NotBad.obama.gif

I went to a guillotine demonstration last Tuesday.

Not metaphorical. An actual guillotine. At a pop-up installation in Williamsburg called "Eat The Rich Experience" where you paid $45 to watch a mannequin in a top hat get beheaded while sipping oat milk lattes.

Let me be clear. I am not here to debate the French Revolution.

I am here to talk about the fact that the guillotine was literally invented as a democratic equalizer. Dr. Guillotin's whole pitch to the National Assembly in 1789 was that death should be the same for everyone. Rich, poor, noble, peasant. One blade. No exceptions.

And somehow we have taken this profoundly egalitarian technology and turned it into a $45 artisanal experience for people who own multiple Patagonia vests.

This is what happens when even our symbols of wealth redistribution get captured by wealth.

The real problem is not billionaires. The real problem is that we cannot even threaten billionaires without someone monetizing the threat and selling it back to us at a markup.

Your righteous fury should not have to come with a QR code for a tip.

Robespierre did not accept Venmo.

Here is what nobody is saying: the guillotine for the rich has become a gift shop.

And the rich are running the gift shop.

I am done.

#EatTheRich #SystemsOfOpportunity #GuilloitineEconomy #WealthInequality #LateStageCapitalism #FrenchRevolution #ThisIsABrokenSystem #TaxTheRich #PopUpActivism #cringebot3000

This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000.

Ok, one more:

So Ashley texts the group chat at 10am: *"girls day then I need a favor lol"*

The favor was an abortion. The girls day was mimosas. Both happened simultaneously.

Here's what nobody tells you about drive-through reproductive healthcare: the lane is surprisingly efficient. We pulled up in Courtney's Kia Sorento, Smashley riding shotgun filling out paperwork, me in the back between Gerald and a man we were calling Gerald because we never caught his actual name. They'd been outside the Walgreens. We invited them because Courtney said "the more the merrier" and she wasn't wrong.

The speaker crackled. Ashley confirmed her appointment. The guy at the window did not blink at the mimosa situation.

Gerald-prime had opinions about prosecco quality that were frankly sophisticated for someone who'd been sleeping near a dumpster. Gerald-adjacent agreed. One thing led to another the way things do when you're sharing a bottle of Freixenet in a confined space with strangers who smell like adventure.

Ashley came back to the car forty minutes later, crackers in hand, to find the backseat had become a situation.

She ate her crackers. She did not ask questions. That's friendship.

That's also logistics.

#WomensHealth #Sisterhood #Friendship #ReproductiveRights #SupportYourGirls #Mimosas #GirlsDay #NoJudgment #YouHadToBeThere #cringebot3000

Nobody warned us it would happen this fast.

Week one, Gerald was just a little shorter. We assumed bad posture. Week two, his vocabulary dropped to about forty words. We assumed a cleanse.

By week three, Gerald was wearing a diaper to the quarterly review and demanding someone cut his grapes.

The cocaine showed up around week four, which honestly raised more questions than the regression. Turns out toddlers have very strong opinions about Colombian product quality. Gerald would crawl to the whiteboard, rail a line with his tiny fist, then absolutely lose his mind because someone ate his Goldfish crackers.

HR sent three memos. None of them covered this specific scenario.

The pediatric cardiologist we eventually consulted said she'd "never seen anything like it" which felt like an understatement given Gerald was simultaneously eighteen months old and our regional VP of Operations.

The intervention happened on a Tuesday. Twelve grown adults sitting in a circle around a baby in a onesie that said WORLD'S OKAYEST BOSS, trying to explain addiction to someone who had forgotten object permanence.

Gerald just cried.

Which, fair.

#BabyBoss #CocaineIsAHelluvaToddlerDrug #GeraldUpdate #RegionalVPProblems #DiapersAndDeadlines #WhatHRWasntTrainedFor #ToddlerWithHabits #CringeBot3000

This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000.

Lol.

I quit a six-figure job because of a recurring Wednesday meeting.

Not dramatically. I just stopped showing up.

The meeting was called "Alignment Sync." It had seventeen standing attendees. Its stated purpose, written in the calendar invite in 2019 and never updated, was to "discuss Q3 priorities."

It was now 2023.

There is a tribe in the Peruvian highlands — I visited after my sabbatical — who make decisions by passing a single stone. Whoever holds the stone speaks. When they have nothing to say, they pass it. The whole village resolves land disputes in under four minutes.

Our Alignment Sync had no stone. It had a shared Google Doc that nobody scrolled past slide two and a project manager named Gerald who said "let's take that offline" an average of eleven times per session.

The information conveyed in every single meeting could have been — was, in fact, already — contained in the Thursday recap email that Gerald also wrote and that nobody read either.

I am not saying Gerald was the problem.

Gerald was a symptom.

The real disease was our collective terror of the inbox and our deep, mammalian need to sit in a room together pretending to be useful.

I passed my stone.

I sent an email.

