for these parties to “pay off” in any economic sense. I am already plugged in enough with the group that if a “friend of a friend” had an opportunity for me, it would have happened already. Also, the school that I left and threw my first magnanimous party for is the same one where the administrator rat fucked me on an employment history check... though I will note none of the administrators were at that party, in spite of being invited. The point is the party itself, and it is money well-spent whether or not something comes back to you from it.

The most eye opening part of "Wonder Boy," the biography of Tony Hsieh was that during the period he was living in a compound in downtown Las Vegas, and called by the media the Mayor of Downtown Las Vegas, he at one point expressed frustration that a music festival he had funded did not turn a profit. This was during the peak of his post-Zappos utopianism, when he was trying to remake not just company culture but actual city blocks according to the principles in his book "Delivering Happiness." And yet, despite all his experiments in serendipity—serendipity being a word he used a lot, sometimes industrially—he couldn’t quite stomach the festival losing money. It was supposed to be part of a kind of social-engineering ecosystem: invest in culture, attract the right kinds of people, spark innovation, happiness follows. Except it also had to "work," meaning it had to scale or feed into some quantifiable network effect.

Sure, he was rich enough for the loss to be irrelevant—and he seemed to genuinely believe in these events as civic good, but could not quite accept that civic goods sometimes just cost money. He tried to write the book on happiness,but his models of happiness and applied social order did not include benefactors giving gifts that would not be monetized, and with great impatience [3].

It’s nice to know I can be a bigger man than that.

==========

[1] I got myself so buried, that it is has been a long process to get myself out. I knew that I could not do any of this in one swing, so to speak, but would only through the accumulation of small improvements. The rough idea has been to be 10% more employable each month, and I think that is basically have done.

[2] After all, keeping weight off is statically the harder thing to achieve.

[3] After Vegas, Hsieh would retreat to another, more closed compound in Park City, Utah. Here he tried another happiness strategy called 10X, where if you fulfilled his whims, you could bill him 10 times the cost. “Get me a soda,” could be worth $20 or more to you. How this is a strategy for “happiness” for anyone but the wealthy person making the demands was no longer the point. Hsieh also got into ketamine, with the God-complex that can lead to. Eventually, since he could no be bothered to move from spaces so cleaning people could temporary occupy them, he ended up living in filth. Whether there was any degree of foul play, or he was just being stupid with fire safety, his end is also part of the cautionary tale.