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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1783 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 20, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Is there android app which uses accelerometer to count squats or situps number and their depth. Unfortunately, large amount of "health" apps just want to sell user exercise plan.

I appear to be one month pregnant.

How do you make decisions about parenting?

What do you mean? If all goes well, this will be our third child.

How do you weigh the pros and cons of having children, and how do you do research and come to conclusions about the various decisions you have to make about how to raise the kid?

Oh. No, I don't do that.

The first child was sort of an accident, I was on oral contraception, but didn't take it at the same time every day, got pregnant, was married and 30, and thought that we would regret it if we killed it.

Then that child was really hyper and more social than me, and it seemed like she shouldn't be an only child.

Then several of my friends had third children, and it's not like we can go to bars or fly much anyway, and have a largish house and yard, might as well.

Both of our families are basically alright, so we're basically raising them the same way as ourselves. I was homeschooled, but it isn't financially viable, and also firstborn needs more socialization and structure than I'm likely to provide. Our neighborhood school seems basically fine, we'll give that a try and see how it goes. I kind of believe Caplan and DeBoer's philosophy, where the sort of decisions parents and teachers are in a position to make (aside from the really obvious -- father is not a terrible person, some kind of education, at least average nutrition, don't let them fall in with terrible peers, that kind of thing) don't ultimately matter all that much.

Why didn't you want to have kids earlier?

Both of us are very high openness, low conscientiousness. We were wandering around without a house or steady job. Now we do have a house and steady jobs, mostly because of the kids, but are restless about it.

Thanks for sharing.

Congratulations! I hope you have a strong and healthy baby. :)

Great timing to find out too! Merry Christmas

One of the problems with Charlie Brown syndrome is that you might feel like everything is against you and nothing anyone does make sense, except for what you do, but at least you’re the main character.

I didn’t realize that I had this focus until a friend of mine told me that he felt like Charlie Brown, and always thought that I was more like Linus. I felt vaguely insulted.

better than being Pig-Pen i guess

I'm about 12,000 miles from home and looking forward to a lonely Christmas with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a bottle of Scrumpy to keep me company. Hopefully I won't cry too much. How are you getting through the holiday season?

My life is also pretty bad lately, but I definitely did something interesting:

  1. I celebrated the Winter Solstice, not Christmas
  2. I gave my children strange, cheap gifts which they loved (despite everyone's eagerness to open them, the eldest was extremely insistent that we open them one at a time so that he didn't miss any present)

Details are here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/happy-solstice-eve

Downside - may not work with only Lord of the Rings characters to hang around with Upside - Label presents in Futhark which you learned from that old copy of The Hobbit when you were a kid, and Tolkein is there is spirit

I'm going to be spending New Years thousands of miles away from home too at New York (If you're gonna be at Times Square at NYE too, that's the closest another mottizen is probably getting to me lol). I finished up a brutal project at work that required many sleepless nights, so treating myself with a little vacation.

It's good to shed a few tears while watching LOTR. There's always a part of FOTR and one or two parts of ROTK that make me very emotional. Frodo and Gandalf talking in Moria ("I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. - So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you" and the ending(s).

Not the worst Christmas, even if you might be shedding tears from separation instead.

Apart from a Christmas dinner, I will be putting a lot of time into meditation over the next couple of weeks. The holiday season always brings fresh intensity to the need to do the work to attain more liberation from the mind and the foolishness of humanity.

Wow! I’m spending the holidays in China with my GF’s family. My home is near SF and I’m only 7000 miles away!

I’ll probably spend Christmas losing money playing Mahjong.

New Year's resolutions? Do you make them? Do you keep them?

This year, I am thinking of the following priorities:

  1. Work hard(er). Get into the habit of hard work.
  2. Continue to meet new people, and maintain existing relationships

I came across The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and I agree with all of them but "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." I actually wish I was working harder and really would like to maintain a consistent daily work habit. I managed this a couple of month this year but it dropped off at the start of October. I should probably read Atomic Habits even though I feel like I will know most of it.

I have more ideas floating in my head but I won't set them as goals just yet. I should tidy up and publish a crappy project I have, just to get it out there. I should release more work in general, or build in public. I want to perform in front of an audience. I should figure out how to leverage the internet to make friends online. I should get into climbing. I want to go on a solo trip somewhere. These are more specific and I might pick some of these later to focus on, but I know for sure those two priorities above define the general direction I want to go.

