Alone but Grateful
I’ve been thinking likely about the difference between finding things for which to be grateful, and practicing feeling gratitude. I never really considered the difference until a therapist put it in those terms.
Immediately following our honeymoon in Iceland, my wife and I were apart for two weeks. I had some work travel in Europe and it made more sense for me to stay over rather than fly internationally again, wrecking my body and my sanity at once.
It was a strange time. Spending two weeks apart from your partner is a lot for most couples. Doing it so soon after the wedding and honeymoon is something else. It is the longest we’ve ever been apart in our relationship and we’re doing it again right now, albeit with the tables reversed.
This time will set a new record, but it would be special if it wasn’t. Since COVID began, we’ve been apart a handful of times, each of which felt special. Spending so much time with only each other has made parting particularly strange.
As I begin writing this, she’s been gone two days. In that time, I’ve stayed unusually busy. When I was unemployed in early 2021, Lena remarked that she wasn’t sure I knew how to take it easy. I worked harder during those two months than I care to admit.
So far, in my first two days alone, I’ve attended a rally in support of an attempt to unionize a local Starbucks (UPDATE: they won their union!), did a ton of yard work, bottled some homebrew, went to the beach with friends, hit up a brewery, went to the grocery store, watched Stranger Things, and you get the point.
To be clear, I don’t think I have any problem taking it easy when I want, but I appreciate hard work and had a lot I wanted to get done.
I’m also filling my time because I already miss my person. I’ve spent all but a year of my life living with others. Put another way, I have only lived alone once, it wasn’t for long, and I met my now wife only a few months into that. I only technically had my own place for a very brief time. Despite appreciating my alone time, I thrive living with people. I have no interest in living alone. Others make life worth living.
From here, it will be more challenging. Mercifully, I have our dogs here to love on. Otherwise, I will be waking, working, cooking solo this week and next. I expect I will be out in the evenings more frequently than this married man in his 30s tends to be. Men famously don’t have as many friends as they age, and a couple of mine are also away. My lovely wife may have orchestrated an opportunity for me to reconnect with someone who’s company I previously enjoyed so that I could ask him to a beer in her absence. Is it any wonder I’ll miss her?
I will not, however, be taking this reprieve for granted. It is a rare thing and as much as it is not my preferred mode, there is much to be taken from this time alone.
…Interlude… time has passed…
My partner has on multiple occasions expressed to me that she is more apt to clean when I’m away. Apparently, I’m more likely to make plans when she’s away and less likely to clean. (It’s me, so things still get cleaned…just a bit slower)
Two weeks have passed. I will be reunited with my love in just 24 hours.
It occurred to me a bit late that the time difference makes an additional impact. Her being six hours ahead means she heads to bed just as I’m wrapping my work day. This might have been one of the harder aspects.
While I made more plans with her away, I’m still frugal and don’t love spending money only on myself. I’m not the kind to go out and spend money just because the alternative is being alone. Most of my week nights were some approximation of our normal evenings, which made more stark her absence. These nights felt strange, but what they really did was highlight a greater surprise.
Working from home, alone, is a different beast altogether. I had no proper experience working from home prior to COVID. When it hit, we were both able to transition. Hell, we were on vacation when things started locking down; we returned home and caught up with what our colleagues were in the process of understanding.
Working in close quarters isn’t always the easiest. She needs to speak with clients, which can mean she needs a more controlled environment than I do. We tend to vent frustration rather than just letting it go. Timing dog walks is a daily concern. So on and so on, but basically you have to accommodate one another.
I never appreciated how important this was to my day. I took it completely for granted.
Working in silence was not more focusing. If anything, feeling the emptiness behind me and the motivation vacuum she left made me feel demotivated. I often felt like I was doing only what needed to be done in that moment.
Worse (for me): I had no one to take care of. No one to give a casual hug because the world feels terrible or banal. Work, even work you enjoy, can be such a damn drag sometimes. Between timezones and working from home and all the little things that are just easier when shared with another, I deeply missed my partner in a way I do not want to forget. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, yes, but diligence is necessary to not let this easy learning slip away.
I write this from the dining table of a gorgeous lake house, a house in which I’ve stayed for free for the past three days. I’ve begun my mornings kayaking and paddle boarding. I’ve worked with the most incredible view. I bought beer from a corner store that let me leave an IOU when the credit card machine was down.
I am living a dream, but it isn’t half a good as having her back with me.
