It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.

I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.

MONEY IS A STORY

It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a  tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.

Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!

ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER

Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.

Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.

After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.

Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.

To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!

WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY

The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.

For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.

Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.

TO THE KINGS

Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal,  democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.

NO MORE KINGS

And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men.  It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.

But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.

ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER

Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.

We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.

I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP

Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.

So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.

WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES

We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.

Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.

Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.

It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.

WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA

Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.

It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.

It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.

HOW DARE THE POOR?

Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people.  That’s a story.

Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.

None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.

We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.

Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?

The post Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There are two conflicting pieces of advice that drive me crazy on a regular basis.

1. The “trust your intuition,” “go with your gut” crowd that says you should always heed your instincts as if we have magic intestines.
2. The “feel the fear and do it anyway,” “push harder than you want,” and “don’t let your fear limit you” crowd.

Of course, the answer is both. As with all pieces of advice, context really matters.

The problem?

IF WE PICK WRONG, IT CAN GO SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In both directions. Of course, those are the people who consistently take no risks or consistently take all of the risks, but the rest of us are just a messy combination of playing it way too safe and then practically killing ourselves.

Sometimes you do exactly right and still get hurt. To quote Jean Luc Picard, or at least an anonymous Star Trek screenwriter: “It’s possible to make no mistakes and still love.”

You listen to your gut and your gut is just plain wrong. You play it safe and miss the perfect opportunity. You take a huge risk and reap the consequence. So it’s not like the tips in the rest of this newsletter or foolproof and if you just do this you’re not gonna get hurt and you’re not gonna miss out. Both of those things will still happen, but maybe a LITTLE less often

OTHER PEOPLE SEVERELY SCREW UP YOUR RADAR IF YOU LET THEM.

We are herd animals. Many of our instincts are about getting along with the herd, which means we are much more likely to disregard our own gut when we’re trying to fit into the group.

You are most likely to disregard your gut for other people.

If you’re risking everything for somebody else, even though that feels really noble, pay real close attention. Part of our instincts includes overriding our own instincts in order to follow the herd, particularly the most powerful members of the herd.

You’re most likely to play it safe for fear of other people.

The corollary is you could be avoiding risk because you’re afraid of people who aren’t in your group. Be wary of that, because again we are built to be afraid of them. Whoever your particular them is.

“Us” are never so noble as we think and “them” are never so scary.

ABSENT INFORMATION, EVEN YOUR GUT IS GUESSING.

One of my favorite books on earth is The Gift of Fear by Gabin de Becker who talks about how our brains can make super-fast judgments about situations that keep us safe.

But what often gets left out of most conversations is that you have to feed your brain data in order to make a call.

It isn’t intuition, so much as lightning-fast evaluation. If you don’t have all the facts. It’s not gonna work.

How many people make moves or take jobs without ever speaking to someone at the company or in that role or living in that town? If you’re having a strong gut feeling about something, ask yourself how much you know about your decision. The less you know, the less you can trust that gut feeling.

AT THE SAME TIME, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING.

While you can’t fly completely blind, you will also never have enough data. The analysis paralysis of researching until you know when you’re never going to work. It can help to make a time limit: either a certain amount of days or sources, or whatever, and after you’ve learned them, you call it.

Will any of these protect you from disaster? Nothing protects you from disaster. But hopefully, it will protect you a little bit from regret, both for taking a risk or passing up an opportunity.

At least you can tell yourself you have decided how to make a decision.

The post How to Go With Your Gut and Push Your Limits. Magically at the Same Time. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Photo: Sean MacEntee

WHAT IS IT?

No, but seriously? What is it?!?

If the past few weeks of Twitter drama have proven anything, no one is exactly sure, even the people who own these companies.

ANY BUSINESS IS JUST A STORY

Complete with protagonist, antagonist, love interest, conflict, challenge, triumph, and disaster. That doesn’t mean to imply they don’t have an effect on the real world. Stories can be dangerous!

Okay, most of the time, a business strategy document is a really boring story, where the villain is a slightly disappointing third-quarter report and employee turnover, but I don’t think enough people realize it’s a story they made up about a hopelessly complex reality nobody can completely comprehend.

But sometimes even business stories become totally fascinating.

SOCIAL MEDIA WAS AN INNOVATION.

It upended the publishing industry. Yes, the publishing industry.