Last few years I haven't done much. Next year I want to get marginally more serious about getting employment, muscles, and romance.

Ware has an immense incentive to tell people what they want to hear.

I have two separate sets of things, one of them are resolutions in the sense of some substantial change that I intend to make and the other are a set of fitness goals that aren't changes, but specific targets. I generally keep the resolutions imperfectly, but better than if I never thought about it at all. The New Year is a great time to reset and think, "what should I be doing differently?". One of mine this year was to read more books, and I have indeed done so. Probably not as much as I would like, which implies that if I want to do that again, I should put a specific target on it going forward, but still, this was directionally correct. On the fitness end, I'll be setting targets for total pushups on the year and total miles run on the year - I'm very motivated by specific numbers and delight in completing goals with big numbers assigned to them. I will also have goals for race times, but these are less directly controllable than just kind of an expectation-setting thing for the next year.

No, it's too arbitrary of a label for me to buy into it. The best time to start anything was yesterday.

It's a nice checkpoint to consider the last year and strategize about the next.

You can do that now. If you need a reset of the Gregorian calendar to muster up enough will, you are fucked anyways.

Yes I can do it now, hence the post. Personally I don't think of it as strictly a 1st January thing. And the changing Gregorian calendar can provide a psychological framing that aids behavioural change.

I GET THAT !! But ask yourself who actually pulled off anything worthwhile because it was their new years resolution ? If you need soo much psycological framing, just don't do it.

I resolved to read more this year and I did read quite a lot more. That seems straightforwardly good.

I set concrete running goals and accomplished them (run X miles, run PRs, win at least one race). I might accomplish those without setting them at the beginning of a year, but having specific things to work towards helps structure the year.

What makes you think people aren't capable of doing that?

I omitted my priorities for last year for brevity, but 2023 was a success. I think we are getting hung up on the term "new years resolution". For me, it is not some frivolous goal picked out of a hat that I don't really care about.

Your entire life is psychological framing and you shouldn't underrate it.

for 2023 i resolved to lose weight. i technically did keep it so far .

Why the "technically"? Weight loss insignificant? Did you game the system by measuring your "weight" on the moon with mass held constant?

Maybe he got a haircut or decided to cut his fingernails short?

Taking a shit also does temporary wonders.

I would assume that falls under "insignificant", but one can't just assume, on the internet, that they're not speaking to a Mandarin or someone with really luscious locks.

Maybe he lost a limb.

Building mental resilience

Ever since college, and stumbling into a lucrative sales job that asks absolutely nothing of my intellectual capacity, my brain has become mush, absolute mush. When even in years past - I’m now 28 - I would have made the token effort after dinner to open a book or write a passage in my journal, now I fall into a dull catatonia, mutely watching hour after hour of drivel on YouTube while absentmindedly swiping this way and that on a carousel of Bumble, Tinder and Hinge.

If it sounds pathetic, that’s because it is. So then why can’t I stop it?

Because every external marker is saying ‘you’re winning the game, keep doing what you’re doing.’ Making a lot of money working 25 hours a week, fully remotely from Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Valencia, sleeping with more women than is good for me. Writing it out sounds like a Reddit neckbeard’s fantasy, yet all the while I’m deeply unhappy with it.

Unhappy because I feel latent within me something potent but inaccessible, blocked by this 1000 pound gorilla that swats away any attempt to live beyond the sedating minimums of eating, sleeping and fucking.

All this is to say, how do you confront a personal acceptance of what feels like mediocrity? How do you retrain your brain to say ‘although you think you’re winning, you need to reset the rules of the game’?

Apologies for what may appear to come across as a blatant humble-brag - there's really no other way to make this post.

