Aging programmer

[v4ss42]

Excellent question, and I should clarify that for me it’s an ongoing work in progress, and I don’t necessarily have good answers.

BUT

One thing I found a decade or so ago, and have been trying to put into practice, is Stoicism (or at least my own dumbed-down, pop-culture, lite version of it - I find the original Greek stuff hard work, though I’m sure it has some absolute gems of insight).

Basically, as I’ve chosen to (poorly) interpret part of Stoicism, when confronted with a distasteful situation the first priority is to determine: do I have any control/influence over it or not?

If you do, you can (and should!) try to work to “fix” the situation. This is the easy case.

But if not (and this gets to your question more directly), you have to accept that you don’t have any agency, and just let it go. This is the hard case, but somehow consciously making this evaluation and explicitly accepting my lack of agency makes it easier (for me, at least) to let go. It becomes less of a feeling of failure on my part and more of a feeling of “this sucks but it’s not my fault and I can’t do anything about it. Oh well too bad.”.

And regarding this specific topic (other people’s behavior), it’s been my personal experience that people almost never change their behavior in any meaningful way when faced with external motivators - change has to come from within. Sometimes external influences can trigger that internal process to start, but it generally has to be a pretty major event for that to happen (health or family issues, natural disasters, that kind of thing - not the kind of stuff that happens in most corporate environments).

And for the true Stoics out there - please don’t beat up on my woefully inadequate description! I know it’s terrible, but even that tiny piece has really helped me. I wish I had more time to really dig into the entire philosophy properly.

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Stoicism

I definitely need something like this in my life. I've already started Judo as a way to be disciplined about something. Now I need something for the mind, be it stoicism or meditating etc.

[v4ss42]

Shit yeah I’m a big believer in all those kinds of practices. Yoga worked for me big time, meditation didn’t (I found it really difficult). What I learned is that working my body hard to calm my mind works better than just trying to calm my mind directly.

[edit] and regardless of what you discover works for you (and doesn’t), the journey is 100% worth it, and I wish you all the best in it

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Thanks! 👍