Up until this point, publishing companies of all descriptions would employ professionals to create content. And then instead of charging customers the full cost of creating that content, they would charge other businesses to advertise their products alongside the content.

It was a win/win/win situation most of the time.

The publisher stays in business, the advertiser gets new customers, and the customers get valuable content and get to hear about products they might like. The customer did sometimes contribute to the publisher, mostly with letters to the editors, but that was a minority of content.

THE GENIUS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The tech industry dreamed up a genuinely new strategy for doing business as a publishing company: combining two (and often all three) of these roles!

The publisher stayed the same: push out content and ads to customers while taking a cut.

But suddenly producers and customers were one and the same.

Think about it, it’s absolute genius. Instead of paying contributors, you got your own customer base to create your daily magazine full of content. And recruit customers to come and read it. And then you could show the same audience ads and take a cut of that money, for nothing.

Some tell the story of how we are the product of social media, sold to advertisers, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

We are its volunteer content creators and its customers in one.

And for those of us who own a business, its advertisers too! Genius! (If you’re a social media company.)

WILL YOU PAY TO CREATE CONTENT?

Musk’s idea to charge people $8 to use the site is another innovation. He’s making a gamble that in exchange for not seeing as many ads, people will be willing to pay for volunteering to create content.

I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but certainly not at scale. Everyone’s on Twitter because everyone else is on Twitter, and nobody with this big of a platform has tried to switch from advertising to pay-for-play. (I’m leaving aside the dramatically bad rollout of this thing.) It’s failing because it was poorly executed, but also probably because this is not an innovation that will stick.

What is it usually called when you pay to publish content? Vanity publishing? A scam?

Judging from the pushback, most people on Twitter see it that way.

If anything, historically, Musk should be paying THEM to create content. Some social media companies work like that. Both Youtube and Tiktok have creators sharing revenue. Others get away with the fact that easy access to your friends is worth the time commitment of creating for them for nothing, and if you get big enough brands pay creators directly in addition to companies.

WHY I’M NOT HARPING ON FREE SPEECH/TOWN SQUARE ARGUMENT

That is another story a lot of people have told about social media. That it’s some kind of commons/public utility.

You use a public utility like telephones and the internet in private. In my opinion, the moment you broadcast to a larger audience, you enter the realm of publishing.

It’s like if the church bulletin board went online, only the bulletin board made billions, and could sell all of your most private and personal thoughts, hopes, wishes, and dreams to local businesses in exchange for selling things on the board.

Free speech is about the GOVERNMENT silencing people, not about what private publishers choose to publish or not.

That’s called… an editorial decision. Arguably the one has very little to do with the other.

We do have protected classes you can’t discriminate against, even in editorial decisions, and, say, censor all of a certain minority group, (like TitTok has recently been accused of doing) but there aren’t that many protected classes this applies to and they’re governed by totally different laws than the first amendment. And they’re really hard to prove. (Political affiliation is NOT a protected group… Just saying.)

We also have libel laws about ruining other people on social media, but since they’ve successfully argued they’re a utility company, magically don’t… And I’m not saying they should be, but only because we just don’t know what we’re looking at. We don’t have a good story about what these businesses are.

VOLUNTEER CONTENT CREATORS AND LACK OF EMPLOYEE HANDBOOKS

Which is also why the harassment problem is so bad. Not only are you a volunteer content creator, but you’re also outside of any kind of employment protection or code of conduct, or journalistic ethics standards that a paid employee would be entitled to and held to.  And all the family bloggers are outside any kind of child labor law protection.

SO WHAT IS THE STORY OF THE IDEAL SOCIAL MEDIA?

I think it is the story of a unique kind of publishing company. Their main competitive advantage is making the interface easy to use for those creators and showing their audience what they want to see, using ad targeting that people consent to.

If I’m dreaming, I might as well say their workforce is no longer volunteer unless the social media company is also not-for-profit. All for-profit social media content creation should be a profit-share with the company.

They should have standards for publishing and standards for behavior that limits a lot of legal speech and who can use their site because they’re private publishing entities that can censor whoever they want so long as it is not a protected class like every other publishing company quietly does every minute of the day.

At least, that’s the dream story I would like to tell.

In the meantime, we have people railing about public utilities and the first amendment, people trying to charge their volunteer content creators, people upping ads until the content/ad ratio drives the audience away, and people refusing to protect their content creators/customers from harassment of other content creators/customers because… public square/free speech?

