Note to this sub: you probably already agree with the diagnosis (e.g. housing supply, CEQA, etc), so you can skip to the probably new-to-you solutions:

• A block-level opt-out. This removes most of the incentive for the NIMBYs to block all reform. When Houston introduced upzoning, they allowed individual blocks to opt out if they got the majority of their block to vote on it. 16% opted out, the rest didn't, and Houston is affordable.
• Legislate outcomes, not process. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with the cities constantly inventing ways to get around the reforms, legislate outcomes. This is how Voting Rights Act finally beat Jim Crow's workarounds after 70 years of banning individual tricks.

If you want to skip to more details about the possible solutions, control-f "Key idea"

Here’s a mystery for you: why the hell isn’t homelessness solved yet?

I grew up on the West Coast and I thought everybody had this problem, but the more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve seen something puzzling - it’s just us.

Other places have homeless people, but it’s just not the same quality or quantity. You can travel to any other first world city in the world, and hardly ever see somebody visibly homeless, then come back and be kicked in the heart with such overt suffering and awfulness.

Why are we failing at something that everybody else seems to be doing better at?

Or, more optimistically - if everybody else is doing better, that means it is solvable, and what are they doing that we can copy?

In this post I’ll:

1. Diagnose the problem.
2. Propose a concrete solution, including how to get it past the people who’ve been blocking the necessary reforms.

How to not de-rail the homelessness conversation

The two most common ways the conversation gets de-railed are:

1. Some people are trying to help the homeless. Some people are trying to fix the problem of finding visible homelessness unsightly and scary. I am only trying to help the homeless themselves in this post.
2. Some people are just trying to solve homelessness specifically. Some people are trying to help the homeless get back to a relatively normal level of welfare, which means not just fixing their homelessness, but also their mental illness, addiction, employment, abusive family, etc. I am going to focus only on solving homelessness. Solving everything else is for another post or 20,000.

This isn’t to say I don’t care about those other problems. However, I am but a humble writer. I think I can simply solve homelessness in a blog post.

Also, this post will focus on SF and California, but much of it cross-applies to the whole West Coast of North America, including British Columbia.

Housing costs determine how many people become homeless. Drugs and mental health determine who becomes homeless

Want to help one specific person? Treat what went wrong for them.

Want fewer homeless people overall? Build more housing.

Both matter.

They're just answers to different questions.

Think of it like a game of musical chairs with 10 people and 9 chairs, where housing are the chairs.

You can give the slow kid sprinting lessons.

There are still nine chairs.

Somebody has to lose the game. It will probably be the slower kid (the person with disabilities or drug addictions).

If you ask the kid why they’re chairless, they’ll say it’s because they’re slower than the other kids. Which is true.

But it’s the proximate cause.

The structural, distal cause is that there are not enough chairs.

“But surely, Kat, some homeless people are just too messed up to afford housing, no matter how cheap we make it?”

Yes, you’re right. Some of the homeless people are not part of the market, they are unemployable, so the market cannot fix their problems.

This leads to an important distinction between the types of homeless people. ~80% of the homeless in SF are temporarily homeless. They will likely only be homeless once in their life, for a relatively brief period of time, then they’ll pull themselves back onto the rungs of society.

It’s easier for them to pull themselves out when there’s low rent and high vacancy rates, so lowering housing costs helps this group.

Cheap housing also does something sneakier: it shrinks the future chronic population. Nobody starts out chronically homeless. You become chronic by staying homeless: you lose your ID, the couches run out, the untreated illnesses compound, and you're sleeping next to fentanyl every night (exposure is a massive cause of addiction). The faster people bounce back onto the ladder, the fewer of them ever harden into the group that needs the expensive solution.

For the chronically homeless, who are in it for the long term and potentially for life, we need a different solution. The solution is permanent supportive housing (PSH). It’s a room of their own, provided by the government, either via vouchers or directly, where the building itself concentrates a bunch of services to treat the common problems, such as drug addiction and schizophrenia.

This works. As Scott Alexander puts it, the evidence that giving people housing makes them housed is overwhelming. (The evidence that it fixes the addiction or mental illness underneath is much weaker. Which is fine. Because in this article we’re only solving the homelessness problem.)

Why hasn’t SF already done this?

Trick question: they have!

Just not nearly enough.

