nitrogen

Which ones are the right ones? Yours? Mine?

Do children inherit the sins of their parents?

Muphry's Law strikes again: compl-e-mentary vs. compl-i-mentary.

What present-day meme will reach a similar level of distribution and hazy origins? Will we see future generations speculating about the true nature of Harry Potter, or the Jedi, or Chuck Norris's superpowers, or the one true Nyancat?

I'm vegetarian and I eat a pretty healthy diet.

Consider adding grass-fed/pasture-raised beef (or even just an occasional not-bottom-tier hamburger) to your diet on occasion. In my twenties I found that eating some high quality protein (better with friends, but even alone) added a small but growing crack in the walls that barricaded my soul.

Also consider drastically different life philosophies/cultures in case the one you're in isn't for you (e.g. the ideas that meditation is a cure-all or that vegetarianism is virtuous are pretty culture-specific). For me that meant leaving conservative religion, but for others it might mean leaving progressive "religion."

Something else that helped me was going into social situations with a slight "idgaf so I'll just be my positive self no matter who might try to shut me down" attitude.

And finally, find any weak link in the vicious feedback cycle and chip away at it. Don't feel bad, but if you do, don't feel bad about feeling bad, but if you do, don't feel ...etc. Put the brakes on the meta-guilt and just be okay with feeling whatever for now, and you can feel something else later.

The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they have robbed us of any sense of common identity.

It's no longer acceptable to be thought of as part of broad category A where everyone has different interests and affinities. Instead now, we have to be exclusively XYZ and W, and nobody else could possibly understand the XYZW perspective.

"Jimmy, Jack, and John go to the store..." would be just as effective of a setup for a story problem without sneaking in moral displays.

The perfect summary of much of modern political discourse.

1. The US drops all agricultural subsidies and tariffs.

2. The US begins importing most of its food from elsewhere.

3. "Elsewhere" goes to war with a US ally and stops selling food to the US.

4. The US then wishes it hadn't given up its abilty to grow food.

It's worth considering the possibility that the "why" is due to insidious bullying, a miasmatic reframing of language in the false name of unity.

If everyone feels a bit awkward about saying anything, then those who generated the awkwardness gain tremendous power.

This is the lie we are all told to preserve the walls between "us" and "them," to divide and conquer our society. We are told to focus on the superficial differences between groups.

We are told to flip our shared humanity on its head and treat the superficial as fundamental, and the fundamental as irrelevant, to the point where we react viscerally to even the suggestion that someone who doesn't share tribal value X can still be a good person. But there is a lot of common ground between all human groups, if only we would focus on what we share instead of what we don't.

What defines good is our shared picture of empathy, consent, maximizing joy, minimizing suffering, reciprocity, etc. Basic golden rule stuff that's built into most of us and within reach of all of us.

I would describe the values of the altruistic modern atheism of people I know, which has a lot in common with Christianity and Judaism at the big picture level, as "be good, do good." One needn't believe in God or gods to believe in good.

There's a sort of No True Scotsman fallacy combined with confirmation bias that comes into play with other spiritual practices with which I am experienced. For example, "If your prayers aren't getting answered, you aren't fasting enough and praying hard enough, or you are praying for the wrong thing."

This is an easy trap to fall into with anything that generally works for some people but not others, and it's important to remember that there are other dimensions beside "really" or "enough", plus general randomness, that affect whether a practice/belief/etc is good for a person and successful.

If you can pick up on the patterns of an unfamiliar language and/or codebase and make your code look like it fits in, you're probably good at both reading and writing code, and working with a team.

I can't speak for the parent commenter, but by "patterns" I am referring to multiple layers:

Detail -- Indentation, spacing, line length, naming convention, placement of braces and parentheses.

Flow -- pacing, grouping of blocks of code, levels of nesting, when and where to break up functions into spaced blocks or helper methods.

Architecture -- class boundaries, interfaces, cross-file organization.

There are higher layers but I haven't named them yet in mind and they aren't as well tested by this kind of interview.