THE CURRENT STORY MAKES NO SENSE!!!

Some people are moving on because the magazine just isn’t good anymore. Or cool anymore. Nobody wants a subscription to the magazine your mom loves. Everyone laughs at MySpace for crashing and burning but what looked like a one-off fluke now looks like a feature of the industry. Maybe no social media company has a shelf life beyond 10 years. Most magazines don’t.

In reality, it’s going to take a long time for Silicon Valley, the government, and the public at large to reach some understanding of what this business is, and what is legal or not. If nothing else, it’s going to be entertaining to watch. Most stories are.

The post How to Stop Worrying and Love Our Social Media Future first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

(That should be the new tagline of this newsletter! Hopefully, this is interesting if not helpful…)

1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PROCRASTINATION

Don’t get me wrong, I am a master procrastinator. Witness eight novels. It took active work to not publish after a while.

But the more I work, the more I realize delaying work, writer’s block, fear, and all of these tactics are rooted in good instincts in my brain. It usually means something is wrong with the work itself and if I resist writing something, it shouldn’t get written. Sometimes it means I’m terrified of the marketing side of things and I need to shrink those tasks. Sometimes it means I’m just exhausted and I can get things done later if I just take a nap.

So now, if my brain is telling me no, I figure it has a good reason, and I just have to figure out what it is.

2. HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE WORK DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO THE QUALITY OF THE WORK

This is another thing that I believed for a long time. There are a lot of days I’m very lucky, and when I sit down, I’m inspired and things go quickly.

Then there are some days where every word is like pulling teeth. I’m not inspired. I don’t like what I’m doing. I don’t have faith in what I’m writing but I can’t think of anything better to write. And so I’m just slogging through a scene that I’m sure will be terrible and deleted.

Looking back over what I’ve done, that isn’t the case. 

In fact, sometimes the slog is better, because I’ve had to go slower and be more careful and it reads better than the inspirational word vomit. And sometimes it does happen and I have to delete some dreck that took me way too long to write.

But this is my point, whether I hate every minute of it or whether I love every minute of it does not correspond to whether I’m going to like it or keep it later.

This is really important in being able to keep going.

3. SITTING DOWN TO WORK AND ACTUALLY DOING THE WORK ARE TWO DIFFERENT SKILLS

Writing is a skill. Making sandwiches is a skill.

Showing up to work is a different skill!

Managing your time and energy and distractions and pain to be able to sit down and be productive is just as hard to learn as where to put a beautiful adjective.

It’s helped immensely with the pants-in-chair struggle to separate out the skill of sitting down to work and the skill of actually working. On any given day, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which was more challenging, but it gets easier when I treat both like the truly challenging skills they are.

4. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PRODUCTIVE, BUT IT CAN BE FUN

I feel like there are two kinds of articles in the productivity space. First are those that say buck capitalism! You’re just here to beeee. Versus those that say: how to get forty-five things done before 5 AM!

Both of them miss the fact that, yes, modern productivity culture can kill you if you let it. (Ask me how I know.) But at the same time, most of us like producing things. We’re a generally industrious species. Work is a huge source of pride for most of us, even if and perhaps because it’s so bloody hard.

5. CREATING A SCHEDULE IS NOT THE SAME THING AS PERFORMING THAT SCHEDULE.

Just like sitting down to write and writing are a different skills, sitting down to write (and exercise and eat and relax and socialize) every day is another different skill.

I am a champion schedule maker. I used to be a project manager, so you better believe I can make a schedule like nobody’s business.

Am I capable of performing that schedule every single day? No!

And that’s okay. Work is hard. Sitting down to work is hard. Sitting down to work consistently is the absolute bloody worst!

I used to make the big mistake of thinking if I planned, it was real. There’s some evidence that this is how your brain works. If you think about something, your brain reacts as if you did it. That’s really cool in the imagination department, but really hard when you’re trying to build a life you like.

Now I know that if I make a change in my routine, it’s going to take time for me to practice and get good at that routine, even if individually it’s made up of things like making lunch or writing a scene that I have done 1000 times. Putting them together on a regular basis is hard and I’m not going to do it every day starting tomorrow.

But I can eventually get there if I keep trying.

6. IT’S IMPOSSIBLEISM, NOT PERFECTIONISM

This deserves its own note,  but it’s worth touching on briefly that the expectations in your head are fantasies. They’re not perfect – they’re impossible and naming it perfectionism still makes it a little bit attractive.

