spencer wrapped 2022 coda doc for this to share with the public
For newsletter
Some quick updates:
- Stay tuned for some projects coming out of my recent involvement with verses
- Made a fun 2021 wrapped doc to recap my year (also an experiment in protesting against data stockholm syndrome)
- coda 3.0 and packs GA
- skiied for the first time this season
- smile exchange
Letter to past self on gambling.
Dear 2021 Spencer,
It’s probably been a few days since you did your own annual reflection. You’re reflecting on your previous year intention to do more instead of your inherent instinct to think. You’re thinking that you’ve made progress, but you want to accelerate it, double down on pushing yourself to act like the people you admire and work on the things you care about. You’ll choose a provocative theme, gambling. You’ll do this intentionally—the word choice a tiny act of rebellion to egg yourself into moving out of your comfort zone. You probably don’t realize how meaningful that intention would become.
You’ll gamble 258 days of the year, pushing yourself to do everything from striking up a conversation with a stranger to sending that terrifying ski slope to sharing nascent ideas for critical feedback. You’ll push yourself to become active on Twitter and more vulnerable in your sharing, both to friends and publicly. You’ll try to write honestly, kicking off a 100 mini-essays experiment on your birthday and holding yourself publicly accountable on your newsletter and Twitter.
You’ll do things you had thought of as a fanciful dream: dancing on a stage in front of all your friends, publishing a piece on the magic of technology, play with your sense of identity through fashion, and lead development of a critical software project.
10 instances from the year
It’ll be a hard year, but you’re pushing yourself to embrace the pain and struggle now because you want to know what you want. You want to feel strongly and stand for and advocate against rather than waver between possibilities and go with the flow. You want to rely more on your feeling and be grounded in the fact that things are valuable just because they feel meaningful. You’ll fight to make your chest full by learning to chase energy and bottling them up in tiny artifacts, bad poems, and fun experiments.
These thoughts and ideas aren’t anything new to you. You’ve had them in fits of inspiration and storms of curiosity and blankets of creativity. They’re not as glamorous as the moments of eureka shown in movies, but they pack the same impact: watching the flow of people and intentions at the bus stop, eyes fluttering at the edge of sleep, taking the fluffy husky out to poop. You’ll just learn to capitalize on those moments, glamorous or not. You’ll build deep appreciation for how sustaining they are, bounds of energy releasing upon capture. When inspiration strikes, you’ll write, and you’ll build; you’ll imagine, and you’ll conspire. You’ll act instead of do; gamble instead of hide. You undergo a transition from vita contemplativa to vita activa.
from my 2021 wrapped
You’ll struggle with the meaning of love and what you seek in a relationship and reconsider what traits you hold valuable in a friendship, pushing yourself to be more honest about your feelings when they conflict. You’ll look for your tribe online, those that care about how technology affects our humanity and can be leveraged to enable our actualization, those who give deep care to the power of words and feelings—to colors and meanings, those who are deeply optimistic yet pragmatic about how to build a better future for here—starting now.
Your travel instinct will be fulfilled with trips to Hawaii, to Alaska, and beyond, seeking everlasting bites of food and unreal sceneries and endangered vibes, the feeling of youth and exploration and serenity.
2021 is a hard year, but your consistency in sticking to your theme will pull through. You’ll push yourself to be a little more settled in your identity in both small interactions at the grocery store and career decisions. It will be a year filled with lifelong memories, precious moments, and taking gratitude for all the blessings in your life and the opportunities you’ve been given.
Towards an ever-firmer self, 2022 Spencer
2022
In 2022, I want to be more generous to the people in my life and those around me. I think I’ve always been generous in the sense that I’ve been trusting to the point of being gullible. Generous in the sense that I avoid conflict so I always check myself to accommodate others. I’ve come to realize that that isn’t generous at all. It’s taking agency away from others by choosing for them, rather than giving them the opportunity to show up and be themselves and affect your shared world.
In 2021, I think I listened to myself better and became more quietly confident in my ability to be my authentic self in everything that I do. However, like a lot of my struggles in life, I’ve tried to tackle it independently at least from the start and from the most part moving forward. Ironically, I think I have an incredible support network and very compassionate, talented, and present friends and mentors, but I have always struggled with trusting myself enough to ask them vulnerably and admit my weakness.
