An organizational psychology perspective on Cosmos (with a few initial recommendations)

[Santorini]

@robertkelleya very interesting thesis and agree with most. Appreciate that someone spent his personal time to highlight how important unity is.

wtf u guys (Jae, Zaki, Ethan and remaining “gang”) cannot sit on a table and discuss all these issues.
If u cannot find a solution to bring unity back to cosmos then find someone to sell your part and leave the cosmos ecosystem alone. Last 2 years we (buyers/stakers) had enough drama.
Damn even 5 year old kids don’t shit post non stop on twitter to each other, or try to undermine others with ambiguous proposals such as those we had in the past.

Irrelevant to specific issue, but if any genuine soul is still in cosmos: put an annual cap to funding, bored to a see a new idea/group being funded, as usual the validators friends of the devs of that idea voting YES, so next time they will return the favor. I own a business and every year I see my reserve and say ok I have $20 how much can I spend, what profit my investment will bring etc

[jaekwon]

I want nothing more than to split away from the likes of you.
You’re literally no better than somebody who tells you that you need to marry your rapist.
As if I haven’t tried to make that work already.

If you want to keep supporting rapists and liars and thieves so be it.
We will split from you, it’s as simple as that. And good riddance.

[LOWO]

Thanks Rob for your contributions your professionalism on how to make cosmo a better place.

[Soverin]

Dear Rob, welcome to the Cøsmos forum floor. Every now and then there appears an expert here who suggests to the eco community to let him try his hand at changing matters in some aspect from the outside. I’ll give you my personal assessment of your implicit proposal in a to-the-point fashion in which you’ll hopefully won’t find too much offense.

• Your CV comes accros as very jumpy, is mainly anchored in business and has only relatively recently moved towards the field of psychology

• Your mission as stated in your Linkedin namely “to help mission-driven leaders wield power with good intentions” is not only somewhat of a ‘contradictio in terminis’ but also does not match that well with a decentralized culture as ought to be the case here

• Your introduction above contains a lot of assumptions for a self-admitted ‘non-crypto expert’ regarding certain elements in Cøsmos such as “Cøsmos not being a cult”, “A shared long-range vision with the substance of the Atom2 paper” and “Cøsmos has a vision that goes decades into the future”

• Your vision which is supposed to be about the organizational challenge is larded with (crypto)-finance centered terms and slogans like “fiat-maxi”, “bull and bear market” and even “right but not rich”

• Your professional activity is currently regardless of your somewhat jumpy track record connected to an array of banks featuring the sustainability and ESG theme

I find it to be upmost remarkable that someone with your relatively light professional background with very little connection to the crypto industry and even less affiliation with Cøsmos frankly has the audacity to come up with this specific list of ‘risks and recommendations’ that involve setting up a Central Planning Committee of a group of “the most powerful people within Cøsmos”, creating the World’s Best Institutions within Cøsmos on several terrains like communication… and providing Leadership Development Tools that even consist of “Wellness Programs”. All these suggestions go straight into almost everything that a decentralized crypto-ecosystem is to represent if it would like to live up to its very definition. And besides all of this it radiates a dark agenda imho with a huge loss in sovereign influence for Cosmonauts for which I’d have to reject your epistle in the strongest possible way should this surface as a future proposal.

with kind regards,

Soverin

[ebuchman]

Thanks Rob for writing this. Enjoyed talking to you at Nebular and Cosmoverse and feel like you’ve aptly summarized both the potential and the pain of this ecosystem. Appreciate it.

There’s a lot we could talk about amongst your recommendations, and I hope we’re able to keep the conversation going so we can actually work through this and emerge stronger as an ecosystem. I’ve been trying for the last few years to rebuild the org structure since the Big Bang, but it’s felt very lonely at times, and has certainly pushed me to the limits of my competencies and emotional bandwidth. It’s been very difficult trying to do it across org boundaries, especially given my various roles as cofounder, ICF council member, and CEO of Informal. People seem to want to put it in the past (we all do), but what we experienced takes years to recover from, and there’s been many setbacks along the way. I’m not sure if this is the kind of rhetoric you refer to as catastrophization - if so, would appreciate feedback on how to talk about it more constructively

I think one of the most important points you made is around the lack of management skills and experience. There’s a lot of smart, motivated and passionate people across the ecosystem but that does not necessarily translate into professional management competence of complex orgs or software. I think the ICF especially has suffered from this. In general across the ecosystem we’ve seen people assume positions because they were there and they cared, but not necessarily because they had the right skills or experience. I’m hopeful that with new foundation council members joining the ICF soon, we will be able to recruit what’s needed there.