The inputs that went into your vision aren’t real. Whether they were from the culture at large or your family of origin or the really inspiring entrepreneur who is probably gonna be dead by 40 given his schedule, just because you dreamed them does not mean they’re possible.

Real life is always chaotic and much messier than that, and if you have not lived up to your expectations, step number one is to examine your expectations not upbraid your imperfect human squishy toy of a body for failing.

I mean, yes, it’s possible your expectations were reasonable and you didn’t live up to them, but in my experience, 99 times out of 100, it’s my expectations, not my performance that was the problem.

7. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WASTING TIME

When I was younger, books were all I really cared about. And everyone said there’s more to life. But I really didn’t think so. And if I didn’t do this, I felt like I would have wasted my life.

There’s no such thing as a waste of life.

Having spent a great deal of the last year unproductive, dealing with vertigo, that lesson was hammered home. Whether you spent the day binging the latest TV show or writing a novel or working your dead-end job or playing with your kids or just waiting for the world to stop spinning, there’s no jury out judging your day.

8. FINISHING SOMETHING, EVEN IF IT’S BAD IS REALLY SATISFYING

There are lessons to be had in completing something, even if you don’t end up putting it out, even if it’s not good, and even if it is a novel-shaped object rather than a novel.

Finishing it is delicious.

And with that, I’m done

The post 8 Sanity-Saving Hacks I Learned Writing 8 Novels first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It’s the pitch meeting for a Newspaper Movie, only it’s an Urban Fantasy

It’s going to be Twilight meets All the Presidents Men!  Exploring themes of freedom of the press, corruption, truth, and the undead.

It’s called All the President’s Vampires where one intrepid reporter will get the tip of a lifetime from the ghost of Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca, which breaks the story that will take down a president.

We open on a grizzled old reporter moving out of his DC brownstone because his wife is an angel, like literally, but it turns out even angels have a limit — and being married to a  fairy who can always detect the truth who went to journalism school is hers.

That night, as he’s guzzling beer at the local bar for journalists, (different than the pub for cops, the cafeteria for politicians, the steakhouse for lobbyists, the blood bank for vampires, and the morgue for zombies), he gets a tip through his anonymous email to meet a source in a parking garage.

There are a lot of parking garages in DC, so it takes him a while, but when he finally finds the source at the Dulles Airport long-term parking facility, he learns it’s a janitor who can talk to ghosts. And the janitor has brought along a ghost of the long-dead Coolidge White House pet, Rebecca the Raccoon.

This janitor also speaks raccoon, being both an animal whisperer and a ghost talker and she says that the President has been drinking blood in the Oval Office.

Now that he thinks about it, the grizzled reporter realizes it’s a little bit strange that no one covered the fact that the President didn’t show up to the Iowa State Fair until the fireworks started, and no one has seen him since in the light of day, but he knows for sure there is a story here.

The meeting with his editor doesn’t go great because it’s right before lunch, and she’s a zombie and tries to eat his brains. And she’s worried about the reputation of the paper with such a bombshell accusation. She tells him he has to find a corroborating source who isn’t the ghost of a raccoon or a janitor.

And so begins a long montage of seeking a source and not getting eaten or hexed or cursed. There will also be shots of opening refrigerators in empty apartments to reveal a solitary half-eaten pizza and more shots at the bar and even at a different bar.  At one point he even hears about a super secret project in the wilds of New Mexico, but reluctantly lets that go, because it’s the wrong genre.

Finally, after five minutes of tracking shots, set to a score by the same guy who does all those disaster flicks, he tracks down the ghost of Zachary Taylor, who died in the White House after consuming insane amounts of green apples and cherries. 

He takes the corroboration back to his editor, who agrees that the ghost of a dead president is slightly more trustworthy than the ghost of a raccoon, but since the same janitor translated for both ghosts, they still had work to do.

And so begins yet another montage of pavement pounding, but this time various to various psychics and magical creatures around the city until he finds a tarot card reader in Chinatown who does not tell all of the politicians she sees that they will win the next election with her help, and does not tell all of the tourists she sees that museum esoterica that the costs $20 bucks, half of which goes back in her pocket, is better than any Smithsonian. Sometimes she mixes up the two messages, which results in quite a few politicians in photo ops at the esoteric museum, but the reporter deems her trustworthy enough to translate.

