social media culture

AMA with Jordan Myska Allen. Wednesday 2/4 at 12:30pm CST

Founder and CEO of UpTrust, founder of Relatefulness... solving seemingly impossible social problems and having fun doing it

#heywait 

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Like is different than trust. I think Jordan said at an uptrust session that he misses the like button. I’m having the same feeling lately, there are posts I like that I wouldn’t necessarily say I trust. Or I want to give it some sort of that was cool but I don’t want that statement in my trust algorithm.

But maybe that’s all for the best? Surely some not-insignificant portion of my trust isn’t in my conscious awareness, maybe feeling a sense of yes to something is functionally the same as trust.

Owning activation while posting. A bottleneck I’m encountering is some belief that I shouldn’t post or respond when I’m triggered but there’s a lot of motility and I need to do something new. I’ll be including both what I think the trigger is about and my rebuttal and I’m going to endeavor not to devalue my points because I’m triggered. I’m thinking of putting the awareness of the trigger in parentheses but might play with the format. Feel open now to respond to comments about either

It's the littlest thing . . So this happened. . . How would you relate?

I recently purchased new kitchen appliances (yay me!). They were delivered today. Prior to their arrival, I had been sitting with a range of emotional states (from joy to fear to contentment, etc.) and body sensation that kept me energized.

When the new fridge and stove arrived, I felt my excitement again. Saying goodbye to the old, dated, dingy appliances was a joy. The stove looked amazing when it was installed. The fridge has french doors and bottom freezer, exactly what I wanted.

And. . . There is a noticeable ding on the left door of the fridge, subtle yet in plain sight! Yaaaaa! Everytime I see it (and it has only been a few hours), my body tenses up and there’s annoyance. I am told that I have 2 options, I can take $150 compensation for the ding and keep the fridge, or exchange the whole fridge (which means I need to take action and coordinate a whole new delivery). I feel frozen and indecisive. . . Which option do I take?, I ask myself.

It is really interesting how impacted I seem by this one little thing…. a ding.

How would you relate, if you did?

Metatation - rant - is it . Is Metatation a thing? I’ve been using it as a mantra during meditation. Somehow the metatation mantra helps me calm down all the meta’ing always seem to be do’ing. Metatation has made my mediation practice more fun. Metatation is almost a state of mind that often takes me into too much awareness. Is that possible>? Is too much awareness a thing? Probably not. Probably some complex term to summarize the sensation. But too much awareness does feel like a real thing and overwhelming specially with the sense of sensory awareness. Has anyone heard the term HSP? Highly Sensitive People: which am probably that, can feel like too much awareness of the environment: the noises, the lights, the temperatures, the smells, can be too much for some while other people in the same environment are not bothered by it. Then add on top that awareness, awareness of ecosystems out of harmony and awareness of inequalities and unjustnesses (like to make up words) and in the words of Kristen Wigg: Welcome to me.

Metatation on the app itself:
I am noticing as wirting this that the auto correct feature in this window as a type are not working like i’m use to via text and email. Which is showing me i’m not a great typer, nor do i spell all that well left to my own devices.

In the background of this post, is the metatating that i’m writing a post and imagining if it will be read, how it will be recieved and that it’s a new app and in beta testing. And that i before e, except after c (sorry to non-american educated peeps, if that’s not a thing you got placed in your brain at a young age). received: successfully typed it without autocorrect. Seriously i feel like my keyboard is broken. Oh and also noticing sometimes after the end of the sentence and the period, starting a new sentence, it doesn’t auto make the first letter of the sentence a capital letter.

I’m pretty sure i didn’t make up metatation, but i think i did, at least it felt like it happened that way as a new experience in my world. But metatation.com is taken to help design websites.

Metatation of you reading this:
Was it a waste of your time to take this in? Does that question make it so. Without asking if it was a waste, was it not, but after asking if it, now is it? These types of wonderings.. never ends, is it fun or is it anxiety being acted out?

The end.

And it really is my keyboard! the letter i barely works on my laptop and guess that never noticed as most of the time the autocorrect fixes it.

Cities and Ambition. I recently reread this Paul Graham essay [ https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html ]. It’s about what messages individual places send their inhabitants vis-a-vis which ambitions are good. It mentions Berkeley (where I live) as a place that wants people to live comfortably/well, which seems right. So I’m curious: what city do you live in and what does its vibe want you to do?

Are We Ever Awake/Free/Thriving Enough To Not Practice? Through the years, I’ve had periods in my life where I feel so overwhelmingly good that all my daily spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, prayer, Big Mind process, relatefulness, spiritual study, etc) fall to the wayside.

When I feel super awake, connected to everyone and everything, able to flow with whatever is happening, in an unshakeable trust that Basic Goodness is all there is, it’s really easy for me to go: Well, this is it. I’m done. No point in doing any practice of any kind anymore. And that’s not to say that I abandon practice entirely. I still lead my sessions online a few times a week or whatever, but the underlying attitude in me is this is all optional.