Because you know how hard it is to build buildings in SF? You know how hard it is to even turn an abandoned building into a innocent and beloved ice cream shop? Now imagine trying to build a house for the worst off homeless people, the ones with the most disruptive and probably permanent problems?

SF already runs one of the biggest supportive housing systems in America: roughly 16,000 units, more per capita than almost any city. And it's still losing. Because building a new unit of PSH in SF costs $600,000 to $1 million.

Compare that to Finland, which just converted its shelters into apartments (2,121 shelter beds in 1985, 52 by 2016) and cut homelessness roughly 80% since the 1980s.

Or Houston, which houses people for about $18,000 a year each, and cut homelessness 63%. Not because Houston is generous. It spends less on the homeless than almost any major city. Houston can afford to house people because Houston has cheap apartments to put them in.

Which then leads us to the question:

Why is SF housing so damn expensive? Vetoes, zoning, and entrenched interests, oh my!

Housing costs are a simple matter of supply and demand. If demand is high, that will push costs up. Which usually leads to supply providing more, which will drive the costs down again.

Unless supply is blocked.

Which is what happens in SF and a lot of expensive cities.

“But Kat, SF isn't expensive because of supply. It's expensive because it's full of rich people bidding up prices." Half true! Demand here is enormous. But demand is enormous in Tokyo and Dallas too, and they're cheap, because when demand rises there, they build, and the demand shows up as new apartments. When demand rises in SF, the demand shows up as price, because the number of homes barely moves. Same demand, opposite outcomes.

And notice which half of the equation you'd actually want to change: the only way to lower demand is to make SF a worse place to live.

Supply is the only lever that doesn't involve sabotaging your own city.

In SF it’s not uncommon for it to take 3 years just to get the permission to build. Let alone actually building the thing.

Compare this to Houston at about two weeks. Or Calgary at four to five months.

So what’s going on? Isn’t SF full of builders? Why is a city full of builders so bad at building actual buildings?

The proximate cause of SF sucking at building buildings is vetoes

Imagine you are a developer trying to build a building in SF. You check to make sure that your building meets the stated laws. It does. You submit some extensive forms and wait 3 months for review. A neighbor says that they’re worried about a shadow. It’s scheduled for them to discuss this 14 months from now.

Honestly, I could keep going, but writing it was giving me flashbacks to the worst bureaucracy I’ve ever experienced (registering a charity in India) and I don’t want to inflict that on myself or anybody else. Kafka bureaucracy stories are horrific and boring to experience and read about. If you want some concrete micro-stories Claude wrote to get a sense, check out here.

Suffice to say it’s a series of vetoes, where even if everybody on the block is fine with the building, a single no can stop or slow down the whole thing. The biggest ones are:

• Discretionary review, as compared to ministerial review. Ministerial review is how most of the world does it, where if you follow the law, you by default get approved by an administrator. Discretionary review means it’s up to the discretion of the administrators and even your neighbors. Instead of clear rules, you get vibes.
• CEQA approval. It’s meant to be an environmental law, but people were given a veto lever, and they started using for everything under the sun. Don’t give people a stop-everything button. Some people will press it.
• There’s a 5 department relay that takes ~600 days to go through. If nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Each department gets an opportunity to slow you down.

It’s important to say that this is not democratic. It’s not that if the majority of people on a block don’t want something, it doesn’t happen. It’s if anybody says no.

Most insanely - you could be following all of the rules and this will still happen. It’s up to the discretion of a bajillion people.

It would be like a group dinner where the restaurant choice needs unanimous approval. One person's vegan, one’s a carnivore, one hates Italian, one's gluten-free. You probably just . . . won’t eat. And in SF you probably just . . . won’t build.

This is different than how most of the world works. Most of the world does zoning where by default you’re allowed to build as long as you are following the local rules. You check the rules, fill out a form, an administrator checks you are indeed following the rules, gives it a stamp, and you’re ready to go.

Most places take a few weeks to a few months to get permission to build. SF takes an average of 523 days just for planning approval, then another 605 days to issue the building permit for the already-approved project - about three years.

It’s the difference between a vending machine and an interview. If you have enough money, a vending machine will simply give you what you pay for. The vending machine doesn’t question whether you’re worthy of a snack. An interview is up to the discretion of the interviewer and is opaque and even if you look great on paper, you can be rejected for any reason.

