It appears there is very strong opinion these days about issues like corruption and misconduct. Either people are 100% sure it's happening on a large scale, or they refuse to believe the possibility even exists. Is it strictly a belief system thing, maybe just creating divide,... Any insight or ideas about this? 

AMA with Hannah Aline Taylor. Wednesday 2/4 at 4:00 PM CT

love, boundaries, and mistakes in relating, community, and peopling together (+ thank god love doesn’t look like you expect it to)

AMA with Ali Beiner. Wednesday 2/4 at 11:00 AM CT

Kainos host Alexander Beiner exploring cultural sensemaking around psychedelics, popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics, and spirituality.

Frozen Wednesday Feb 4. Frozen Wednesday.

The ground is still locked in ice. The trees are quiet. Even the deer step softer when the world feels this tense.

Nancy Guthrie is still missing — a family somewhere living every parent-child nightmare in real time.

Alex Pretti’s death has now been ruled a homicide, and the questions that follow feel heavier than the winter air.

The Epstein files continue to ripple across the world, upsetting old power structures and reminding us that truth has a way of surfacing — even when buried deep.

Meanwhile, the president is openly talking about national elections, and Americans are once again leaning forward, listening carefully, deciding what kind of country we want to be.

And yet… the Super Bowl is this weekend. Millions will gather, food will be made, laughter will spill across living rooms. Because that is also who we are — people who keep living, keep connecting, even while history churns around us.

This is the strange rhythm of being human:
fear and football, grief and groceries, uncertainty and love.

Stay warm. Stay aware. Stay kind to one another.

Strong humans don’t look away — but we also don’t forget how to hold each other up.

❄️

Appreciation With Great Difficulty. (Originally published on substack. This was unusually scary and vulnerable to publish)

There’s this Buddhist poem. I don’t know if it’s a poem. They say it’s “a set of contemplations.”

It’s called “The Four Reminders,” and the first time I read it, it kicked me to the floor. And every time after, too.

Here’s Trungpa’s translation.

—

Joyful to have
such a human birth.
Difficult to find,
Free and well-favored.

But death is real,
comes without warning.
This body will be a corpse.

Unalterable
are the laws of karma;
cause and effect
cannot be escaped.

Samsara
is an ocean of suffering.
Unendurable,
unbearably intense.

—

When I was first learning coaching, one of my teachers said “An unwanted present state will stay stuck until it’s fully appreciated.”

To appreciate something is not to say “I like this” or “I condone this” or “I value this”. It’s to let it in. Just let it in to your heart. You must let the things into your heart that you’ve excluded. Make space for them in your heart, or they’ll be chains around your ankles.

To fully appreciate the present state, to love the world as it is. To allow the world into you fully, and not keep out parts, not try to keep yourself separate, but let the world belong to you and let yourself belong to the world.

This requires a letting go. A surrender to life, to what will happen. “Amor Fati,” Nietzsche said. “Love your fate.”

Or as Tyler Durden put it “Stop trying to control everything and just let go”

When you do that, you get the benefit of belonging to life. You are just life, living. You are the world and the world is you.

But Goddam it’s a lot to take.

I don’t know war, outside of news, and social media, history books, and Hollywood. And it’s already more than I want to know.

But what if the only way to stop war is to let it into your heart? For each of us to let it into our hearts. Not to love it. But to allow it. To allow it to exist. To not resist*, but include it in your heart, and include your love of peace. To include those two things together is to break your heart.

Things don’t care whether you want them or not.

So we allow war to be. In this moment, when it is, we allow it. We appreciate it. Things are not different than how they are. And when you do that, also feel your love of peace, and the pain of all the suffering war is causing, and your own fear about your suffering and your death and the suffering and death of your loved ones, and remember, your love of peace, your longing for peace.

Just try, right now. Include all that in your heart. Pause. Close your eyes. And feel your love of peace and the fact of war, together in your heart.

