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Letting go of the idea of keeping up

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Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#141

Post by ElevenLathe »

resource_waste wrote: post #99
amonith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. > look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%…

>You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. :( Yeah I know >What kind of nature are you even watching From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are. I will admit that you can intellectual insanity your way to enjoying/handling suffering, I was a Stoic for 3 years. Whatever the case, maybe I've personally experienced more of…

If you know for a fact that your wife and friends only like your professional success and not YOU, you need to either work on that or get out of those relationships -- or at least build new, additional ones.

I suspect you are exaggerating things in your head though. How will your wife or friends even know that you are only a 75th percentile coder (or whatever your profession is) and not a 99th percentile one? They don't, and can't, and you need to do whatever work is necessary to understand that their love for you is not actually conditional on working 90 hours a week or staying up to date on "the literature".

> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.

I'm not a doctor of any kind, so this isn't medical advice but: I've dealt with similar fear (usually I get scared of being in the bottom percentiles of whatever I'm doing rather than not being in the top, but the idea is the same), and IMO this feeling is enough to talk to a psychiatrist or therapist, because it is classic anxiety disorder thinking. If you really feel this way all the time (rather than just occasionally, which is pretty normal IMO -- our society tends to over-pathologize stuff like this) then talk therapy or an SSRI might help. Even if you don't think you are "crazy" or have any kind of disorder at all, talk therapy alone can improve your life dramatically. It has mine.

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#142

Post by ggpsv »

resource_waste wrote: post #138
ggpsv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reckon you're misunderstanding stoicism if you think of it as mental gymnastics. You're implying it is a practice of self-deceit or indulging in irrationality. Stoicism is largely about accepting things as they are and letting go of the illusion of control. This, if truly integrated in your outlook, is the opposite of mental gymnastics. Said otherwise, you'd have self-awareness to understand your predicament and cu…

I think you should read The Meditations, skip chapter 1.

I have read it, hence my confusion regarding how you've described stoicism.

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#143

Post by andsoitis »

NalNezumi wrote: post #48

When I saw the title I thought the article would be about the dreadful stress of keeping up with new tech or research .. But it's about spare time reading? Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession). I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of profession…

> I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading

When I widen my aperture, what I see is this is a form of "keeping up with the joneses", or teenagers comparing themselves to others on Instagram, or chasing the latest buzzword in technology, etc.

FOMO (fear of missing out) vs JOMO (joy of missing out) is another riff on this age-old idea.

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#144

Post by droobles »

starkparker wrote: post #51

At one of my jobs the entire team read at least a book a week, often more and seemingly non-stop. Every standup started with every person talking about what we'd read that week. I'd never been a huge longform reader (more like a book a month, at best) and rarely had anything to contribute. Sometimes I'd say "our documentation" because that's what I'd been working on, and when I wasn't working _I wasn't reading_ becau…

Like... an involuntary book club? As in one person opened up that they read something like The Scarlet Letter? I'm sorry that you experienced that.

At an old job I read a fiction series based on a suggestion from my manager but that's because we liked the same type of books, absolutely was not expected to be read to join the "in" crowd. If anything, we were the "out" crowd!

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#145

Post by svnt »

scotty79 wrote: post #132
amonith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. > look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%…

> Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. I think it's fairly common among top performers.

Agreed — people choose you because you’re shiny, and to the rest of the world it looks like a family, but watch what happens if you try to give up being shiny.

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#146

Post by madeofpalk »

resource_waste wrote: post #90
NalNezumi wrote: post #48

When I saw the title I thought the article would be about the dreadful stress of keeping up with new tech or research .. But it's about spare time reading? Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession). I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of profession…

Thanks for starting the discussion. > Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared. I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not perfor…

You think your wife is going to leave you if you're not learning about the latest tech?

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#147

Post by [deleted] »

resource_waste wrote: post #99
amonith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. > look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%…

>You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family. :( Yeah I know >What kind of nature are you even watching From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are. I will admit that you can intellectual insanity your way to enjoying/handling suffering, I was a Stoic for 3 years. Whatever the case, maybe I've personally experienced more of…

[deleted]

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#148

Post by prewett »

mapt wrote: post #121
ErigmolCt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you feel the stress of keeping up with new tech or keeping up with book reading, don't you think it's the same? Just don't worry, everyone has their own pace

"I will be completely unable to make a meaningful contribution to a five minute discussion at a cocktail party a couple months away" vs "I will be completely unable to collaborate on a project because I literally don't understand the concepts on which it's based" The only non-fluid timeliness considerations of literature are typically social in nature and casual in import. Not so, tech.

I've made a point of not bothering to learn new tech environments unless I was interested, and it hasn't made me unable to collaborate. Usually I just learn it on the fly, when I'm asked to do something outside my usual scope at work.

Although I did have a moment of panic when I signed up for a contract work with some OpenGL/C# work. I was hoping to talk them into C++, but I'd used C# before. Turned out to be a TypeScript project using WebGL, neither of which I'd done anything with, so I had a couple of days of panic until I realized that TypeScript was similar enough to C++ that I could get work done while learning.

(Also, if you want to learn new things, doing lots of smallish contracts is a great way to do it. You select the contracts that are doing something new but leverage some of your existing knowledge. These are not hard to find; you'll have a harder time finding something that doesn't require some learning!)

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#149

Post by [deleted] »

resource_waste wrote: post #90
NalNezumi wrote: post #48

When I saw the title I thought the article would be about the dreadful stress of keeping up with new tech or research .. But it's about spare time reading? Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession). I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of profession…

Thanks for starting the discussion. > Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared. I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not perfor…

[deleted]

Re: Letting go of the idea of keeping up

#150

Post by tsunamifury »

pas wrote: post #134
tsunamifury wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Pacific Heights, likely one of the top 5 richest neighborhoods in the world. Let me tell you this really directly… inequality is not going down, these people just have no fucking clue how extreme it’s become because they aren’t amoung it and keep comparing terrible datasets that completely lack the outlier data that makes up most of the extreme inequality. And pacific heights won’t come up at the top 5 rich…

Data is always crap, but there are error bars. GDP is pretty well accounted for. There was shadow wealth at every point of the last decade, so it's already factored in, the numbers (and studies) are already taking that into account, ... unless! Unless folks suddenly started to commit more tax fraud. (Which is hard to do if your money comes from capital.) https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/4/30/map-i...

Yea well there is you answer. Most wealth is not money.
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