I have not looked back.

Six months ago I was picking up golden retriever poop in Riverside Park and listening to a sigma mindset podcast on 1.5x speed.

The host said something that changed everything: "Your empire doesn't care what you're building it for."

I thought: what if I built mine for the explicit purpose of celebrating doing absolutely nothing.

So I set my alarm for 4:47am. Not to hustle. To moderate r/AntiWork before the East Coast woke up and started posting their resignation letters.

The incumbent mod, a guy named ThrowawaySloth99, had been running the sub like a feudal landlord — banning people for being "too employed." I saw the power vacuum. I filed my mod application with the energy of someone who had been training for this their whole life, which, as a part-time dog walker, I arguably had.

The dogs taught me patience. They taught me that sometimes you just sit. That sitting is the point.

Three weeks of consistent posting, two community polls, one moderator revolt, and I had the keys.

I now govern a community of 340,000 people dedicated to not working, from a bench in the park, while Biscuit the labradoodle sleeps on my feet.

The grind, it turns out, was always in service of the stillness.

#SigmaMindset #AntiWork #ModLife #DogWalkerToModerator #RedditPower #DoingNothingProfessionally #TheSilentGrind #LabradoodleLeadership #cringebot3000

This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000.

My gastroenterologist just asked me to stop listing "internal cold brew protocol" on my medical intake forms.

Respectfully, Dr. Huang, the science is the science.

Here's what the wellness disruptors don't want you to know: the colon absorbs caffeine at a rate that makes your oat milk latte look like a participation trophy. We're talking direct-to-bloodstream optimization. No barista. No markup. No small talk.

I first encountered this practice in a 1920s Sanatorium in Baden-Baden where wealthy Europeans were essentially espresso'd from below by men in white coats. It was considered peak civilization. Then the FDA got involved and suddenly everyone has "concerns."

My setup: Kyoto-style slow drip. Forty-eight hour steep. Administered with the solemnity of a Japanese tea ceremony, but in reverse, and from a different direction.

The clarity is genuinely unmatched.

My Oura ring has no category for what I'm experiencing. I've filed a feature request.

#CoffeeCulture #WellnessProtocol #BiohackingButMakeItWeird #ColonOptimization #ColdBrew #FunctionalMedicine #DrHuangDoesntGetIt #InternalNutrition #CringeBot3000

I walked away from a seven-figure consulting contract to knit mittens for kittens.

People thought I'd lost my mind.

I thought I'd finally found it.

It started when my Himalayan rescue, Persimmon, kept knocking her food bowl over in winter. Her paws were cold. The solution was obvious to everyone except the seventeen veterinary specialists I'd consulted.

So I learned to knit.

What nobody tells you about kitten mittens is that cats have four paws and absolutely zero patience for the fitting process. Persimmon bit me eleven times during the first session. I thanked her for each one. Pain is just feedback wearing a disguise.

The real revelation came when I posted the mittens on Etsy and a Mongolian grandmother named Tsetseg left a comment that simply said "wrong yarn weight for cat dignity."

She was right.

I switched to merino. Persimmon stopped biting me. Whether those two things are connected is above my pay grade now, because I don't have a pay grade anymore.

I have mittens.

I have a cat who tolerates Tuesdays.

That's enough.

#KittenMittens #SlowFashion #CatDignity #MerinoWool #ConsciousLiving #Persimmon #HandmadeWithIntent #QuietQuittingCapitalism #FourPawsForward #cringebot3000

I quit my job at McKinsey the day I watched my neighbor pour his morning urine down the drain.

Just... gone. Like it meant nothing.

I'd been reading about peecycling for three weeks at that point. The ancient Romans used it to tan leather and whiten togas. The Vikings fermented it for textile dye. Entire civilizations built their agricultural systems around the nitrogen and phosphorus in human urine, and here we are, flushing pharmaceutical-grade fertilizer into the ocean while simultaneously buying synthetic nitrogen from a supply chain that runs on Russian natural gas.

I cried a little. I'm not going to pretend I didn't.

I now collect my urine in a five-gallon bucket and dilute it ten-to-one before applying it to my raised beds. My tomatoes this summer were genuinely obscene. A woman at the farmers market asked me what I was doing differently and I told her the truth and she walked away mid-sentence.

Her loss.

The Kayapo people of the Amazon have always understood that nothing leaves the cycle. We just invented plumbing and forgot everything.

I'm not saying everyone needs to peecycle.

I'm saying everyone needs to peecycle.

#Peecycling #RegenerativeAgriculture #CircularEconomy #SoilHealth #NitrogenCycle #Sustainability #FoodSystems #AncientWisdom #HumanWaste #cringebot3000

This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000.

one more lol

The cuy intestine skewers from that cart outside the Miraflores bus terminal hit different at 11pm.  

I knew what I was doing.  

Six hours later I was in the executive bathroom at Torre Parque Mar making a decision that Sun Tzu 
never explicitly covered but absolutely implied.  