You've discovered what the luckiest and unluckiest people discover - life is inherently unsatisfactory, and nothing you chase in the world can give an ultimate sense of meaning, or fully take away the pain or ennui, or fill the black hole. Your mind is shaped by evolution to keep dangling carrots in front of your face. Never letting you have satisfaction for long, because if you did, you'd stop chasing. The way to break free from the prison the mind constantly builds is to look inward. More and more I'm seeing the truths in the Buddha's four truths of the noble ones. 1: there is unsatisfactoriness inherent to life. Birth, aging, sickness, death, bring the untrained mind into suffering. Even in great conditions like you currently have, there can be unsatisfactoriness. 2: the cause of unsatisfactoriness is craving, leading to clinging. 3: there is a way to stop craving. 4: that way is the eightfold path of the noble ones. :)

I would say to get into the habit of scheduling those kinds of activities. I’ve recently taken up fiction writing, just for fun, but one thing I’ve found is that even though I like doing it, it’s hard to actually get down to it unless I schedule it and block out the time. It doesn’t have to be hours and hours, just enough to get started. Write in a journal for 15 minutes before bed. Read for half an hour after dinner. Whatever it might be. Even working out. Work out MWF for a set time. You’ll do it.

There's a theme from other responses I would latch on to - improving relationships.

You're storing value right now in the form of currency and worldliness through travel. The tank you're not filling up, by serially hooking up and not being physically in one place, is goodwill from friends, family, and women that you can access when you need. Not to mention the general fulfillment that comes from being liked.

Perhaps you're doing this more than is clear from your post, but I just caught up with a world-traveling, highly successful friend that seems similar to you. I haven't seen him in 8 years. He's trying to shore this aspect of his life up and just got engaged, so take that for what it's worth.

Making a lot of money working 25 hours a week, fully remotely from Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Valencia, sleeping with more women than is good for me.

While it’s certainly true that this might make many people happy for a while, that (a) doesn’t mean it’s true for you and (b) doesn’t mean it’s true forever.

Sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to be honest with yourself about what you really want. I don’t know that I’m great at it. But the things that have often made people happy, which are a good marriage, raising children, finding (or building) a community, spending time with friends and so on are usually a good start.

Sometimes it takes a great deal of courage to be honest with yourself about what you really want. I don’t know that I’m great at it.

A little advice: The greatest insights about your yourself always come from other people. No exception. Take special attention to the insights about yourself you get from those people who are very capable yet are not very close to you. If you are a relatively smart and imaginative person, it's pretty easy to tell which guys will amount to something. And who will become zeros. I am pretty sure you agree on that.

How do you retrain your brain to say ‘although you think you’re winning, you need to reset the rules of the game’?

Impose a change of routine on yourself so that you can't idly default into your unsatisfactory habits. I guess the simplest one would be to power off your networked devices for a time, maybe say for two hours after dinner. Then find out what your now unoccupied mind prompts you to do instead. Maybe you tidy up. Maybe you fix something you've been putting off. Maybe you go for a run, or start writing, or start the prep for tomorrow's meals. All fairly mediocre, but still a switch from passive to active. Or maybe you start planning your personal Hock.

Mediocrity isn't going to reject itself.

Money food and girls is a large aspect of the project of life, but there are a lot of rough edges that remain to be smoothed out.

There are other attributes to max out or attempt to as well. What about your relationship with friend #4? What about family member # 6? How is your progress on hobby # 2? You get the idea.

Staying busy on multiple concurrent mini projects helped me by not allowing me to have too much time to ruminate.

I had that feeling in my early career, settling down, marrying, and having kids has helped.

I also wrote an online story for a while and it got a good following, having people actively appreciate what I was doing felt better than just getting paid to do a job.

There may be some unfulfilled part of your mind is inaccessible to the conscious mind. It is alerting you that you are ignoring it by manifesting as unhappiness. You could try to get in touch with that part of your mind through things like Internal Family Systems, Internal Double Crux, a therapist, or psychedelics.

Once you have a better idea of what this unfulfilled desire is then it should be much clearer what you need to do differently in your life to feel happy. It could potentially be a lack of some type of deeper connection with people and/or the world.

To me the sting of defeat is always worse than the joy of victory. I’m a very non-competitive person, usually the first to turn down any kind of casual tournament or game. I never play PvP. I always concede first where it’s an option, unless I know with great certainty that I’m going to win.

It’s not that I don’t like winning, it’s that to me the joy of it is far more fleeting than defeat Where I Really Tried, which stings and which I think about long after the event. Recalling defeats hurts as if the loss was yesterday, while recalling triumphs doesn’t seem to capture any of the pleasure of the moment of victory. Being a loser in some competition doesn’t make me angry and aggressively motivated the way it seems to do to a lot of people. I can concede and feel no seething jealousy, no particular resentment, and whether I win or lose I usually forget about it quickly, unless it really feels serious in which case, as mentioned, losing is always worse than winning is great.