The Hub itself has also suffered from this (as do many other on-chain governance systems), but I’m hopeful that with the new Hypha/Informal funding proposal and oversight committee we can start to take some steps towards making the Cosmos Hub a leader in the decentralized governance of software. As I’ve said before, the Hub is already a leader in Decentralization. And it certainly seems to be Autonomous enough. It’s time for it to become a leader in Organization.

On the topic of coaches, some of us actually have tried quite a bit. AiB hired coaches in 2018 to help us through the issues we were experiencing. Coincidentally I recently found the homework I wrote for them back in the summer of 2018. Since Jae just wrote his version of events here, I figure I might as well share what I wrote then to give a reflection of what we were experiencing back in 2018. Not that it really counts for much now, but Jae, I hope you can see in this an honest reflection of how difficult it was working with you through this period. I’m sorry we weren’t able to work through things better.

At Informal we’ve also been working with coaches the last couple years, and they’ve helped employees across our company grow and step into positions of leadership. I’m quite proud of the way Informal has matured new ecosystem leaders that didn’t work at AiB. Leaders who are now stewarding key parts of the stack.

The ICF has also engaged coaches, and tried to make them available to others in the ecosystem, but attempts at coaching/convening multi-organizational bodies have not been particularly successful. It would be nice to figure out how to address that, but, to be frank, I don’t exactly know how. Perhaps, Rob, we could try convening something with you. I’d love to get out of this historical rut and figure out how we can all move forward together. My own lack of communication on things probably hasn’t helped - I hope to change that.

Finally, on vision. There are multiple visions to account for - at least those of the Cosmos Hub, the interchain, the Cosmos stack, and the ICF. And perhaps there are separate visions for every major piece of the stack too (Comet, SDK, IBC, Wasm), and for the core developer organizations that maintain them. But there’s also a need for a vision for the applications and kinds of applications we build - the ultimate impact we have on the world.

I do think there is an extent to which we have a shared vision for much of this, though it’s insufficiently articulated. We definitely have not had good collective processes to work on these things, or their translation into roadmaps and software development cycles, though that too is starting to change with the new roadmapping work from the core teams. We have done various vision exercises before, but we need to do more to follow through and connect it up with other parts of the organizational structure.

So what’s the vision? I’ve framed the ICF’s vision as nurturing a Cosmos Hub that nurtures an interchain ecosystem that nurtures the transformation of money and finance. Which leaves us to define a vision for those. For the Hub, there does seem to be an emerging shared vision as a provider of interchain security and interchain money (or is it interchain capital? frankly I don’t think any of us really understand money). On the interchain, I think we all generally agree on a vision for an open communications network for arbitrary blockchains and devices to enable sovereign and interoperable communities. And for the Cosmos stack, to be the leading enabler of community computers in the interchain. As for the applications to build, this is probably less certain - from my end, I’m pursuing applications that enable the collaborative reduction of debts through optimizations in a decentralized payment graph. Of course, for all of it, there’s plenty of details still to work out.

I’ll leave it there for now, thanks

[seb2point0]

Rob, I’m delighted to see the (mostly) constructive responses and feedback to your post. As a relatively recent observer, I’ve been impressed with your level of interest in Cosmos and your ability to accurately assess its challenges given its tumultuous past.

To echo @hxrts’s sentiment, I see many positive developments in the last year. There’s a lot of positive collaboration happening at the moment, best exemplified by the incredibly thoughtful conversations taking place in the AEZ room at Comsoverse. I believe we need to create more opportunities for stakeholders, developers and token holders to meet, debate and share ideas in a physical setting, as well as online. Nebular aims to be one of those venues.

I’m on board with your recommendations with the exception of #1. As you know, the idea of creating an ad-hoc group of representatives goes against the decentralized ethos of Cosmos. While I agree that we need a better way of coordinating around things like vision, roadmap, funding priorities, etc, this goes counter to the values of the community.

A valuable exercise would be to study successful decentralized organizations or software projects to learn from how they overcame their coordination challenges and create recommendations for the Interchain.

How do you envision progressing towards our shared objective of enhancing collaboration in Cosmos?

[SpaceMonster]

“Decentralized” means a flatter heirarchy, no kings. It doesn’t mean no cooperation, no organization, no shared goals, and no shared agreements over finite resources.

