Two inabilities that have plagued me from birth: 1) I am bad at coercing myself to do things I do not care about. In other words I have weak willpower. 2) I am bad at pretending to care when I do not care. I fake unconvincingly.
To succeed in the workplace I’ve had to pretty good at figuring out how to actually care about things. This skill of finding the meaning and worth of things has become more valuable than the activities I used to have to talk myself into doing.
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If your production drains your energy away, you’ll try to compensate for the loss consuming. The consumption necessitates productivity. Lots of people desperately consuming makes the economy boom until it stops.
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An economic depression is a collective psychological depression. An economy just can’t see why it ought to keep producing.
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Too much “realism” creates a world that just can’t give a shit about itself, anymore. One day the realist’s impersonal numbers start dropping and keep dropping. They stare at the numbers and try to understand them mathematically. They are too realistic to realize the numbers are a shadow of life.
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“Realistic” people are psychological fantasists.
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Where realism is out of joint with the realities of human beings, realists make up and impose ethical principles to make human beings become more realistic. Much more ingenuity has been expended on the problem of making humans more realistic than on the problem of understanding the reality of humans. Realists pretend they simply observe the reality they actively create. They create it because they prefer it. They thrive on it.
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The Roman Empire fell because it became indifferent to its continuance.
Don’t care about things at work, care about the people you work with.
I have to care about things at work because I care about the people I work with. I have to function for them. Caring and helping others care is how I function.
Unfortunately, many times what is demanded out of me is exactly what undermines my ability to keep caring. Then everything collapses on me.
The ugly fact: I succeed only because I do not do what is expected of me. People are constantly trying to wring this or that kind of use out of me. If I let them take what they want, I’m destroyed.
My survival depends on the people around me staying aware of the value they are getting from me. If they start looking for what they think they are entitled from me, that’s pretty much the end of the arrangement.