Amy peak

Me atop Twin Sisters peak yesterday, Estes Park, CO. Geez, I hope it's not ALL downhill from here!... (Click to enlarge)

I’ve always said that my one true goal in life is to be a crotchety old bitch, sitting on the deck of my mountain cabin, a cup of tea or jug of wine and a plate of smoked salmon or trout at my side. I’ll have a shotgun across my knee, ready to cock it at anyone coming down the driveway and yell, “You from the gummint?”

I’m actually not kidding.

I’m not saying I’ll shoot anyone (necessarily), but crotchety old bitches tend to be able to get away with stuff like that, so why not?

The good thing about having this kind of life goal is that simply by continuing to exist, I’m progressing toward it. Today is my 45th birthday, and I’m starting it right — sitting on the deck of my cabin in the Rockies, still shaded by aspen…

I’ve been here for most of a week and have done two fabulous mountain hikes, hung out with good friends in Boulder and up here at the cabin, enjoyed an excellent motorcycle ride with a good friend, spent a day helping another friend in need, cooked some wonderful meals, spent lots of quality time with one of the most important people in the world to me, and generally enjoyed the peace and rhythm that settles over me once I’m much closer to treeline than sea level.

The only thing missing is my cats, who are probably shredding something in my honor right now back in my Oakland apartment. And my sweetheart George — but he got to enjoy this little slice of mountain heaven last month. And my friends and family who are too distant to join me here today.

I was saying to George last night that he’s much braver than I am for daring to be lyrical and personal in his blog. He’s a wonderful writer, and that’s his writing practice. Meanwhile, I’ve been neglecting my blog again — but dry spells happen, and it’s something I can always come back to.

So here I am, daring to be just a bit personal here. Roll with it, it’s an experiment. (UPDATE: This experiment mostly had good results, but led to a notable clueless PR encounter.)

I guess turning 45 makes me officially middle aged (unless you’re a singularity devotee, which I’m not), so that’s good in terms of hitting a milestone toward my life goal. But it does make me wonder: Is this the middle of my life? What do I want to do with the other half, at least en route toward eventual crotchety-old-cabin-bitchedness?

Right off the bat I’m striking off this list anything having to do with grand world-changing achievements or a personal legacy that outlasts my mortal existence. Someday I will vanish from the face of this world, no one will remember me, and that will be OK. The future shouldn’t be too heavily anchored to the past, and I’m happy not to become historical ballast.

I’ve chosen never to have children (and at 45, let’s say I’m safely past that risk) in part because I’m not maternal, but also in part because I seem to lack that craving for immortality that seems to drive why so many people become parents. I love kids and have had many in my life — and hope to always have some in my life. Kids can be amazing friends and teachers. But I don’t want them to owe me anything. Except maybe my Social Security check, but I’m not counting too heavily on that.

That said, I have always had an irrational compulsion to help, and to learn. I feel good about the work I do mainly because, more often than not, what I learn and say and teach about media and technology generally seems to help people.

Even when people disagree with me, or dispute me, or even prove me wrong, it seems I contribute value to the conversation so we all can try more new stuff and figure out what works. So that’s okay. I didn’t become a journalist so that everyone would like me or agree with me, after all.

I have lots of flaws, and I’ll always have lots of flaws. During the rest of my life I’d like to continue working on them. That’s been a pretty rewarding effort — if at times awkward, difficult, and painful.

I’ve realized, though, that in working on my flaws I must be guided mostly by my own internal compass about what kind of person I want to be. Too often in my life I’ve taken to heart criticism from others that’s rooted mostly in their own expectations or fears. That’s not to say I ignore criticism from others; but I need to consider it carefully, to figure out if their motives and goals jibe with mine, before attempting to reshape myself in light of that information.

Because this life I have — it’s mine. What I do with it needs to matter to me, and feel right to me. Especially since I’m eschewing the whole legacy deal.

For too long, I suppressed what I really felt and wanted in life. Often it didn’t seem to be what other people wanted, and it definitely didn’t seem to be what social norms said I should want — so just being one person, I had to be wrong, right? Wrong!

