Yesterday was bad in some ways, and in some ways I don’t want to dwell on it because of the whole like “focus on what you want to see more of” thing
But I also think that quickly processing it might be good
The good
It was fun going into town in the car, me driving, with 3 friends
Writing “friends” here inspired me to make this quick page, mostly excerpts from Tasshin’s post - Friendship
So yes, 3 friends, 2 who I barely know but have lovely vibes, one who I also don’t know well but who I feel a huge amount of warmth and tenderness for
One of these new friends came with me to meet the Spanish man who was selling a thinkpad in the closest town, a 15 minute drive from Casa Tilo. It turns out he speaks much better Spanish than he implied, and was totally conversant with this odd Spanish man, and was a huge help to me in testing the laptop. It felt really sweet, kind of miraculous, to have this new friend be totally happy to come along with me and help me out in this way
So that was very sweet, as was being in the car together. I drove on the way there, which felt cool and adult, even if I ran a red light at one point
The bad - So my macbook died, randomly, and quite terminally, it seems
Why is it bad that my macbook died?
Lost software?
Luckily, everything lives in the cloud, so I’m not too worried about what I lost (apart from a worry that my Ableton license only applies to that laptop. Maybe a time to switch to open-source software for music, I only need basic features anyway, although re-learning does feel aversive)
“A single Ableton Live license allows you to authorize the software on up to two computers owned by the licensee. You can’t use the software on both computers simultaneously, but you can transfer your license between them. ” - ok great, so if I buy another macbook at some point I should be ok!
Lost setup
I had my macbook setup just so, after owning it for years. Things like neovim setup correctly, espanso for text expansion (why didn’t I back up the config file on github!!!), Aerospace window tiling manager
Also, a macbook is just a lovely device. Absolutely best-in-class trackpad - a thinkpad trackpad is profoundly worse. Also, the keyboard - the control key on this thinkpad is setup in a really unpleasant place, as if you’d use your pinky or ring finger - it feels out of reach. I want to swap the alt and control keys but I’m so sick of tweaking this thinkpad
Linux thinkpad setup
This thinkpad was €220, 12GB ram, two SSDs, i3 processor sadly
It had windows 10 on it and was really quite slow, bizarrely
I put Linux on it. In retrospect maybe I should have gone for a very “batteries included” linux like Ubuntu, but idk, I have arch on a very old thinkpad at home (like, 2007) and it was really fun on that. But I underestimated how long it’d take to setup, how every single thing is difficult at first (e.g. atm I can’t connect to bluetooth devices, meaning I can’t use my keyboard and nice logitech MX master mouse, meaning I’m confined to the trackpad or the daunting thinkpad nipple)
I ended up using Manjaro Linux, which is Arch with some more stuff pre-installed, I think, and a profoundly easier setup process (it has a nice GUI installer)
What took time and drained my energy and eventually filled me with despair
Thinkpad was in spanish, took some time to change that, as Spanish was the only installed language
Thinkpad keyboard is in spanish, so some things aren’t where I’d expect. I’ve remapped it to GB keymapping now so it’s much better for touch typing although the symbols on the keys are now somewhat misleading
Installing Linux was a pain - it failed twice due to a network error, BalenaEtcher wouldn’t work twice so I had to switch to a different tool
i3 window manager is objectively worse than Aerospace on mac. On Aerospace, you can use letter names for workspaces, e.g. I had workspace A for AI tools (Gemini), B for browser, E for email, etc. Really great muscle memory had developed, making navigation a breeze and clunky alt-tabbing a thing of the past. Whereas i3 only seems to support numbered workspaces, so it’s like “bah, where is Firefox again, is it in workspace 1 or 2 or 3 or 4” etc. Much more annoying
I think there’s a blessing in this, in that I can’t multi-task and context-switch as much. Maybe I should just have 2 or 3 workspaces and lock in much more
i3 also means that I can’t access the ´#´ key, because it takes me to workspace 3. I spent probably an hour trying to fix this, and kept breaking i3. This key is essential in markdown!! At the moment I have to copy-paste it
I’ve lost my espanso config, which I used to text-expand via keyboard shortcuts, e.g. today’s date could be immediately pasted via :da , and I could make an arrow with :ar, etc. Emojis too. I want to set this up again, but I’m banning myself from any more setup today
Thinkpad keyboard is different, there’s a windows key, the left control key is really hard to reach
Github login took a while
Logging back into my 3 key google accounts took a while
Good things about this thinkpad
It’s a bigger screen. And ok, it’s a WAY worse screen, but it’s 15 inch, so there’s more real estate
The lower resolution will probably force me to single-task more
The keyboard is really pleasant to type on
Everything is currently clunkier to do, which might be good for single-tasking too. To navigate to firefox and then use the trackpad feels aversive, so I’m more locked in to what I’m doing
It should be the case that I can gradually improve it (in a much less “all-at-once”, front-loaded way than I did yesterday), so it’ll keep getting better. There are presumably some benefits to Linux like gradually getting to a setup that really works well
Other good things
Obsidian was a dream - I cloned this website vault via git and boom, the vault is immediately setup correctly because the obsidian config file was in the vault, so the theme is right, all the plugins are right, vim mode is active, etc. Obsidian was 100% preserved, which rules
Ok, so that’s it, I feel like I’ve processed that, hopefully, maybe. The thinkpad works well enough now, I can tweet and write here and access my google accounts
End of a work era - I can’t make money this way anymore
Oh yeah also I think I’m done with my contractor job!
