I’ve always been a communicator. When I was 12, I started writing articles and sending them to the editor of my local model airplane club’s newsletter. He unceremoniously gave me a column, “The Trailing Edge.” This briefly got picked up by the Fly Times, an aviation newsletter which increased my readership to the statewide level, and I enjoyed an unusual amount of notoriety for a teenager.
I’ve usually maintained a blog of some type or another, sometimes personal and sometimes on behalf of my company. I was featured on the Discovery Channel, NPR, and a host of local news outlets as an alternative energy activist when I was 16. I’m in a couple of books. When my life moved into the world of aerospace, I kept communicating, posting my shenanigans on Facebook for anyone who would watch.
And then the world started to get scary. Facebook got loud, political, and divisive. My career became increasingly secretive, as did my personal life. Suddenly, communication became risk. In November of 2019, I logged off of Facebook and never looked back. I stopped talking openly about my projects. I even moved to a quiet, remote house on a mountain top, where I weathered the pandemic in peace and solitude. For the first 6 months that I lived there, I didn’t have internet or cell service. I’d catch up on things when I drove down the hill for work or groceries. Bob, the neighborhood bobcat, became the only first-name-basis friend I would see regularly.
In many ways, this was wonderful. I loved the mountains, the snow, the wildlife. I loved my morning coffee and my evening whiskey in the backyard, looking out into the woods. My brain started to get quieter and more deliberate. I made peace with some difficult times in my past.
At the same time, however, my world got smaller. Friends who used to ask me how my projects were going would now ask what happened to me. The town in the valley below evolved, as old friends moved away and new people moved in who I only knew in passing, if at all. This didn’t bother me that much – I was living my own little Walden. My attention had turned inward, as did my sense of validation. I was finally happy. Not without struggle, but happy.
I don’t live on a mountaintop anymore. My brain got what it needed and I came back down. After a bit of shuffling around, I moved to Ventura. I’ve been getting out more, spending more time around people in general and making new friends. It’s been wonderful. I’m a little worried, though.
The world keeps getting scarier. Geopolitical tensions are certainly the highest they’ve been in my lifetime, along with divisiveness within our country. AI is real. Brain implants are real. We’re going to space on a weekly basis. The sense of societal responsibility associated with these things has started to feel a little heavy. There’s a lot going on right now, and a lot of us are concerned. There’s one piece in particular I’d like to talk about.
As we go into this year, we are faced with a national ban on TikTok. After years in the aerospace industry, I’m no stranger to the security concerns an app like this poses. My company has adhered to FAR 52.204-27 since we began pursuing federal contracts in early 2023. I watched social media companies like Facebook and Twitter begin removing misinformation. I’ve been watching increasing media bias and inflammatory – even unprofessional – language become commonplace in once-trusted venues.
There’s no understating how complicated these topics are, and I won’t pretend to have the answers. One conclusion that I have drawn is that communication has never been more important. We must not lose our ability to speak, and as a society we all hold that responsibility together.
The first hard lesson I learned, as a teenager giving interviews to nationally syndicated media outlets, was that it’s entirely possible to say correct and important words yet communicate absolutely nothing. The ability to make noise is only one small piece of the skill of communication.
I quickly learned that empathy is essential. You have to know who you’re talking to, and see the world the way they do, in order to get the words inside. I learned the art of debate. I learned how readily a skilled opponent can rattle your bones. Much later in life, I learned how to see past these efforts, a skill that I’m still perfecting.
Perhaps most importantly, communicating used to bring me joy and connection. I’d work on some goofy project and write a blog post about it or put a video on Facebook, and people would ask me about it when I’d bump into them. I’d realize they were interested in some of the same things and we’d talk about it. I was always excited to talk to people. I really miss that.
While we’re currently faced with the loss of our ability to make noise in one small way, it has never been more important to make the best use of the rest of our outlets. So this year, I have two resolutions:
1) Communicate. This blog post is the first step. I know it’s important that I start talking again. Not just because it brings me joy, but because more than ever, the world needs all of us to practice the skill of sharing our voices. We can’t afford to lose it.
2) Do things. We live in a world where someone has already been there, done that, done it better, and put it on the internet. I don’t care anymore. Doing stuff makes me happy. I love machining. I love writing software. I love designing circuit boards. I love putting all of these things together to make something new, even if it sucks. I’m going to start doing that again.
I’d like to encourage anyone reading this to join me. We need to be heard. We need to do things, make things, break things. It’s what makes us, us.
Even if it sucks.