You sound here like one of those wild west types that wants it to always stay wild. If that’s what you want then you need to keep moving your wagon to the next frontier. Otherwise you eventually end up being forced to pay for municipal plumbing & water. If sovereignty to you means that you’re always the emperor of your camp, well that’s not sovereignty. That’s isolationism.

Pretty much everybody else prefers plumbing, roads, courts, and a fire department. Those things can be decentralized, but they still require consensus on map drawing & such. Maps require planning, collaboration, team building, and a shared vision for success.

Without those things you don’t get to bathe very often.

The Wild West is only fun in movies.

[jaekwon]

I have also written my complaints down but in the board meeting minutes of the ICF.
can you please publish all the board meeting minutes where I was involved?

Burt you won’t. You’ve shut me out of my own email address at interchain, and you won’t let me back in so I can’t find any ICF records. How about you give me my email address back and all of my old files?

[jaekwon]

"He once articulated that he thought our on-boarding process should be akin to dropping some-
one off into the ocean and seeing if they could swim to shore. He certainly played his part there."

I was the one telling you that A players hire A players, B players hire C. You were the one who cited Google “studies” that tried to demonstrate the exact opposite of this (which I disagreed with for us), and then you cited the example of some band where the lead composer hires non-muscians to play some orchestra by making them play an instrument they never knew how to play. This disparity in our ideology was the ROOT difference between us, and here you’re completely negating yourself.

“Jae was quite difficult to reach and highly unreliable.”

I always thought this was strange too. You never called. I have said so many times to everyone to call me if they need me.

At this point it just seems like a strategy to fuck with my mind, to be so blatantly opposed between what you claim and what actually is. It really fucks one up, and combined with statements from Zaki such as “my favourite book is the traitorous eight” it starts to paint a picture of “revelation of the method” MKUltra experimentation.

And for anyone who wasn’t in my shoes, it’s hard for them to believe (like it was for me) that anyone can be so brazenly opposed between their statements and their actions.

“It’s become an unofficial initiation process at the company to get yelled at by Jae about code.”

I do tend to raise my voice. I raise my voice but you’re the one who calls it yelling. If I were Italian you would just say I’m passionate. Somehow because I’m Asian I’m not allowed to passionately disagree with you without being called a yeller. Honestly I feel like this comes from a place of inner racism and elitism, and the wokism that comes with it. The latter is most sinister, it is the infection that enables the transfer of power to manipulators.

And I’m sure sometimes I went a little overboard with my tone, and OFTEN I have apologized about it. But nobody in my shoes given everything I have written above, would be able to keep their cool forever. But you know this deep inside, don’t you? There’s no way you don’t know what you’re doing. When you code you can see all the cases just fine. I find it impossible to believe that you make these egregious oversights accidentally. No, it’s only plausible to the third party observer who doesn’t know our full conversation history.

You can take your wokism and shove it up your ass, or snort it up your nose.

The first time I actually YELLED within AIB was finally before the engineers left for Gore2020. I changed my name to @jaesustein as an experiment, and some people got so offended about it. Why can’t I change my name? Well, I think what Ye went through when people wouldn’t acknowledge his name change from Kanye to Ye speaks volumes. I think this is another well understood trigger. I feel like I got gangstalked into gore2020 according to a playbook that involves spamming people with religious memes until they bite, and then depending on their type of reaction, blaming their reaction and shaming them for it as a means to trigger an over-reaction, and then blaming the over-reaction, and so on, over and over again. Rinse repeat.

From my perspective this is exactly what is happening. The same playbook happened to Ye and we all saw Pasternak’s threat to Ye. What happened to Ye happened after what I experienced, though I’m sure he went through it too before, and countless many other celebrities.

Beloved celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak appeared to threaten to “institutionalize” Kanye West so that the rapper would be medicated into “Zombieland forever.”

Following his anti-Semitic rants, West shared texts purportedly sent by Pasternak, who is Jewish, that began by offering to have a “loving, open conversation” with him based on “fact.” Pasternak also asked his former friend and client to refrain from “cuss words” or “crazy stuff.”

“Second option, I have you institutionalized again where they medicate the crap out of you, and you go back to Zombieland forever. Play date with the kids just won’t be the same,” the message continued.

And it was Pasternak who previously agreed with the “crazy stuff”. Just like when I shared my alarming discoveries with Jacob he was the one eager to tell me that he actually believes every single thing, only to use our conversations against me two years later by lying by omission. And even you accused me anti-semitism. It’s so tiring.

