“This isn’t about being spec-compliant anymore. I need to know the thought process behind this decision. And also please fix it.”

This unhinged tone is what I live for in blog posts

Edit: added hyperbole to make humourous intent clearer

That hospital bill sucks, but I’m glad you’re home and doing (relatively) well.

To kill Demodex mites on our hands that could possibly contaminate something we’re working on

Thanks for posting, OP. I have replied to a few people’s comments in this thread, and I’m really appreciating you sharing this post which has led to such thought-provoking discussion.

Oh man, you’re so right in highlighting how this problem manifests even in art. In a way, hobby related stuff is even harder because there’s a weird pressure arising from a sense that you’re not allowed to enjoy things that you’re not good at. And like, how are you meant to get better at a thing if it doesn’t feel permissible to be mediocre at it for a while? What if you don’t want to get better at a thing, what if someone is happy to just have fun with a hobby and doesn’t care if they are consistently mediocre at it, because they’re doing it for themselves.

And it doesn’t get better if you are good at the thing. Suddenly you’ve got people saying “wow, you’re so good at that, you should sell them”, and that’s then even more pressure because it reinforces the constant feeling that not only must one strive for the “correct answer” in all things, but that progress towards this answer involves selling the products of one’s labour because that’s how we try to translate intangibles into measurable numbers. But the logic falls apart because excellent leather craftsmanship, for example, isn’t at all related to one’s ability to be running a business, and every time I have monetised a hobby, it kills the joy of the craft. Similarly, I have a friend who is an artist who used to be earning money from art, but they got sick of doing pet portraiture and got an office job so they could regain art as a hobby. Things that sell well != Things that are good (and that’s even before we consider the Intrinsic value in dabbling in hobbies and creativity for fun’s sake)

I’ve seen a few people recommend that book, I should check it out.

A way of thinking about tech that I’ve found interesting is what philosopher Bernard Stiegler refers to as “φάρμακον”, or “pharmakon” (the greek root from where we get “pharmacy”). He uses the greek not just to be a pretentious arse, but because whilst it most directly translates to “medicine”, pharmakon also can mean a poison or toxin. Stiegler argues that technology can be both helpful and harmful, often at once. It depends on how we use it. ^[1]

(I’m reminded here also of Cory Doctorow’s discussion of reverse centaurs, because turning people into reverse centaurs is definitely the vibe of “pharmakon as poison”. At the core of it, most people aren’t being empowered by tech in our lives, and I really feel like we need a collective, radical recalibration around this. Books like “Digital Minimalism” certainly seem to be pushing towards that.

[1]: n.b. I am not a philosopher, nor have I actually directly read Stiegler, just a few people who draw on his work. One such person is Greta Goetz, an academic whose blog is great for people who like dense and wordy philosophy about tech and teaching.

Yeah, that is fairly consistent with how I’ve been feeling. It’s tricky because you have a huge backlog of things on the hypothetical to-do list.

I’m reminded of an essay I read concerning complex systems and how complexity grows in functional software — the essay used the phrase “habitability” to convey the idea of software that is functional and usable even as it grows. In practice, this means nailing down your core functional requirements and starting with that, adding more features in a modular manner that aims to avoid messing up that core functionality.

What this looks like applied to my agenda problem is that my backlog is weeks if not months of work for multiple people to get on top of, and I can’t pause my life in the interim. Even getting a thorough list of the tasks in the backlog is too overwhelming a task for me at present, in part because new tasks keep coming from just existing. In the past when I have felt swamped like this, I did a big blitz through and got my life in order, but the backlog blob is too large to do that. Realistically, if I can’t give myself a proper clean slate like I usually would, I need to give myself a virtual clean slate so I can at the very least stop adding to the backlog.