But it’s not all bad news! The state has actually spent the last few years dismantling most of this machine. Since 2024, under a law called SB 423, any SF apartment project that follows the zoning rules gets approved ministerially in three to six months. No discretionary hearings, no Board of Supervisors. In 2025 the state gutted CEQA for infill housing too, and put shot clocks on the five-department relay. For the kind of building that follows the rules, the vending machine is finally installed.

So SF is booming now, right?

. . . Right?

More than 8,000 units sit fully approved, permits in hand. . . but nothing’s being built.

Because two other blockers are still standing.

Which brings us to the fees.

SF made it unprofitable to build buildings

Builders aren’t building because according to the city’s own calculations, exactions have simply made it unprofitable to build.

What are exactions? They’re basically “you can build here, but you must include X% of your units below market rates / pay some of SF's twenty-plus separate impact fees (transit, schools, parks, childcare) / pay union-level wages / upgrade the sidewalk while you're at it / etc."

Exactions are not bad in and of themselves. They’re like taxes. Taxes broadly help provide public goods that the market wouldn’t provide on its own. But just like taxes, exactions can get too high, and then people stop working, just leave, or lead a revolution. Developers aren’t usually your revolutionary types, so they usually just don’t build or switch jobs. That's why today SF technically could have more than 8,000 units built - they're fully approved, entitlements in hand - but nobody has signed up to build them. They'd lose money.

To be fair, the city has noticed. In 2023 it cut its inclusionary percentage by roughly a third, cut impact fees by a third, and let developers defer 80% of fees until opening. Still not enough. The city's own most recent study found that even at zero inclusionary, buildings don't pencil.

This needs to be fixed on top of removing the vetoes before we can expect housing supply to increase, thus leading to a lowering of costs.

SF made it illegal to build dense housing

SF decided it wasn’t enough to make it unprofitable and painfully slow to build. They also outlawed the type of housing most people need.

Do you want to work in SF? Well, you have to commute every day. But all of the areas with a reasonable commute have already become single family homes. The only way to fit more people within a reasonable commute from work, you need to build up. You need apartments.

So of course, SF zoned about two-thirds of its residential land for single-family houses only, and capped most of the rest of the city at 40 feet.

This means that even if you take 3 years to get permission to build, you still cannot build enough on the lot to make a dent in the supply.

Why would they do something so silly?

Enter stage left:

There’s an organized group who doesn’t want things to change. They like things this way

Remember the loveable old man in Up (Carl)? Who refuses to move while the evil developers destroy his neighborhood?

This is the person who is blocking building in SF.

I like using Carl as an example because it’s great for empathy.

Carl is not a bad person. And he’s not wrong in some ways. His house is more beautiful than those large soulless skyscrapers.

Not to mention he loved his home and the neighborhood. It’s not simply replaceable with another home and neighborhood. He is losing something important and real if his neighborhood changes.

It also shows what can happen if you go too far in the other direction, where you give developers all the power. It’s what happens in China when they simply kick out people who’ve lived there for generations to build something shiny and new.

If Carl lived in SF, he wouldn’t have to face this. He would simply have vetoed the building next to his house, and it would have stayed the same.

Except, of course, then it would lead to massive rents, leading to mass homelessness, and programmers having to live in bunkbeds in a bedroom of 8 people. It shows the single identifiable victim instead of the diffuse victims.

And here’s the kicker - the victims can’t vote on this. Zoning is done at the city level in SF, and largely at the neighborhood level in practice, since supervisors answer to tiny districts, so the people who'd most benefit from cheaper housing don't live there yet and can't vote on it.

This is unlike in most other parts of the world where zoning is done by a body a level up, so people can vote on it who don’t already live in the affected neighborhoods.

This is why it’s best to do the proposed laws at the state level. Then the people who are affected can vote for this. A neighborhood of Carls will never vote for change.

But it’s important to sit with our empathy for Carl for a moment. We really don’t want to become the soulless developers who steamroll over him.

The key idea: give people the ability to opt-out. Respect autonomy while still changing the default option to yes.

Let people, at a block level, opt out of the specific thing they really care about.

If you can get the majority of people on your block to vote to opt out, you’re all good.

I love this because it does two things at once:

• It takes down the main motivation of the opposition group. The people who keep blocking this for everybody else will be fine if they can opt out. They don’t care about other neighborhoods changing. They just care about their own.
• It actually respects their values and avoids being authoritarian. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch, but I hate it when people force me to do something. I don’t want to do that to somebody else unless it’s a really extreme circumstance. High housing costs is not an extreme circumstance. This helps us avoid going to the other extreme, of just bulldozing the opposition.

