If You’re Scared You’re Winning (2019)

Instead of good work being an exception, I believe that it should be the norm (for me).

In my work, I do every project as if it was a “ship” project, to be submitted to the App Store. Even my simple test harnesses are apps that many professional developers would gladly submit for approval.

I write very good code, very quickly. It’s reached the level of “muscle memory.”

It's the same thing as keeping all receipts, nobody does it but some people do it, and those people end up way ahead of the money game.

[EDIT: here I start to change the subject, but I tie it back in the end]

But let me declare time and money are very different things. In some ways money is better in other ways time, people who say time is more valuable than money are always simply bragging about how little time it takes them to get money from others. For people who are getting exploited, time is worse than money. Time is all they have, their least valuable resource, it has negative worth, that's why they spend it watching TV (this also helps ends meet because you recover calorically from turning your brain off by watching television, the poor don't watch TV because they're stupid they watch because of how horribly calorically draining their work and especially commute are. I would do the same thing for the same reasons in the same situation. Like there's so many the-rapists saying life is the most precious thing, but not if your life is being someone else's bitch, yeah maybe the the rapists life is precious but the exploited, the evicted's is not. Time is a problem. Meaning not to HIMSELF, his life is precious to the the-rapist, in fact when I was in a torture ward, a nuthouse, that place, I was told these guys get into deep shit if a patient effectually kills himself in there. Meaning pulls it off. I opted for smoking instead, it's a perfectly legal and socially accepted form of suicide, I had no love for life then because I was being so much harm and my existence was primarily in order to benefit those I hated the most, my life was terrible why would I want to live it more if it's a worse life? So I started smoking, and in my case that really was freedom, just like Philip Morris says it is. I vouch. I knew a professor at Stanford who attempted suicide, we were in the ward together, he just wanted to die, when I told him I was getting threatened with being denounced to the police at any minute, my lynching, he told me about his cousin who committed suicide because he was going to prison for the second time, shotgun, perfect shot, no hesitation.

Like who gave the deliberately imprisoned homosexual serial rapist inmate the right to rape above the right of a beautiful junkie (this professor said he had a face like an angel) who got DUI's--California, 3 strikes, prison for a season (because of America's medical system being consistently niggardly with medication that actually works, there's the-rapist again), the dealer cheated him--so that guy doesn't have the right not to get raped? Like why is the problem that he ends time in order not to get raped?

Who made these rules? The-rapist. Not the one in the prison, he's secondary, he's like a puppet or a fluffer, very cruel and psychologically and physically poisonous, there's literally pimps who call themselves Poison, but he's a tool, formally a farm animal, he's weaponized, it's not him, it's the-rapist running the torture ward. The torture warden. Yeah they make money from the-rapey, $300 per patient per day. Erasing trauma, which should not be erased, trauma is valuable, it's your body doing everything it can to preserve evidence to protect and vindicate you and those around you in the future. But no trauma is bad, they say they can treat that, fill up that difficult-to-fill time in their own weekly schedule, he'll keep coming back for decades for more counterproductive, super super safe advice and think making him cry and leaking everything to his worst enemies is therapeutic. And all these mental health experts always telling you to be a bitch. There, that's all the the-rapey you need for the rest of your life, their advice compresses losslessly into "be a bitch." Be their bitch basically. Slavery.

So in fact that professor I befriended in that psych ward--this was actually a pure psych ward, not also a torture ward--also found a legal way of expressing his suicidality, he successfully got euthanasia, legally and mercifully, best death anybody could ask for, and he got the system to respect that desire. And that was because he was a genius, a famous Stanford professor, he just wanted to die hated his life and demanded dignity. And he fucked the system into giving him that dignity in death. And it varies a lot culture-to-culture, in the East suicide isn't seen the way shrinks see it like as a deformity, and in fact death worship is the optimal strategy in martial arts and war.

I quit smoking many years ago, and despite not having cravings (I have no idea what cigarettes cost these days, put it that way), I just think fondly of it. I like second-hand smoke, I am a huge smoker sympathizer, envy them, I like the smell. I wish I could go back to smoking and figure out how to go about it the right way, like plan ahead for resuming a completely successful act of quitting smoking, and it was very difficult, resume that addiction because there's nothing wrong with being an addict. I don't know, buy cigs in bulk and very carefully choose what chemicals can go in or not. More than being addicted or not it's what the addiction is to, what chemical, with what filler, who provides it, how punishment is dealt for poisoning it, how you know you're not getting cheated, what you can do about getting cheated, like what the hell are you addicted to? And having dignity in your addiction, making people fucking respect it, if you need to fuck the system in order to get respect by all means FUCK THE SYSTEM, dude this is the modern Underground Railroad.

But it's not meant to be. I can't responsibly become a smoker again, I have my addiction to stimulants, I owe it to that addiction to be monogamous, stay away from all other drugs.

And I have a better life now, treated the underlying problem, I stand as living proof the-rapists advice "be a bitch" is bad advice. Like there's some amount of tolerance to adversity, like in the Odyssey against the rapists stalking Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus, yeah, but truly giving up your worth is shitty advice. And in the end, time is all you have. It's not easy but the crown of thorns is in fact quite comfortable, it's not only still a crown it's the only crown that deserves respect, gold crowns are for douchebags. Goes back to the material, what is the crown made of exactly? What is the intent of it being made of that material? More than the label of addict or king. Whom do you serve?

Life is made of time. Effort comes from your soul. Estimates are in order to make promises to yourself, between your past and future persons, to have solidarity among all the moments in your life. Let me clarify I don't believe in the present, don't consider the present to be real, ties back to the distortion in my perception of time, for which I get the treatment I'm addicted to, and always will be addicted to, and hence why time stretches much more for me than for any astronauts. I invented something to quantify it, apparently it's double-time but I didn't have good ways of telling at high-resolution. Basically tells me how many seconds I experience per second the world experiences. Called a tempometer, it measures tempo. I haven't gotten it to work on people but it does currently work on cameras, crazy high resolution, I can tell the frame rate of a camera with it, which is what it feels like, slow motion. I'm coming up with ideas as I write this.

But yeah, humans are bad at estimating.

The author has just given birth and is raising her kids is feeling social pressure to demonstrate her value to her peers. (Side note, this only occurs in more affluent circles. A working class mother talking to her friend would feel no such insecurities.) She seems to resolve this conflict in her head not by realizing that the premise is wrong, but by "giving herself some slack" until she can get back and make some career accomplishment to restore her sense of value.

Ultimately we all choose the yardstick we measure ourselves with, and for the most part if you have confidence in your choice, other people will actually accept whatever we've chosen most of the time.

This kind of unhappiness the author is experiences comes from being unable to break free from the perceived expectations placed on her. The solution is to form your own expectations of yourself and try to live up to them, but many people it seems do not have the courage to do this on their own, so instead they join in with whatever the current zeitgeist says the new set of expectations on everyone should be, as if simply changing them will be their solution as well. These new expectations once they take hold, however, will simply be tomorrow's tools of oppression of the individual, no different from those that exist today.

I think this ends up inevitably for many people being a very sad way to spend your life unless you happen to fit into and have the life circumstances to support fitting the model. Even if you do, you'll do so without ownership and agency in the choice of what you're going to do with your life.

This is a literal response to your question as to why it's good that people think reproducing is an achievement, I'm not talking about whether it actually is or isn't.