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I’ve been thinking about the relationship between friendship and therapy in our modern world. It’s become increasingly common to suggest therapy as the default solution for nearly every emotional challenge, as if talking to a professional is the obvious answer whenever life starts to hurt. Therapy can be valuable and sometimes necessary, especially for people dealing with clinical conditions or trauma. But I think we’ve gotten too used to professionalizing emotional support and forgetting what good friends are for.

Software engineers are likely familiar with the CAP theorem, coined by Eric Brewer. In essence, the CAP theorem states that distributed databases can have at most 2 of 3 attributes: consistency, availability, or partition tolerance (fault tolerance). In other words, you can have a database that is consistent and highly available, but not fault tolerant. Or, you can have one that’s fault tolerant and highly available, but isn’t always consistent (especially during network failures).

One harmful myth perpetuated by the various cultural medias is the idea that there exists some people in the world who have it easy, and aren’t struggling their way through life. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has mostly managed to fail upwards, which is probably the best outcome anyone can hope for. Even the billionaires claim to be having a real tough time getting through every day (although my advice to them would be to retire and let someone else get some money, because you guys have enough and at this point you’re just greedy).

There are 2 ways to go through life: you can either play the game, or you can play the metagame. The game is 1-dimensional chess, and the metagame is N-dimensional chess. You can apply this idea to just about everything in life. The easiest way to move from playing the game to the metagame is to think about every interaction in terms of incentives. Examining incentives is the easiest way to figure out what people want and how to turn win/lose or lose/lose transactions into win/win.

For a long time I was a futurist, and an optimist about technology in general. I agreed with the thesis that technology makes everything better over time. These days, I’m older and (maybe?) wiser, and I’ve become a lot more pessimistic about technology in general. Can our fossil fuel machines save us from the problem created by fossil fuels? 🤔

I still remember a time when leetcoding interviews were less common, and then all of a sudden, they became the norm. Even for jobs that have nothing to do with leetcoding, it seems that most “tech” companies have galvanized around the idea that before you can hire anyone they must first prove that they can adequately impress someone with their skills at coding during an interview.

The big news today is the US Federal Reserve’s big FOMC meeting. The expectation is that the Fed will announce a big rate hike, one of the biggest in decades. The previous rate hike amounted to 0.5%, and the expectation for today is 0.75%. While it’s entertaining watching Jim Cramer and his ilk share their opinions on various matters which–I think–they likely have no clue about, it’s even more interesting learning about how institutions like the Fed really have no clue what they’re doing.

By 2050, scientists predict there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans by weight. Last month, I found myself wandering around Muji, phone in hand, about to buy yet another kitchen gadget I didn’t need. That moment of consumer autopilot made me question: how much of my consumption actually improves my life versus simply contributing to our ecological crisis?

One thing that stood out to me around the 2020 Biden election was how many people seemed to think normalcy would just snap back into place if their guy won. As if someone in charge finally had the answers and the rest of us could go back to sleep. This appeal to authority pulls people away from what’s in front of them. They get hung up on personalities and characters instead of facts, outcomes, and systemic issues. Whether it’s Trump, Biden, Elon Musk, or any other public figure, the fixation makes it easier to ignore the actual problems.

One truth we all eventually have to face as we become fully formed adults (“grown-ups”) is that being right doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters is appearances, being in the right place at the right time, and your connections. This is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a while, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it. To do so, I can only think in terms of storytelling so that’s what I’ll do.