I have not been using my blog. I tried out substack for a bit, but I do not write enough and for an audience either. I was tired of the notes part as well. If I write, I will work on some substantial essay and pitch to a few journals. I have no need for secondary income, so I can take my time. That being said, I am social media less, this is the my only footprint.
At work, I write weekly emails about my thoughts and reflections on the last week and the week ahead. It helps orient myself.
I will use the blog to just share thoughts and can send it out to various friends. Also any pictures too.
As most of the people who will read this know, I got married. We live in FiDi. We got a puppy, an American Village dog, Freja, she has beautiful black fur. Mel is pursuing a career in neuroscience. Life is good.
Otherwise, work has been exciting and fulfilling for the first time. It is a big year for the company, with lots of change. We have ambitious goals. In the midst of this, there were two things that helped me at work. One was the situation, change is always something you can leap into and succeed in, to chart your own course. Also, the right people. In my division or org or what have you, Benefits at Justworks, we had a new engineering leader, Cullen, and he has been great. I moved into being an engineering manager.
When I first started at Justworks as an intern in 2018, I thought I would be an engineering manager. Part of that was because coding was not the most exciting thing to me. However, I realized at some point when I was full time that there is a large amount of control you can exert as an engineer over your career while maintaining independence. If you produce good results, you can get promotions and raises pretty consistently. Good programmers are always in demand.
Cullen actually asked me if I wanted to be a manager at one point over the summer, and I said no, still worried about letting go of that control. But the more I dipped my toes into manager-esque things as a senior software engineer, the more I realized I enjoyed it and could be great at it.
Just as software engineers are high in demand, being a great engineering leader is even higher in demand.
Engineering leadership has been the most intellectually rewarding and challenging part of my career so far. It is also emotionally challenging.
I am impatient. A part of me leans into that cold, calculating, rational side. Too much of that you are like Jimmy Carter or Kissinger. There is an objectively correct way or objectively right decision to make, and part of me thinks you can just say it and people will go ok that is the right answer. But tactical leadership is easy and simple, but adaptive leadership is harder. Adaptive leadership is different than just having the right answers. It is getting people to challenge their own values, their own attachments, to expose contradictions in their thoughts, without necessarily giving an answer.
I keep thinking about some of the "great" leaders worshipped by some folks. Caeser was great at strategy but stabbed in the back, I keep using as an anecdote at work. You can be highly tactical but getting things done always involves bringing people along. If you don't you are just delaying the eventual time when people stab you in the back. In the best case, you don't get stabbed, but people's ego defenses will kick in when they know they are being told what to do and will resist, even if you are objectively correct. For better or for worse (better, I think), the democratic spirit runs deep, even in corporate America.
Managing is not necessarily leadership. There are plenty of people who just do management in a narrow sense. In a literal term, they just try to manage the situation. Damage control. Create or keep order. But to be highly adaptive and grow is to take times of change or crisis as moments for progress. A common thing in politics. Some people have low tolerance for stress, but sometimes a good leader needs to keep the stress because it exposes something real, some fundamental conflict of values. Leadership Without Easy Answers uses a great example of LBJ and the riots at Selma. Everyone wanted him to act immediately, to bring in order. But if he did that, it would have taken away from the real problem at hand, the rights of black Americans. By letting the temperature stay hot, it made people feel uncomfortable. They should feel uncomfortable. Good leadership is judgement, knowing the situation, knowing the appropriate amount of stress that brings about change but is not more than individuals or people can take. Too hot they get burnt, too cold nothing gets cooked. Aristotelian means. Virtue is not dead.
Outside of work, I have had a great year of reading. I approach reading in a sort of BFS/DFS style. Since I am not in grad school, I can stray as far from any sort of reading plan as I want. There is a plan still though. This year has been all about Pippin. Pippin's intellectual journey is a much deeper, yet parallel journey of mine. I went through a similar undergraduate curriculum I bet, history of philosophy with some contemporary. Both got into Kant and Hegel and some of those thinkers adjacent to that, such as the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, Marx, etc.
Pippin's new book, The Culmination, is largely a self-critique of his own allegiance to Kantian-Hegelian modernity. In it, in a reductive sense, Pippin abandons what Heidegger calls the ontological position of "being as intelligibility" for the pursuit of the meaning of being. This results in a turn from the apperceptive thinking of Kantian-Hegelianism to Heidegger's poetic thinking.
Looming in the background is Nietzsche, for Pippin and Heidegger. Heidegger appeals more to Pippin for the metaphysical depth, whereas Nietzsche is a little loose (on purpose) on metaphysics. Heidegger is the only vehicle for a proper self-critique of Pippin's own career and Western / modern metaphysics. However, Nietzsche is the aesthetic-cultural prophet that predates Heidegger's philosophy of destruction.
Nietzsche's screeds were the philosophical and cultural background that Heidegger and other German conservative revolutionaries grew up in. Nietzsche also had a similar effect on America, which we see now as well. It is not that America will have 1:1 similarities with the Nazis. But what is similar is the fascist pre-history. The same type of pre-history is forming in America. If fascism takes off and gains substantial power, comparisons to Hitler and Goebbels are useless. But right now, the similarities between the pre-histories are stark. The cultural Nietzscheanism, the Spenglerian decline, the weird unities on the right of so many orthogonal ideologies, and even Pippin's rejection of apperceptive thinking for poetic thinking.
Pippin is by no means a fascist, although there are many that will vote for Trump. Pippin is much more like Thomas Mann. However, what is worrisome about Pippin is his poetic thinking has a similar temperament to Nietzsche, not like Montaigne. There is a focus on the negative of life and not the positive. My friends and I are doing a reading group on Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass. There is no doubt that Whitman is engaged in a similar type of poetic thinking, yet his temperament is definitively positive. There is also a third type of poetic thinking, which is one of a more Daoist or Buddhist non-attachment. But these don't seem viable alternatives in American thought.
I don't know what I will write, but it will be something about Pippin, Heidegger, America, poetic thinking, unreason, politics, democracy, Christianity...
Once I wrap up these readings, which expanded quite a bit over time as new things of interest popped up, I am moving into a study of America or Americana. Mencken. The debates and writings going on around the Declaration of Independence era, the Constitituion, the Civil War. Lincoln. American poetry. American philosophy. Kuklick, Kaag, pragmatists. Paine. Hackett's constitutional and political thought volumes. Emerson.
Girard was one of the most interesting ways I got sidetracked this year. This is also prompting a related study of Christianity, democracy, America, and paganism. Homer. Euripedes. Presocratics. Plato. Aristotle. The Bible. Mesopotamia. Bhagavad Gita.