It’s too much. I can’t do it. I’m sure I don’t even come close.

But trying just now, I sink down. It’s like lowering myself into a hot bath of vibrating sensation. Or descending from the pristine clouds into the hot, chaotic jungle. I feel now that I belong to the world and my heart cracks, and I want to cry.

And then I can’t stay, and I rise back up, out of that intensity.

But for a moment, I felt I belonged to the world.

Maybe trying this practice with something as huge, horrendous, and abstract as “war” is setting us up to fail. But what happens if you try it with something in your own life? Find that knot, that persistent place where life keeps being the same, painful way. What’s the the thing in your own life that feels hardest to appreciate?

Now again, close your eyes and let it into your heart. It can sit right there along with your desire and longing that it be different. You have to make room in your heart for what is so, as well as your wanting something else. When you do that, and breathe, and feel it all together, as part of the wholeness of life, what happens? What happens in your heart? And what happens in your life? I’d love to know.

Of course, I only get to explore these territories because of how much peace surrounds me. This blessed peace, that allows me to stop and feel life in this way. This precious peace, this delicate, sometimes punctured, peace, that I pray remains, that I pray grows stronger. I pray that you are surrounded by this peace too, and all the people you love, and all the ones they love and so on, out across the whole world.

—

* This is not to say real world actions are unnecessary. I’m not talking about quietism. You can include a rabid dog in your heart, even as you’re putting it down.

Thoughts on AI coding an effifciency?  would love yalls thoughts on this. Here’s a provocative start: 

This whole thing is bullshit. So if you're a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools — by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria — trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they're slowing you down, if you're confused how other people can be so productive, you're not broken. The data backs up what you're experiencing. You're not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you’re feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it.

From a Mike Judge substack article

that’s one take.

There are a few other takes that I’m aware of, but I’d really love to hear the developers first

future you love We are your friends. Aliens arrive and they are so evolved they lead us to being an amazing thriving world. We are your friends. The joy increases and ecosystems thrive and we sing and dance in the walk streets.  

^This may sound silly or like a joke, but truth be told, ponder it as if it's very plausible for decades! Kinda been waiting for these evolved beings to pop out of their ships or portals from other times, dimensions or galaxies and make the world make sense for all involved.

Always had pictured them alive like us, physical life forms, eating, breathing in 3D...

 #afutureyoulove 

Writing this actually shifts my subtle hope of a future happy earth outcome were aliens come to the rescue...

Now see this: our only hope is humanity, sorry meant AI.

#SciFiMovieQuotes

On gratitude, awe, and breakthroughs. I believe in the conscious practice of gratitude, even in its simplest 'glass half full' form. Despite any challenges I've had in my 54 years I feel fortunate to be rich in this emotion.

I must admit, though, that despite my efforts to enter the state, almost all of the peak moments of gratitude in my life have happened to me -- I was a receptacle, and it arrived; often in a way that reminded me of the size of my self and ego in this big glorious universe.

For example, stepping out of my car as I arrive back at my home in the woods of Western Maine, I can glance up at the stars on a clear night and almost begin to cry as the beauty rushes in. It's almost comical to think that I would do something that results in that experience. In the elephant and rider metaphor, it's my elephant that gets jacked into the spiritual feed, and the rider that I experience as 'me' just happens to be sitting in the right place at the right time.

Personal development breakthroughs have often followed a similar pattern. Years of conscious work will result in measurable slivers of change, and then I'm 27 years old, folding boxes in the back of a Pizza Hut, and I'm suddenly awakened to the knowledge that I am not my thoughts or my emotions. What the fuck? I mean if I had at least been eating pizza...

None of this makes me want to stop any of my conscious practices. They exist somewhere between 'essential element of growth' to 'excellent distraction until the next gifted moment'.

Would be curious to hear others experiences. Are your most sublime moments your own conscious creation, the jackpot from life's slot machine, or something else entirely?

