Did it, as every year. Thanks for your work.
eurg
Karma: 194
Similar experience, and not much of real advice. I mostly solve it by setting up obligations by myself. However, I revert to this only for stuff that is important. Examples:
I’ve announced and discussed doing some boring accounting and controlling for the hackerspace, and people now expect some specific results.
On anothor note, instead of procrastinating about finding a better workplace, I gave my notice. Once I was out of the job, I simply had to start looking.
Finally, I do not need to be perfect. More people than I expected have the odd day or two during the workweek, and knowing this I have reset my expectations regarding my own performance to something more humane.
I was doing this in the past to heavy-weight books for very pragmatic reasons: Gödel, Escher, Bach is worthless to me if the book would just sit around in a corner, but to take it with me and read it while commuting, I had to get the weight down.
Since learning this amazing trick, any book I read and that’s inconvenient to hold has to fear the knife.
Depending on personal specifics, such stuff is also used in psychotherapy; overburdening oneself is not an uncommon problem. For me this helped even though such substitutions were all but universal, I don’t know about how important it is in general, though.
I’m sorry to have not answered for so long, I had some busy weeks.
Depression: I’d suffered many months from a depression bad enough that I was not able to work the hours of a part-time job, let alone achieve any acceptable performance. I was using alcohol as replacement for other diluted variants of H2O. This was also not the first time of being depressed, and needless to say, such things can fuck up your life, and are generally not very desirable.
I recovered as well as I think possible: I feel well. I can work. I enjoy, and can concentrate on stuff that piques my interest. I feel secure enough to make plans spanning more than two days, and expect to be somewhere between OK and very good for the forseeable future. For most measures, I am now better functioning, healthier (physically and emotionally) than the average person.
The sword of Damokles being that the next episode might break through my defenses so fast that I break down. Again. If I remember correctly, there is a four in five chance there will be one. I do not worry about that, though.
Therapy: The most useful part of my therapy was the judicious choice of some small things to work on, and the frequent feedback from an outsider. Also, never underestimate by how much a therapist approaches problems differently than a damaged brain.
On my own I would either not do anything, and hate myself for it, or try something, and hate myself for failing (again), or do something, and hate myself for spending energy on such a worthless, embarassingly tiny task. It was primarily option one.
It took some months, but through repeated experience I came to accept slight progress as progress nevertheless, and many of the tasks I was given to do integrate very nicely into everday activities now. I learned about saying “Well done!” to myself. I also learned about building habits, not as in ‘scientist’, but but applied to my own life. I also made it through some setbacks, faster and better than in the past years, so there is the chance that I actually learned something useful.
Last but not least, after a severe and sudden setback about two months or so, my therapist set me up with a psychiatrist to get some nice pills. A few days later I slept better than for the last ten years. Sleep is great. Everybody should get some.
What do you enjoy most in software development, and why are you going to be looking for a job again soon? What’s your dream SW dev job?
Cannot really answer what I enjoy most; I like almost every job that comes up, with only a few exceptions. I hate repeating myself, and I hate having to do things in a … … … way against my better judgement. I prefer to work more time (as in effort and calender time) doing the architecture/design/coding parts, but I also prefer doing other stuff once in a while more than being purely a lonely coder.
I will give my notice in a few hours, so I’ll than search for a new job. I will have two months time for that, though, and maybe I take some time off before starting in a new company. I’ll end this job because neither one of money, project nor team is good enough to make me happy, and the job market for software developers allows for searching for improved conditions.
My dream SW job would involve writing open source software which somehow tangibly improves the lives of some people (think better medical DAq and analysis instead of the newest photo sharing app), working with a team where competence and respect is wide-spread, as is friendlyness, and pay which is not worse than I what I got when I was still failing to drop out of college. Sadly, I do not think such a job exists, especially not for people like me (who do not have the necessary skills for anything fancy).
What’s your motivation for veganism?
Moral reasons. All else equal, I think that inflicting pain or death is bad, and that the ability to feel pain and the desire to not die is very widespread. I also think that the intensity of pain in simpler animals is still very strong (I think humans did not evolve large brains because otherwise the pain was not strong enough). I also think that our ability to manage pain slighly reduces the impact of our having the ability to suffer more strongly and with more variety. But I give, for sanity check reasons, priority to the desires of “more complex” animals, like humans.
Due to our technical ability we can now produce supplements for micronutrient which are missing or insufficently available in plants[1], and so I see health concerns resolved. So all the pain and death that I would inflict would only be there for greated enjoyment of food. Although I love the taste of meat and animal products, the comparative enjoyment is not big enough that I would kill for it. That I can enjoy plant-based foods is partly based upon my not being afraid of using my kitchen, and having a good vegan/vegetarian self-service restaurant 100m from my apartment.