A dramatic meeting is arranged, this time on a park bench beneath bare tree limbs, which takes some doing because it’s the middle of July. But finally, the tarot card reader and the ghost of Zachary Taylor confirm that yes, the president is drinking blood.

And now, it’s all over but the writing, and the click click of the printing press, which is weird in a movie about an online blog, but the big bold headlines are the same crying the president is a vampire. After a last-minute call for comment to the White House press secretary who says she can get back to them after sunset. In the final editorial meeting, the editor says to go with that quote and that they are going to change the world, speak truth to blood-sucking power, and a few more inspirational cliches.

And as the reporter sits watching the news of the President’s address, the screen fades to black while small white letters tell you that this one article forced the President to say sorry and for one moment tell a little bit of the truth, before going on to win reelection by 20 million votes and two electoral college votes.

The post 1 Reason Why Movies Should Not Have Vampires and Reporters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I write stories, which means I spend all day in a universe where everything happens for a reason. It’s so great.

In a traditional story (anything not absurd or surrealist), everything has a cause and effect. Scenes build on the ones before until you get a climactic end that obeys logic.

It’s so satisfying.

It’s arguably what our brains do every minute of the day: make meaning out of a very chaotic, complex reality.

Everything needs to have a cause and effect when they’re happening and credit and blame when they’re over. Whether it’s ourselves or the stars, the gods, fate, or blind luck. Whatever it is – there’s a REASON.

WHAT IF ALL OF THAT IS WRONG?

There’s a great deal more happenstance, nonsense, and chance in our lives than I think any of us are comfortable with.

There’s a story I learned whose origins have been lost to time, though it’s been variously attributed to Buddhism and Taoism of an old farmer and chance. I used to absolutely hate it.

An old farmer got a horse. And all of his neighbors praised him and told him how lucky he was.

His response: we’ll see.

(Or sometimes: “Maybe,” or “Who knows,” depending on the translation.)

When his son fell off the horse and broke his leg, all of his neighbors commiserated with him.

His response: We’ll see.

Then war broke out and all of the oldest sons were drafted into the army except for his son because of his leg, and all of his neighbors said how lucky he was… You get the idea.

The specific events that happen to this guy also change with translation, but it’s always tragedy and triumph in succession.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

I hated the story because I knew it was absolutely right, but there was never the next step of what to do with that information. 

If you begin to live by acknowledging how little control you have, how do you make any moves at all?

In the Drunkards Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow describes one study about popular music that shows even when we get success, it’s still not worth much credit or blame.

Eight groups of people were asked to rate songs they’d never heard before.  Some groups saw each other’s ratings and some didn’t.

In the groups that saw others’ ratings, the songs that ended up at the “top of the charts” varied wildly. It turned out that songs that got an early lead when just a few people liked them, shot up in popularity at the end. That was the variable that made the difference, not the quality of the song, the work of the artist, or anything else.

The book has oodles more examples of personal success at sports, at stock picking, and more that look no different from randomness once you crunch the numbers.

Now, the vast majority of us are never going to send a song up the charts, but this kind of statistical randomness affects us too in who we date and the jobs we take, and the chances we’re given or not.

I’m not saying the things we do or don’t do don’t matter. If you never leave your house you’re going to stay single. If you never write a song, you’re never going to be on the chart at all.

But the specific way things and actions and decisions play out is a lot closer to random chance than luck.

WHAT DOES WORK?

The story I’ve learned to tell myself about endeavors has two parts:

For one, relax about outcomes.

You can’t really control how things play out, not with negative thinking or positive thinking, hard work, blame,  talent, luck, or anything else.

Everything you do has a chance at success and what turns a chance into a sure thing is pretty random and almost certainly not under your control.

For two, get serious about action.

You have to take chances or nothing happens. Again sadly, you can take a bunch of chances and nothing will still happen. That part is not under any of our control, but if you are consistently taking chances, your odds go way up.

It’s like throwing snowballs down a hill in the mountains. It’s very unlikely you’ll cause an avalanche every time. But it’s also very unlikely that they’ll peter to a stop a few feet from you every time either. Over the course of a lifetime, you’ll probably only get one or two avalanches, plus a lot of tiny snowballs, and maybe a few snowmen in between.