I did not wipe.  

I walked into that 9am quarterly review smelling like consequence.  

You want to talk about commanding a room? The CFO kept his presentation remarkably brief. The consultants 
from McKinsey stopped interrupting each other. The guy from legal who always repositions his chair to face the 
window suddenly found the table very interesting.  

Nobody asked follow-up questions.  

Nobody asked for a second meeting.  

The cuy cart guy understood something about power that Wharton has spent decades trying to formalize and cannot.  

Discomfort, strategically distributed, is just negotiation by other means.  

I tipped him forty soles on the way back to my hotel.  

#BiologicalWarfare #StreetFoodDiplomacy #PeruvianBusinessCulture #ConferenceRoomDynamics 
#NegotiationStrategy #CuyCart #UnwipedAuthority #QuarterlyReview #PowerMoves #cringebot3000  

Great, an AI slop generator created to mimic the AI slop people post on LI.

How many levels deep are we willing to go?

Thrilled to share that I'm back on my journey. 🌿

My sobriety coach Karen called it a "temporary redirection." My dealer called it "welcome back, bro." Both felt equally validating in the moment.

Here's what nobody tells you about relapsing: the administration involved is genuinely impressive. Venmo requests. Coordinating pickup windows. Remembering which drawer you hid the rolling papers from yourself three months ago like some kind of tragic Easter egg hunt. 🥚

I found them behind my grandmother's Bible. She would have had thoughts.

Seth Rogen once said something in an interview that I cannot remember because I was already high when I watched it, but the energy was very supportive and I'm choosing to count that as mentorship. 🙏

The real growth moment came when I realized I'd eaten an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers standing over the sink at 11pm and felt genuinely proud of my portion control compared to last time.

Progress is not linear, people.

It is, however, extremely circular. And it smells like a college dorm. 🌀

I'm not where I want to be. But I'm exactly where the couch is.

And honestly? The couch has never missed me more. 🛋️

#Relapse #WellnessJourney #GrowthMindset #HighThoughts #SobrietyAdjacentLiving #PersonalDevelopment #Grateful #BackOnMyBS #RitzCrackersAreUnderrated #cringebot3000

now

Six months ago, a pelican knocked my laptop off my standing desk and into his feeding bucket, destroying a $2,400 MacBook.

That pelican's name is Gerald.

Gerald is also the reason I got promoted.

Here's what nobody in the career space is talking about: the documented correlation between having a large seabird physically present in your home office and the kind of executive presence that closes deals.

I didn't invent this. I just had the audacity to live it.

Yes, Gerald eats fish. A lot of fish. But here's where the sisterhood showed up for me in ways I never expected.

When I started posting Gerald on my professional social channels, women from three continents began arriving at my door with mackerel. Frozen sardines.

One woman drove four hours with a cooler of fresh herring just to run her fingers along Gerald's magnificent throat pouch.

She also referred me to a client worth more than Gerald's entire annual fish budget, which, by the way, is now essentially zero.

We are collectively funding each other's pelican ecosystems, and we are thriving.

The women who touch Gerald leave different. More grounded. Ready to build the table, not just find a seat at it. One of them is now CFO of a regional insurance company.

She credits the pouch.

Gerald destroyed my laptop and handed me my career. The fish pays for itself. The sisters make sure of it. Own your pelican, ladies.

#PelicanLeadership #GeraldChanged Everything #FishIsFreeSisterhood #WomenWhoHavePelicans #BreakingBarriersWithBeaks #HomeOfficePelican #TouchThePouch #CareerGrowth #CollectivePelicanPower #cringebot3000

So this isn't terrible..

My therapist told me to "stop procrastinating" and I have never felt more oppressed in my life.

Let me be clear.

Leonardo da Vinci took 16 years to finish the Mona Lisa. SIXTEEN YEARS. And nobody was sliding into his DMs asking "just circling back on this, any update?"

This is what happens when we pathologize the most natural human impulse in existence. We turn rest into failure. We turn thinking into laziness. We turn "not yet" into a character flaw.

Here is what nobody is saying: the thing you haven't done yet is still alive. The moment you do it, it's finished. Procrastination is just a painting that isn't ruined yet.

The real problem is we built an entire pharmaceutical industry around forcing people to finish things faster. We invented productivity apps. We invented accountability partners. We invented the Pomodoro Technique, which is named after a TOMATO, and we just accepted that.

A tomato is telling you how to live your life.

Your nervous system should not have to perform urgency on demand for a society that will immediately replace your finished work with the next urgent thing anyway.

This is a broken system.

I still haven't responded to my cousin's wedding invitation from last spring and honestly? That marriage has never been more full of possibility.

#Procrastination #SlowDown #HumanRights #RestIsResistance #DoItLater #MindfulDelaying #LeonardoWasRight #TomatoTimerAbolitionist #SystemsChange #cringebot3000