Merit is a many turn game. The common take now is that meritocracy isn’t real because of privilege. But it’s actually a generational or tribal meritocracy, where you do your best to set up your kids/“clan” to have the privilege that you didn’t. You might happen to get lucky for yourself, but the real game is that you work hard and in a generation or 2 your descendants will be privileged. Our hyper-individualist, short-time-horizon culture fails to see or embrace that which is why immigrants come here with nothing and have kids that become surgeons. 

:) #DeepTakes

Fuck. I'm not as open minded as I like to believe I am. I’m watching this video made by a former liberal who voted for Trump because I want to better understand what is happening. It’s well made, she seems extremely sane and rational. My approach has been to listen from a mindset of what would it feel like for me if a majority of this was true?

I’m stunned to see how visceral my fear of listening is. Tightness in my chest, sudden exhaustion, extreme urge to eat something soothing or do literally anything else. I’ve been giving myself breathers, but also doing a lot of looking straight at the sensations. There’s grasping fear of my mind changing, even slightly. There’s a potent feel of betrayal, specifically in a moment when the video showed Rachel Maddow, betrayal of the gay community I grew up with in Memphis. Betrayal of the beauty and love they raised me with. Fear of becoming one of the people I’ve seen as conspiracy theorists. Fear of estrangement from the people I love the most if I were to ever discover that I disagreed with them, if I could even fathom having been capable of choosing to vote for Trump.

https://x.com/JoomiKim1/status/1850530862531498458?fbclid=IwY2xjawGYjD5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHX6NqxhGLf66D5dwcO4QYdWiFNY26N92a26splKrZiqYbHYxosDeCggb8A_aem_hYzzfzlGJolkUhgqT73l-w

Getting tired. I’m finding I’m getting more tribal and emotional as I’m getting more tired. I think I’m tired both from listening and something about using the platform. A lot of thinking.

Getting tired. I’m finding I’m getting more tribal and emotional as I’m getting more tired. I think I’m tired both from listening and something about using the platform. A lot of thinking.

This is a big update for me: 50 Niche Social Networks by the numbers. I used to think we were up against a graveyard of failed projects. There’s truth in that, but it obscures the vibrancy of the existing social media landscape:

• There are 30 social networks most of us have never even heard of pulling in 500k+ monthly active users. This isn’t just a fluke - it’s solid proof that focused, community-driven platforms can thrive.
• In addition to the standard dozen billion+ MAU Major Players (Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat; and .5 billion+ Snapchat, X, Pinterest, Spotify, Reddit, Quora)
• plus the foreign heavyweights (Douyin, Kuaishou, QQ, Weibo)
• there are also 19 pretty other huge platforms killing it

This is testament to

• The viability of focused, community-driven platforms.
• The social media landscape is more diverse than it might seem
• The success of niche platforms suggests there’s still room for innovation and growth in social media, especially for platforms that address specific needs or values that aren’t getting met by current platforms
• One option we have is positioning UpTrust in a different category, we’re not directly competing with established giants but rather creating a new space—where our niche is nuanced conversation about cultural landmines that goes well, in addition to kickstarting the trust economy (instead of the attention economy). It’s not about how long we can keep you scrolling; it’s about creating real connections and actually making people’s lives better.

Platforms with 1-5 Million Monthly Active Users

1. AllTrails: (hiking) ~4 million/mo
2. Letterboxd: (film enthusiasts) ~3 million/mo
3. Bandcamp: (music) ~3-4 million/mo
4. iNaturalist: (nature observation) ~3 million/mo
5. Mastodon: (decentralized social networking) ~2.5 million/mo
6. Ravelry: (knitting) ~2 million/mo
7. Tripoto: (travel) ~2 million/mo
8. Fitocracy: (fitness) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate, exact numbers not disclosed)
9. ResearchGate: (academic research) ~20 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Untappd: (beer enthusiasts) ~1.5 million/mo
11. Couchsurfing: (travel networking) ~12 million total users, MAU likely much lower
12. Gaia: (yoga and meditation) ~500,000/mo (estimate)