In short, you really, really, really cannot get caught up in outcomes. But neither can you stop playing the game. (:

The post 2 Ways to Make Goals in the Face of Randomness and Chaos first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It will not become a thing. It will not be universally adopted.

I know I JUST wrote a post explaining how I  do not make bold predictions after experiencing the worst prediction ever, and I definitely could be wrong about this. The only thing I can confidently predict is that I personally will never, ever put one on. (But I just don’t think I’m the only one.)

THIS IS NOT A MORAL OBJECTION

Tech companies are not morally neutral. They are low-key wrecking democracy as we know it in their pursuit of profits, but that’s not new. A new fancy headset is not going to make that worse than it already is.

THIS IS A PHYSICAL OBJECTION

The reason I will never put on a helmet is because I would puke my guts out.

Cyber sickness isn’t new. It’s been estimated that at least 10% of your users experience dizziness and nausea in VR. But a new study has shown that is a drastic understatement, and the number is closer to 65%.

Let that sink in. That means 35% enjoy their time on a headset. (That’s a hardcore failing grade…)

WHY DO WE GET MOTION SICKNESS AT ALL?

It’s actually a really fascinating, and complicated question.

How do you know where you are in space?

It’s not like one of your five senses can just announce: this way is up; this way is down; I’m standing still.  It’s three different systems in your body carefully talking to each other:

• It’s your formal vestibular system which consists of three little loops in your ears that sit at different angles and tell you when you’re horizontal, vertical, or diagonal (and sitting, standing, etc.)
• It’s also your eyes and what you can see, especially the horizon.
• It’s also your proprioception or the nerves of your body that can sense where you are, particularly in the upper vertebrae in your neck. (Yes, your brain only really cares where it is in space. Below your neck matters, but not nearly as much.)

Your ears, eyes, and body have to agree. When there’s a mismatch, some people get sick.

For me, it runs in the family. At my grandmother’s nursing home, they had a swing outside where you could roll a wheelchair onto one side and sit on the other and rock together. How sweet.  My family used to bet that they could put my grandmother on one side and me on the other and see who pukes first. Really, very sweet.

Whether you get sick depends on which system you pay attention to the most.

For people who do not get motion sick, you pay attention to your ears. Your vestibular system is the loudest, so if your eyes don’t agree, you don’t get sick because your internal sense of where you are is stronger.

But for people who pay the most attention to your eyes, the least reliable of the three, you get sick.  What you see changes a lot more than your head moves.

Makes sense, all well and good.

BUT WHY ON EARTH DO YOU VOMIT?

Your stomach is not really related to your ears, vertebrae, or eyes. Why does what you eat matter to how steady the ground is? There’s no connection! 

I know I’m diving into weird arcane science  But I’m telling you this has been happening my entire life from the time I nearly totaled a family car with cheese whiz on a road trip to South Dakota. We all just accept that if things move, some people must void all of the food in their stomachs. What is going on?

There’s new research into that as well. It seems like you get nauseous because when you have been poisoned you feel unsteady.

The vestibular system is really sensitive and is often attacked by poisons and viruses, (which is why the virus that shall not be named that wrecked the last three years can go after the vestibular nerves.)

So the theory is now that if you are unsteady for any reason our DNA has coded that as potential poisoning and just in case, better empty the stomach.

And since we are primates who had nothing to do with the sea for hundreds of thousands of years, we did not get the DNA that said if the ocean is moving, you’re fine.

SO WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE HOT NEW TECH?

Remember the metaverse? This is a post about the metaverse…

I’ve been to the metaverse, 20 years ago!

In the 90s, one of those novelty Virtual Reality shops popped up in my hometown for a hot second where you waited in this long line watching people wear a box on their head twice the size of a motorcycle helmet connected with wires out of their brainstems. They swatted at the air before you got to do it too for five minutes.

It was some kind of catching gems game on multiple platforms, but I could not orient at all, and I just remember looking down and laughing that the game had programmed feet and then running and suddenly being at the edge of the platform before almost puking and pulling it off my head.

If this is anywhere close to the introduction 65% of the population has to these devices, they’re going to have a problem.

IT’S NOT JUST NAUSEA, IT’S HOW VULNERABLE IT LEAVES YOU

Our little phones are there whenever we have a breath free, but they don’t cut off our primary sense. For the vast majority of humans, 80% of the information we take in is through our eyes. 50% of our cortex is dedicated to processing it. Our eyes are the main way most humans stay safe.

