Fatherhood

I love building things, and I love hobbies, and I love all sorts of stuff. But creating life with another human that you love is literally the peak experience of being on the planet.

`3:13:10`

No. But there's been bigger transformations. I mean, imagine growing or being born in like 1880. Imagine seeing the First World War and the Second World War. Imagine seeing the airplane, the radio-... television. I mean, the transformation, and I think Peter Thiel makes this argument, that basically nothing has happened in the physical world in quite a long time. We've been stagnant. All the development has been in the digital realm. And as important as that is, it's actually not as consequential as we like to believe it is. Maybe AI will be that thing that is more consequential. It does seem to point that way. But there are other humans at other times who have lived through-... transitions that for them certainly would feel as momentous as what we're living through. And I think having that sense of history, that you're not that special in your sense of worries, in your anxieties. This was one of the great revelations of discovering the stoic writings. You have these guys 2,500 years ago dealing with very familiar dilemmas and challenges in their life, and recognizing that we're not so special in that regard, I think is a great liberation. Because then you think, "Okay, well, we have whatever, 200,000 years of human development before us, and they somehow made it through."

`3:14:51`

I read this book The Fourth Turning. You check that out. It talks about this notion of history working in cycles, and there are these, phases to history, and they name them and so forth. And the specific theory is not as important as just realizing that this is a... History is a circle, more so than just a straight line. And we are repeating many of the same patterns over and over again. They feel so unique to the moment. And whatever crisis we're dealing with right now feels so pressing and important until we zoom back a little bit in history and realize that the last one also felt so pressing and important to the people who lived through it.

`3:15:55`

I took not a big break, a little break, break from Max this summer, three weeks.

`3:16:21`

I've done that before. I just sometimes get the sense that X in particular is the most addictive form of information, entertainment, connection that exists in my life, and anyone that follow my X stream as I was on my flight over here would certainly go like, "That man is deeply addicted-

`3:16:49`

... to the connection." And yes, guilty as charged, which also means that occasionally I gotta cut it cold, because I do think you can break your brain. And over the summer in particular, for whatever reason, I had somehow managed to steer my feed, my algorithm, towards too much politics, and not enough tech, and not optimism, and not enough building. And even if I agreed with the politics and the angles that were being presented, I just didn't need-... that much of it.

`3:17:23`

And I think arriving at a place where you just go like, "Okay, that's enough." Not that... Like, it doesn't have to be something bad. I would also say after eating probably two, maybe three chocolate strawberries, I'd go like, "Okay, that's enough." Like, it's not that I don't like the chocolate strawberries, it's just, like, I don't wanna eat 17 of them. And I think X and the modern algorithms are very good at feeding you freaking 17 chocolate-covered strawberries.