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It's in our own self-interest to serve something other than ourselves.

Serving yourself is only successful in the short term. Eventually, it leads to all the diseases of nihilism – compulsive acts of consumption. The person on the street drinking mouthwash and the hedge fund manager who just bought a yacht have more in common than both of them think. In a second, it can all be gone.

It's better to serve something else. But choosing can be terribly difficult.

Some lucky people stumble into situations where what to serve is clear. Some activity they enjoy, fulfills them socially, provides a sense of purpose. People who dedicate their lives to music at an early age – Artists. Deeply religious folks. Surfers, ski bums, perpetual travelers.

Some get it from their job. Social workers, Health care workers. Soldiers, Scientists. Barbers and bartenders.

But if you don't get everything you need from one bundled source, then you have to balance competing interests. You gotta choose.

Choosing is hard because of opportunity cost. An infinite number of things we must choose not to do every time.

If you have an activity with no correct, deterministic answer, but which instead requires choosing between tradeoffs, it's an art, not a science. Most of life is an art: it has limitations, and requires practice and creativity.

Bikes have always represented freedom to me. Just recently, I've also learned they represent responsibility.

I had a Huffy BMX as a kid. It was an iron tank. Not light, but indestructible. I could ride it anywhere, especially away from my troubled house and to friends.

Years later I came back to cycling as a way to turn my commute into exercise. The feeling of freedom came back just as strong, but still a solitary activity, it might not have stuck with me.

Almost 10 years ago in Austin, I discovered social cycling. Or as I've heard kids call it several times, bike gang. There's something about a big group of adults, riding for no reason other than pleasure, with music and colored lights and smiles, that kids go nuts about.

Bike gang went back to the feeling of friends. Moving for the sake of it, having a little adventure together. I think that's what kids love, seeing adults who can still have childlike enthusiasm.

But unlike childhood friends, social cycling doesn't happen spontaneously. There's a lot of work involved in organizing a ride. And as the Little Red Hen taught us, someone has to make it happen.

So recently I started organizing and leading rides, because someone needs to. Freedom comes with responsibility.

If you want to party with the gang, you've got to be willing to put in the work.

Have you ever turned on the wrong stovetop burner? The same principle makes social media so awful.

When I was eighteen, Donald Norman's book "Psychology Of Everyday Things" changed my life – the title later changed from 'Psychology' to 'Design', but I find the original way better. Because good design has to follow from understanding the user's psychology.

POET puts forward several concepts, including correspondence between controls and controlled. This is the stovetop problem: the burners are arranged in a square, the controls in a line. We're forced to decipher the little hieroglyphic pictographs of the empty and filled circles. Terrible consequences lurk if you're distracted and you fail to interpret correctly.

Physical design has been around as long as humans have been making tools. Yet we still get basics like correspondence wrong. By comparison, software design is a newborn baby of a discipline, not even one century old.

Correspondence of controls and controlled in social software borders on impossible. I can imagine what combination of keys I could press to get my Facebook account locked instantly – a word whose primary meaning is violent followed by a demographic slur would probably do it.

Anything subtler than that, the correspondence between cause and effect blurs. One time I posted some lyrics from a favorite song, expecting my fellow fans to recognize them; but the overwhelming response came from people who didn't recognize, and worse, mis-interpreted.

POET also recommends the principle of immediate feedback. With a gas stove, you know if you turned on the wrong burner. Not so with an electric that takes time to heat up. Without feedback, correspondence can't be recognized.

We keep using social media although we don't really know what the controls do. As if we kept turning the knobs for burners we couldn't see.

And we wonder why the world is on fire.

Have you ever noticed time is different in older recordings? There isn't a strict adherence to tempo. Songs speed up and slow down. They breathe.

That started to change in the late 70s, early 80s because DJs wanted records they could "beat match." If two records are locked in to strict tempos, you can turn up the volume on one while turning down the other. This "cross-fading" changed clubs into discos, because the dance crowd could transition between songs without stopping. It still works if they're not the same tempo – but they have to be strict.