This means most parents for at least a decade of their kids’ lives can’t use this for very long and lose sight of them, and nobody vulnerable will ever put this on in public.

And sadly, many women, especially, are vulnerable in the metaverse too!

There are already accounts of attacks. Companies already have a dismal record of dealing with harassment, but it’s an order of magnitude worse when you jump from horrible words on a tiny screen to an avatar rubbing up against you. And just where under the law do virtual attacks fall? We are not ready for this.

All of which restricts this to single or childfree people in the 35% of the population who don’t get motion sickness and aren’t worried about real-life or online harassment to use in the privacy of their homes.

Sounds like a toy to me. It’s a cool toy, don’t get me wrong, and I don’t think it’s going away. But it is a toy.

The post I’m Never Getting on the Metaverse. Or a Boat. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I know that sounds crazy. But bear with me…

I write fiction: stories people do not believe. Sometimes I think this newsletter is the mirror to that: deconstructing the stories people automatically believe.

The idea for this week came from the news story about the water problem in the Western states of the US and the incredible droughts in Europe. Namely, that there isn’t any water. (I mean, I love the TV show Drain the Ocean, but it’s not supposed to be literal!)

LIFE IN CONSTANT DROUGHT

I grew up in Colorado, and it’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t grown up rationing water what it is like. Residents for decades filled fountains with lights instead of water and transformed our yards into rocks and took military showers.

But more than any one action, this mindset infects you until it’s almost instinct.

The craving for water as you watch the world turn beige and light on fire every year. As your skin desiccates and your hair crackles. As new residents clutch their chapstick and all their bath products stop working, and they wonder, “It’s so dry here.” As you discuss what you would save in the fire because everyone knows someone who’s lost their house.

I thought it was a universal experience, that everyone hoards water until I went to England where there is water everywhere. Where people took showers for as long as they wanted. Where it never stopped raining. Where huge plants soaked up everything and grew to the sky. Where lakes dotted every field. And nobody thought for a single second about what was coming out of their tap. It took me months to grasp that it’s not that they didn’t worry – they didn’t think about it at all.

This may be the first real problem the developed world has faced in a long time.

We have more energy than we know what to do with, which means we have enough to feed, house, and care for everyone.  On a practical level, what else do we need?

OUR SELF-INFLICTED PROBLEMS

I want to be extremely clear. I am not saying we don’t have real suffering. There is no end to the way we make ourselves miserable, especially the marginalized among us, who suffer the absolute most. But none of those are real problems.

It’s the definition of prejudice: it doesn’t actually exist. It’s a made-up story that is killing people.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died from gun violence, none of which was necessary. It’s a made-up fight. With real casualties. Hundreds of thousands of kids are stuffed into overcrowded classrooms getting an inferior education with books decided by political actors. Totally made-up problems. (Though they’ll be real enough when those kids come of age.)

WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT IS NOT?

I ran a grocery store through the pandemic, and this became a constant refrain: What is real and what is not real?

There was a lot of policy coming out of corporate. (Side note, never stick a bunch of executives at home and bored again. Just don’t do it.) Some of the changes were absolutely essential to our own protection, and some were absolutely ridiculous.

Safety was real. Getting food on the shelves was real. Making sure the signs were right so we didn’t kill somebody with a nut allergy was real.

Making sure that the automatic schedule was not manually adjusted too many times was not real. Making sure the hourly orders were recorded on paper in real time was not real. Making sure that all the marketing decals for the next holiday matched the map sent by marketing was not real.

And you know what? I was right. Letting that stuff slide didn’t make a single difference.

Oh, eventually our overlords would get a bee in their bonnet about one number or another. For a memorable three months, right at the beginning of the pandemic, it was cold rotisserie chicken sales.  I’m not kidding.

We were up to our elbows in bleach and panic and getting calls about our low numbers of leftover chicken.  And then that suddenly became real, because you know, staying employed is a real problem, so we’d worry about it for a few weeks, and then it’d be onto something else.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to jump through as many corporate hoops as the next person, but when you’re out there making life and death decisions, and there is not enough time in the day, you have to prioritize what is real.

WE HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO TO KEEP FROM RUNNING OUT OF WATER. IMMEDIATELY.

There’s no blaming one side or the other. I mean you can try, but that doesn’t get you more water. You can even put up a sound bite or graph about climate change. Or one denying climate change. There is still no water. Finally, we must do some actual governing. With actual solutions.

