ankushnarula
You have not earned the right to direct the attention of others.
You have violated the sacred trust placed in you by your employer by exploiting your access to a public-facing employer event.
If you cannot control your thymotic impulses where you earn your food and shelter, then you cannot be trusted again.
You must accept the consequences of your moral convictions.
This is dharmic justice.
And six years later the same client said “I don’t care anymore, say whatever you like, and I will explain how you may be projecting your personal fears on me.”
But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.
Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.
And here’s a good video by Andrew Huberman on dopamine regulation and optimization - he’s big on lifestyle changes before medicating (as am I). But it’s really hard unless you’re committed to doing the work on yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TW2Chpz4k
The type of anxiety you mention stems from accumulated unprocessed negative emotions or traumas. These intense feelings — such as shame, guilt, dread, remorse, rage, helplessness, neediness, and hopelessness — often paralyze or disorient procrastinators, particularly when they are compelled to confront the present moment. These emotions typically reflect deep-seated issues with self-esteem and self-confidence, and an inability to face negative feelings squarely.
In my view, procrastination is essentially a high time-preference tradeoff, where escapism is favored over confronting immediate challenges and responsibilities. Common forms of escapism include excessive consumption of media, overworking, video gaming, substance abuse, emotional eating, casual sexual encounters, and excessive socializing. These activities provide temporary relief from stress but ultimately lose their effectiveness, causing the anxiety to resurface more intensely when the procrastinator becomes increasingly aware of their predicament.
This recurring cycle of avoidance and stress often leads procrastinators to act out—either by seeking constant validation through drama, shifting contexts frequently to keep their minds engaged with novelty, or by focusing on others instead of introspecting.
Despite knowing various organizational techniques and tools, lifelong procrastinators often struggle internally with facing reality, continuously deferring it to some future date. They appear constantly busy yet achieve little, mainly because they aim to divert attention from the mounting issues that they have sidelined
The problem is a pervasive culture of ignorance, idealism, inflation, and exploitation.
Also, it’s not difficult to imagine that many decent firms have been advising their clients on the legal risks and alignment benefits of DEI and ESG compliance. Will they not heed their own advice?
Because this is a woke smokescreen, whose ultimate purpose is to politically capture control more hearts and minds and ultimately to stigmatize and ostracize the non-compliant.
Pretty sure this is the nature of current lithium battery tech, according to many Tesla owner reports. From what I have gathered, the loss rate will slow and gradually level out above 70% for much of the ten year battery warranty, as long as you follow Tesla’s guidance on battery health.
And you may not believe it, but most people in non-totalitarian cultures don’t want social/cultural/political symbols planted like a flag in their personal cognitive or physical territory. It’s bad enough that corporations brand the shit out of every physical surface. Now we have intrusions by political movements and social causes.
This is spam and it shouldn’t have to be tolerated.
https://messari.io/article/look-to-the-stars-navigating-the-...
First and foremost is to find a talk therapist who will work with you long term on helping you develop a mental mapping of your emotions to your physiology. When you are feeling an emotion, there is a corresponding physiological change throughout your body. The key here is that when you find yourself obsessing or avoiding or focusing on other people’s problems instead of your own, you will begin to notice the physical correlations in your own body. You will learn to use breathing techniques to notice your mental states. Emotions like despair, vulnerability, resentment, shame, guilt, etc all have physical correlations. As you begin to map the language of emotions to your physiology, you will begin to find ways to short-circuit these patterns through physical regulation and asserting emotional boundaries with your family.
The most important aspect of this… you will discover that regulating your body and your environment is the same as regulating your mind. The harder you push your body physically, the less you will feel mentally adrift or obsessing over external information to contain your emotions. Your attentional willpower will improve in parallel to your physical confidence and you will choose to care for your self.
Some other practical basic tips to self-regulate
Find some activity that keeps you centered on your own body - hard exercise, yoga or physical games are best — gardening and hiking are good too. AVOID all activities where you are constantly cognitively systematizing information. As an Information Age worker, you MUST take regular breaks for 5-10 min each hour - especially when you are in the hyperfocused productive zone. Go for a walk or do some pushups or yoga. You also cannot sacrifice sleep to the obsessive mind — if you can’t sleep or don’t have the will to sleep go do some physical activity.
Info Hygiene is key
Delete most non-utility apps on your phone and turn on time limits/screen time. Unplug from real-time digital media in your life - especially interactive media. Email and forums are fine - but not as realtime activities - check them at 2-3 fixed times each. Reading and writing are fine - but set limits.
Hope this helps. Good luck
(P.S - search for Andrew Huberman Willpower on YT)
The point here is that institutions must provide equal opportunity within their own functional scope. But simultaneously, institutions must also maintain enough filtering criteria to ensure they do not abandon their core function.
MIT best serves general social questions of equal opportunity by accepting individuals based on some standard quantifiable baseline filtering criteria, and tackling such vast social questions through open and honest inquiry & research.
As a side note, perhaps institutions that are closer to problems like social inequality are best suited to serve them.
Also, these demands for pay equity from knowledge workers (and their leaks to tech media activists) will almost certainly incentivize and drive employers to increase hierarchies and divisions in their organizational structures. Can you legitimately complain about pay equity when your job is unlike anyone else’s job in the org chart?
If the government is willing to suspend these[0] in order to fast track vaccine development, then why isn't this the default for all new drug development?
The answer is political expediency, of course.
[0]https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/08/14/57...