I got this idea from Houston. Houston is the poster child of affordable housing in a high demand city. Part of the way they got to this situation is they allowed this block level opt out system.

About 16% of them opted out. Meaning 84% didn't.

It’s an open question how many people would opt-out in SF. It could be higher than Houston. That doesn’t matter unless it gets pretty crazy (which is quite unlikely). If even 50% of SF opted out, going from 0% of SF can build to 50% can would be insane for rental costs.

It might make sense to make an exception for housing next to public transit hubs, since that’s so particularly important for providing housing to the poorer people. But that’s for the legal folks to figure out.

The general thing is we’re not here to bully. If you really care and enough people on your block do too, you can opt out of all of this.

It just changes the default. Before the default was that nobody can build unless you get everybody on board. Now the default will be that people can build, unless the majority of your block is against it.

But hasn’t this already been tried and it didn’t work?

You've already seen this play out. Remember the vending machine nobody used? The state spent years removing the process vetoes (see appendix), and production didn't budge, because the exactions and zoning blockers were still standing. Every partial reform 'fails' this way, and every failure becomes ammunition for people who say reform doesn't work.

The problem with blockers is that if you get rid of one, you still have all of the other ones.

You need to get rid of all of them.

This is an example of the Law of the Minimum. This is a fancy way of saying “you can only go as fast as your limiting factor.” It’s like getting your family out of the house. If you’ve got everybody in the car, but there’s one lolligagger still in bed, you’re not going anywhere.

The problem with SF housing is that if you get everything right but you miss something along the chain, it all breaks. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that it’s hard and you shouldn’t expect much in the way of changes until you get all the pieces.

How to stop the game of whack-a-mole: police outputs, not inputs

The problem with almost all legal reform here is that you are not playing against a static opposition. If you pass one law, they’ll find a workaround.

But there’s a solution to this: legislate outcomes, not process.

Pass a law at the state level saying:

1. Cities must permit at least X units per year.
2. If you do so, you get to keep your local zoning rules.
3. If you fail to do so, you automatically switch to the state mandated zoning system, which is by-right building (the vending machine model), being able to build up, anything not approved within X days gets approved by default, fees capped, etc.

Right now with most legislation, they’re rewarded for coming up with ways to delay building or come up with different ways to block it. But in this model, that would be self-defeating. If they come up with a way to delay building, then the law will detect this and switch them to a zoning that they hate even more.

It doesn’t matter the workaround they find - it’ll get noticed in the outcome metrics.

This has actually already been tried with great success in the civil rights fight.

For 70 years, Congress kept trying to legislate away the Jim Crow tricks.

They banned the grandfather clause, so they introduced literacy tests. Congress banned those, and then they introduced “understanding clauses”. Black voter registration stayed at 7%.

Then in 1965, Congress changed to measuring the outputs, not the inputs: any county that had less than 50% registration would lose control of their own election process.

Finally, registration went to 60%.

Cross-apply this to housing. Stop legislating individual zoning rules. Legislate the outputs.

What about the homeless who refuse shelter?

What if we build all of this housing, fast and cheaply, and then they refuse to live there?

You might have heard that a lot of the homeless could be in a shelter but refuse. This is true, but irrelevant.

Temporary shelters are but a stop gap for helping the homeless. And they kinda suck. You might refuse them too.

• They split it by gender, so if you have a partner, you can’t be with them.
• They’re crawling with diseases.
• You don’t even necessarily get that much better of a sleep because you’re in giant open rooms with tons of people snoring, coughing, and having psychotic episodes around you.
• Crime and assault are common.
• You have to wait in line for ages.
• You can’t store anything there and you have to leave in the morning, so you’re still on the streets most of the time

In a word, it’s not really housing.

The generally accepted solution to actually providing housing to the homeless is to give them what’s called Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). PSH is where you get a small room of one’s own, with your own key. In the fancier ones you get your own kitchen and bathroom. In the more frugal ones, you share the bathroom and kitchen with a few other people.

But you’ve got a door with a lock. You’ve got your own room where you can store your stuff in the day, including just staying inside if you want to. No need to spend your days on the streets or in libraries.

The “supportive” part of PSH is that then usually this is where a whole bunch of supportive services are concentrated, such as programs to help you quit an addiction or get your meds, etc.

