What is this newsletter? And why “Mystical Silicon”?

Hello dear reader! I thought I’d start by explaining what is this newsletter? Why am I writing this? And why the name?

I have had the most interesting year and a half since the beginning of the pandemic and have struggled to figure out how best to explain it. The world has been turned upside down in so many ways… At the beginning of it all I was doomscrolling like everyone else, quickly running down Maslow’s hierarchy as I struggled to understand what was happening and how to be safe. But once things calmed down a bit more I found myself still doomscrolling… At some point I realized this was making me very unhappy and so I started to actively change my behavior more than I’ve ever done before (and mind you I was already on the idiosyncratic side of the equation). Over the past year or so I’ve turned inwards and ratcheting up my mindfulness activities quite dramatically. The results is being more mindful, happier and more equanimous. That’s not to say everything is always zen but it’s noticeably different than a year or two ago… It’s been transformational and I keep wanting to share what I’m finding.

I’ve been reluctant to do this until now because I felt there wasn’t much to gain from talking about this - most of what I’ve gained is from going offline and being more present. Isn’t a newsletter the opposite? Also, what if it sounds crazy? What if it just opens me up to criticism? What if it’s not good enough? All the many voices in my head… So let’s see how this goes :)

I’m trying the phrase “Mystical Silicon” as a play between the fact that a lot of this falls broadly under the term mysticism (although I’ll use the term mindfulness more) and the fact that I live in Silicon Valley and work on technology: Silicon Valley is not New York levels of amped-up, but recently it has most of its laid-back allure of days past + not only do I work in “tech” but I actually worked at Twitter which is the mother of doomscrolling + for a while I worked on Notifications - one of the biggest lures of them all. Added to this most of my job focus for the past 5 years has been to deal with bad things on the internet…

The intersection of mindfulness & tech is one of the main themes I wrestle with - keeping mindfulness throughout the entire day while also needing to be up-to-speed on what is happening every day on Twitter. I’m required to be glued to my computer many hours a day but I want to be present. It’s a bit like dancing on a tornado - how do you not get sucked in?

I plan to share bit by bit what I do every day in the hopes it helps others and also to learn from you what I’m missing. I also plan to share some of the other random things I do that are mindfulness-adjacent (including a lot of thoughts on memory and memorization) and hope I don’t lose most of you in the process…

If you ever have questions or suggestions - I still check Twitter - albeit more infrequently than before.

Thanks for reading and I’ll try to write more soon