I YELLED at YOU after, AFTER things became more clearer (though I was still involved in quantum thought) that you were being malicious. Why shouldn’t I yell at that point. You still haven’t responded to any of my points. You were involved in DoubleDare and you didn’t even bother to tell me. You deserve a lot more than yelling for that.

GET A HELMET. IF YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED, WOKE HOUR IS OVER.

Business is business. But your only playbook is to blame the reaction. Go figure.

It’s really baffling how the playbook could be SO IDENTICAL. “Take your meds” from your party line. It’s so very very baffling.

[robertkelleya]

Wow!! This response has been beyond my wildest expectations. Thanks so much to everyone who has replied or commented on Twitter or directly to me.

I’d like to start by extending a special thank you to @jaekwon for sharing so much on here. Jae, this must not have been easy to write. When I wrote in my original post that there’s a lot of pain in the ecosystem, I hadn’t even considered how much of that you’re still living with. We all owe you a great deal of gratitude for everything you created and worked on that made Cosmos what it is today. I also admire your commitment to your values as well as your openness regarding your religious faith.

I don’t have the context to understand everything you wrote, but when I read through your posts, I observe a pattern where you’ve been disappointed by people over and over, to the point where you wrote, “I don’t trust anyone.” It’s a horrible feeling to have people let you down, especially when they let you down with their ethical behavior. And it’s gutting not to be able to trust anyone, when trust is the bedrock of all human relationships.

All human interactions involve some expectations of how other people will behave. When their behavior fails to meet our expectations, we experience what Jeff Hunter calls confusion. Confusion feels really uncomfortable, and so we look for explanations that get us out of that confusion state – these explanations often take the form of judgments, such as that people are “clowns,” “evil,” “liars,” “scammers,” etc. Making these judgments makes us feel better, because now we have an easy explanation for why our expectations weren’t met; the problem, however, is that they don’t make our future expectations any better. People are actually way more complex than these simple judgments, and to improve your expectations about them, you need to 1) approach people with compassion and curiosity and a recognition of their infinite complexity, and 2) foster a tolerance for the discomfort that happens when you’re in confusion, because it’s a very natural state of being.

I invite you to consider, among other things, the Christian concept of grace, and how it might bring you increased peace and well-being. As the Anglican priest Justin Holcomb writes, “Grace is most needed and best understood in the midst of sin, suffering, and brokenness. We live in a world of earning, deserving, and merit, which result in judgment. That is why everyone wants and needs grace. Judgment kills. Only grace makes us alive.”

(My apologies to the many of you out there who are allergic to religion – I rarely discuss it, but I thought it seemed relevant given the context here.)

[jaekwon]

Moving on works when I know it won’t happen again.
And turning the other cheek does work wonders to expose a pattern.
Do we not have enough of a pattern established yet?

What about just before Ethan you called me about ATOM2, when it was still being drafted in private, that “all it is about is removing the lower inflation bound to allow ATOM to become deflationary”? That wasn’t true at all, that was textbook definition misleading… it’s a whole lot more than removing the lower inflation bound, and it’s about creating an excessively large treasury so the ICF doesn’t have to spend its principle. Just admit it.

If you can admit that I have mostly valid points, and you own up to it, then I can of course forgive you. Isn’t this the story that the world so desperately wants to hear? I am open old friend.

[jaekwon]

@robertkelleya

People are actually way more complex than these simple judgments, and to improve your expectations about them, you need to 1) approach people with compassion and curiosity and a recognition of their infinite complexity, and 2) foster a tolerance for the discomfort that happens when you’re in confusion, because it’s a very natural state of being.

You are neglecting the same option that I neglected for too long, about the intent behind the source behind my confusion. What if I am right? What if my worse fears are true? I used to wonder. I don’t anymore.

[jaekwon]

@robertkelleya

when you’re in confusion

Actually it is you who are confused.
It is plain to see for those with eyes to see.
This isn’t the right way to solve this kind of problem.
This is not your hill, inducing stockholm syndrome.
My head is a hardened rock but my heart is not.
May I ask about your background, Mr psychologist?

Random off topic question,
how do you feel about the application of psychology
to manipulate targetted individuals via coordinated group response?
you’d have people acting like Agent Smiths reading off a GPTprompts.

[robertkelleya]

Hey Seb, thanks again for everything. I’d agree that there’s a lot of positive collaboration happening in the Cosmos ecosystem right now, and if my post came across as too negative, that wasn’t my intention.