The stats you’ve heard about how a decent chunk of the homeless refuse shelter is about them refusing shelters.

Not PSH.

PSH is different.

When researchers ran the hardest version of the experiment - a randomized trial offering permanent supportive housing to the most impaired chronically homeless people in Santa Clara County, people averaging five hospitalizations and three jail stays in the prior two years - the vast majority moved in and stayed housed. People don't refuse housing. They refuse shelters.

Also, while we’re on the subject of PSH - the bulk of the ability to build enough of these will be making the city by-right. However, there’s also a good ~50% increase in costs of building if the government funds it compared to only private funding. This is largely driven by union-wage mandates, gold-plated design requirements, and the multi-year scramble to assemble a dozen funding sources. This is another lever to pull on, though lower priority than simply making it easier in general to build in SF.

Before we dive in, here are some of the most surprising findings:

• Alcohol makes me happier and doesn’t affect my sleep, happiness, or productivity the next day.
• Ramen and chips ~3×'d my irritability intensity. Ovulating ~3×'d my grumpiness frequency.
• Polyamory doesn’t hurt my emotional well-being (surprising to me) but it dramatically reduces my life satisfaction.
• Antidepressants probably gave me depression.
• 2020 was actually my best year on record. More on this later in the post.
• Weather totally affects my mood, specifically, grey overcast skies. Good thing I spent most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, a place famed for its sunniness.
• Starting a charity approximately bajillion x’ed my mentions of the word “stressed”.
• Meditation works for me - only when it’s a new meditation technique. Then the effect fades and only comes back if I try a new technique.
• Cannabis, despite making me very happy in the moment, does not affect my mood overall, one way or the other.
• Drugs, meditative states, and Christmas are the source of practically all of my peak days. Work accomplishments don’t show up in this list.
• Polyamory and conflict (related) are the source of practically all of my worst days.
• Largely my mental health is unpredictable and data analysis falls short of what I’d like to know.

Alcohol makes me happier, despite “what the science says”.

There’s currently a big fad amongst high achievers to stop drinking. All of the studies at a population level say that drinking as much alcohol as I do is unhealthy, and even if it doesn’t feel like it’s affecting my sleep, it does.

And yet - my analysis found that alcohol makes me happier and it doesn’t affect my sleep.

I’ve got an Oura ring and if anything, my sleep is better when I drink. I have better sleep onset, I don’t have the micro-awakenings or changes in the phases that everybody says happens.

I am just as happy and productive the next day as I am if I didn’t drink.

And overall, I’m happier. It doesn’t just not affect my happiness. I am, in fact, happier when I drink regularly.

I’ve tracked my emotions and a million other factors almost every day for the last 11 years. Before I go to sleep every night, I write in my “journal” (the qualitative cell in the spreadsheet), and then fill out various things in other columns like:

• Emotional well-being
• Life satisfaction (importantly different)
• Energy levels
• Productivity levels
• Irritability
• Physical symptoms (e.g. headache, cough, etc)
• What meds or supplements I’m taking
• What I ate
• And many other things, depending on what hypothesis I’m testing at the time

So I can actually see alcohol’s effects.

Also, since I’ve tracked for so long, I can actually compare periods of time where I didn’t drink at all to the ones I drank every day.

And the results are loud and clear: periods where I drink every day I record as happier. Productivity stays the same. Irritability stays the same.

How does this square with all the science saying this shouldn’t happen?

Am I just a college student, coasting on my youth?

Thanks for asking, but I’m 36. Depending on your age, that will sound like a crone or like a baby, but I think I’m definitely past the “I’m just relying on my youth.”

It could be that all of the worst health effects show up later. I think this is plausible. This is why I have a yearly liver scan done. Liver damage is the first detectable sign of alcohol’s long term damage, and I’m intending on cutting down once I see any damage.

As it is right now, my liver scans show a pristine liver.

It could also be that a lot of the long term health outcomes are driven by the outliers. While I technically drink more than a lot of scientists say is healthy, I only drink socially in the evenings, I pretty much never drink enough to pass out, vomit, make bad decisions, or have a hangover (except New Years, which is allowed imo). I also drink drinks optimized for lower immediate effects, mostly vodka sodas. Drinks with more sugar or particulates (such as red wine) are more likely to cause the immediate negative effects.