Metronomes had long existed for practice purposes. But nobody used metronomes in the recording studio – called "click tracks" – until social pressures changed. Listeners quickly grew to expect strict timing.

The technology changed the music.

Computers fundamentally changed us around 2000. We were all looking for it, but none of us could see it.

Some things are exceptionally hard to put into words. If you look straight at something in the dark, it disappears, you have to look at it sideways. We only truly understand our lives in retrospect, but we have to live them now.

"TNT" by Tortoise came out twenty five years ago, March 10, 1998. At 4 times a week, I estimate I've listened to it over five thousand times since.

It has a tremendous amount of detail. I still discover new elements – fewer now than at first, but it keeps surprising me often enough to keep me from taking it for granted. The elements have an alchemical relationship – the way I feel when I listen affects what emerges.

TNT interacts with the environment around it. The wolf-tone bass dissonance in "A Simple Way" often produces weird physical rattles through different speakers. One day a few years ago, I heard the clothes dryer playing its little 'I'm done' song. I noticed it was in tune with the song playing, but shifted modally. Then I realized appliances didn't used to play songs. Maybe buzz, or ring a bell. But things can play little songs now because everything has a chip in it. Time has changed.

I clearly remember the first time I heard TNT. It starts with a single beat, one hit on an acoustic kick and ride. Crank it up loud – you can hear the room the drums are in too.

The drums patter in jazzy misdirection for almost a minute. At 0:54 though, the beat locks in. From this point forward the rest of the album is on strict time.

Whenever a restriction exists, it opens a possibility for creativity. Black and white photography puts the focus on composition. Hip hop comes from two turntables and a microphone.

Ideas are like "Minesweeper". Do you remember the game? It came on Windows machines in the 2000s. Minesweeper could give you a shock, when you clicked a single tile and the whole room opened up. When an idea hits me, it feels like an ice crystal forming, stretching out a tentacle that spreads…

TNT balances precisely between the old world – jazz, with its musty instruments and revolutionary museum pieces. And the new world – computers, fresh and clean, constantly, instantly new.

Computer jazz.

Dante wrote, heaven has no laughter, because all humor stems from pain.

Rock and Chappelle's recent assaults violated an ancient human custom: the freedom of the jester to cause pain. Every joke has a twist in it, and the effort required to follow the twist is painful. If we like the content, we find the pain enjoyable, which is why we consent to the joker inflicting it.

Trigger warnings follow a similar misguided belief: that the world can be made safe. The world is a beautiful place full of light and love, but it's also totally ambivalent about any individual's well-being. Terrible things keep happening… and amazing beauty too.

I don't think it's actually a paradox, just two things not often combined: ambivalent love. Terrifying beauty.

Divine comedy trigger warnings.

Computer Science and software development have less in common than you might think. I'll tell you why with an example from the movie "Zoolander".

There's a plot point where the savvy reporter, Matilda, sends the clueless male model, Hansel, to steal some files from a computer. Hansel puts his eyes up close to the iMac, whispering in awe, "the files are in the computer." Later, at the climax of the movie, he smashes the round orange appliance to 'release' the files.

Hilarious! But, not wrong physically. For an electronic device to store information, it has to make a physical change. Any memory device with its capacity filled up physically weighs slightly more than the same device empty. How can that possibly be? Well, mass and energy are equivalent. A device containing more energy weighs more. The files really are IN the computer.

Wrong in the interpretation. The memory measures regions of energy or no energy, and those get interpreted as ones and zeroes.

They're not really ones and zeroes. They're regions of energy or no energy. If we think of them one and zero, we can use math techniques to manipulate them and produce desirable results.

Very useful, but not the same. We actually don't care about the math, or more accurately, we trust the math is correct until we have reason not to.

