I think I’m falling into the trap of looking at my capacity only in terms of each day. Ie if I get a good night’s sleep I erroneously feel like I should be able to sustain my (probably unsustainable) momentum. When I try to relax, I feel like I’m wasting time if I do it for too long. Does anyone have any advice for this?
Start reframing the value proposition of relaxing.
In my mental model, I look at relaxation/disconnection like sleep.
You can behave as if it’s not important for awhile, but eventually it will catch up.
Personally, since I couldn’t see the burnout around the corner, I didn’t have the internal self talk to remind myself that relaxation is not just a waste of time.
I’m now working on baking this into my every day life by building habits around it. For me, that looks like:
- Mindfulness practice in the morning (using the “Waking Up” app, which has solidified the concepts for me in a way that no other app ever had)
- Regular walks in nature
- Cannabis + music listening sessions
But I can’t stress the value of mindfulness enough. For me it has become a tool to check in with myself more often and to really notice how things are going instead of just getting carried along by the currents of each day. And note this is not the same thing as some common forms of focus/concentration-based “clear your mind” meditation practices.
Shift your focus to reliability, not efficiency. It forces you to recognize when you've done enough, and it makes it OK to down-prioritize things to ensure you deliver on what's more important.
I'm a lot like you in that sense. Here's what's working for me (still learning):
> I get a good night’s sleep I erroneously feel like I should be able to sustain my (probably unsustainable) momentum
Try to have patience.
When we see an improvement we get attached to it. This happens when losing weight, sleeping more, etc. Changing habits, even slightly, always takes time.
If, it seems to be evolving in the direction you desire in the long-term, you're good. Extrapolating from one or a few data points won't give good predictions.
> When I try to relax, I feel like I’m wasting time if I do it for too long.
Trust yourself.
Do you feel you're wasting time after a few hours, days, or months? If you relax enough, the need to do stuff usually comes back to you on its own. No need to force it via guilt or worry.
If you objectively can't relax as much as you'd like to, then remind yourself _why_ you're doing the things you do. You'll probably have great reasons to do so —making the most of some opportunity, doing it for your loved ones, whatever.
It could also be you needed to avoid relaxing some time in the past and now you have more space to relax but haven't re-analyzed your current situation properly and are not aware not-relaxing is not adequate strategy now, according to your desires and objectives.
You need to make a conscious effort to become better at managing your stress. When you notice your stress is peaking, try different techniques to relax yourself. Find out what works then you can make that a daily habit to reduce overall stress. Also need to train your mind to flip off the stress switch when it’s time to go to sleep.
It is actually something you can teach yourself to do.
It requires some practice, but the gist of it is to train awareness around your thoughts, and then to dispassionately label your thoughts when you find yourself stuck in a loop about something. Don't engage with them or try to fight them, just say "that's worrying" or or maybe if your source of stress is you're constantly try to solve all the world's problems, you say "I'm problem-solving".
It's important not to make it a struggle. Just label them over and over again. Two hundred times in an hour if that's what it takes.
If you do that over and over again, not only will it become easier each time to the point where it's almost like flipping a switch and your mind flushes all that crap like an airplane toilet and in the absence impressions of the world come rushing in, it becomes very clear how stuck in a bubble you were. Not only that, which is arguably a benefit in itself, you'll also find yourself stuck in those thought patterns less over time.
Beautifully put! I just realized I've been on both sides of that. Younger me tended to be the first case you described. Older me seems to tend towards the second case. Perhaps because I am highly conscious of my time now and don't give myself much time to play.
No, the problem is bad developers pulling in dependencies for trivial functionally. If there was a `for-loop` npm package bad devs would be pulling it in instead of writing their own for loops. Padding on the left is something if it doesn't exist you write it in a few lines of code yourself. You don't add a package for such trivial functionality.
Nope, this is a bad take, parroted without understanding; if it got moved into the std lib, it was probably useful enough. You can even read why in the original proposal if you comb the archives enough (from https://github.com/tc39/proposal-string-pad-start-end):
> It is highly probable that the majority of current string padding implementations are inefficient. Bringing this into the platform will improve performance of the web, and developer productivity as they no longer have to implement these common functions.
You are neglecting the risk-factor of pulling in libraries from unknown authors on npm vs the stdlib. The package-bloat problem is one of culture, where developers keep neglecting this risk, only seeing the 5 lines of code they save by importing something, without seeing the potential cost and tech debt of having to review, maintain, update and security-monitor this dependency for all future.
Nobody thinks leftPad was not a useful function. The question is, was it useful enough to counter all the risks of npm, probably not. In the stdlib there is no such risk.
Ah, and now we’re talking about the real issue, which was the security risk.
My point has been this whole time that left-pad was not a story of a trivial function needlessly pulled from an external source as the person I replied to had claimed, and it appears you agree. Good!
Here's my theory. Older programming languages force you to think about sub-dependencies: if you decided to use a third-party library, you would have to look at and manually add its requirements to your build system.
But, with npm, suddenly it was trivial to include other packages without having to worry about sub-dependencies. The whole tree just magically added itself to your build, and only if you paid attention to the build process would you discover just how many developers you were transitively trusting.
Well, while yes, automatic dependency management is a really relevant reason why things got that bad, it can't be the only reason.
Programs in other languages with the same kind of tooling tend to stop at hundreds or at most low-thousands of dependencies. Javascript code often reach tens or low-hundreds of thousands of dependencies.
Dependency explosion is bad all around, but JS is exceptionally bad.
Part of me thinks it's just the media trying to manufacture conflict and rage for more clicks.
Somehow we have accepted the idea that showing up when you are supposed to and doing the tasks you are required to is not "doing your job" but rather "quiet quitting
I agree that the notion is ridiculous. Ridiculous to the point where it looks like bait.
"A few people I talked to in life, have this love for learning everything to the point they feel "afraid to die" before mastering something."
Damn, that describes me pretty much. Though I just feel sad that I'll die because I can't learn everything that I'm curious about. I felt this much stronger in college. Now not so much. Just trying to survive now.
Trust me. You aren't alone. And there is nothing to feel bad about it. I have it to some degree (although a bit unidimensional - I just want to finish all my purchased math & engineering books). That brought me to the conversation with others in the first place. Keep the curiosity alive. Its a powerful, motivating force. Just don't get too anxious.
One way I think about it, is that someone will pick up the torch - someone who follows my work, blog, maybe my children. I did that for my father's dreams. If not, you are long dead already & it won't matter. That gives a sense of closure