Meanwhile, I’ve watched documentaries about alcoholics, and they’re regularly day-drinking, drinking alone, passing out, and the whole shebang. They’re drinking multiple bottles of wine equivalents a day. It could very well be that most of the stats about liver disease and the like are driven by the truly problematic drinkers.

Anyways, the underlying interesting thing here is that what happens on average isn’t necessarily what happens to you. On average, women are shorter than men, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t women who are taller than men. And if you track things, you can see what works for you instead of the population on average.

Ramen and chips triples my irritability intensity. Birth control stopping ovulation reduces irritability frequency.

First off, I don’t mean eating ramen like a normal human or like in Japanese cuisine. I’m not cooking it and adding vegetables and whole foods. I buy the bags, break the noodles into a crumble, then eat it raw with the seasoning, like a modern barbarian.

It’s basically a bomb of refined carbs, salt, and ultra-processed foods (UPFs).

I don’t really care for sweets. But I’m a total salt junky. I will sometimes “snack” on just powdered soup stock.

So ramen and chips used to be my go-to comfort food.

I probably ate them every other day, usually as a full meal. (Good policy by the way. If you’re going to eat junk, make it the whole meal, so you don’t just add calories to your diet.)

I tried all sorts of moderation techniques. I didn’t store them in the house. I banned myself from convenience stores on the way to work. I set limits.

Nothing worked.

Chips and ramen are as crack to me.

So I did what one must do with crack - you must go cold turkey.

A little over a year ago I quit them entirely. No more chips and ramen for me. For life. Ever. Exceptions are something I cannot trust myself to not wiggle through.

Now, I track irritability, because I sometimes have waves of 1-7 days of irritability, where everything bothers me. Other people breathing, chewing, disagreeing with me, or even just being around me makes me crave murder.

Of course, murder is wrong, and I have impulse control, so murder is not had. But man, do I crave it.

After I quit ramen and chips, the number of days I rated a 5/10 irritability or higher went from 5% to 0.5%. Four out of ten days went from 9% of days to 3%. I still occasionally got irritable, but it’s never as intense as it was before.

I don’t know what caused this. It’s not the refined carbs. I still eat plenty of those. It’s just not in the form of ramen and chips.

Could it be some sort of chemical used as a flavoring in one or both of them? This seems plausible to me. A bunch of UPFs are associated with mood issues among children. No reason to not expect that to generalize to us crones.

The intensity went down due to ramen and chips, but I still often had low grade irritability. Days I rated a ≥2/10 irritability went from 27% of days to 21%, so practically the same.

But for the last 6 months, it’s gone down to only 7% of days. And it’s because I stopped ovulating.

On purpose mind you. I had studied my data and realized I don’t get PMS or moody when I’m menstruating (weirdly, those tend to actually be my best part of the cycle). I get moods from ovulating. My brain responds poorly to the sudden spike and drop of all the various hormones. So I experimented with taking birth control that suppresses ovulation (not all birth control does this).

Et voila! Frequency went down to ⅓ of its previous rate.

(It also coincidentally got rid of my occasional pimples as an unexpected bonus. Apparently this is such a common side effect it’s a regular recommendation from dermatologists. Who knew!)

The lesson you can pull from this is if you have mood issues, do experiment with your diet. Both adding good things and taking away bad things. A friend of mine halved her anxiety (which she’s struggled with her whole life) by starting to take an iron supplement.

It might just be that late night snack which is why you’re breaking up with your partner.

Likewise, if you’re a woman, consider taking an ovulating-suppressing birth control. Going through your cycle once a month for most of your life isn’t “natural” anyways. Hunter gatherers typically only had roughly 100 cycles in their lifetime, compared to the roughly 450 times modern industrial women go through.

Polyamory tanks my life and relationship satisfaction

I actually started tracking my emotions in 2015 because I wanted to prove to my husband that, actually, him falling in love and sleeping with other women made me unhappy. Then I just kept tracking because I’m an information hoarder.

I’ve written before about how I think polyamory is net negative for most (but not all) people who try it, so I won’t dive into it here.

Suffice to say, what’s interesting in my data analysis is that, despite my worst days being caused by poly (there ain’t no drama like poly drama), it didn’t actually affect my average day. Weirdly, one of my best months was during massive poly drama.

However

It tanked my relationship satisfaction and life satisfaction. Relationship satisfaction for the obvious reasons. I’m not a jealous or insecure person, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried polyamory in the first place. But it turns out your husband having sex and falling in love with another woman is just inherently insecurity inducing.

