Having it all.

Ever since leaving my position as CEO of Ello I've had a lot of feelings come up.

Some of those feelings are ones I'm excited about (I have time to write again! I can invent new things!) but others, like heartbreak, are more difficult, and not ones that I'd choose if I could get away with avoiding them.

I admit that for me, sadness has always been a struggle. I grew up in an environment where everything, even death and surgery, was always going to be OK. Learning to tolerate heartbreak was something I had to teach myself, and getting there required a lot of experimentation. I was definitely an asshole sometimes along the way.

Most of the feelings that we struggle with are results of the way we were raised. A child naturally experiences an enormous spectrum of feelings — mad, glad, sad, scared, nervous, heartbroken, inspired. As adults we may have a problem with one, or some, of these feelings, and we project that on our children.

When we don't let a child be all of who they are — when we give them a cookie when they're sad ("Come on, cheer up!") or shame them when they're having fun ("A five-year old shouldn't act like that.") — we force them into an impossible situation. They have to choose between what's real, and our love. They always choose love, and the result is that they cut off a part of themselves, and tell themselves that the way that they are is not OK.

Carrying those wounds into adulthood we find ourselves unable deal with certain situations. Conflict aversion, for example, is triggered when we just can't handle the fact that someone we deeply care about is really, really pissed at us — and may not get over it. The experience is just too overwhelming. If we can't con them into loving us again exactly the same way as they did before, we have to shut down, or cut them off completely. The alternative (staying in relationship and facing that anger) is almost unthinkable.

But anger, as well as joy, inspiration, sadness, and terror, is real. We experience all these feelings, whether want to or not, and whether we even realize it or not.

This came home to me a few years ago when a friend I hadn't seen in a decade died. I told myself I didn't feel anything, and then found myself breaking into uncontrolled sobbing fits weeks and months afterwards. I cried listening to the radio in the car, I cried at business meetings, I cried at dinner with friends and at the most awkward times.

Denying such huge parts of ourselves turns us into robots — endlessly caught in the same broken loops, disconnected from ourselves, unhappy, relentlessly discontent, and painfully unaware about what, exactly, is the problem.

I don't usually post about politics, but here is a brilliant article in Bloomberg about How the Republican Party Licensed Their Brand to Donald Trump.

It echoes what I've been privately thinking for a long time: that in order to win elections, the Republican Party's leadership of mostly centrist economic conservatives began inviting more and more radical and fringe interests into their party. These include the religious right, anti-abortion activists, social conservatives, anti-gay activists, war hawks, anti-government libertarians, anti-immigrant and nationalist groups, the left-behind and aging (mostly white and male) working poor, and even some racist and white supremacist groups.

Now the Republican party is paying the price. As it became less and less clear what it actually stands for. The party fractured, the traditional center lost control, and Trump has co-opted the Republican party for his own purposes — which seem to have little or nothing to do with anything but himself.

Super amazing Buff Monster Truck on the Upper East Side.

My friends at Alley in NYC invited me give a talk about Ello, Kidrobot, Budnitz Bicycles, and other awesome stuff that came out of my brain.

We got a bunch of free tickets we're giving away. Go here and enter the code ellocommunity to get in free!

See you there!

Paul

Dear Everyone,

I just stepped down as CEO of Ello.

Over time the distance between myself in Vermont, and the rest of our team based in Colorado became too great.

In principal the idea of a distributed workplace is a good one — it can set us free to live and work wherever we want.

But in practice, it meant that most of my days have been spent on video chat and in messaging apps, instead of rubbing shoulders with the real human beings that were building this network alongside me. There is a certain magic to leading a company like Ello that only happens when we are physically together over a long period of time. I began to miss that, as did my partners, and I knew it was time to step down.

@todd Berger will take over as Ello's interim CEO. Along with @lucian Fohr, Todd co-founded this network alongside me, and is one of Ello's lead designers. He is a fantastic next leader for the Ello team.

I'll remain involved as chairman of Ello's PBC Board of Directors, and as active as I have always been on our brilliant network for creators. But I'll move out of the day-to-day, which will (finally) leave me bit more time to spend with my family. And time to finish my book!

Much love to all.

Paul Budnitz

David Bowie for President. ️