Well, I earned a surprise 9.5 grand last night with a big sale.  That wipes out the loss of the 3 laptops and 4k worth of lost account info.

I’ve got another 10k coming in this month from some deal, and double that in October.  And my steady income is slowly increasing at a rate well past my steadily increasing expenses.  And new income streams will, eventually, also come online.

They say that you feel losses more than gains, so even earning the 9.5 k which is twice as much as recently lost doesn’t quite calculate as a cancelling out of the loss; “But I would have had even more if I hadn’t lost!”

Long term stress raises cortisol, which kills neuron in the hippopotimous-campus and within that the amygdala, which causes emotional disregulation and eventually depression.

Depression can be a neurological condition, which can mean that you can’t muster the will power required to get yourself out of it.

Antidepressants work negligably better than placebos, which means that a placebo effect can be incredibly strong regarding depression.  This does not mean that we therefore have conscious free will over depression.  It means that we have unconscious something over something.  That’s completely different.

My strategy for sadness, grief, and depression has usually been to do drugs and alcohol through the worst of it, maintain lifestyle crafting, and to wait for it to go away.

Lately I’ve been having stubborn grief and depression.  It’s not going away.  Sometimes it’s just too painful so I reach for relief.  Booze probably also shrinks the hippopotimus and for me is addictive, so could be short term relief and a long term problem.  Valium can be related to depression and loss of acumen.  Dopamine agonists and opioid receptor agonists are quick to cull the receptors, so they also borrow against future contentment.

But when you actually hurt, you don’t want to hurt.  Normally it’s fine to medicate temporarily.  Hurt subsides.

I guess I’m still waiting for a clarity of vision.  It’s one thing to grieve and have a positive forward looking plan.  It’s another to lose your vision and not know what to do next to fix it.

I’ve had interns out here a number of times, and each time things seemed to go well in important ways.  Socially things often went quite well.  This last time I had some high financial hopes, and extended some of my business visions into a new promising direction.

I was already living in my future; working towards a future that I could see so clearly that I was living inside of it.

The loss of that future, plus the social loss has left me not only caught off-guard for how to re-envision my plans, but left my emotional system, which is semi-autonomous to other mental systems, reeling.  Having interns leave before has never hit me quite this hard for so long.

I’m using this post as a journal, in the hopes that merely writing will help tease out clarity from the jumble of experience.

Yesterday in my dream state I focused on simply feeling my heart.  Just maintaining attention there, rigidly, during the sleep state.  It was not insightful, but I just wanted to be present in my body, in the part that seemed most salient to my experience lately – my emotions.

This morning I seemed to have some glimmer of clarity in my morning dreams, but still woke up to pain and sadness.  Physical pain that hurt enough for me to want it to go away quickly.  Not some trivial mild mood, but OUCH that HURTS!

The glimmer of clarity related to the emotional loss of comraderie with westerners.  It’s cool to hang out with Indonesian girls who love me and my body parts devotedly, but it’s a very different social interaction to hang out with buddies who are from the same culture who get each others jokes.  It’s a different category of sympatico.  And when that is woven in seamlessly with business aims, the tapestry is more valuable still.  Fine high caliber friends collaborating on business is silk and gold-thread embroidery as compared to the cheese cloth that is bar buddies.

But I’ve been burnt quite a number of times.  Interns one day are all enthused and cooperative, and literally the next day tell me that they are leaving with no notice.  I don’t get a hand off of work done.  I don’t get correspondence after that.  Everything’s roses and butterflies until they go ghost.

In the West you expect a minimum of two weeks notice.  That has never happened out here.  Apparently there are no rules out here.

The most recent guy to come out, Mat, wanted to do a careful background check before he started working here so I encouraged him to contact as many of the previous interns as he could.  I gave him all the contacts that I had.

Months later after he had decided to leave I asked him if he knew how the previous interns had fared in their life, after leaving.

They were all capable guys.  But I had to wonder if their decision to leave my enterprises led to improvements in any areas of their lives.  Social, economic, or any other measure of improvement.

I got vague answers from Mat, so I really don’t know, but if I had to force an impression out of the vagueness I’d guess that people’s lives overall did not improve, and most likely declined after leaving our group and our group efforts.

One thing Mat had heard from the interns is that I’d shown them “how easy it is to start a business”.  This seems to have inspired people to go it on their own.

One thing I’ve heard from another entrepreneur is how mistaken this impression usually is.

It’s not easy to be self employed.  You must expect a 90% failure rate.  And you have to be able to support yourself and put in the time and effort through those periods.  And then the successes you do get might not be in as large a project as you can do if you are in a group.   Individuals simply can not do large tasks.  That takes large, well coordinated groups.

But that’s not something that a want-to-be self employed entrepreneur wants or cares to hear.  He doesn’t care.  He wants 100 percent of something that is his, instead of 20% of something that is someone elses, and the bottom line is not financial.  It’s emotional.  As Daffy Duck always said “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine mine mine mine mine mine mine!”

So I’m of the impression that of the interns who left to go find their own “Mine!” that they didn’t forge successful companies.  I’m of the impression that we would have done much better as a group.

It just takes so damn long.  To someone in his twenties, even six months is a long time.  One year seems like forever.  Two or three?  That’s starting to be a big fraction of their adult lives.

To a guy like me who has cycled through many businesses over decades, two years is just the beginning for one business.  You can’t expect much of anything before that.  Business takes lots of effort, and lots of time.  And lots of people collaborating their time and effort.  Continuously.  There are no quick fix get rich schemes to go after.  That’s almost never what business is about.

Somehow I’m going to have to get back to having westerners collaborating on my businesses.  Especially I need writers and perhaps also people to help with video production.

I have no idea how I’m going to even approach that problem.  No idea.  I can’t make the same old mistakes.