I thought this would be cool to share. This is mostly lifted from my journal, with some editing for anonymity/privacy. People are often confused by how/why I go where I go and do the things that I do, and I hope that sharing my messy process might be interesting.
Sooooo uncertainty with the Lisbali crew reunion
I was a fuck yes to - reunion, living together, going through life together, building community together, deepening a relationship to a city I could imagine spending more time, going deep on circling together, building community that could persist/grow after leaving.
Yeah I feel a bit of the solution space/abyss opening up. A bit of a “back to the drawing board”, like wasted planning effort. Though there’s something to treasure in that excitement too. And I notice some contractions. Some sadness about the vision as originally conceived probably not quite happening, or at least not being sure of it.
I appreciate the feeling that I have in my chest. I feel connected to myself and my internals. Yay.I feel more open.
Soooooo there’s a million things I could do! Which is actually quite exciting! I also feel some pressure for being able to update people with my plans, if they’re changing. Some other various wants/things that I was looking forward to potentially dashed.
Soooo alright time to start listing things that I want (and could do) starting mid August
No TPOT portal in Porto rip
Spend more time in Seattle with family and J and B (and A?)
Spend more time in SF and see through some more crewing stuff
Go to LA and start repairing some relationships
Be in LA September
See C Taiwan December
Visit Taiwan family
Still meet up with Lisbali crew somewhere
Check out Asheville
Check out Central America/South America
Check out South Africa?
China? India?
Return to SEA
Do a solo trip somewhere
Microsolidarity EU summer camp
Tree week
The Garden
Tamera
ISTA
Circling (SAS training)
What’s P want to do?
Visit romantic interests
See where L is?
Sail
Coliving
See T
I want to take an inventory of “life building with” of people in my life. Or at least “living life together with”. That’s something that I enjoy about traveling is that we are living life together during it.
Pretty sure I want to be in LA Jan-Feb. Which leaves August-December open.
I feel weird about the bolding, I don’t want to limit myself to only those.
SAS starts October
I’m afraid of going too deep alone. I want to make sure I have peers.
Another angle is - where do I have peers?
I’m feeling a bit paralyzed. There’s too many factors swirling around and not an obvious yes.
So a few options I have:
Surrender and not decide anything until I start feeling some yesses - would involve just sticking around in Seattle til I feel like it’s time to leave
Scrounge up the strongest yes based on the info I have right now and lead with that
So with the Lisbali crew, I’m looking at - is there yes in there minus E (‘s commitment, at least). What would I be stoked to have 1 or more of them be part of?
I’d love it if they just came to me and followed me around and we collectively navigated into something we wanted lmao. Would I be a yes to going to, say, Estonia for August-October with T V E? Maybe?
Something about Tamara strikes me, as do communes and stuff. There’s a sense of “maybe it’s just a hard problem, and the best solutions out there are the best ones out there, there’s no silver bullet”. Like Tamara is figuring out how to do intergenerational stuff. They’ve navigated a bunch of challenges that I haven’t navigated. If I show up to Tamara and don’t like it, what are the odds that I’ll be able to do better than them? It blackpills me on the “start a community in the middle of nowhere” idea. It’s not like I’m immune from shadows, I’m sure people have tried to navigate their shadows better than me in context of leading a community.
My suspicion is that a business simply doesn’t work, finance wise, if people work the way I would want to work, which is free of self betrayal. Race to the bottom, there’ll always be a business with people that work harder. I suspect there’s a lot of alpha in actually giving a shit about people though. Would have to put my money where my mouth is, enter the arena, blah blah blah.
I want to work on something with people for like 10 hours a week. People that I like and care about. In person. On something that I care about. Doing activities that I enjoy.
This is kinda the SAS training, all of the trainings, they’re just shorter term.
I like C’s project around “jailbreaking” people. I feel like I’ve been working on that solo for a while subconsciously and trying to jailbreak my friends. To some results, not what I’d do now if I could design something actively. At this point, actively designing a way to influence my friends feels completely inappropriate without informed consent.
