The Mom From Inside Out

[Serafin Sonnier]

I spent the better part of six years with a very narrow idea of "home".My literal home was the boxy, six-wheeled place I slept and stored my assorted garbage.My actual home was, well, anywhere else, as I've oh so dramatically written about before.I'd whittled away the utility of my primary shelter to little more than a literal shell, and it's no secret that I was happy (and maybe even a bit proud) with that.

So when I moved into an honest-to-God house a year ago, I found myself in the relatively novel position of redefining what I wanted "home" to mean to me. For example, my home is now all of the following, in no particular order:

Nothing turned out to be a bit spartan for my tastes, so I went to the local grocery store and picked up a pan, a pot, and a big mug-bowl thing.Then I scoured Craigslist for the few implements I thought were relevant to my goals.I bought a treadmill desk (to work at), and assembled a squat rack (to lift at) out of six or so different postings. I drove around in rented UHauls schlepping stuff around like the good ole days.

And for the first month or so, that's what my life looked like. All my meals were sauted vegetables + some carb + some protein.I ate them out of my one weird mug-bowl thing, either standing in the kitchen, or sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat* on the floor like some New Age yuppie. In retrospect, it acted as a gradual transition to being a real person, and it was glorious.

Then my better half moved up to Oregon and politely requested we live in a real house, with reasonable amounts of actual furniture and kitchenware.I now eat my meals sitting at a table like a Real Human Being, out of Very Normal plates and bowls.** There's even an area rug, which was a completely foreign concept to me. It's alright I guess.

On the flip side, I also thought about all the, shall we say, less than ideal aspects of the truck. The inability to store and/or cook food. Co-workers coming in while I'm brushing my teeth in the office bathroom. Rain being cataclysmically loud. Being roasted alive during the day. That sort of stuff. For the most part, these have been solved by, well, just not living in a box truck. Easy peasy.

No seriously, I now have the computing power of a small island nation. The monstrous electricity requirements are offset by a roof full of solar panels, which generate nearly a megawatt hour of energy per month in the summer.

At this point, I've been in the house for a whole year (almost to the day!), and generally feel like I've settled into a happy (and new and different) rhythm. I've had plenty of time to reflect on the truck and all the changes and whatnot, and that alone should be enough to keep this blog from collecting too much dust in the near future. Stay tuned!

***This blog is not running in my basement. While I have gigabit download speeds, my uploads are limited to the low double digit megabits per second, which means serving large content like images would become a bottleneck, potentially choking out my (and my partner's) ability to use the internet and do work and stuff. I might eventually run the blog admin infrastructure locally though.

Hello! It's been an eventful few weeks months: the job has been quit, the truck has been sold, the California has been left, and the new venture has been started (full-time!).Selling the truck is probably the biggest and most blog-relevant event. Even though I'd already announced my plans to sell it, having legitimately sold it still feels different. One of those things that doesn't really register until it's actually happened. Truly the end of an era. In Marie Kondo-fashion, I thank the truck for its service and wish it the best in its new life.

Speaking of which, as best as I can tell, it won't be used as the stealthish RV I've used it as. Rather, it'll be used to help a couple start their fledgling potato chip business, which is delightfully specific and quirky. Not that the truck cares either way, but I'm glad it'll be put to (good?) use.

The new truck owners told me I didn't have to rip out the insulation, which I appreciated. Eagle-eyed blog readers might notice that my bike looks a bit different than usual, which I have every intention of eventually writing about.

But this post isn't about the minutiae of my move, it's about why any of this is happening at all. Why I'm shaking up my life in such dramatic fashion. But before we get to that, it's probably useful to rewind a bit and go on a tangent or two, which is really standard fare at this point.

I'm a big believer in actively choosing the life you want to live, mainly because if you don't, more clever and enterprising folk will pick your life for you, usually to their benefit. Part of choosing your life is asking lots of questions about how you spend your time, why you spend your time that way, and if you like spending your time that way.

Of course, this only makes sense once you've got the more visceral basic layers of Maslow's hierarchy covered. It's kinda hard to think about what you want out of life if you don't know where your next meal is coming from. Which is to say that I recognize there's a certain amount of privilege embedded in even being able to think about the things I'm rambling about. That ackowledged, let's talk about time.

