My doctor had a renowned research record, retired at 68 but got bored, and went back to work. Whilst I was in hospital, I got to observe him throughout the work day.
I don't mean this in a creepy way at all, but I got the impression the greatest source of joy was hanging around with younger people. A hungry grad, a cleaner, a nurse, male, female, whatever.
I'm sure he enjoyed his peers as well, but I could detect a shade of boredom of those interactions, which inevitably had stress and responsibility attached.
I think what I'm trying to say is that work isn't just about challenge, it's about socialization and having fun. And one of the greatest benefits of being financially independent is being able to navigate to those kinds of moments without the pressure of being on the make.
Exposure therapy is the cure for anxiety. I have a personal hunch that part of the massive rise in anxiety in the world is explained by many of us no longer being regularly forced outside of our comfort zones. Before the Internet and smartphones, we were obligated to go into the unknown much more often. It was a constant mandatory exposure therapy.
Today, I can't remember the last time I walked into a restaurant without already having seen the inside on Google Maps, read several reviews on Yelp, and perused the menu online.
Nah, it’s actually a studied thing. Exposure therapy can work for some subjects but it’s quite controversial due to it quickly becoming “trauma therapy”. It can easily reinforce someone’s existing beliefs and make someone actually weaker and traumatized. Happens a lot. Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance. He won’t be resilient from this - it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Plus, there can be social consequences (and consequences with other exposure therapies) that will be lasting from making such a brute force strategy.
Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue - bad things do happen. And sometimes bad things happen more often to those who are “needing” exposure therapy.
> Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance.
Just randomly doing shit that causes you stress isn't exposure therapy. It's just hazing yourself and rolling the dice as to the outcome.
> Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue
I think you have an over-simplified notion of "good outcome" here.
It's not necessarily about achieving the goal of the action, it's about seeing that the catastrophizing scenarios in your head aren't based in reality. In the example with the ugly kid, if he's afraid that asking a girl out will lead to her laughing in his face and publicly humiliating him, then even simply being rejected with compassion is enough to thwart that catastrophizing.
But, of course, having him ask out every girl at the school is a terrible example of "exposure therapy". Strangers should not be used as unconsenting test subjects in one's personal therapy.
And multiply by dinner eating. Which I have done solo many hundreds of times between business and other travel. Not something I think twice about. In fact, at conferences, I've sometimes been peopled-out by the end of the day and actively avoided going out of my way to setup group dinners unless they came together organically.
With all due respect you are living in a different world. Not in a bad way, it’s just you haven’t experienced what maintenance on a large complicated code base is like.
I’m a small business owner and solo developer on that business. Let’s just say I’d rather know the costs of my choices upfront. I’m sure there is not one small business owner in tech who would turn their nose up at that.
Good points. Works both ways though, you are splitting your time between two worlds, and don't have a fully clear view on the costs of bad choices on a small business
to know this you need to know what processes these businesses have been using for the past decade to run real full time business with full time staff. for example, you don't know just how bad the prior systems were, that the self built systems replaced.
with all due respect you don't have all the info to make the calculation on my world. just as I don't have it for yours.
the same tool that helped me build our systems, is not going to be the same tool that helps you maintain your large code base. But my point is, that I'm on the front line of change, and my guess is it's not going to be limited to my size of business. I don't know what your tool will look like, but I'd bet it's coming
No you're absolutely right. One of the things I'm starting to see and I wrote another Hacker News post about this is that more people are starting to come out talking about all the mistakes AI is making even as it gets better. Then You've got people like Karpathy talking about how drastic the landscape is shifting
I've been doing this for 25 years and I can tell you that the AI is a better coder than me, but I know how to use it. I reviewed the code that it puts out and it's better. I'm assuming the developers that are having a hard time with it are just not as experienced with it.
If you think your job is going to stay programmer, I just don't see it. I think you need to start providing value and using coding as just a means to do that, more so than coding being valuable in itself. It's just not as valuable anymore.
Same with medications? It’s well known that medications don’t eliminate risk.
For the average person without genetic outlier risk, perfect diet and exercise would definitely make heart disease a non-issue in their lifetime.
The risk your cardiologist is talking about is probably the risk that you have one of those genetic outlier conditions that require medication regardless of diet.
the mainline guideline is more exercise and better diet which is the treatment to much more than just heart disease. that's not something 27 hours of doctors a day can provide unless you give them guns
the treatments reduce risk, but they don't change the fact the human body is very reliant on the heart and increasingly vulnerable to cardiac death with age, even with perfect biomarkers
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