It’s almost refreshing. There is no room for bluster. There is no room for experimenting. We don’t have any water.

Sadly, and happily, there will be more and more real problems as our fight over fantasy problems lead to real-world consequences. The stress sucks, but the simplicity is almost a relief.

I know this sounds weird coming from a writer of fiction, to pay close attention to reality. Still, it is perhaps my time spent focused on fiction that allows me to recognize it so easily in the vast majority of our politics and news.

At work, in news, in everything else, I promise it’s a great thing for your blood pressure and your ability to plan your day to ask: What is real and what is not real?

The post A Fiction Author on How to Fall in Love with Reality first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I talked about last week how we’re terrible at the first step in the scientific method: making a hypothesis. We never learn to do it. Here’s a few ways to do it better.

TELL YOURSELF THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED

We all have stories about why things happen in the world and in our lives. They can be really awesome stories. Whizbang beginnings, tense conflict, explosive endings.  Elaborate backstories. Fifteen sequels.

Do they have anything to do with reality? Until we had the scientific method, we had no way to know. But now we do!

The fancy word for this is a root cause analysis, digging through the story to try and find the story that most closely matches the reality of what happened.

It is shocking how many big decisions people make their lives without the smallest bit of due diligence. They apply for graduate programs without ever talking to someone who’s gotten that degree or has the job they think they want. Or without talking to someone who has that job to make sure it’s something that sounds remotely palatable.

We spend more time delving into the restaurant we’re going to pick for dinner and reading up on reviews than we do on major business decisions or life decisions.

IDENTIFY BOTTLENECKS

This is another way to tell a more accurate story of what happened. Instead of delving deeply into the very beginning, you look for the biggest pain point right now, aka a bottleneck.

In my previous life, I was a project manager, and I came to know the importance of bottlenecks painfully and deeply.  It’s the part of your process, whether you’re writing a book, baking something delicious, creating a giant website, getting a kid out the door, or whatever Herculean task you’re attempting that holds up everything else.

One business coach I follow, Danny Iny, insists that business growth is primarily ever about solving the next bottleneck. Whether you work for yourself or a company, you may think you have a ton of problems or a ton of opportunities, but there is always one primary thing tripping you up, and if you aren’t solving for that, you’re not moving forward.

USE ANALOGIES

From the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, (I mentioned this before, BRILLIANT book), he talks about the usefulness of analogies.  Sometimes novelty is even more useful than expertise.

InnoCentive lets companies post thorny problems that have stymied experts for anyone to try and solve and awards cash prizes to anyone who can figure them out. Most of the solutions come from totally unexpected industries. One dude solved the problem of how to clean up oil from the arctic by comparing it to how you get a slushy out of a cup with a straw. That little analogy netted him $20,000!

REMEMBER THERE’S NOISE IN THE SIGNAL

I spoke last week about the fact that we live in the wicked world of chaos and complexity, not the kind world of chess games and computer algorithms. One of the hardest things about the wicked world is that you may learn the wrong lessons from experience. Why did your campaign succeed? You have a good story, but it’s just a story. You will never really know.

As you make your next guess, acknowledge the fact that there may be irrelevant details in the data and key factors you understand that will similarly obscure why you succeed or fail the next time.

PUT IT TOGETHER

Do you want to do something new with your life? Or make your next idea successful?

1. Before you commit to anything, tell the story of what’s happened so far, and then dig. Really dig back to learn as much about what happened as possible. If this is something new, dig back as much as possible into other people’s experiences.
2. Focus in particular on bottlenecks. What is the one thing holding everything else up? You don’t need to be worrying about video editors if you don’t have a video camera.
3. Don’t just focus on what you know or what the experts know. How can you compare this problem to things completely outside your usual experience or the expert’s experience? Quiz total amateurs which will force you to use analogies.
4. Remember that there will always be noise in the data. This is the wicked world. If this were easy, a computer would’ve already figured out how to do it. There are things that you don’t know you don’t know and there are things that you think are important that are completely irrelevant and that WILL ALWAY BE THE CASE. There’s not much you can do to prevent that except be on the lookout for them so that you don’t at least learn the wrong lesson.
5. Make a guess!

What do you want to try next? What do you want to learn? This can be so much fun!

The post How Bottlenecks and Slushies Help You Get Better Ideas first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.