And for good reason! He always said that we could stop anytime I said the word. I always told him it was easy for him to say that given he wasn’t in love with somebody at the moment, but that would change.

And I was right.

Yay?

The other interesting thing is the difference between emotional well-being and life satisfaction.

Emotional well-being is the balance of positive to negative emotions in a day.

Life satisfaction is asking yourself “on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”.

The two come apart quite often. Somebody might experience emotional well-being while playing video games all day, but their life satisfaction is likely low. Somebody might experience low emotional well-being waking up in the middle of the night to feed their baby, but their life satisfaction is likely high.

What was interesting about my experience of polyamory is that it did make me grow, in the sense of it forced me to pull out the big guns when it came to coping. During that great month in the midst of poly insanity, I exercised like a motherfucker. More cardio than ever in my life. I meditated more often then than almost any other time. Whenever I felt upset, I’d go for a run then go to the Tesco and buy smoothie ingredients, then meditate for 30 minutes. I worked at a treadmill desk, walking 4+ hours a day. I cultivated a thriving social life to distract me and support me during one of the worst periods of my life.

So I was “happy” in the sense of being able to overcome the negative emotions using every trick I knew.

But I was not happy with it.

I didn’t want to have to spend half my waking hours coping. I wanted my relationship to be a source of comfort, not something I had to cope with.

The thing that finally got me was when I did a thought experiment - what if I had a magic wand and I could simply not have polyamory make me unhappy?

I wouldn’t want that.

Because I just overall didn’t want to be polyamorous, despite having been poly for 7 years.

I didn’t want the intrinsically more drama than monogamy. I wanted somebody who wanted to just be with me. I didn’t want the incessant negotiation and emotional processing of it all. Even if I was emotionally fine with it, there’s always at least two other people involved, and I’d still have to deal with their unpredictable issues.

So I left.

I’ve been in a happy monogamous relationship for 6 years now and I’ve had less relationship drama in that entire time than I had in any random month while being poly. I was reminded that I’m actually a confident secure woman in relationships. My emotional well-being is about the same, but my life satisfaction and relationship satisfaction has reliably been high ever since.

So if you’re considering polyamory but you’re not sure, make sure to not just read the books written by people who like it. Read about people who had a bad experience with it too. Books about a topic are usually only written by people who are true believers. Look for the articles and tweets of people who hated it, it exploded their relationship, and they left and never looked back.

Also, make sure to distinguish between emotional well being and life satisfaction. They can point at very different things.

2020 was my best year and it’s a mystery as to why

2020 should have been bad. I got divorced. I was unemployed. I had no permanent home or even city I lived in. I was in a motorcycle accident in Uganda and was in pain and couldn’t walk for 4 months. Oh yeah, and there was a pandemic, if you remember that?

And yet it was by far my best year.

What the fuck?

My answer is roughly:

1. Yeah man, I have no idea
2. But here are some theories

One interesting thing - divorce doesn’t actually make people less happy. Just before the divorce causes immense suffering. But post-divorce people tend to be far happier than their baseline.

This reminds me of a question my mom, who’s twice divorced, asks people when they say they got divorced:

“Is that good or bad news?”

Absolutely, divorce can be very bad for those affected. But it also can have been deeply the right decision.

For me, the relationship had been causing me massive suffering prior (due to polyamory plus other factors I’m not going to discuss publicly because I still care for and respect the guy). So leaving led to relief rather than suffering.

It also helped that I did everything I could think of to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. We brainstormed dozens of possible fixes, ranging from couples therapy to meditation retreats to applying mindfulness to it to trying different polyamory configurations. We prioritized them based on probability of working and ease of doing and worked systematically through the most promising ones. This was not a spontaneous decision after a bad fight. This was a rational decision come to over months to years, depending on how you count it.

I had also been doing this for pretty much all of the 7 years of being poly. So at a certain point, you have to say that you know what, I can’t change my internal state. I’ve got to change my external environment.

So when I got divorced, I felt awesome.

Same thing happened for employment. I had been running charities for the past 7 years, and while that gave me good life satisfaction, it was also stressful as fuck. So, unemployment is usually a negative factor, but for me, it was a relief. Especially since I had savings and was still working on projects I thought were important, I just wasn’t getting paid for it. So I still had purpose, money, and self-respect, which are usually the reasons why unemployment is bad for people’s mental health.