I know this is what I need to do, but it’s very easy to become too overwhelmed to do anything. I know what I need to do, I just need to have the fortitude to start small and ignore the backlog for a while. Tell you what, I’m going to try and set a super basic agenda thing up today or tomorrow, so I can capture incoming tasks or notes. I’m going to try and tackle this like I would a software project, which means trying my best to avoid unnecessary complexity, like often happens when I try to consider the backlog blob. Watch this space, I guess :P

Thanks for the prod. I know you didn’t say much and I mostly talked myself into this, but sometimes that’s what’s needed when you’re wise enough to give great advice to yourself, but foolish enough to not take aforementioned great advice.

Moissanite is extra sparkly compared to diamonds too

Just chipping in to second the recommendation for ACT. I haven’t have ACT delivered by a therapist (yet?), but I have had a heckton of other therapy (mostly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which seems to be what they offer by default). CBT helped in some ways, but I found it pretty lacking in many others, especially in areas where my life circumstances were just objectively shit (disability and living with shitty family at the time, for example). I’ve been reading through one or two of the ACT books lately, and I find the approach refreshing compared to other therapy I’ve got experience with.

What’s bogus about this?

I have known some wonderful people who have helped me to grow into a person I don’t entirely hate. Most of the time, I’m depressed, but I feel privileged to know people who remind me of things that are worth fighting for.

The best thing that Truss gave us was the Lettuce that will go down in historyl

Hello, fellow human!

I hope your day has been full of the various human things, such as eating, and sleeping. Certainly I have been enjoying those things; as a human, I get plenty of sleep and food and other human things.

I think it’s actually a table

Thanks for sharing your experience, this is additional context that I’m glad to have.

I’m sorry that you experienced what you did in order to have this insight to share. I’ve had many patches in my own life where I’ve struggled with suicidality and what you describe sounds like the last thing that would help someone who is in crisis. No-one deserves such inhumane treatment.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my late best friend. He was incorrigibly optimistic (though fortunately had the grace to not be like this when it came to my disability), and he was a great person to have on side because he was a sheer force of nature when it came to problem solving. Sometimes though, being good at solving stuff meant he wasn’t great at being reassuring when what I needed from him was emotional support.

There was a big stressful event at one point, and it was stressing him out too, because it was very high stakes for me and he desperately wanted things to turn out well for me. He would often try to reassure me along the lines of “it’s okay, we’re going to get through this, the appeal will go fine”.

It took me a while to understand why this disheartened me further, but eventually I realised that it was because it felt like we were implicitly saying my future was contingent on this big and scary appeal process, which made me feel even less like my life was in my own hands. I explained to him that if he was aiming to be reassuring, what I really needed from him was to let himself be vulnerable and scared with me, because we actually didn’t know whether we’d be victorious against the shitty, bureaucratic system I was fighting; I needed him to be saying stuff like “regardless of what the outcome of this process is, we’ll get through it”.

It was an interesting realisation because it revealed how actually, his relentless optimism/problem solving was as much a coping strategy for himself as it was a way of supporting his friends. He felt overwhelmed when faced with a potentially unsolvable problem, but ofc, so did I (and if he wanted to reassure me, we needed to be on the same page in that respect).

This is only somewhat analogous to what you describe, but I think there’s a similarity in how people aim to reassure because they feel uncomfortable with the truth of “this is bad and it’s going to get worse and that’s fundamentally a cosmically unjust situation”. I think your actions were justified and reasonable, because you’ve already had to come to terms with the injustice of ill health, and it’s not reasonable for you to have to do emotional labour on other people’s behalf because they’re fortunate enough to have not gained that understanding.

In the thing with my friend, I was able to explain what I needed from him in part because we were so close. However, refraining from talking about certain topics (such as health) is also a valid way of approaching this problem. If people want to be able to support you, ultimately, they need to meet you where you’re at. If they can’t do that, then fair enough, but they can at least stop making you feel worse.

Sympathy and solidarity, friend

I think it depends on the vibe, for me. I’ve experienced it before where the “feeling better?” questions are sort of like “the last time I asked you if you wanted to do xyz thing, you weren’t able to because of your chronic illness/disability. Are you magically not disabled so that we can do the thing now?”. That’s a different kind of disheartening than the cure suggesters, but not better or worse, in my experience — just different.

