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Mourning loss as a remote team

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Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#371

Post by Angostura »

willcipriano wrote: post #195
Angostura wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that there are probably literally an infinity of thoughts and concepts that it is acceptable to talk about at work.

Everything except politics, religion, sexuality, drug use, firearms, philosophy and your ambitions in life (unless they are die working here). You also don't want to bring up things like playing video games too much, or going out for drinks too often, unless people get the wrong impression about you. Getting too personal about issues you are facing in life also can be career limiting.

I'm pretty sure I know about the sexuality of my coworkers - not something that come up as a matter of conversation much, just gets mentioned in passing and most of the company has pronouns in their e-mail signatures, now so that's gender sorted. Firearms doesn't come up because I'm in the UK. Yes, I know about the ambitions of most, and who is thinking of resigning in a month or so. I think I'm the onlly gamer and people think it's highly amusing that I watch Twitch streams in my late 50s, but hey. Sure, I'd tend to avoid politics and religion - but those are hardly massively limiting constraints.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#372

Post by lossolo »

Scarblac wrote: post #370
anonporridge wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a behavior has been socially locked in as "virtuous", then doesn't it create an incentive for individuals to signal that virtue?

Not necessarily, no. Why would it?

Maybe because it's perceived as noble thing to do so people would signal that to others as benefit to themselves - to get higher status in a group.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#373

Post by watwut »

nine_k wrote: post #358
anonporridge wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that. Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way. So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking ab…

To reap benefits of cooperation, there is no need to signal it. It still helps the species survive and thrive, even if the only organism aware of an act of cooperation is the one providing help.

People mimic what they see. Seeing other people be helping makes people more helping. Seeing them being selfish makes one more selfish.

That is on of vectors how culture is created.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#374

Post by saalweachter »

Twirrim wrote: post #210
NotAWorkNick wrote: post #14

Disclaimer: I'm about to disclose some personal information so will probably burn this nick shortly. I am slowly going blind (long, boring story; only relevance to the topic is during a discussion with the eye-guy consultant he mentioned that he had had a close personal friend of his kill himself the day after a night out and that he (the consultant) wished that he had been able to somehow sense that his friend was s…

I had someone I knew from two consecutive jobs commit suicide. We'd routinely cross paths through meetings, water cooler chats etc. Nice guy, smart engineer. Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid and spotting the shorted path to the best resolution. The kind of engineer you'd be lucky to have on your service team. He grabbed me for a lunch time meal about a week before he committed suicide…

> Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid...

A lot of anxiety-ridden people have a sort of "Hulk secret" that they seem to handle stressful situations well because they are always extremely stressed. If they couldn't maintain a calm exterior while freaking out inside they couldn't get through the line at the grocery, so when shit starts hitting the fan for real that mask makes other people think they don't feel it.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#376

Post by dschulz »

pflanze wrote: post #357
dschulz wrote: post #306

Back in 2020 I could very well have been the Pete in this story. I was struggling so bad with mental health issues, financial issues. On top of that, my father was giving the figh to prostatic cancer. I was just starting working remotely for the first time for a Canadian company. My employers were the nicest guys I have ever meet online and I was thrilled to have been asked to work for them as a software developer. A…

Oh my, I hope you're feeling OK now. Some of what you're saying rings familiar to me, I've got a German/Swiss cultural background and was in Canada, and do think this background can give difficulties. I also do think that mental health problems are difficult for others to do anything with, so it may have made them nervous and act counter productively. I hope you're finding or have found good therapy. Let me know if y…

Thank you! I'm much better now.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#377

Post by BowBun »

Matumio wrote: post #321
anonporridge wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that. Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way. So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking ab…

But this is humans we are taking about. Humans have evolved genetically to be maximally flexible in behaviour. Our psychology is learned from role models and repurposed by our cultural institutions[1]. So here we are, discussing a story passed down over generations, to guide our moral values. This is culture, not biology. This particular story teaches us that we should judge people by their individual intentions. Wes…

The fact that a company has the legal rights of a person is a mockery of human rights in my opinion, and Citizens United a huge mistake.

That aside, I don't think you can judge the intent of a company's actions. Let's ignore the small family business for now, but if you look at a big corp, decision making is a distributed responsibility with individuals checking off their part as it passes through their department.