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that — despite entrenched social norms — relationships are not one-size-fits all. So when someone matters to me, it rarely makes sense to cut them out of my life just because the nature of our relationship shifts. Which is why I’m spending a week at my cabin with my former spouse Tom, who is (and has always been) one of my closest friends and confidantes.

The few times in my life I’ve had to remove people from my life, that’s been very difficult and painful for me. But mostly, I can find ways to accommodate changes, and additions.

My inclinations for almost all kinds of relationships are mostly “both/and” not “either/or” — which is why I’m polyamorous, and probably also why I’ve been self employed for so long. I’m often amazed, amused, puzzled, or dismayed when I encounter people who require hard lines and clear roles in their connections with others — as if things like monogamy, a full-time job, a college degree, a conventional family, or legal recognition will ensure safety or happiness. I’m not saying they’re wrong and I’m right. I’m just saying, it’s a mindset I have a hard time understanding. But I respect that these things mean a lot to people, including many very smart people I care about and respect deeply.

In the past decade especially I’ve really grown to love diversity in most aspects of life: Diversity of thought, diversity of people, diversity of cultures and ethnicities, diversity of age, diversity of experience, diversity of desires, you name it. And I am part of that diversity.

This doesn’t mean I need to (or can) learn to appreciate or like everything — for instance, creationism? Oppression and racism? Iceberg lettuce? The Iraq war? Anime? Las Vegas? Humid weather? I don’t think so. But I generally have found that understanding why other people fiercely embrace and enjoy things I find abhorrent helps me navigate this world better. And I don’t need to agree with people in order to learn from them.

In the last few years especially I’ve become keenly aware of how much place matters to my sense of well being. I need to feel like I have a home, in a place I can love. I can live other places for a while, and enjoy that — but eventually I feel the need to go home. I’m at one of those points now. I’ve lived for a few years in Oakland, a city that has taught me much, where I’ve found many friends and amazing love. But it’s not home for me, and I need to start searching for home.

Fortunately, I don’t have to rush. Since I’m self-employed and can work from anywhere with internet access and that’s not too far from an airport, I’m not tied to any one location for external reasons. And I also don’t have to have a hard deadline for moving. I’ve arranged my life to offer lots of flexibility, and that’s perhaps the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m not sure where I’ll live next. I’d always assumed I’d eventually just go back to Boulder, Colorado — a place that I’ve always loved and that was a wonderful home to me for many years. And I may still do that. But right now, at this point in my life, Boulder feels a little small and insular to me.

So I’m considering some cities like Portland and Denver. I need to live in a place that’s not totally ruled by cars, near real mountains, where the summers aren’t humid and the winters aren’t relentlessly frigid. And where there are people I enjoy, with a culture that’s diverse and generally friendly and flexible.

Oakland offers many of those things, but I feel constantly hemmed in by concrete and cars there. And California’s mountains are too far away. But there may be other California options for me, I’m not ruling it out. Mostly I’m hoping to find a place I love that doesn’t requiring owning a car.

Life can change drastically or end at any moment. While I’m here, I want to experience it, and enjoy it, and to be good to others and to myself. I’ve been gratified to have so many wonderful people in my life: family, friends, lovers, colleagues, teachers, and more.

I’ve been surprised to realize what a social creature I am, but I need my private time too. So I’m really glad to be around at the dawn of social media — a tool that allows me to foster and maintain a wide range of connections from all parts of my world. One of the first things I did today was post to social media, to let people know it’s my birthday, because birthdays actually matter to me and I’ve learned it’s not reasonable to expect people to be telepaths.

Anything that helps me communicate with and connect with people is probably mostly good, as far as I’m concerned. And I’ve tried to learn how communication can do the most good and the least harm. I think the ability to communicate has largely defined how humans have evolved, for better or worse. It’s powerful. I enjoy learning how to do it better — even though it hurts like hell when I screw it up.

So this post is rambling, and personal, and it may or may not make sense. But it’s just where I’m at right now, a snapshot of a work in progress. And since I’m scared to post it, for fear of embarrassment or criticism, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve learned the most from facing my fears and inhibitions.

