Substrate

“happy monday.”

I’ve begun to instead deeply worry about the power of inertia in our lives. Put simply, I think people are not nearly as intentional as they should be with their lives and how they make decisions. The decisions people make in the short-term and understanding long-term implications, and everything in between increasingly just happen. And we let them. I think the ages of 28-32 really is when inertia starts to take hold strongest. You no longer think you are totally flying blind in life, you are increasingly a little more tired than normal, and the path of least resistance can seem nice after having life beat you down to varying degrees. How much can I or should I attempt to impact or change those close to me and their lives?

The core idea of the essay could be summarized in an equally as powerful statement brought forth by another Tumblr user: Being known is being loved.

Mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b0mnbrue61kveez/mhdempsey_2020-Aug-15.pdf?dl=0

While icebergs are obstacles that can be avoided to survive, rime is more deadly. The only way in which you can remove rime is to put in the work and chip away at the ice consistently over time.

In our personal lives, many of us let these types of emotions rule our choices. Think about how many times you and your friends have told a close friend to quit their job/get out of a relationship/stand up for themselves/do something else risky. Instead of following what everyone is saying, often people defy the advice of the people closest to them and trust their gut (whether it’s right or wrong is irrelevant). ​ My friend Ryan is famous for saying “confident about the inputs” and that’s kind of all many of us have. Take your inputs, your external data points, and your internal thoughts, and iterate on your stances.

You realize relationships, non-relationships, and fun nights out are easiest when you’re brutally honest. You don’t quite know it yet, but you’ve established one of the pillars of your short life that honesty is indeed the best policy.

A+ thread IMO private spaces feel more conducive to conversations that get closer to the truth, allowing for misunderstandings & developing ideas. No matter how real you think you are or you try to be, we are all engaging in some kind of performance for a larger crowd on here. The internet is less fun when people move from public to private thinking. Whether due to change of job, status, or competitive landscape, it's noticeable. Have had to do this for certain areas & it feels limiting at times, & mostly leads to less discourse/diversity of thought. The counterpoint is that when you find your braintrust, you can let things fly at a faster pace and with higher variance on quality and reasoned judgment. This leads to *different* discourse but in reality, personally building a diverse braintrust is harder than we like to admit Not to go on an "intellectual dark web"-toned tangent but final point: I sometimes worry that the attractiveness of public thinking that seemed to dominate for past 7-10 years has eroded recently because of 2 core forces that create a cycle of withdrawal or dilution of thought. 1) Widespread hate on social media today across all groups and how it's nearly impossible to make a fringe point without it being hated on. And related, our industry deals with confrontation *horribly*, specifically in the co-opetition world of VC. 2a) A widespread exhaustion & recognition of what is the over-intellectualization of thought & simple content. This leads to a ton of dilution in our feeds filled with abstract tweets, 9 min reads that should be 2, historical allegories for things happening in 2019, & book thread 2 b) Further explained: Many now take simple concepts, abstract them away to much more complex language/narrative as they recognize the arbitrage in doing so due to the value it brings to personal brand (IMO this is 90% of people) 2 c) OR they are so wrapped up in their own rhetoric they think communicating this way is dominant. In this case, I think we can cycle back to the difficulty of building a personal braintrust that is diverse and truly challenging.