No, we care about the files, the interpretation. Do you care if your software is mathematically correct? No, we care whether it does what we expect – manipulate our data in useful ways, while keeping it reliably protected.

As software developers, we're like Matilda telling Hansel what to do. We can't reach into the computer ourselves; we have to give instructions to this clueless idiot to be carried out for us. Sometimes Hansel interprets our instructions in ways that we did not intend. That's a bug, friends!

I have tremendous respect for and interest in Computer Science. But CS is a branch of mathematics, and math is to software development as linguistics is to creative writing. We use math, but ultimately we're really judged on the patterns of energy the machine produces.

A good writer may occasionally use un-grammatical constructions, like a sentence fragment or dangling preposition, in the service of communication. Good programmers give instructions to make sure Hansel behaves as intended, not to satisfy mathematical correctness.

Like writing comes with ethical responsibilities, a programmer has a moral responsibilty to protect users.

Even male models.

"But why male models?"

Physics says, spacetime is curved. This sounds mystical, but it's simple.

Nothing is ever straight because nothing stops moving.

We're told the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But if an airplane plotted a course between two cities in a totally "straight" line, it would be a crash course – a straight line between two points on the earth goes underground.

Airplanes and cars and people all have to follow the surface of the earth. When we are traveling, we never notice. The earth appears flat locally, curved globally.

Spacetime is like this too. The shortest distance between two points is a curve.

Imagine throwing something at a target. You have to aim a little higher than the target, to account for the projectile dropping while it travels. You've heard the term called "escape velocity"? To launch something into orbit, you just have to get it going fast enough so that when it drops, it falls over the horizon. Orbit is just falling over the horizon indefinitely.

Staying in orbit takes almost no energy. Changing orbit – up or down – takes huge amounts. The shortest distance in orbit is staying in orbit (which is a curve).

The straightest thing possible should be a beam of light, but light is attracted by gravity. All the photons in a laser will eventually curve into some orbit.

Space and time and motion can't be discussed separately, and neither can gravity and energy.

I'm passable on the drums. I can keep a beat and do a few fills. My first gig in Portland, I sat in on drums for a band I'd eventually play guitar and sing for, the Bo'Weevils.

We played on the lawn behind Silly's Restaurant. It was a gorgeous spring day and there was a pretty good crowd.

I paid barely any attention to my surroundings though, deeply focused on the music. I desperately wanted to get into the band scene any way I could. I felt how this performance went would set my fate.

Afterwards, a friend of the band I barely knew walked by. "You sounded great!"

I immediately started apologizing for a litany of mistakes I'd made, cataloging them in great detail. I thought I was being humble and conscientious by admitting my many flaws, but her face was crinkling up. As if I'd farted and she smelled it. I stopped talking. There was a pause.

"When someone gives you a compliment, just smile and say thank you." She walked off.

It took me a long time to understand what I'd done wrong. Non-musicians may not notice or care about all the details of a performance. Instead they just like what they like. By telling her all the things I'd done wrong, I implicitly criticized her opinion.

As if I'd farted… and then told her about it. Listen, don't point out your flaws to people. Good people want to see you successful, because they want successful people around them. And bad people, we don't need to gift with ammunition.

Last, you don't need to do that to yourself. After every performance, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny writes ten pages of notes critiquing himself. The amazing discipline Metheny has cultivated results in spectacular music… but he doesn't make the audience listen to that part.

Some people like to say how they always speak their mind. They pride themselves on brutal honesty, they make sure everyone knows they don't care who disagrees.

It's funny to me now, how rarely the brutal truth these people feel compelled to share expresses gratitude. I certainly fell into that category back then.

It took me a long time to realize ingratitude made me utterly miserable. The best advice I got wasn't really about compliments, it was about learning what I'd done wrong.

Know your blindspots.

Before I started writing, I thought it consisted of announcing things to the world: Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets, carved in stone.