Based on what I’ve heard so far, I think it would be best to start small (and fast). The most ambitious proposal I would make at this point would be to team-coach either the Hub or the ICF, under the hypothesis that these organizations could acquire and then role-model more-effective communication and collaboration methods. If there’s interest in some research on improving coordination in decentralized organizations, I would be happy to at least coordinate that. At the very least, some individuals and organizations have already reached out to inquire about coaching – if any of these become clients, I’ll invite them to share their experiences publicly, if they’d like to.

To be totally honest, I expected to have a better idea of what to propose now than I actually do. I’m all ears if anyone has any more concrete ideas. Personally, I’m open to experimenting to find out how I could best help out and contribute.

[robertkelleya]

Hi @Soverin, thanks so much for your welcome. Let me correct one thing first, though: I’m not an expert on much of anything. I’m a proud generalist

• Your CV comes accros as very jumpy, is mainly anchored in business and has only relatively recently moved towards the field of psychology

“Jumpy” is a great word to describe my CV! Yes, part of me regrets that it took me until six years ago to find my dream profession. And I didn’t even include my (barely) successful jazz festival and failed record label! I spent far too long in jobs I didn’t believe in and wasn’t good at. But grant me this: it’s a pretty impressive CV for someone who felt acutely out of place in every place he ever worked! And for my current job, it was an extraordinary education in working with a ton of absolutely brilliant leaders with many very successful organizations.

• Your mission as stated in your Linkedin namely “to help mission-driven leaders wield power with good intentions” is not only somewhat of a ‘contradictio in terminis’ but also does not match that well with a decentralized culture as ought to be the case here

Yes, the line is somewhat oxymoronic – but that’s intentional. What I’m going for (perhaps unsuccessfully, apparently) is called “sincere irony.” It’s like I’m obviously self-aware as to know how it might come off, but actually on some level I believe it: we all have power, and we all have good intentions.

• Your introduction above contains a lot of assumptions for a self-admitted ‘non-crypto expert’ regarding certain elements in Cøsmos such as “Cøsmos not being a cult”, “A shared long-range vision with the substance of the Atom2 paper” and “Cøsmos has a vision that goes decades into the future”

I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at here. If it’s that I know suspiciously a lot about Cosmos, I have gone back and read a lot of articles and listened to a lot of Epicenter podcasts. If it’s that I don’t know what I’m talking about, well, fine. I’m just sharing my observations. Some people appreciate getting an outside perspective, some don’t. Feel free to ignore.

• Your vision which is supposed to be about the organizational challenge is larded with (crypto)-finance centered terms and slogans like “fiat-maxi”, “bull and bear market” and even “right but not rich”

Is this like when I wore a Sonic Youth t-shirt in middle school and some skater kid came up to me and asked me if I was a poser? (If anyone here gets that reference, thank you for not making me feel older than I am.) I mean, “bull” and “bear” aren’t exactly Web3.0-native. With “fiat-maxi” I was quoting @sunnya97 and citing a moment of impressive higher-order thinking that first got me curious about Cosmos. And yes, “right but not rich” was introduced to me earlier this month at Cosmoverse, and I just find it so packed with wisdom!

• Your professional activity is currently regardless of your somewhat jumpy track record connected to an array of banks featuring the sustainability and ESG theme

My banking account would be very curious to know more about this “array of banks” of which you write!!! We do work in the ESG function, and we have a banking client. For the record, I love ESG people – they’re trying to use power to make the world a better place. Maybe they’re wrong about how to do it! But maybe you are, too. Personally, I have accepted that I’m not very good at the content part, but I’m pretty good at the method part. So my approach is to find people who I like and whose values resonate with me, and I see if there’s any way I can help them build better and closer to their values.

I find it to be upmost remarkable that someone with your relatively light professional background with very little connection to the crypto industry and even less affiliation with Cøsmos frankly has the audacity to come up with this specific list of ‘risks and recommendations’ that involve setting up a Central Planning Committee of a group of “the most powerful people within Cøsmos”, creating the World’s Best Institutions within Cøsmos on several terrains like communication… and providing Leadership Development Tools that even consist of “Wellness Programs”.

Finally, thank you so much for writing that I have “audacity” – this is a trait I have never associated with myself, and I’m reading it now as a sign of how far I’ve come these past few years. You’re obviously a brilliant person with sincere convictions. If I can ever be of service to you, let me know.