And than there are the environmental reasons, and the antibiotic use, etc. etc. They count, and might be even sufficent on their own, but I’ll only investigate those in case my other concerns/reasons were invalidated.
[1] There is vegan vit B12, vit D3, EPA/DHA (omega3), and creatin powder.
Thanks!
This was surprisingly simple: I got myself to want to run, started running, and patted myself on the back everytime I did it.
The want part was a bit of luck: I always thought I “should” do some sports, for physical and more importantly mental health reasons, and think that being able to do stuff is better than not being able, ceteris paribus. So I was thinking what kind of activity I might prefer.
I like my alone time (so team- or pair-sports are out), I dislike spending money when I expect it to be wasted (like Gym memberships, bikes, et al.). And I feel easily embarassed and ashamed, and like to get myself at least somewhat up to speed on my own.
Running fits those side requirements. Out of chance I got hold of “Born to Run”, and even after the first quarter of the book I thought that it would be great if I could just go out on a bad day and spend an hour free of shit, or how it would be great that I could just reach some location a few kilometers away without any prep or machines or services.
I then decided that I will start running, and that my primary goal shall be that I like it and be able to do it even in old age if such would happen. With the ‘*’ that I give myself an easy way out in case of physical pain or unexpected hatred against the activity, but not for any weasel reasons.
I didn’t start running for another one and a half years, because Schweinehund, subtype Innerer. When my mood was getting slightly better (I was again able to do productive work), I started, with the “habit formation” mind-set. Also didn’t tell anyone in the beginning. I think it helped that I already had some knowledge on how to train and run correctly, which especially in the beginning meant that I always felt like I could run further than I was “allowed” to.
And for good feedback: However it went, when I finished my training, I “said” to myself: I did good. I feel good. I feel better than before I started. I wrote every single run down on RunKeeper and Fitocracy, and always smiled at the “I’m awesome!” button of the latter one. I’m also quite sure that having at least one new personal best once a week helped. (Also, when you run barefoot, you get the “crazy badass” card for free, however slow you run. I like this.)
Once started, such a feedback loop is quite powerful. When I once barely trained for month, I was also surprised that getting back into regular running after that down-phase was so much easier. Now, after only seven months of training, I went from doing walk/run for 15 minutes to running 75 minutes, and having no problem with a cold-start 6% incline for the first two kilometers. I’m proud. Feels good (is quite new to me).
No, not by myself. Wouldn’t have the skillset for it, anyways. So I only try to introduce people to things like MIRI, to improve the chances that future discussions might not stop dead in fatalistic and nihilistic clichés. Effective altruism is an angle where I try to get a sense if a worthwhile elaboration is possible, as steering the arguments is somewhat easier when not starting with the most crazy stuff first.
Ask me almost anything. I’m very boring, but I have recovered from depression with the help of CBT + pills, am a lurker since back from the OB days and know the orthodoxy here quite well, started to enjoy running (real barefoot if >7 degrees Celsius) after 29 years of no physical activity, am chairman of the local hackerspace (software dev myself, soon looking for a job again), and somehow established the acceptance of a vegan lifestyle in my conservative familiy (farmers).
Value of information is zero. Do it if you are curious, or take the money and watch some movies with friends.
Also, in many European countries it means “pre- and post some different tax”. Because one part is payed by the employer, and the other by the employee. Populism, Politics and Economics. Good results guaranteed.
Survey taken, as always. It sure was well prepared. It’s worth starting it for the first option (ruining everything), and continuation is always just one click away...
You are right, of course. I did not want to imply that a vegan diet would have been feasible until recent advances.
The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that “humans did not really care about the well-being of …”. We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It’s mostly organized lying to feel OK.
Read a 350-page novel in your 2nd language: 9 hrs (work & elapsed)
In Austria, where for all practical matters and purposes charity donations are not tax-deductible, the animal welfare group Vier Pfoten is doing this. Doesn’t make it more attractive to me, though...
after tax pay of 75k a year isn’t crazy unusual [...] in major cities
Less than half of that isn’t crazy unusual everywhere else. Of course, anybody can just move there, and is qualified and lucky enough to find such a job.
Still doesn’t change the OPs point, though; living on 15k/year is still a very convenient life.
As others pointed out, “memory wipe” is a broad category, but assuming that this is about episodic memory:
How about sending yourself a letter via delivery service on a specific date in handwriting + audio-recording? This of course completely ignores any other faked messages that would need to be discarded, but even with only episodic memory loss, I assume I’d be so confused as to be easy game for even the most incompetent scammer.
If this is about formal guarantees, we need to have some more precise ideas about the “memory wipe” and the adversary in question. In the most general case, likely game over.