I don’t mean to sound like one of those depressives for whom every happiness seems temporary and every setback permanent, because I’d say I’m a pretty happy person. It’s more that I think I just don’t get as much out of both victory and defeat as other people do. Neither particularly motivates me, my happiest memories are all things like conversations with friends and loved ones, entertaining experiences, falling in love, that kind of thing. I can’t recall one real moment of personal triumph in the competitive sense that sticks with me, stuff like getting the job I wanted or getting into a good college was ten minutes of happiness (although really more like relief) before I continued with my day.

I think I’d like to become more competitive, but this attitude is holding me back from doing so. Has anyone made themselves more competitive?

I understand your hatred of defeat - I hate losing as much as you and I've lost an awful lot! This has lead me to a few mental frameworks which can make losing less painful:

  1. Losing is a huge motivator for me not to lose - it forces me to critique what I'm doing, seek help, and actively make adjustments to 'lose less'. Losing is a motivator!

  2. Losing means I'm learning - assuming you can repeat losing, if each time you 'lose less' it means you're winning more - 'winning' and 'losing' are not binary but rather ranges and distributions.

  3. Losing is risk on behavior - seek to increase risk outside of your comfort zone. I've been on this forum enough know that you work in finance to some degree which is an institution where risk-seeking is dangerous. Too much risk causes all sorts of problems so so much of what you do is mitigating risk while maximizing growth. Your hatred of losing can also be a dislike of risk - as other people mentioned in responses this is largely female encoded. In many ways losing is a sort of risk tolerance - are you willing to lose more as an accumulation of risk?

  4. Identify where you hate losing. Some activity you might lose in won't hurt you emotionally as much as others. For example, losing professionally could carry a huge risk. What about learning something new? Trying something new? Cooking something you never tried that's outside your wheelhouse? There might be many things you're less worried about

  5. Change the framework - focus on trying to win instead of trying not to lose - rather than worry about, risk focus on trying to beat out other people. This is largely antisocial behavior but it can come at success - by being better at someone in a thing that's moderately important than you, you're worrying less about 'I hate losing' and more about improving yourself to be able to get ahead.

  6. Ask forgiveness not permission - Once again it requires in engaging in more antisocial behavior, but just going ahead and doing things without first asking for permission or coordinating with others can be a useful competitive mindset - of course it isn't always useful in certain areas, but this sort of choice can allow you to more opportunities and to be more competitive without the 'I want to get ahead' mentality. Sometimes it's 'I want to get things done quickly'

The trick to competition in my experience is building up an internal mythos for why one loses while absorbing other intuitions for how to actually win.

Every person I know who wins a lot that also loses a lot has this ability to shunt the pain of losses into the ether. They may also just know exactly why they lost and what they do to correct it.

Still, I find myself in a similar boat as you. I avoid public competitions, as I am not very competitive, though for me it's not the pain of losing- there's no personal investment when losing. But if I think I have a chance, I'll give it a shot.

I do not consider myself competitive at all, but people I know, and some I know well and who arguably know me well (including my wife) have routinely made the throwaway comment about me that I am. In that vein, I would suggest, despite your protestations, that you may be more competitive than you think--at least this is what I suspect from my reading your posts here. It's true, you do not rise easily and irrationally to challenges (as many, many do) but if that is competitiveness, I have to reluctantly echo f3zinker and ask what the attraction to such a trait might be.

You do not like PvP. Why not? Because it enrages you to lose. Might I suggest that is indicative of the strong desire to not lose, which, arguably, is one definition of competitiveness. You probably control yourself well enough that you simply avoid this darker pathological part of your character. I suspect if and when real challenges arise and you are equipped or potentially able to equip yourself to deal with them (e.g. anything involving thinking) you'll do fine without whatever particular Ehrgeiz you imagine you are lacking.

This does not answer your question and is of course presumptuous as a reply, so for that I apologize.

I don't really have a strong competitive instinct, but then, I don't really care about most things. Like, losing a video game or boardgame doesn't bother me because I don't care about those things. But I do find myself caring pretty strongly about keeping up with others at work and particularly in the gym (I have a lot of insecurity about how small and weak I am).