Thanks for reading, if you’ve read this far. The direct sun is hitting my cabin deck now, so I’ll take a deep breath and post this — and then make some more tea and breakfast, and get ready to welcome some friends up here to celebrate later today.

If you come down my cabin driveway today, I promise not to shoot.

deck

Crotchety old bitch, in progress....

Two tweets from Wilson especially caught my attention:

crash

Mike Wilson's first post about the Denver plane crash he survived

And then, a couple of hours later…

crash2

Mike Wilson reflects on a similar bullet he dodged earlier

…Next I was making breakfast, listening to Colorado Public Radio, which was (of course) reporting on the Denver airport accident. They followed that with a story that stopped me cold for a bit: Witnesses, Families Remember Lockerbie Bombing. Yes, today is the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 — a terrorist attack that killed 259 on the plane and 11 on the ground.

On the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, I was a 22-year-old journalism student packed up and ready to head back home to NJ after spending a semester in London. I’d been at the office Christmas party for the business magazine where I’d been interning. When I entered the house I’d been sharing since August with five other students, my housemates who hadn’t yet departed for home were sitting in the living room, crying. Mindy said, “Diane’s plane crashed”…

My onetime college housemate, Diane Rencevicz, on the victim’s list of Pan Am flight 103. She was 21 when she died.

Diane Rencevicz was a fellow Temple University student. She was the quietest heavy metal fan I ever knew, and I didn’t know her well. We merely shared a house for a few months. But I liked her well enough. And I was stunned to think that, at 21, she was suddenly dead.

In fact, she’d died taking exactly the same flight that Linda (my other housemate) and I were slated to take the very next day: Pan Am 103.

The next few days happened in slow motion.

In the morning I visited a local hospital to get tranquilizers for Linda, who was so distraught she could barely speak. I remember dropping my key through the mail slot of the lovely terrace house we’d rented on Moscow Road in Bayswater. Linda and I took a cab to Heathrow airport, where we bid Mindy farewell. While we were waiting at the gate, there was a bomb scare and everyone evacuated briefly to the parking lot. Really bad timing.

Eventually we got on the mostly-empty plane and flew across the ocean to JFK. My legs trembled the whole flight, I kept getting up to pace, and the flight attendants kept making me sit down. I remember their expressions, they’d just lost several friends and had to keep functioning. I didn’t argue with them, and they weren’t angry with me.

My family met me at JFK airport. My mom was crying. Lots of people were crying. I was exhausted. They took me home to NJ. Christmas happened. I attended mass with my family at the Catholic church down the street. The priest mentioned the bombing and I felt numb. Even though I was a news junkie, I avoided the news for weeks.

A few days later, Linda and I attended Diane’s memorial service. There, I was stunned to learn that Diane had an identical twin sister. Maybe I’d known that before, but I’d forgotten. Never in my life did I have such a strong feeling that I was seeing a ghost. That really shook me, more than anything else about that experience.

WHY NOT ME?

I dodged that bullet for the most mundane and human of reasons. Linda is a methodical person, and she made our flight arrangements. I didn’t want to depart for London on my birthday, so we agreed to fly out the next day, on Aug. 22, 1988. We were staying in London for four months. So Linda scheduled our flight home for exactly four months later, on Dec. 22.

And that’s really why I’m here today.

I have very strange, mixed feelings about this experience. Not getting killed in that bombing did not change my life in any dramatic way — except that I continued to live, and I felt more aware of others who don’t get to do that. I became very aware of chance, and randomness. For a while, flying made me very nervous. Then that fear wore away.

Soon after I returned home I was introduced to Stacey, who’d be my closest friend for several years. She introduced me to her ex-boyfriend Tom, whom I married a decade later. I worked for a bad book publishing company in Philly, then a business magazine on the Main Line outside Philly, and then lived very briefly in north Jersey, and then moved to Boulder in 1995.

Since then….

Some of my sisters and cousins had kids, and one of my nieces now has kids of her own. My brother survived leukemia. My grandmother died. My parents aged, sold the home where I grew up, bought a smaller home nearby, and are doing well.

