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I'm addicted to being useful

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Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#171

Post by embedding-shape »

Aurornis wrote: post #67
lazide wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful you don’t end up with people who have constant emotional problems that need fixing - or that you’re 100% sure that you’ll never need to say ‘no’. Speaking from experience. Some people really don’t like ‘no’, especially when they have emotional problems.

Another pitfall with this approach is when someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything. Being the person who validates their emotions becomes harmful if they’re over-reacting or developing harmful emotional reactions and you’re always there to validate them.

> someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything

What are "emotions" if not "irrational chemical reactions in our brains"? Seems really strange to decide what it or isn't "irrational emotions" for someone else to have.

I, just like you I presume, see myself as a rational and logical person (maybe you're also a programmer), but I also realize that humans are humans, and having irrational emotions is very much part of being a humans, and emotions in general is such a subjective experience.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#172

Post by jama211 »

thisislife2 wrote: post #46
n4r9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver. Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. You can help by being curious about what they're say…

> switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver Thank you for this useful tip! I've recently become aware that I may not be as good a listener I thought I was - I too make the common mistake of immediately offering solutions, or talking too much about my own relatable situations and feelings, instead of trying to really listen to them and help them figure out their own world view and fee…

“Don’t just do something, stand there!” - I love this quote. Standing there or being there for someone is amazingly helpful and it’s a skill to do it, congrats on working on this.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#173

Post by bigstrat2003 »

y1n0 wrote: post #167
Aurornis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support. I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a w…

His advice was specific to the husband - wife relationship. You’ll understand if you happen to get married or enter a long term relationship.

Even there, though, there needs to be a balance. Sometimes my wife needs to vent to me about her problems, and I listen. But on the other hand, sometimes I need for her to not bring stuff up with me unless it's going to lead to a solution being implemented.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#174

Post by relaxer »

Aurornis wrote: post #160
relaxer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'. Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do. An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons…

> I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do. A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened. The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way. This is the problem with th…

> Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way. IDK if anything here counts as a good container for emotion.

'validate' is very ambiguous. 'comfort' is very different from presence. It can actually be a way of invalidating funnily enough. 'not question' has a lot going on.

I definitely hear a lot of enablement in your example. It sounds like she is better off without that.

> This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.

I agree here. Validate itself is a loaded term, especially in the tech world. It sounds like it implies correctness. Maybe I'm onboard with just a need for 'emotional presence' over 'validation'.

Validation can slide into enablement. Challenge can slide into invalidation. Presence is the impossible one. Having someone you can openly explore an emotion, even just say it all without evoking a fear or anger response, a validation or invalidation response from. Let's it just hang in the air without reaction. Let's it exist without adding distance or withdrawing connection. Have endless curiosity.

I do think I am onboard with validation being a more dangerous term. I get its origin/concept - maybe trying to combat the amount of invalidation in the world but it's ironic to see how invalidating the wrong kind of validation can be.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#175

Post by clcaev »

harryday wrote: post #5

Help is the sunny side of control.

Someone who stops at road side, and helps a stranger with a tire iron, likely has no reason other than it just feels the right thing to do; the recipient's smile being the most precious payment they could possibly receive.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#176

Post by deepvibrations »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #53

This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play. Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well. Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing. Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play. All stems from inability to have sy…

Was about to comment the same till I found your comment.

I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society.

If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#177

Post by gowld »

I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#178

Post by dkarl »

> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying

I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.

If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#179

Post by phito »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #153
phito wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.

Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience . I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews. If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.

I really don't mind PR reviews, as long as the author is cooperative. I do not like arguing over obvious things with someone who isn't participating in good faith. Thankfully I have a good team in which it doesn't happen.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#180

Post by lo_zamoyski »

dapperdrake wrote: post #161
nuancebydefault wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the more one knows about what it means to be a good listener, the more one becomes aware of not being such a good listener.

Being a good listener is one of the hardest jobs in the world. And narcissists are soul sucking traps for good listeners.

Which is why you should not be an indiscriminate listener.
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