(And yes, I think I do have pretty low testosterone levels).

Another comment mentioned testosterone and I will add n=1 that when I supplement testosterone (Cistanche or Tongkat Ali) I feel slightly more competitive.

I will also add that I don't like artificial competitions like sports or video games. I do things because I enjoy them not because I need to compare my results to others. I focus on collaborative non-hierarchal endeavors such as attending support groups and book clubs. That makes me much happier. IMO building things together with people feels better than winning competitions. Sometimes there is a small competitive component such as wanting to your local organization/club to be held in higher esteem than similar organizations, but that would never preclude me from helping out my competition if they asked nicely.

I believe I have.

I'm similar to you in that I've far more muted responses to victory and loss than my contemporaries. I had a hard time genuinely celebrating with the team when we won tournaments and I never cried or lashed out in anger when we lost.

I of course still prefer winning to losing but it's not at all the same intense reaction that some people have.

I've found two ways of getting myself invested despite this:

  1. Make others dependant on me. I care a lot more about not disappointing people than winning for its own sake.
  2. Spite. I might not care about winning for its own sake all that much but I can make myself really care about defeating someone I despise. This can be a bit unhealthy when I create semi-fictional enemies of people in order to motivate myself, i do this even unconciously. Ie. Find a guy to hate on the other team or possibly a rival on your own team.

Beyond that i often just like competition, not for the sake of winning or losing but because competition is fun on its own, since it increases the level and intensity of play.

Thanks - your 1 is definitely true for me, I think my primary motivation in a lot of things (especially at work) is not letting down people dependent upon me.

In other words, you are closer in temperament to the average woman than the 75th percentile man? Why must this be changed and for what? Especially along male coded traits.

You are also probably more neurotic (I would wager 60-70th percentile for women). But negatives feel disproportionately worse anyways for evo-psych reasons, given you know the worst thing that can happen is literally game over.

My unsolicited advice? Accept yourself for who you are rather than who BAP or some greek philosopher says you should be, after all that is one of great things of being a woman, your status and worth isn't tied to how how good you are in the global sense.

Or to be less condescending ----->

I don’t mean to sound like one of those depressives for whom every happiness seems temporary and every setback permanent, because I’d say I’m a pretty happy person. It’s more that I think I just don’t get as much out of both victory and defeat as other people do. Neither particularly motivates me, my happiest memories are all things like conversations with friends and loved ones, entertaining experiences, falling in love, that kind of thing. I can’t recall one real moment of personal triumph in the competitive sense that sticks with me, stuff like getting the job I wanted or getting into a good college was ten minutes of happiness (although really more like relief) before I continued with my day.

------> Do more of ^. Have kids, look after them, be a good mother, wife, friend, etc.

Also like the other guy said.. Dose testosterone, this is probably as innate as anything could be.

Also try starting a business or taking a risk, I've seen few people work harder and being as much on the sigma grindset as business owners, but I would once again wager its survivorship bias, the ones not willing to be ruthless and work their fucking asses off and don't feel joy at merely winning and taking market share, etc, don't make it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KTLw2vM3N6I

^ Also what do you think of this woman?

I'm wired similarly, not taking much joy from success, but now that my life is in decline and even small victories are behind me, I keep returning to them to warm myself a little at the faint embers of past glories. Once upon a time, I fought. I entered the ring and fenced and wrestled, and though losing mostly, I won at times. I am not a lost cause then, though I sadly turned away from fighting almost entirely. And once upon a time I studied, and studied hard, until I passed the tests and made my degree. I put in the effort and I understood things that would now boggle my mind. I am not truly an idiot, though I may feel thus nowadays. And once I had friends, and did much with them, and they enjoyed my company and I theirs. Now I may be alone, but it is good to recall that I am not beyond friendship. And so I can make believe that if my fortunes turned one day, or I found a way out of my situation, I might again fight, and learn, and be in good company.

So go out there and push yourself, because a time may come when memories of past accomplishments are most of what's left of you, and that's far better than nothing.

What an interesting prompt, I'm sure you will get a lot of feedback on this one.

For some context, I have always been a very competitive person myself. Where other people enjoy hiking, creating art, or unstructured socializing, I always wanted to play sports and games. Something with some level of competition with a clear winner and loser. I've lost many such contests over the course of my life, in soccer, tennis, golf, baseball, board games, card games, poker, debates etc. And every time, I have been unhappy to lose. This doesn't make me enjoy the competition any less, it just makes me want to play again and win.

