I'm late to this but I wanted to say that I'm glad to see this concern on LW. I have a tendency to burn out whenever I try to do things in The Most Efficient Way (precisely because my Efficient (TM) parts underestimate how much downtime other parts of me need), and I've had to avoid LW sometimes in order to get out of a "must do everything efficiently!" spiral.
(That said, I like this idea and will be trying it out and see if it helps or hurts me.)
ETA: I did not try it out after all; I was too worried about causing burnout.
This is an interesting idea!
I'm prone to pushing myself too far and burning out, so I'll have to be careful about this, but this sounds like it could work well for me. My problem is that 1) forcing myself to do things is exhausting and 2) I need more downtime than I expect, and I think that this approach could help with 1).
I'll try this for a week, and check in the following Monday.
ETA: I did not try it out after all; I was too worried about causing burnout.
This post really made me think about how I present. I can see now that I wanted to be high/small for a while now, but haven't been very good at making myself small. I want to be the kind of person who leaves space for others, but when I'm around a group of big people I turn big reflexively so they can't talk over me. I think part of the solution to that is spending more time with people who aren't "shouting me down".
The horse metaphor works well for me - humans aren't that different from other animals, at least in my mind.
Thank you for this post! I like writing on paper (I don't think I'm negatively influenced by school actually, and it definitely helps me think) but I have an aversion to it because keeping it around is such a hassle. When I do write something down on paper I intend to digitalize it/scan it, but I don't actually do that. I'm already stuck with ten notebooks full of stuff; I don't want to accumulate more.
I manage to convert lecture notes into Anki cards though, so I suppose it's partially having a plan, and practicing.
Maybe a wh...
content note: child abuse
People who have something to protect just win—or if they can't win, they freeze or flail. What they don't do is confidently pursue an irrelevant subgame that distracts them from the true goal and prevents them from noticing that they've lost.
I'm not sure this is always true. Your story about Ben got me thinking about a friend who went through parental abuse as a teenager, and they had a goal that mattered to them (getting their parents to leave them in peace) but they didn't see any chance to win, because...
A blue one is going to want to talk it over and figure out exactly what's wrong.
...
The key recognition is that all of these ways of being are okay. They're all good, they're all evolved and refined, they're all adaptive and workable.
But they're different. If you're blue/green and you walk around implicitly believing that everyone else is, too, you're going to be confused and disappointed at how everyone is just regularly screwing up, and how they don't even notice it.
This has happened to me. I'd tentatively call...
Item 2 is an example I've seen in discussions of emotional labor. While distribution of some burdens really tends to be gendered and it's a good thing to be aware of, I like this post as an acknowledgement that burdens exist all the time, in all kinds of situations. Sort of a broader picture, of which gendered emotional labor is a detail.
Thank you for your sequence!
My good:bad ratio was 1:2.75, which is a reason to use Facebook less for me (1:3 was "I'd rather not put up with that", 1:1 was "would be okay"). This is after unfollowing lots of people. (In this exercise I also found two more people to unfollow.) I've hidden my newsfeed using F.B. Purity for now.