These feel like hard conversations to have with people. It feels hard to communicate and be heard if I shared - I have a lot of considerations, many of which are challenging to how other people relate to their lives. And most people don’t have much experience of what I’m talking about and so can’t really relate to it. Or are my friends, have more context and relatability, but have partiality to where I land, or an impulse towards problem solving. I could just request exploration and understanding and not problem solving though, name when it’s happening.
I’m annoyed that the plans falling through inspires this “attempt to take inventory of my life, problem solving” process. The panic and then the trying to figure it out. Although the other angle is that it’s a cool opportunity to take inventory of myself and my prioritize again, to rephrase them, to refine my understanding of them, as I’m doing here. No doubt this looks different from the last time I went through a process like this. Like new reflections/syntheses on seeing people, going through life with people, the challenges of starting communities and stuff, etc.
There’s a sense of “there’s no free lunches out here”. Everything that is worth building takes work, and doing stuff I’m not excited about. Can I learn to be excited about that stuff? And can I honor my own pace? And not devote myself naively.
Running the crewing program has involved doing shit I don’t love doing - logistics, messaging people, insecurity about people not showing up, insecurity and tenderness about people not having more time and caring. There’s no world where the thing just happened without some effort/energy. Though I didn’t really hate any of it. It all felt growthful, I simply didn’t do it if I didn’t want to, I ignored plenty of messages, allowed it to unfold at its own pace. Tying it to my sense of self worth lmao, but also curiosity and excitement, was enough to be motivated. I don’t think I was taking substantial psychological damage in doing the logistics, at least no more than I do on a daily basis just organizing/planning/coordinating with people.
There’s some small sadness in “I wish coordination was easier, I wish the people could just be here with me and I could walk over and it would be easier.”
There’s a way in which just being colocated with a shared project is a gift. I haven’t had that in a long time.
Damn Johnson working a job arc incoming at some point. Maybe? Wild.
I suspect I’d enjoy something like running SAS. People come to me, pay me, to be together and with each other and we connect and bond and experience the fullness of life. There’s still something transactional about it though, there’s no clear sense of “oh and we’re going to be going through life together from here on out”, although it might include that. Like people come to me for a deeply connective committed container with each other. And really I’m not doing anything other than being myself.
I want SAS to happen here, in SF or in LA or something. Not in Europe. I want it to be immersive and residential for 6 months, not mostly online with a few in person weekends.
The weaker version of this is Sleepawake (well, weaker than the version I want), which has a more US based cohort.
Hm part of me is now wishing I could’ve gone to Sleepawake.
Going through life for most people in this part of the world involves earning money for safety/stability. I think my strategies are and have always been:
Jailbreak people from that
Embrace coexisting on the margins of others doing that
Embrace doing stuff that earns money to spend time with them
I always liked option 1 most. Embracing 2 has been the main intention of returning to the US this time around. Embracing 3 feels the most edgy, in that I have the strongest aversion to it.
The thing about the work environment is that it not only encourages and normalizes self betrayal, but relational betrayal also. So the likelihood that spending 8 hours in a work environment with a close friend meaningfully builds trust is not actually very clear to me. If anything it probably builds resentment, though I feel generally good about my capacity for repair, and this could be a good test/challenge for that.
The likely end of this one is something like “get on a team at a middling tech company with friends and do the minimum while fucking around and enjoying each others company”.
There’s nothing I’m really that passionate about creating. Other than a family and a strong community/support network for that it. Which is an enormous undertaking, that I suppose my reflection on places like Tamera are like “man that’s a lot of work do I actually want that? I kinda want to be embedded in the world. And do I think I’d actually do that great at it?”
I suspect that keeping it to fewer real relationships rather than trying to grow it would make it more manageable. My current challenge is sourcing people that I actually want to do that work with/for.
Like there’s plenty of people that I’d be interested in doing that with/for if there was reciprocal motivation, but when you add reciprocal motivation, the list is short.