My career took off in interesting, independent, entrepreneurial directions. It’s been feast or famine, but never boring. I’ve done work I’m proud of, and made some humbling mistakes. I’ve helped, inspired, frustrated, confused, and annoyed people.

I’ve backpacked on the Continental Divide and camped under buttes in the Utah desert. I once got a 2-hour foot massage in a Beijing hutong, I left an Amsterdam Indonesian restaurant at 10:30 pm while it was still daylight, and I grazed breakfast at a farmer’s market in Rome. For a few days I lived blissfully on tapas, tempranillo, and flamenco with a friend in Barcelona.

I have many friends around the country and in several parts of the world. I learned to kickbox, and I learned how to live as a polyamorous person in a monogamous world. I’ve seen my body and mind change, for better and worse. I’ve generally gotten much stronger and more flexible, in almost every way. I’ve laughed a lot. I’ve hurt a lot.

And I just kept breathing. By chance, because Linda was methodical enough to make four months mean exactly four months.

WE ALL DODGE BULLETS

This isn’t the only bullet I’ve dodged. I remember at least two occasions when I was nearly in bad car accidents. And who knows about the near-misses I never even knew about. It just so happens that in my life I dodged one particularly famous bullet that warrants public remembrances in national media. I feel sadness for the people who died in and above Lockerbie that day. And I feel anger for the people who willfully took those lives.

But mostly, it just feels weird. Surreal. All the stuff I’ve experienced and done since that day, my place in the overlapping ripples and flow of life… it could have ended, right there.

And someday it will end. That’s certain.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane that blew up. That’s all. I dodged that bullet. It doesn’t feel like a miracle, or grace, or even that I was “saved” by chance. It’s just how things happened to go for me. And it reminds me how very different life can become, very quickly.

Each moment is its own world, and one moment does not always determine the next. We have no choice but to roll with that. But we can choose to be aware of the ubiquitous possibility of instant, drastic change.

When I tune into that awareness, my life is much richer. It doesn’t necessarily make more sense, but it feels more meaningful.

I really used to hate stereograms.

When they became popular in the early 1990s, they often reduced me to serious frustration and headaches. I would stare at them — glare at them, really — trying to will their embedded 3D images to leap out. Everyone else seemed to enjoy these hidden illusions with ease. But my eyes and brain stubbornly refused to do the trick.

Then one day, I realized that I was looking at a dolphin. I just glanced at the cover of a book of stereogram art, and there it was. I was delighted to discover that the image wasn’t “leaping out” at me — rather, I was “seeing into” it. I wasn’t even sure how I’d started to see the hidden picture. All of the sudden, and quietly, it just worked.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that whenever I’ve identified a key mission or purpose I should pursue, it’s emerged (very much like that dolphin) from the background of the world around me. I get a sense that some vision is waiting to be seen, and I prepare my mind to be open to it. Then eventually I see it, and it feels like I always should have seen it.

In contrast, whenever I’ve tried the top-down, primarily rational (rather than intuitive) approach to choosing a course in life, I usually end up not really wanting what I’ve been working for, or liking what I’ve done — which is frustrating and demoralizing on many levels.

I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, mostly because I’ve been spending more time conversing, research, reading, and journaling. To be honest, I’ve been searching for purpose. For a couple of years now — although I’ve been doing a lot of interesting work, meeting a lot of interesting people, and learning a lot of interesting things — privately I’ve been feeling like I’ve been flailing around, seeking direction and purpose.

Finally, I feel like the picture is starting to emerge. Here is the outline so far…

• Relevance: I think I can help foster a greater practical understanding of relevance — connecting the dots between information and people. This could, in turn, help people create automated tools that can spot and convey relevance. Imagine a “relevance engine” that could scan a seemingly random group of news stories or datasets and indicate not just which ones are probably most relevant to you, but explain how each is relevant.
• Helping people discover and share useful information. On this front, I think I could be most immediately useful by helping to free professional and amateur journalists from the constraints of traditional news organizations (most of which probably won’t be around much longer, and which have also succumbed to a toxic culture that directly undermines journalism and communities). Journalists have developed very useful skills, and I don’t want that value to be lost as this particular corporate house of cards collapses.
• Energy. My work and interests keep bringing me back to energy (electricity and fuel). It truly makes almost every other good in the world possible. Plus, the fragility, unevenness, and difficulties of how energy is produced, transported, and used around the world lie at the root of many thorny problems (war, poverty, drinking water, medical care, climate change, etc.). I want to directly support the development of more diverse, less destructive, and less centralized energy sources around the world — as well as more efficient ways to use that energy.

