I’ve been having a hard time lately.
This has been a rough year.
I was let go from my well paying tech job in June of last year. I’ve applied to hundreds of roles since and still nothing. On top of that I decided that now would be a good time to go back school and attempt a career transition. My partners industry is also in a major slump and we’re both dealing with legal issues.
I’m trying to keep this blog going because I find it therapeutic. I like posting about things I find interesting in the hopes that others find it interesting too.
Here we go!
Stuff I’m doing 🏃🏻♂️
- I’m still looking for work. If you’re in the tech space and need someone to look after your customer-facing teams please give me a shout.
- My next marathon in Vancouver on May 4th is quickly approaching. I have my longest training run tomorrow (36km). My legs are already sore in anticipation.
Stuff I’ve read 👨🏻💻
Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too.
I was raised in the Mormon church. Anyone who has experienced a high-demand Christian faith knows that they are all hyper focused on pornography. It’s an obsession.
In the Mormon faith you can’t look at porn, you’re told not to think about porn (God can read your thoughts), and you definitely can’t masturbate.
For the life of me I can’t think of any reason why all these restrictions would lead to people looking at porn and having multiple wanks a day.
This studies in this article discovered that it’s not porn itself that dictates any kind of addiction, rather it’s the religiosity of the user.
what the Internet did was to put porn in the hands of people woefully unprepared to manage it or their sexual desires.
This is exactly it. You’re taught from a very young age that sexuality is bad unless you’re married. And by “married” I mean a heterosexual marriage otherwise sex at any time is of the devil.
In one study by Perry and Whitehead, pornography use predicted depression over a period of six years, but only in men who disapproved of porn use. Continuing to use porn when you believe that it is bad is harmful. Believing that you are addicted to porn and telling yourself that you're unable to control your porn use hurts your well-being. It's not the porn, but the unresolved, unexamined moral conflict.
Shame. Religion peddles it, pushes it, enforces it. Even after you’ve left it follows you for the rest of your life.
In therapy, instead of trying to change people’s porn use patterns, we should instead be focused on helping them make their values and behaviors congruent, and learning to understand and recognize the impact of their moral beliefs.
It wasn’t until I left the faith in my late 30’s that I could finally align my behaviours and values in a healthy way. It’s taken years and a lot of reading/therapy but it can be done.
Because of religious opposition to sexual education, many people struggling with masturbation don’t understand what is normal, or that their sexual interests are healthy.
I remember going to a sexual education class in junior high and we watched a video that talked about masturbation. I remember the narrator mentioned in was completely health and normal. This was the first time in my life I had ever heard anyone describe masturbation as anything but evil and wrong.
Even if you’ve not or never have been religious, this article is an interesting one. Also, fuck the Mormon church.
Leadership over Measureship
If you’ve worked in the Tech Industry you’ve experienced “measureship”. It’s the relentless focus on metrics. KPI’s, or whatever else they’re calling them now. Its effect is to remove the humanity from the human workforce. Everyone and everything is reduced to processes that can be tracked. Those numbers are used to justify everything the business does and I do mean everything.
The result is a brutalist business philosophy defined by its relentless optimization of the status quo for the corporation's good at the expense of the customer.
Careless People
I’m old enough to remember the internet pre social networks. When it was all discussion boards and chat rooms and then blogs. I say this because I’m predisposed to hating Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not just Mark, it’s tech billionaires in general. They’re a cancer on our planet. As you can see I went into this book with a lot of bias. I was still shocked by some of what I read.
Nick Heer at Pixel Envy) did a great write up of the main highlights in the book.
Stuff I’ve Watched 📺
Adolescence
Fuck this show was good! If you have kids, you need to watch this.
Apple Cider Vinegar
This show fits neatly into my hatred of all things social media. It’s fucked up people, doing fucked up things, for clout and money.