And yet, the feedback that I keep getting from Life is that I do, in fact, need practice.

There’s something about making the daily commitment to presence, to myself, to Spirit, and dedicating one or several periods of my day to some form of spiritual practice that is just so nourishing.

And when I stop doing it, it’s like if I stop doing physical exercise. After a while things start feeling kinda stagnant, and my way of being in my life gets wonky. I’m more likely to make choices that could hurt me and the people close to me.

I’m grateful that I can always come back to the routine of one or more daily practices. It feels healthy. : )

I need a new word. I’ve been using the word autistic as a description of a state experience where, when one is in such a state, they don’t recognize subtle passive cues from others. One example is when someone’s feeling a lot of unity they often fail to see bids for connection from someone who’s more codependently minded. I think it’s kinda lazy of me because I don’t think that factor speaks to the experience of an autistic person. Any ideas?

If I switch to neurodivergent is it better?

How to do the basics when your life feels like a dumpster fire? I’m working through some super deep shit in therapy right now. I found out that my dad is a diagnosed Covert Vulnerable Narcissist and I’m going back through all the memories in which I have him filed in my mind as a victim and looking through what I now know reality to be. It’s super duper disorienting and intimidating; my inner world is a mix of emptiness and everything out of place, and my coping skills are patchy.

One of today’s coping skills has been watching videos of a dude detailing very dirty messy cars. Seeing a literal version of what I’m attempting to do in my internal world seems to help somehow.

And watching videos of people playing NES Super Mario Bros. How am I only just now noticing that Bowser is a gay leather bear?

From the perspective of projection, what's Trump symbolize in you? Is it something in you that you haven’t loved yet?
Is it something in you that you haven’t boundaried appropriately?
What else?

Sometimes to do this kind of thought experiment i interpret my waking life as if it were a dream. When I look at how I view trump, what does he symbolize? And then I can ask how i relate to that to find out how I’m relating to that thing.

I will come back and do this self analysis in a moment.

We Need World One Goverment. Argument: Currently, there are a host of problems, challenges, and opportunities that cannot be adequately addressed within national borders (COVID, pollution, global warming, piracy, tax havens, AI, etc). And this creates arms races and problem of the commons issues.

In order to resolve these problems or take full advantage of the opportunities, we need one world government that can make consistent policy across the globe.

It could be like the US with States or EU with nations, but there needs to be a stronger world government, UN doesn’t cut it.

Argue for/against/synthesis

What's it like to post? Let's note! When I ask myself the question, What am I afraid of?, all I notice is the non-verbal sensation. So, why not name that?, I ask myself again. I sense space and a yes. So, this is what I notice. The freeze in my chest, the heat in my face, the watery eyes, and the soft impulse to just shake it (which I am doing in between typing). There is a quiet, loving hold of my fear, and it seems to give me space. And now, I notice how I write. I write in full sentences, and I seem to make sense.

I now celebrate my first post.

What was it like for you while posting, whether it was your first post or your current one? I’m curious.

Left Media Bias bigger than i realized. No matter how you measure (print media, online, page views, paid subscribers, followers, etc) US media leans heavily left, to an extent that surprised me. Most ways I tried back-of-the napkin math have right + right-leaning news sources being below 10%… and even the most generous assessments that include lost of neutral/other outlets still have left + left-leaning above 50% (meaning 5:1 liberal to conservative is the lowest estimate i could find).

Context

The US is pretty evenly split in terms of the two major parties:
> 45% of U.S. adults Republican-ish, 44% Democrat-ish Gallup 2022

Some sources

• Allsides Here’s Allsides review
  their media bias on Allsides.com here’s the site’s own assessment of its own bias
• Googling the top 25 most-subscribed news channels in the United States, and
• Even the more left leaning LLMS can’t help but point out this as a fact of modern media.

Takeaways

• First, this gives me empathy for Republicans. Many American conservatives feel like the underdog, regardless of how much power or influence they yield, because in a very real way, they’re not represented in a substantial part of the public narrative making machine—the media—proportionally. The perception of bias is true despite their being popular conservative outlets with sizable audiences, and as a result the left has influence on public opinion.Impact on Public Trust (but also how come Republicans aren’t better at getting media subscribers?)

• Second, how come Republicans, who are stereotypically thought of us as having more business acumen or money or something, are getting so handily beaten in the media?

• Third, I try not to get involved in politics because I’m scared of loosing connection or turning people off of the value of relatefulness because of my takes, even if they’re nuanced. We’re very good at otherizing people and forgetting to look at nuances. I’m certain I lack nuance. I don’t want a difference of political opinion to get in the way of our connecting. I started writing up this for the TTT email (which I ended up deciding not to send) but I realized others are deeply esconced in politics and way smarter and more educated in the field than I, so I decided to not go there. But here on uptrusting.com I think it’s a cool opporutnity to test; could also be a nice road to empathy, or self-empathy, depending on our identifications.