Platforms with 5-20 Million MAU

1. Fishbrain (fishing): ~6-7 million MAU (estimated)
2. Dribbble (design portfolios): ~5 million MAU
3. Depop (fashion resale): ~4-5 million MAU
4. Day One (journaling): 1-5 million MAU (estimate)
5. Patreon: (creators) ~8 million patrons
6. Komoot (route planning): MAU not disclosed, 40 million total users

Big Niche Social Platforms (20 - 180 million MAU)

1. BeReal: (authentic social media) ~25 million daily active users
2. Fandom: (fan communities) ~315 million total users, MAU not disclosed
3. Soundcloud: (music sharing) ~175 million/mo
4. Discord: (community chat) ~150 million/mo
5. Twitch: (gaming) ~140 million/mo
6. Tumblr: (microblogging) ~135 million/mo
7. Strava: (fitness tracking) ~100 million total users, MAU not disclosed
8. Wattpad (storytelling): ~90 million MAU
9. Goodreads: (books) ~90 million total users, MAU not disclosed
10. Etsy: (handmade and vintage items) ~90 million active buyers
11. Nextdoor: (neighborhoods) ~69 million verified users
12. Flickr: (photo sharing) ~60 million/mo
13. Stack Overflow: (programming Q&A) ~50 million/mo
14. DeviantArt: (art sharing) ~45-50 million/mo
15. Houzz: (home design) ~40 million/mo
16. Duolingo (language learning): ~40 million MAU
17. Meetup: (local community groups) ~35 million total users
18. Behance: (creative portfolios) ~25 million/mo
19. Last.fm: (music scrobbling) ~20 million/mo

Religious Community-Focused Platforms

1. YouVersion: (Christian) ~40-50 million/mo
2. Patheos: (Interfaith) ~10-15 million/mo
3. IslamicFinder: (Muslim) ~10-12 million/mo
4. Pray.com: (Christian) ~5-7 million/mo (estimate)
5. Aleteia: (Catholic) ~20 million monthly visits
6. Catholic.net: (Catholic) ~3-5 million/mo (estimate)
7. Al-Muslimeen: (Muslim) ~2-3 million/mo (estimate)
8. Torah.org: (Jewish) ~1-2 million/mo (estimate)
9. Mi Yodeya: (Jewish) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
10. Mindar: (Buddhist) ~500,000-1 million/mo (estimate)
11. DharmaMatch: (Buddhist/Spiritual) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
12. Sikh Sangat: (Sikh) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)
13. Hindu2Hindu: (Hindu) ~100,000-300,000/mo (estimate)

Recent Growth Examples:

• BeReal: Grew from 10,000 users in 2020 to 25 million daily active users in 2022.
• Discord: Grew from 56 million MAU in 2019 to 150 million MAU in 2023.
• Twitch: Increased from 55 million MAU in 2019 to 140 million MAU in 2023.
• Pinterest: Grew from 335 million MAU in Q4 2019 to 450 million MAU in Q4 2022.

A Poem to Ponder . For your reading pleasure. I have had this poem for years and read it often. I wanted to share.

The Nature of Risk

• By Patricia Soper (NOT me), a local poet in Patchogue, NY

What courage, each year, has the tree
to once again birth her leaves,
her pink cherry blossoms or delicate dogwood petals,
knowing in days, weeks or months,
they will wither and fall to the ground.
So, too, the crocus or tulip,
who struggles through the frozen ground,
regardless the chance of Spring snowfall.
Even if warmed, her flower’s glory will be
short-lived.
What freedom to show up, generously share,
sure of one’s value to Earth.
Oh, to be like that,
to bloom without fear,
not clinging to longevity,
nor demanding guarantee,
but offer our best without expectation.