…That’s what I’ve gleaned so far from the patterns in the world around me and how they’re resonating in me. I have a sense that there’s a deeper purpose that unifies these three missions — but I can’t quite articulate that yet. Still, I do believe it’s important to keep my personal focus on practicality, not theory — on helping people in the real world. And I am passionate about all these missions.

I’m curious what Contentious.com readers think of this emerging outline for the next big phase of my life and career — as well as my intuitive process for choosing direction.

How do you figure out what you should be doing in life? Are you rational about it, intuitive, or both? I’d love to hear how other people wrestle with this kind of quest — or if it’s even a conscious effort you make.

This morning I listened to an excellent Radio Open Source interview. Host Christopher Lydon was talking to Global Voices Online founder Ethan Zuckerman and GVO managing editor Solana Larsen. I’m a huge fan of GVO and read it regularly — mainly since I enjoy hearing from people in parts of the world I generally don’t hear much about (or from) otherwise.

One of the most interesting parts of the discussion concerned how homophily shapes our individual and collective view of the world. Homophily is a fancy word for the human equivalent of “birds of a feather flock together.” That is, our tendency to associate and bond with people we have stuff in common with — language, culture, race, class, work, interests, life circumstances, etc.

Zuckerman made a profound point: Homophily makes you stupid. Which is another way of saying something my dad told me a long, long time ago:

“You’ll never learn anything if you only talk to people who already think just like you.”

Here’s what Zuckerman actually told Lydon about how homophily makes it hard for people from around the world to relate constructively…

“We know so little about one another, and what we do know is generally so wrong, that our first instinct is to try to shut each other off. …We have to work a whole lot harder. We can’t just assume that being connected [via the net] solves these problems. If you let us work it out on our own, we tend to reinforce our own prejudices and stereotypes.

“If you look at sites like Digg and Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism, where we would all get together and decide what’s important. …But that begs the question: Who’s ‘we?’ If you’re getting your news from these sites, you’re getting a fairly focused, tech-heavy view of the world. You start to fall victim to homophily. It’s a basic human trait, but it’s probably worth fighting.

“Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized. Homophily can make you really, really dumb. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.

“Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity — the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you en d up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”

I figured if Zuckerman had so much to say in an interview, he must have written more about the dangers of homophily. And indeed he has. Read his Dec. 17 post, Social software, serendipity and salad bars. A couple of quotes from that post:

“Newspapers like the New York Times have a terrific mechanism to encourage serendipity. In many major newspapers, the lower right-hand side of the front page is reserved for a story that readers would otherwise likely miss. …These stories aren’t selected by algorithms — they’re chosen by editors who want to feature content in the paper that might otherwise be ignored, which frequently includes stories on topics other than Iraq, US elections or terror. Dan Gillmor describes this feature as ‘institutionalized serendipity‘.

“It’s less clear where the institutionalized serendipity lives on the New York Times site. The NYTimes.com homepage features several times as many stories than the front page of the paper edition, but it’s much less clear which ones you’re encouraged to read. There’s more choice and less guidance… which isn’t a bad description for the information universe opened by the Internet. And the guidance that’s offered may be a homophilic form of guidance — in the bottom right of the homepage is a box that offers a list of the 10 most popular stories, as measured by e-mail traffic, blog links and searches. In other words, these are the stories that fellow websurfers found most interesting, not the stories the editors felt you should read, even if you didn’t know you were interested in them.

“The serendipity box in the paper New York Times is a form of persuasive technology — it convinces us to pay attention to information we’d otherwise ignore.

And the finale, in which Zuckerman nails it all:

“Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet — it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories. Don’t fear the serendipity.”