Additionally, the pandemic never stressed me out. I worked in global health. When it started, I was living in a place that was having an active bubonic plague outbreak and had just declared itself “1 month ebola-free!”. Covid seemed and continues to seem pretty mild to me. But it’s all about your reference.

My final theory is that it was the mood stabilizer I was on (lamotrigine) combined with having low external stressors.

I had started the mood stabilizer during my deepest depression in 2019 (more on that later), and it seems likely that it pulled me out of my depression. However, there were a lot of confounding factors, and I was still dealing with poly drama the likes of which you have never seen if you’re monogamous. So I just went back to my regular levels of happiness. Lamotrigine might work well for me, but it can’t make going through poly drama fun. It’s no miracle cure.

However, once I was divorced and stepped down from my org, I no longer had those stressors.

I went from 28% of my days being rated as bad in 2019 to 8% in all of 2020. My average over the rest of my years has been ~22%.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t have more good days. I just cut off the bad ones.

Which is exactly what lamotrigine is supposed to do. Most mood stabilizers cut off the troughs and the peaks. They’re usually for people with bipolar, where they struggle with depression and mania. Lamotrigine is the only one that just gets rid of the lows.

I was on lamotrigine for all of 2020, and I had only two really bad days the entire year. One of which was a cancer scare (turns out it was fine). The other one was having to deal with the poly drama aftershocks one last time.

The problem is that I came off of lamotrigine right around the same time I started my next charity. So it’s unclear whether going back to charity entrepreneurship was what caused it, or the meds.

I’ve since stepped back from starting and running orgs, and I still have ~20% bad days, so that’s some evidence against it. I’m now trying lamotrigine again, thanks to this data, but it’s still too soon to tell.

Overall though, the interesting thing about this is that tracking can help you uncover your unusual times. And that external circumstances don’t necessarily always affect you the way you’d predict.

Antidepressants probably gave me depression

In early 2019 I experienced depression so severe I had to stop working for months. I was taking antidepressants and they weren’t working.

Except. . . it’s not that they “weren’t working”. As best as I can tell, they were the cause of the depression.

You know how on the bottle it lists possible side effects, and one of the possible side effects is depression? Well, that’s probably what happened to me.

“But why did you start taking antidepressants, Kat? Surely it just overlaps because you only take them when you’re depressed, right?”

Good question. And that’s what I thought too.

But then I looked at the data.

And it told an entirely different story.

Yes, I started taking antidepressants after a particularly bad week.

But that week was actually just a regular bad week according to the data. I get moods. I’m a woman. Or I’m on the bipolar spectrum. Or something. Anyways, it’s actually totally normal for me to have stints of 1-7 days of feeling low motivation, energy, and mood.

The difference was this time, a friend recommended I try antidepressants.

And that’s when I went from my usual waves of sadness to a tsunami. I couldn’t work. I contemplated suicide. I would experience the most beautiful and loving things and feel nothing but despair. I even had a brief day of paranoia, where I thought people were watching me on cameras. It went from 24% of bad days to 66%. It went from 4% of days I rated a 4/10 emotional well-being to 32%

It lasted for about 3 months. I tried one anti-depressant then another. Neither “worked”. And it was only when I came off of them that suddenly I was cured.

Of course, there were also confounds. I moved back to my hometown instead of living in London, which I had only moved to after being heavily pressured to by my totalizing ethics and totalizing community. But then I moved back to London, and I stayed cured.

I don’t know what lesson to take from this. My policy is to try psych meds, and if you have unacceptable side effects, just stop. The problem with this one is that it was causing the symptoms they were trying to cure, so it can be hard to know. Also, you have to experiment with psych meds for weeks to months (including the titrating on and off of them), and months of suffering is a lot.

Make of that what you will.

In fact, this might be what the conclusion of all this analysis is: I got a lot out of tracking all of this. Alcohol is fine for me, ramen and chips are bad for me, ovulating messes me up, emotional well-being and life satisfaction matter, but also in the end, psychology is too complicated for us right now. I still don’t know for sure what caused the depression in 2019. Despite having tracked it for over a year, I still don’t know if a psych med helped or not.

Overall, I recommend tracking. But it is by no means a cheat code that will help you understand yourself. It is just one tool among many. But you might find out that seemingly innocuous habits are bad for you, and that things that feel like vices are actually good for you in particular.