It has been feeling grindy and difficult the whole time, and one of my things for this week was to think about if I really want to do it, knowing that I don’t at all really but also income is good, and when I finally logged into everything on my thinkpad I saw a message from the founder on slack that it’s probably not working out
So that’s good that we’re aligned, and it solves the problem for me!
What does it mean to not have this contractor gig?
No income!
Why is having no income bad?
Where to live?
I won’t be moving back in with my mum - 6 months of that was definitely enough, and now I’ve left I can’t imagine returning. I think when you’re there it’s like “this is ok”, but it definitely needs to end
Currently, a group house with Simmo in Oxford feels good, but I can probably only afford 6 months of rent before I am truly out of money
Which actually I think puts me on a nice “death ground” (from “The Art of War”)
It feels clear to me that all the ways I’ve historically made money no longer work for me
I have a biomedical sciences undergrad and a bioengineering masters degree - I have no interest in these things
I was a data analyst for 3 years - I do enjoy python! I think there’s a world in which I become a software engineer, but also I think that ship has sailed
I worked in internal operations for 2 years - that now feels really aversive to me
All of this stuff feels very old-me, and I just can’t do stuff that doesn’t feel alive. I thought I’d be able to do this contractor gig for a few hours a day to bring some money in, but because it was work that I don’t want to do, and I’m no longer on-board with the mission, I just found it consistently grind-y and aversive, so it was actually a pretty unpleasant time
What am I drawn to do?
Sharing my experience
At Ship It Week, both Simon and Eveyln have said something to the effect of “you are a very talented sharer of your experience”
Simon said “you’re one of the greatest ‘vulnerability-posters’ of all time” (poster meaning tweeter)
Evelyn read my writing and tweets and said something about how I’m very good at writing about the important thing in a moment/in experience
This is all I tweet about! I don’t have a like deep passion for x thing (well, I do, but that’s not what I always tweet about) - my niche is really just like, being me
And youtube too - got so many lovely comments from people saying that my energy was inspiring and authentic and genuine, etc
And my writing too, substack, the vignettes Writing - vignettes - these just flow, I’m weirdly good at them (vs e.g. writing lyrics)
What am I good at?
I’m such a generalist, I think. I don’t want to go deep on one thing, I want to cobble together a bunch of different things
E.g., I know some coding, I know enough to make a youtube video, to make a basic song, I know the basics of guitar but no desire to go deeper, I have good executive function
It feels like I’ve been looking
I can be in front of a camera, which I think is a rare skill
I can’t help but be honest, I really want to share my experience, there’s a huge amount of flow state energy in writing and making videos etc
What am I drawn to care about?
I care a lot about the suffering of something like the working class, or the lower middle class, people who are suffering under atomisation and no emotional intelligence and no nutrients in the culture. I care a lot about my family and all the people like them
I don’t want to be someone who meditates a bunch. I want to be someone who brings the Tpot, post-rationalism-y stuff that has helped me so much to people who haven’t heard of it
I think this is my thing, to be a bridge between these 2 worlds.
And also, to share what it’s like to expand my own agency. E.g., the journey from traumatised and cPTSD to less so. From “I’ve never felt safe to make art” to trying to make art, etc
There’s a whole huge group of people who didn’t have supportive and emotionally intelligent parents, who had to try to raise themselves, and who are still struggling with this. There are things like IFS and Focusing and ideal parent figure protocol and meditation and psychedelics and etc and it’s just not in the culture at all yet. I don’t want to go deeper on this stuff, I want to show it to others
Consensus-ism stuff too innit. That helped me so much!
So, what do?
I think it’s obviously a return to youtube, whilst unifying various platforms (e.g. bringing in substack too). Maybe even posting to tiktok and instagram too, although that feels aversive at bad
Music, but really just sharing how I’m doing, stuff about my journey etc
It feels quite solipsistic? But I think it can be inspiring and warm-hearted and possibility-space-expanding for people