One of the interesting things about this aspect of my personality is I don't enjoy games where I don't have at least a fighting chance to win. For example, I don't terribly enjoy basketball, it's a sport I've never been good at, and I lose frequently. So I don't play it. I've never been good at chess, and I don't particularly like being overmatched intellectually, so I don't play it. So my recommendation (if you could call it such) would be to find a competitive event where you have potential and are actually interested in. This might be something as simple as a card game like Hearts, or it might be something more nebulous like debating. Do you have any interests that have a level of competition? If so, I would focus on those activities and see if it can be transferred to other areas of your life.

defeat Where I Really Tried

I think this is the crux of it, I notice the same aversion to Really Trying in myself. If you win without really trying, then it doesn't feel good because that means that your achievement was well below your means, you might as well feel good about putting on your socks in the morning. And if you lose without really trying, it doesn't feel that bad because you can still imagine yourself winning if you really tried.

This is all an ego-protection mechanism. If you're like me, then you started conceptualizing yourself as "smart" somewhere in adolescence, and from that moment on you started trying to avoid any experience that would imply not being worthy of that label. I think the key to enjoying competition is letting go of this fixed mindset that thinks every True Loss is evidence that you permanently suck, instead of just being evidence that you temporarily suck.

As for actual practical advice, I think it's hard to practice Really Trying on the big, long-term stuff. You need a hobby you care about with a really short time-to-feedback. I started Jiu-Jitsu a few months ago, and I think it's perfect for this. The prospect of actually getting chocked out in a match of physical dominance against another man really brings out the competitive part of me, in a way that no other sport I've ever tried managed to do. Though as a woman Jiu-Jitsu might not be ideal for this unless you find a gym with a decent number of other women, against whom you actually have a chance of winning.

I am naturally very competitive, so I don't have much advice for changing your base level of competitiveness, but I have sharply improved my acceptance and happiness in defeat. When I was young, I really, really, really hated losing. Intensely. To the point where losing would make me angry, make me lash out verbally in stupid and unpleasant ways. I'm mainly thinking of basketball, where I'm lucky that I never got punched in the face on the court for not knowing when to just shut up and take the L. Nonetheless, it was bad enough that I find it outright embarrassing in retrospect. Not in the, "who cares, it's just a game" sense, because games matter, and being passionate about them is good, but because taking an L with some grace is an admirable trait in and of itself.

Anyway, fast forward to my 20s, when I picked up endurance sports. One of the great things about running is that it's incredibly humbling. When you lose, you lose. You can't tell yourself that you should have made that jumper, or that you got fouled and it was bullshit. You're just slower, and it's obvious. Nonetheless, if you're racing against someone that's at a similar talent and training level, it's going to come down to a combination of tactics, pain tolerance, and determination. As corny as it sounds, sometimes whether you win or lose will come down to who wants it more. When you suffer that way in a race and know that the other guy did too, it changes your relationship to either winning or losing to him, because you know he went through the same thing. Whether I win or lose, I always feel a deep sense of camaraderie with the guy that I'm racing against.

Along the way, something funny happened. In learning to lose with grace and be quick with a fist bump for an opponent, I also learned to admire what someone is doing when they beat me. Maybe they paced better, maybe they had more kick, maybe they're just plain tougher. This spilled over to other things. Lose at a video game? Wow, gg, quick reflexes bro. Lose at trivia? Lol, how wild that you knew that. Lose at pool? OK, that one actually still pisses me off, but we can't be perfect.

So, my advice would be to try doing something really hard, whether winning or losing is a genuinely taxing experience that you will feel some sense of triumph for having partaken in at all.

Dose testosterone.

What dose are you thinking of?

I'm planning to leave my job at the start of the year for a new opportunity. I had been planning to make this move for a while, and over the past few months, I had been neatly winding up my projects. I hardly interact with my boss anyway, and I was glad to tie it all up.

Unfortunately, rather recently my boss drove by and dropped two new projects on my lap. I found myself in an awkward position, where I wasn't ready to announce my impending departure, and would also feel dishonest turning down work when I had availability.

