The Robot Co-op

Fresh back from Alaska attending my 20 year high school reunion and fishing with my brother Conrad I find myself reflecting on crazy social dynamics and the book Status Anxiety which I finished reading in AK. The good news is that the reunion was a total blast—but it wasn’t without a fair amount of self-reflection about the state of my life. My fellow classmates likely had a similar state-of-the-union speech being composed and revised in their own heads.

I chalk a lot of this up to the question “what will people think about me?”. Which is kind of a crazy question in retrospect as everyone was simply happy to see one another. But somewhere between reuniting with old friends, fishing on the Kenai River (do this before you die, by the way) and finshing off the stellar Status Anxiety, I came to a new view of how much energy people waste on thinking about what other people think about them. Myself included. In the end, though, the fishing and friendships are most important. A special shout out to Xavier for some unexpected late night reunion chats about the state of our past and present lives and moving beyond past perceptions of ourselves into a brighter future.

While I was reuniting, Todd was busy Landmarking. I believe that we had parallel experiences using different methods. Todd?

Hello, Daniel. Thank you for quoting Peaches & Herb. See how open and communicative I am being by answering you via this blog post? Chalk it up to my $425 journey over the weekend. While you attended your reunion, I attended a nonlinear, authoritarian-driven weekend of intensive introspection. The Landmark Forum did have a lot to do with the absurdity of social anxieties, how strongly they dictate our lives yet how baseless they are, being universal. (Why feel judged by everyone if everyone is feeling equally judged by me?) And, although they never use these terms, the Forum has a lot to do with living life from an existential perspective, not worrying so much about where you come from or how you’ve been or what stories you’ve carried with you since high school, but deciding how to be right now and where you want to go from here. Personally, I want to be open to the idea of lunch, and then I want to create a future where we go and eat some.