[robertkelleya]

Hi Jae,

If my post to you made you feel manipulated or targeted (or that I was manipulating others), I’m very sorry. Happy to edit or delete.

Feel free to ask anything about my background. I shared a bit more in my immediately preceding post, if that’s at all interesting to you. I’m always happy to schedule a call or take the conversation offline.

[jaekwon]

The conditional bothers me, I wish you would just own up to it a bit. But I’m just Yak Shaving ™.

Please tell me about your early life, what it was like growing up when you were young. Have you ever been desperate or poor? What is your biggest failure? What is your greatest wish?

[robertkelleya]

OK. Manipulation. I guess I could say that I was being manipulative in that I decided to approach you by signaling my respect for you and trying to demonstrate that I heard you in order to ask you to hear something I had to say. I think you could also call that “good communication practices,” but I will take into consideration your comments.

To your questions:

I was born in Colombia to a Colombian mother and American father, and I moved with them to the US before I had even turned three months old. My mom had a degree in economics from the National University of Colombia, but she had hit the proverbial glass ceiling and, unmarried and on the wrong side of 30, moved to Miami to learn English. There, she met my dad, who was a college dropout from working class Philadelphia with some really hard-right views on race and genetics. For some reason I’ll never really understand, they got married. Still, they both loved me tremendously. There was a lot of fighting at home, but aside from that, I had a very nice childhood along with my brilliant younger brother. My dad was a salesman for a company that sold equipment to small banks (think coin and bill counters). My mom didn’t work until I was maybe 8 or so, and she eventually became a Spanish and ESL teacher. Looking back on it, we didn’t have a whole lot of money growing up, but I felt rich. Maybe that was because I saw real poverty on our regular visits to Colombia, or even that I had a lot of classmates who lived in trailer parks or motels while I lived in a house. Growing up half-Latino with an immigrant mother wasn’t super fun in my rural area. To be fair, the vast majority of my classmates were wonderful, but it only takes a few nasty ones to make life a little miserable. I was happy to escape for university, and I think I’ll be a big city person for the rest of my life.

The most desperate and poor I’ve ever been was when I was in New York after the Lehman Brothers collapse. I had made a series of bad career moves and was working as a contractor for a handful of absurd projects when the bottom fell out. My income dried up, no one was hiring. I qualified for unemployment insurance, but it left me with about $400 per month after I paid my rent. I’ll never forget the smell from one night when I was overdrawn and couldn’t buy groceries, and I decided that maybe I could boil the rotten chicken in my refrigerator to a point where I could eat it. I couldn’t, and (luckily, maybe) I lost my appetite for a day. But honestly, getting a small business off the ground these past six years hasn’t been easy, and there have been plenty of moments of feeling (or being) desperate and poor. It’s hard for me to take anything I have now for granted.

My biggest failure is probably that I don’t have a relationship with my dad. He’s a great guy, but, like most of us, he’s complicated (so am I, obviously). Somewhat typically, we started butting heads in my adolescence, and during a difficult period in my 20s I felt disappointed that he didn’t act towards me in a way that I expected or hoped he would. We haven’t spoken in 12 years now, when he left my cousin’s wedding early to avoid me. I found myself in a nonstop mental argument with him that was inhibiting my ability to grow as a person, and for the first time in my life I went to therapy. I realized pretty quickly that what I needed to do was to forgive my dad. But in order to do that, I needed to forgive the universe. That took years, but it unlocked a peace in me that’s very hard to describe. Sadly, I’ve never received a reply to any of the emails I’ve sent to my dad. He’s still in touch with my aunt and uncle, and it sounds like he’s doing OK, so that’s good. I still hold out hope that there’s still a chance for us to reconcile, although I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s probably unlikely.

My greatest wish is to travel back in time to that very first common ancestor of all of us homo sapiens and give them a hug. We’re such beautiful and exquisite creatures, but we’re so hard on ourselves and each other! I wish we could just be more accepting and encouraging and understanding of each other. But that’s maybe a little bit of a cheat of an answer, so I’ll just say that my fiancée and I have been putting a lot of work into our relationship lately, and honestly right now my greatest wish is that we find the happiness with each other that we both want.

I’d love to hear your answers to the same questions. Here, or privately and confidentially.

[jaekwon]

Thank you for your answer, and welcome to the community Robert!
I will answer in kind by tomorrow.

[robertkelleya]

I’d love to learn more. Let me know if you don’t know how to reach me directly.