I've learned that the process of writing requires much more uncertainty. A huge part of writing involves figuring out what to write about – coming up with lists of possible subjects. I started practicing this habit back in 2015, but I wasn't ready to start publishing regularly for four years.

Exploring a topic requires diving into the unknown. Remember the game Minesweeper? To turn a subject into a full piece, you have to visit all the dark corners of the idea. You have to go discover what you really think.

Writing is a habit, and habits require discipline. I kept up pretty well through pandemic, the BLM unrest, and some family challenges. When the Ukraine war hit, we had a couple team members from that country who had to evacuate. I held on for the team's sake, but when things calmed down a little I let my discipline lapse.

The discipline required and the unknown make a difficult combination. 'Ignorance is bliss' implies that knowledge is suffering, and we do have to suffer: to learn, we have to start by admitting we don't know, then endure the pain of confusion.

So I'm coming back to writing after a pause. Another lesson to learn: you can always start over. In fact, we start over with every breath. This is what "born again" means to me: to constantly look at the world with beginner's eyes.

I don't know what painful lesson I'll have to learn next. But the alternative to growing pains is stunted growth.

Learning requires uncertainty.

"Now he's gone and joined that stupid club." – Wendy Cobain, on the death of her son Kurt, referring to the so-called '27 Club' of rock stars who died at that age

I remember exactly where I was when I heard Kurt Cobain had ended his own life. But although I'll relate some of the details, they aren't really important.

The only thing that's ever really important is learning. Nothing is ever a failure as long as you learn from it.

It was my senior year in high school, and my plan for afterwards went step one: become a rock star. My parents both had untreated depression and hadn't paid attention to me in years. So I hadn't taken SATs or applied to colleges, I had played a lot of guitar, read books, written lyrics.

It felt achievable though. As a little kid, I had lived with my grandmother just down the road from Aberdeen, where Kurt grew up. One of my earliest memories is going to the Aberdeen mall. This, combined with the uncomplicated directness of Nirvana's music, gave me hope that I could do it too.

Kurt's suicide pulled the rug out from under my feet in a way that I'm still dealing with.

I didn't have my heart set on rock stardom per se, but on the end of suffering. From my parents, I inherited not only a tendency towards depression, but also an aptitude for learning and intellectual interests. Few things I've found as true as the old saying "ignorance is bliss" though – the implied opposite being "knowledge is suffering". And all the knowledge I acquired told me the world was at best an apathetic expanse of great struggle, if not a hostile jungle.

Other kids blissfully looked at college as an extension of childhood freedom; I saw it as another form of cutthroat competition which I so wanted to avoid. In the rock lifestyle, I saw freedom, the freedom to escape expectation, comparison, judgement.

But Kurt had been the biggest rock star in the world, critically adored as well as commercially successful. Free to do whatever he wanted. He had everything, and everything still wasn't enough.

The tragedy of suicide doesn't come from death. Everybody dies somehow. The tragedy comes from suffering; the bottomless, howling suffering necessary in order to perform such violence on one's self. The hell on earth that precedes the act.

I realized that I had substituted rock stardom in my head as a proxy, a substitute for the real goal: ending suffering. Kurt taught me, in an act which could be summed up by my friend Glenn in a single sentence on a beautiful Spring day, the error of my ways.

So I am thankful to him, perversely grateful, for his unintentionally selfless act of unintentional teaching. Thomas Edison said he didn't fail to invent the lightbulb ten thousand times; he discovered ten thousand methods for making other things. Kurt showed us the rock star method of escaping suffering didn't work.

On the last Nirvana album, Kurt wrote the song "Serve The Servants", which includes the line, "I don't hate you anymore." Not hating is a good start, but not enough. You have to find some way to love those you serve.

Even if they don't deserve it. Maybe especially if they don't deserve it.

I would have preferred Wendy used a less judgemental word than 'stupid'. But it's undeniably a mistake. Suicide is the ultimate personal mistake, because only the survivors can learn from it.

Today, I make suicide into a form of service. I find something to learn from it.