There is no single person you can ask to determine intent. The intent of the many people making the decision could be contradictory, or someone like the CEO could be acting in bad faith and misleading his employees to approve a decision that benefits the CEO and no one else. We see this more frequently with crime or negative actions, where sometimes the CEO is the scapegoat but we conveniently forget the various VPs and individuals that contributed to the decision.

My point is that companies shirk responsibility by obfuscating individual responsibility, and I think that would apply the same way to judging a company's intent.

Lastly, judging implies a verdict, and you can't put a company behind bars. Yet companies are more than capable of committing atrocious crimes the likes of which rival war crimes (child labor/slavery in foreign countries, polluting waterways/airways and poisoning entire cities, running propaganda campaigns against the interest of public health, etc.) I find it ridiculous that a company can enjoy our rights but shirk our duties and accountability.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#378

Post by watwut »

BoorishBears wrote: post #348
maleldil wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's specifically with suicide, then the company has a stigma with mental health, which is not okay. However, if it's always "teammate died" with no extra information, I can respect it. Your teammates are not entitled to know your cause of death. That's a personal thing, but you aren't there any more to choose if it's okay to share.

If there's whispers the cat is out of the bag... the most respectful move is to simply address it and extend counseling Your cause of death isn't a personal thing either by the way, it's a matter of public record in most states (and of course word tends to get out with something as emotional as a death)

Colleagues are entitled to details of mental health issues nor other issues someone who just killed himself had.

If there is public record, they are entitled to that and nothing more.

The death person and his/her family have their own right to privacy and it trumps curiosity of collegues.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#379

Post by BoorishBears »

watwut wrote: post #378
BoorishBears wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's whispers the cat is out of the bag... the most respectful move is to simply address it and extend counseling Your cause of death isn't a personal thing either by the way, it's a matter of public record in most states (and of course word tends to get out with something as emotional as a death)

Colleagues are entitled to details of mental health issues nor other issues someone who just killed himself had. If there is public record, they are entitled to that and nothing more. The death person and his/her family have their own right to privacy and it trumps curiosity of collegues.

This isn't about the curiosity of collegues??

Again, this isn't some random suicide, these are people in a known high pressure environment already aware this person committed suicide.

The organization can pretend nothing happened (even though everyone already knew), or they can take charge and try and help these people cope with that devastating news and help anyone who might already be in a bad place...

Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.

The organization doesn't even have to frame it in of terms this person's death, just a simple call out that "if anyone is struggling with this loss or needs help come to us".

Anything is better than pretending it didn't happen.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#380

Post by haswell »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #352
all_factz wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem. If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above. So I come back to the idea that you need to look inward, into the core causes of your depression, and make some sort of peace with them — freeing you to move forward. Therapy helps.

>If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above. That's just not true. You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years. It's a positive feedback loop that really does help. >If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above. Again, I'm not sure this is true…

This comment highlights just how different each person’s journey is.

> For many people, there's no obvious cause for their depression, but they "just are"

And for many people, their depression can be traced back to specific events or situations.

Mine: C-PTSD from a pretty screwed up childhood. Most people I know would never know, but I’m working to build an entirely new way to frame the world and my responses to it.

I appreciate that not everyone has the same background, but what I’ve learned through my journey is that there are more people with similar challenges than I ever realized. And in a way that’s the theme of this thread.

> You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years

The key here is the word years. At least for a period of time, one step at a time is mostly indistinguishable from “don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things”.

Yes, one can be making progress, but it often takes some time to see the results.

> Learning to stop over-intellectualising everything

And this characterization of the problem is exactly the kind of undercurrent that continues to stigmatize mental health issues, IMO. “Just stop over intellectualizing everything” is not going to help someone who’s currently “in it”. Certainly not going to help if someone is at the point of being suicidal.

> For me, therapy and mindfulness meditation were both beyond useless.”

And for me, therapy probably saved my life.

> and implementing strategies to make mundane, day-to-day life more pleasant

No offense, but this is “rest of the fucking owl” stuff. I’m pretty sure most people focused on improving their depression want this.

The answer is not just “implement strategies” any more than a novice painter’s journey to master is to “paint better”.

The process is often long, slow, and pretty difficult.

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