Time. We inhabit our respective mortal coils for a short and finite amount of it. It flies by. We never have enough of it. And so on and so forth. Since it's so scarce and precious, it seems reasonable to scrutinize those things that consume the most of it. And for the majority of folks between the ages of 18 and 65 (or thereabouts), the most time-consuming activity is exchanging it for money (aka "a job"). And so it follows that it's useful to ask what role you want that job to play in your life.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm going to leave most of it in the box. The thing I want to note is that Twitter, which makes 89% of its revenue from selling ads, and the remaining 11% from selling data,1 talks a big game about "[serving] the public conversation" in their hiring materials.

And sure, Twitter does indeed do that. But that isn't why Twitter exists. As with any for-profit corporation, they quite literally exists to generate value for their shareholders. Nothing more, nothing less.2 But when you're vying for a limited pool of data scientists and machine learning experts, you'll probably be more successful in hiring by telling prospective employees that they're "[serving] the public conversation," even if the day-to-day job description is more like "[finding] new ways to hoover more data (and therefore shareholder value) from our users".

And so I oscillate between drinking the Kool-Aid and being disenchanted with the endless streams of disingenuous verbal diarrhea that companies spew in the name of attracting talent.3 But I also can't blame them, because people do want to feel like they're doing something good or making a difference or whatever with their work. Of course, work can just be about work. But, given the choice between two otherwise identical jobs, I reckon most folks would take the one that purports to be about something more.

Maybe it's the warm fuzzy feeling we get when we do something "good". Maybe it's because we want to sound interesting and altruistic at cocktail parties. Maybe it's part of a larger narrative we're trying to weave about the purpose of our respective lives. Maybe it's all the above. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Wading out of the depths of hand-wavy generalizations and talk of people in the abstract, what do I want out of work? I've got a roof over my head and food in the fridge, why shouldn't I make work about more than than just work? As a starting point, I looked at my life and some deeply held4 beliefs:

How do I pick a job based on these things? Historically, I've been pretty awful at it, falling prey to the aforementioned glossy marketing material/Kool-Aid. But it sounds like I want a job where I use my skills to attempt to level the cosmic playing field. And I don't want this "doing good" to be a side-effect of some other business/money-making venture, I want it to be the direct goal/outcome of my work.

And from there, it seems pretty clear I won't be looking at traditional for-profit organizations. I spent a few years working at a healthcare-focused tech company, where I worked on surgical robots, baby diaper sensors, temperature + COVID sensing patches, etc. All of those technologies have the potential to improve people's lives, which is cool. There are two main problems though:

That second point is the source of most of my cynicism. If you are a for-profit organization, you have a fiduciary responsibility to make decisions that will generate returns for your shareholders. Those returns need to come from somewhere, meaning that some party in your business model is giving you money. This usually means you aren't building things directly for the global poor because, by definition, they have no money to give you.

There are, of course, exceptions to this. Governments and private foundations will sometimes foot the bill for things that benefit the poor, even if they come from for-profit corporations. Examples include the US government buying medicine for low-income Americans via Medicaid, and the Gates Foundation funding private biotech companies doing medical research that can benefit low- and middle-income countries via Global Health Innovative Technology Fund. Beyond that, climate change-adjacent technologies, like carbon capture or better batteries, are promising in that they can be both wildly profitable and beneficial to the global poor,5 who disproportionately have not produced the emissions warming the planet.

So if I was going to go into industry somewhere, it'd probably be in green/climate technology. But that's not what I've done. Instead, I've started a nonprofit. I'll start with the elevator pitch, then a pre-emptory straw man Q & A.

First, an opinion: the two most important problems in the world are climate change and global inequality, for different but intertwined reasons. Further, I claim that nonprofit organizations have made great strides in both domains, whether by lobbying for greener public policy, or helping to eliminate smallpox or control malaria. Continuing the claim-train: nonprofits don't invest in technology the same way for-profit organizations do, usually because nonprofits have more limited resources, and using technology effectively requires some level of upfront investment (engineers and/or IT folk) that isn't feasible, especially when the nonprofit also has their actual mission to spend time and money on.6 The result is that nonprofits don't get to reap the benefits of investing in technology to automate all of the manual minutiae they deal with day to day.

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