Sec Column - What Do You Leave Behind?
Before we dive into how to go about finding the right digital tools to support your digital security posture, I want to offer a bit of a disclaimer. Some of what I will present in this month’s column may seem extreme verging on paranoid to many readers. Please trust me when I say it is not. While the extent of the measures I’ll introduce below would be extreme overkill for many, I seek in this column to present the full breadth of the question up for consideration so that one can chose to think more on what feels actually appropriate to their own security needs.
With that out of the way, I’d like discuss the concept of…
Your Digital Footprint
Everywhere we walk, we leave a trail. In soft sand and falling snow, it might disappear quickly. In dry conditions it might only show in the shifting dust. In the mud, it might last until heavy storms or the next passerby.
The same can be said of your digital footprint, which is the trail you leave behind when you use any kind of network, Internet or otherwise. I doubt the phrase is entirely novel, but I suspect most do not spend much time understanding the outlines and size of that footprint.
Thinking about your digital footprint is a lot like the risk assessment we talked about over the last couple of columns. It requires a knowledge not only of what you do, but what it means in context.
It is all well and good to understand that it includes the websites you visit, and even how you interact with them—for instance, a site you buy from will have more precise info about you than one you only read—but I would say that it is vitally important that you know, for instance, that every single website that includes the option to log in using a Facebook account is always feeding information back to Facebook. This is true whether you have a Facebook account or not.
In addition to understanding that your browsing online can be tracked, I would urge you to consider as well the devices you use which are connected to the internet, how you use them, and where.
Ten years ago, you might have had 2 internet connected devices, namely your phone and computer. Twenty years ago, maybe it was only one.
Today, it might be a dozen. In addition to work and personal computers, you might have a phone, tablet, TV, oven, security system, etc, all feeding data over the Internet. Perhaps most of that data is siloed, but the prevalence of leaks and the increasing consolidation of large tech companies should give you lots of reasons to not expect that will always be the case.
How you use these devices can tell someone a lot about you. Say, for instance, you have 2 phones. One is your personal device that you use off and on, all day. You also have a work phone, but you only use it on the way into, at, and from work. At the end of every day, where is that phone plugged in? I’m guessing the answer is your home. It doesn’t matter that you never use that phone at home. Your digital footprint shows that it goes to the same place as you personal phone, every day.
As another example, consider how you use your web browser. If you’re like most people, you use only one browser and it is probably one of the 4 most popular browsers. Let’s say you never stay logged into anything because it’s a shared computer. On occasion, you open a private browsing window to look something up because you don’t want to see it pop up in ads later. These are pretty minor security measures, true. They are likely also pointless.
Similar to the idea of a digital footprint is the concept of a browser fingerprint (basically the same concept scaled down to specifically how you use a browser). Remember how Facebook can track you even if you don’t have an account? This is because a handful of data points, none of which include things you might think of as specifically private, can be aggregated to make a profile that is as unique to you as your fingerprint. The sites you go to, when, from where, how often, whether you click ads, your search terms, all of this paints a very detailed picture.
Now, let’s say you go to the private window and open an account you only use for one private purpose. All of that normal browsing you were doing, and the searches you did “in private,” that can all now be tied to the secret account that was accessed from the same internet connection. What was that secret thing, and how sensitive was it?
Almost certainly, this is of no concern to you. It wouldn’t be for most people. Indeed, you might say “if you’ve got nothing to hide…” and so on. But let’s consider now that you work with a vulnerable population. You have a publicly listed office, but you often meet with this vulnerable community at locations that should remain private. Well, now your digital footprint is a map of those vulnerable people and where to find them, and your browsing fingerprint might just include some blackmail worthy details.
You might say, “The secret thing isn’t that sensitive, it’s just a bit embarrassing,” to which I would say “is there no one in your life to whom it might not be damning?” You might say, “But I turn my phone off long before I go home” to which I would say “Is your battery removed from the phone? If not, how do you know it’s off?”
Here is where I expect you to think me paranoid, assuming you think I’m referring to concerns I have and actions I take. These scenarios are not me, nor am I anywhere near as cautious as they might lead you to think. But understanding it is important if you’re going to accurately measure you digital footprint, and use that measure to pick your tools and their rules. And that’s where we’ll pick back up next week.
Enjoying the Sec Column? I have ideas for the next couple of months, but would love to know what you want to hear more about or if you have any specific questions.