Zuckerman also linked to some great further reading:

• Republic.com 2.0, a book by Cass Sunstein
• Salon.com interview with Cass Sunstein about Republic.com 2.0
• Zuckerman’s review of Susstein’s latest book, Infotopia.
• Homophily in Social Software, Oct. 2006 O’Reilly Radar article by Nat Torkington
• Echo chambers and homophily, by Danah Boyd

Plus, here are a few more resources I found by following those breadcrumbs:

• Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You, Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2006
• Social Cataloguing for Book Lovers, an IT Conversations interview with Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, a service that offers an intriguing unsuggest feature that directly counters homophily.

On the other hand:

Some people think homophily is a wonderful thing. And they’re not wrong.

For instance, in a homophily theory backgrounder, ChangHyun Jin (Univ. TX, Austin) wrote: “Homophily and effective communication breed one another. …Individuals who …attempt to communicate with others who are different from them often face the frustration of ineffective communication. Differences in technical competence, social status, beliefs, and language, lead to mistakes in meaning, thereby causing messages to be distorted or to go unheeded.”

I’m sure that’s true. It is definitely easier to communicate clearly and with fewer interpretive errors when the sender and recipient have much in common. Which is one possible definition of “effective communication.”

Socially constructive communication is another matter, of course.

What’s the point of fighting homophily?

Seems to me the reason to fight our tendency toward homophily is not to do dismiss the value of commonalities, but rather to broaden our basis for common understanding by being willing to learn more about each other, directly from each other. It’s improving our pattern recognition skills and our ability to reality-check each other. It’s a way to recognize broader and subtler commonalities — even if only by gaining respect for divergent views and experiences.

While this may sound uncomfortable and difficult, I tend to think of it as perpetually working to expand my comfort zone — rather than simply stepping outside it. The bigger and more diverse my comfort zone becomes, the less tunnel vision I will have, and the more interesting my life and work will become. And if a lot of people start thinking that way, then… we’ll all have that much in common.

Which is probably a good place to start.

Thanks, Ethan.

Like many self-employed folks, I’ve got waaaaaay too much on my plate — in terms of client projects, “business housekeeping,” my own interests, and (of course) life. Managing time becomes crucial, and I don’t always do a good job of it. Every day I find myself procrastinating on something that I really should just get done. Of course, the effects of this accumulate through time and occasionally I end up in crisis mode trying to slam through something.

Don’t get me wrong, I get done the vast majority of what I need to do, pretty much on time. But repeated time-crunch crises suck.

One of my current goals is learning to minimize day-to-day stress, and procrastination definitely stresses me out. So I’ve been paying more attention to how and why I procrastinate. That’s been interesting. Here are a few things I’ve noticed about my own habits…

1. Shame. The top reason why I procrastinate is because I’m ashamed that I’ve already put off taking action one or more times. When I see an e-mail pop in, or a calendar reminded pop up, regarding something I’m already behind on by my own reckoning, I feel a flush of shame and want to just push it away. The bigger the accumulated shame, the harder it is to act.
2. Rebellion. Even though I’m the one in charge of loading my own “plate,” I sometimes get annoyed that it’s routinely overloaded. I then rebel against that sense of being burdened by ignoring a task that needs doing, or a communication that needs to happen.
3. Subconscious priority-setting. No matter what my conscious mind decides my work and life task priorities should be, my subconscious mind often has a very different opion on that subject. Sometimes I just don’t do things because I’ve lost motivation, I’m discouraged, or they just aren’t as important to me as they once were. Eventually my conscious mind is forced to recognize this and make choices — but that can get messy.

…Notice that these all have to do with emotions and the inner working of my mind. Notice I’m not trying to judge these as character flaws. They are simply processes and circumstances that exist.

I find that when I look at things for what they are, I can start to manage them or adapt to them. I never seem to get very far when I try to deal with my life, work, mind, and emotions as they “should be.”

I’m mentioning all this because I think these kinds of internal processes have a great effect on how people interact, cooperate, and conflict online and elsewhere. So don’t worry, I’m not getting all touchy-feely-woo-woo on you. I’m just starting to pursue a new line of inquiry. Bear with me.

Does your procrastination have emotional triggers? If so, what are the emotions, and how are they triggered? Please comment below.