But it has been very hard to get invested in it. One of these projects is realtively minor, but has a late January delivery, and nobody to back me up. It will require me to now put in a lot of holiday hours to get it to a passable state. The other one is a major intiative that would realistically require most of my time next year. I've basically (unintentionally) slow-walked it over the past two months, and I guess I will just drop it altogether in the new year, and leave the stakeholders with essentially 2 months wasted delays.

It's something I feel really bad about mishandling, not for the "company's" sake, but for the humans left hanging, the weird, but necessary duplicity when discussion things January and beyond, and the general failure in doing an good job I can be proud of.

Every other role I've ever left, I put in my notice pretty much immediately after being sure of my next role, and left within 3 weeks. This has been a new experience for me, and I feel weird and like I mishandled it. On the one hand, I wish I had told them 2 months ago, I'd be out at the end of December and to plan accordingly. On the other hand, it would have been a real financial hit to my family if I had been let go immediately in response.

Perhaps this is my Hock.

You handled it more or less as I would have; you have to protect yourself and your family. You pretty much must be vigilant for the possibility where, you give a courtesy two weeks, and your employer marches you out immediately with paycheck implications to boot.

Your fiduciary duty to yourself and your family well-outweighs your fiduciary duty to your firm and your coworkers. Plus, you’ve already done good work for the firm, which can be depreciated/amortized over the course of your total employment.

Your coworkers should be able to deal with it just fine. If not, it’s management’s issue with regard to training and socialization of knowledge. Much of the compensation in knowledge jobs is for being able to absorb what your predecessors have done in the past, even if they were already in quiet-coasting or quiet-quitting mode.

Think of it as granting your current-colleagues a commitment device to take a step-up in their skill-set and responsibility, expanding their scope of ownership. By giving an effort as to make the new projects viable, you have already fulfilled any obligation to the firm.

Unless you currently work for a tiny company whose mission you care about, fuck 'em. To whatever extent this hurts your coworkers, who you reasonably care about as humans, this is on your manager to fix. If there is not enough slack in the system for someone to leave, that's a management issue, not a you issue. If the company laid off a coworker, there would not even be two weeks' notice, and you would have to pick up the slack - a symmetric situation, and also the company's fault.

I say give zero notice. If you really need the reference, give two weeks, but certainly don't feel guilty. Since most references consist of "I can confirm the dates of employment and will say nothing else for fear of lawsuit," again, I say give zero notice.

Congrats on the new role!

What made you decide to delay giving notice? Not that you're obligated to, either legally or morally, but with the human interests that you're describing, I would think it's the best approach unless you feared retaliation or early termination. Thinking about that a bit, I think my own feeling would be that if I didn't believe the company would engage in good-faith end-date timing with me, I wouldn't feel all that bad about them getting screwed over a bit and wasting everyone's time. In my only personal experience with a comparable scenario, I was able to give three months of notice, and this actually worked out great for everyone involved because the company and my team lead were good-faith negotiators that appreciated my willingness to stick around and wrap everything that I could. This was actually a surprisingly productive time in my career precisely because all of the stress was off, I had a definitive do-or-die date on literally any project I was handling and got to just do some wonky one-off stuff that no one else really wanted anyway.

The good news is that however the next month or so goes, everyone from you to the other stakeholders will move on in pretty short order, so it's probably not worth getting super wound up about the mishandling. These things usually feel more important in the moment than they are in the long run.

What made you decide to delay giving notice? Not that you're obligated to, either legally or morally, but with the human interests that you're describing, I would think it's the best approach unless you feared retaliation or early termination. Thinking about that a bit, I think my own feeling would be that if I didn't believe the company would engage in good-faith end-date timing with me, I wouldn't feel all that bad about them getting screwed over a bit and wasting everyone's time.

It's a bit of this, and a bit of wasn't sure on the exact timing of the next opportunity. I knew that it was time to leave, and planned to be out by a given time, but there was uncertaintly on both sides of the equation.

In terms of fear of retaliation, yeah. There's been a lot of instability in my current org right now, which is part of why I started making plans to leave. I already had one teammate who was clearly pushed out so they could reclaim her headcound. My fear was that if I had said, Hey I'll be out at the end of the year, they could have (reasonably) come back with, "No, why don't you finish up what you can in the next two weeks."

Then I would have been out ~2 months of pay this year.

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