It sucks when people who you thought were friends act like they’re inconvenienced by your illness. And don’t get me wrong, it definitely is an inconvenience if a friend is no longer able to hang out in the way you used to, but the primary “beneficiary” of this inconvenience is the one who is actually chronically unwell. I lost a couple friends when I became disabled, due to this. The people who are my friends have worked with me to find ways to adapt (such as running games night at my place when I can’t travel), which makes things easier in that I feel like it’s me + people I love vs. my illness. People who give the vibe of “ugh, you’re still ill” makes it feels like it’s them vs. (me + my illness).

I realise I haven’t meaningfully engaged with much of what you have written in your comment, but that’s largely because I don’t have much to add — you capture the frustration very well and unfortunately I can relate too hard to the silly nonsense cure suggestions.

When I lost my dad, I felt conflicted, because we were no-contact after me running out of cope for his emotional abuse. When I first went low contact with him (which involved moving to my Mom’s as a teenager), it was tremendously difficult because I still loved him and would miss him immensely. It would’ve been easier if he had been terrible 100% of the time, but one of his greatest goals in life was to be a better parent to his kids than his disgustingly awful parents had been to him. He did incredible at that, considering the fucked up background he had. I always used to feel sad because I couldn’t really blame him much when he gave me so much after escaping from terrible circumstances — maybe if he’d been able to get stable for a few years and get some therapy before having kids, maybe things could have been different. However, no amount of compassion for how hard he tried can erase the harm he caused me by passing on so much of his own brokenness to me.

It was weird when he died, given we were on (assumed to be indefinite) no contact. I felt like I had already grieved the parent I wished I had, so what was there left to mourn? But there’s a finality to death that means that I’ll never get the closure or support I craved from him, even if that was realistically never going to happen anyway. It took him dying to realise I still hoped for more.

It feels silly, but the BoJack Horseman episode “Free Churro” helped this to click for me. My dad wasn’t half as bad as Bojack’s dead mom, but near the end of the episode long eulogy, he touches on the same angry wistfulness that I felt around my Dad. Beneath any anger is just a confused kid who wants to know why we didn’t get better from a parent who can no longer give us that answer.

I apologise for talking so much about my own experience here. My hope was to share my sympathy and solidarity, because although my circumstances are no doubt quite different to your own, I recognised some familiar shapes in what you describe of your grief.

It’s okay to feel conflicted, both now and in the future, when the grief is less raw. I’m sorry that he wasn’t able to give you more, and it’s reasonable to feel hurt, and to wonder why he didn’t give you more than he did. I hope that in the (perhaps distant) future, that you’ll be able to speak to people who knew different parts of your dad than you did, and the particularly raw pain you’re feeling now will have ran through you enough that you’ll be able to share memories with others in a way that makes you feel closer to him, rather than more distant. Grief never stops hurting, entirely but I wish you the support and the time you need to grow around that grief, and to continue to learn from both his strengths and his mistakes.

Beyond well wishes, some concrete advice that you might find useful: grief often involves stages of anger, and that may especially be the case with complex grief. It can feel hard to actually feel that anger and move through it when it’s anger at the person who’s dead — certainly I found myself getting stuck in feeling guilty for my complex feelings. A friend advised me to write some very angry notes of all the things I wished I could shout at my Dad, and then to burn them. It sounded overly trite at first, but I was surprised by how much it helped me — it felt like it was exorcising some of the complexity I felt.

However, grief is so incredibly personal that this might not be needed or helpful for you, and that’s okay. Even when different people’s mourning shares some common forms, no-one can tell you how to get through this. You’re allowed to feel conflicted feelings about your dad and his passing, both now and forever. It’s also okay to not know what you need to heal. Your dad is gone, and your world is irrevocably changed for this. That’s a heavy weight to carry with you, so take your time to learn how to manage it.

I’m sorry for your loss.

Are there any memories you’d like to share of him? I’m curious about whether you were thinking of anything in particular when you said he was awesome.

I don’t have one because I’m bad at note-taking

I’ve read about that. It’s horrifying beyond words.