That’s what I mean by my false sense of generosity before. It was born out of fear of showing weakness and being vulnerable about needing help. Paradoxically, it’s been shown that asking for help from friends makes them like you more, because they think that you trust them. Whether it’s true scientifically or not, I’ve felt this anecdotally from when friends have asked me for help and I’ve been more than happy to.
Like a lot of us do, I held myself to an unfair, higher standard than I put on others. The threshold for asking for help was unreasonable and I pressured myself to try to solve everything myself to show that I was capable and independent and worthy of being a friend to all these cool and amazing people. Simultaneously, I’ve struggled with trusting others to take care of things that I’m particular about. I’ll feel an instinct to take care of the task myself, unable to completely give the burden away to someone else. These two tendencies stem from the same phenomenon, of putting too much pressure on the scaffolding I need to give to others in order to work together. In turn, I think I closed myself off from others, made myself seem aloof and uninterested when everything I was doing was, in part, to sustain those relationships.
My theme moving forward in 2022 is mutualism.
Mutualism and Interdependence
Mutualism describes the ecological phenomenon where two species interact in ways that give both a net benefit. Hummingbirds and flowers are one common example: the flowers give the birds pollen and the birds spread the flowers’ seeds. Interdependence is a social exchange theory that describes how every act by a member of a group will deeply affect the other members and the state of the group. Specifically, positive interdependence induces positive cathexis, “the investment of positive psychological energy in object outside one’s self.”
Mutualisms are also classified by the involved species’ closeness to one another. In biological terms, an obligate relationship is one in which one “cannot survive without” the other (i.e. obligate aerobe, one that cannot survive without oxygen).
I think humans are obligate socialites—we cannot survive without others to interact with. Mutualism feels like an obligation in that sense. We cannot survive without depending on and helping others. But just because it’s something we have to do, doesn’t mean we need to treat it as a chore. We can commit to the mutualism, to interdependence, to being attentive. After all, choosing means everything in a world of limitless possibility.
Mutualism is about abundance over scarcity, the pie recipe for all rather than a single limited pie. I want to lean into that abundance and cultivate gardens and havens for it to flourish. I want to create free energy, build positive sum worlds, play infinite games. I want to work towards squad wealth, build caring communities, and multiply the opportunity of connection. I want to be attentive to friends, generative with co-conspirators, rigorous with rivals.
With this theme, I intend to build the fundamental assumption that the people around me are compassionate and forgiving, rather than exacting and judgemental. I want to normalize asking stupid questions and voicing still-forming opinions and identifying discomfort and disagreement. Mutualism is about becoming trustless by trusting those you’ve established connection with by default and gathering psychological oxygen for your tribe. Interdependence is about braiding sweetgrass, passing down an ever-growing artifact that accrues value with use rather than depreciating through your community.
The mantra I’ve coalesced around this past year for how I want to spend my time in life is making cool (provocative, thoughtful, empowering, visceral) stuff (software, art, poetry, memories) with amazing (attentive, passionate, diverse, curious) people. My 2022 theme hones in on that connection point—trusting the people around me to be amazing and opening myself up to those moments for communal flourishing.
Outline
- review gambling and intention behind it
- review the year from that perspective
- gather all the instances of gambling, have some fun visualization of it
- pull out some specific ones to comment on
- conclude how i did and how it went and how i feel
- deeper link out to public reflection of how i changed in the year and what affected that change in me
- media
- people
- events
- moments
- highlight some vignettes
- highlight smile exchange
https://www.spencerchang.me/posts/gambling/
- gambling
- list of gambles w selected snippets pulled out
- show # of mentions, twitter bio, how i talked about with friends
- what it lead to
- mini essay
- dance
- twitter sharing
focus on theme and what you intend to get out of it.
- draft this
- cover word and intention
- set forth what i hope to see and how i will be held accountable
- 2022 theme / breakdown
- mutualism
- talk about mutualism and obligation from there and service-service relationships
- interdependence
- rope bundle
- sweetgrass
- collective
- braid
- knot
- mutualism