Systems impact lives
Simple, slightly dumb example: My seemingly botched, or at least ill-advised, eye surgery means I have to close the blind on the only window in the office I share with my wife. She abhors a dark room. She refers to it as “working in a cave”. I know this because she mentions it to everyone, especially when the topic of my eye issues comes up. I feel bad and not a little bit guilty for having what amounts to a manageable handicap whose mitigation efforts negatively impact my SO’s experience of life.
That guilt piles up in my guilt cellar along with all the other guilt and bad feelings. It’s wet, mold and strange creatures grow in it. It eats away at the foundation of the house. I see the cracks in the drywall. I think about how much remediation work is involved in the cleaning of the cellar and I don’t have the time or energy to do that work, so I just want a break from thinking about it. I just want to be able to not notice it for a while. And that’s when I think about a drink, or the non-drink substitutes I’ve deployed for such purposes since getting sober.
I don’t mind working in a cave.
YouTube Music’s product managers are an enigma
The main trouble I had with YouTube music was how it’s one-in-the-same with YouTube. Videos and songs are essentially the same objects in Google’s worldview, as if a random travel vlog is equivalent to I Walk the Line or Suzanne. If I “Subscribe” to a musician in YouTube Music I’m subscribing to them in YouTube proper. My playlists in YouTube Music are also playlists on YouTube. I find this experience so baffling that it causes intense curiosity about the incentives presented to the product managers and designers of the software.
I’m back on YouTube music after a year or two on Spotify, because Spotify is bad in more important ways than their software’s UX.
Knowing a future outcome is likely is not the same as the experience of that outcome happening
You can even be drawing from past, fully-embodied experience (this is “Spidey Sense”), and it won’t necessarily prepare you for the oncoming experience or help you warn others. Or even explain the current circumstances well.
Journaling is helpful here, if you can find your notes about the past experience. But it can also be discouraging when you find out you’ve stepped into the same traps repeatedly over the course of decades. Noticing your failures to anticipate the impacts of a predictable eventuality is easier than noticing the small improvements in your reaction to them–usually emotional, but also strategic or tactical.
Contemplative moments correlate with depression for me
There is something about being a little beat down, or even just experiencing a wave of disembodied malaise or sadness, that unlocks certain connections for me. When I’m happy or satisfied, I don’t have many interesting thoughts or ideas. The notable exception that comes to mind is when working on a project I’m passionate about.
Passion projects almost never become vocations, and when we try to make them vocations, the passion recedes
Unless your passion is business, in which case you can fulfill that passion in almost any business arena. Otherwise attempted transformations of passions into businesses most often lead to contamination of the passion. The changes to the nature of the passion required to align it with the demands of capitalism corrupt it, removing or nullifying the elements that made it attractive in the first place.
Something something gift economy.