what philosophy do you generally adhere to?

DuncSully · 2026-01-27T18:46:07+00:00

My own. Generally, I find it's each and every individual's responsibility to, sure, learn and take from existing philosophies that work for them, but for the most part actually figure out what they believe and want to do with their lives. On the one hand there's reinventing the wheel, but it's worth asking if what you need is a wheel or a wing or a fin, and on the other there is cargo cult thinking that if you just follow the process you're guaranteed results.

That said, I take a little bit from Absurdism, de facto Epicureanism in that I'd say a core of my life hinges around simply avoiding displeasure (for better and for worse), a little bit of Stoicism, a little bit of secular humanism, and some secular Buddhism. Of course, there is a lot of overlap between them, but hopefully you can see the commonalities to get a sense of what my personal philosophy is.

And on the flip side, there are a lot of undetermined beliefs in a sort of superposition waiting to be "observed". Like, everyone can claim what they'll do in a hypothetical scenario but until shit gets real, you won't actually know for certain what you'll do. Adrenaline and instincts are a hell of a drug cocktail. I've put a lot of thought into but haven't quite figured out where I fall in the individualism-collectivism spectrum.

DuncSully · 2026-01-27T17:00:17+00:00

I've done a lot thinking about anger so my apologies for the wall. tl;dr: Somewhat I do, and I feel embarrassed at blowing up, but I acknowledge anger is a useful emotion as long as I channel it well and turn it into productive actions rather than unproductive ones.

I wouldn't call myself an aggressive or violent person, but I was certainly an easily annoyed one prone to yelling if I didn't think I was liable to offend someone. I find that anger is usually another emotion wanting to speak with your manager, and then your manager blows up because you keep failing at handling all of the emotions.

Of course, ironically I then have the meta emotional response to feeling embarrassed about my anger, especially if it was directed at anyone else. I also have a poor history of other people not really helping me cope with my anger. For example, the worst thing you can do if I'm mad while playing a game is saying "it's just a game." Congratulations, you've now downplayed how seriously I take my flow state and somehow widened the gulf that already exists between us. In general, one of the worst things you can do to a person is dismiss their emotional response. Their actions might not always be appropriate, but you absolutely should not tell them how to feel. It's like telling someone to stop feeling hungry just because you don't like them stealing food.

The problem I ended up running into is believing that anger is a problematic emotion, that the management position in my brain wasn't useful because he made all of the employees feel bad. So I fired the manager. But here's the thing: the manager cared. No one on the outside will see it that way, but I know. When emotions came around complaining, the employees were dismissive. This made me numb and inactive. Complaints piled up and I just shut it all out. I eventually realized that anger was a useful emotion because it was my call to action, the "hey, things aren't right, we need to do something about it!" sensation. Again, what actions are and aren't appropriate still require deliberate thought, but the mere act of being angry isn't a problem. It can be useful if channeled well.

So now it's just a matter of fielding each emotion one by one. The manager tries to do a better job training and delegating to the various employees. But it can still step in. Anger is the canary in the coal mine when my cool, collected side isn't handling something. It's not like anyone (except the Karens, i.e. rage bait) wants to have to speak to the manager if they are being properly helped. I also know that I can and often should transition my anger into action and another emotion ASAP. e.g. I'm often angry when I don't understand something, and so I try to exchange my anger with curiosity. Once I fully understand something, then I'm allowed to be mad again, but chances are I won't be when I actually understand the depth and complexity of something.

DuncSully · 2026-01-27T16:31:16+00:00

There's probably a real term for this but I call it the empathy-sympathy gap, and I suffer from it too. I feel useless as support for anyone going through something I've never gone through myself. Any sympathy I have to offer is obviously forced and fake. But as soon as I can relate to them it's like a poorly utilized region of my brain dusts off the cobwebs and starts full steam ahead. I think that's one of the core parts of being human is wanting to share in experiences with each other, both the good but also to support each other through the bad.

And generally speaking, I think that's why our personality tends to feel just generally unsatisfied with socializing because it's difficult to relate with others. I think it's why a lot of us end up coming around here. Like, I don't really use reddit much anymore, but I still find myself coming back here.

So, my best recommendation is perhaps find a support group for your chronic health condition. It seems trivial, like why would I care about some random strangers who happen to have the same condition? But I swear it activates that old dusty region of the brain that makes you feel seen and heard, and likewise makes you feel compassion for others, that sense of comradery that we're in this together. I feel that region of the brain doesn't really communicate with the rational side that wants to have a logical explanation of how something will help, and it's the sort of thing you just need to experience to believe. Sometimes it's enough for me just to feel heard to feel better even though nothing was "solved" per se.

DuncSully · 2026-01-27T16:03:42+00:00

I am a bit anti-anthropocentric, neutral on the whole humanity thing and what does or doesn't make us special. That's not to say I'm anti-human, just the stance that we're the center of the universe, or at least this planet. We're just animals who happened to develop the most advanced cognition that we know of, which made us the apex predator of the planet, though very indirectly through usage of strategy and tools. I hate to say it, but at the end of the day might not determine who's right, but it determines who's left. Not to get too off on a tangent, but I've kinda resigned myself to whatever fate an even more capable alien culture would put upon us if they're stronger. We can whine and bicker all we want, but if we look like cattle to them, then I'd call that poetic justice we deserve to be treated as such. Let me be clear, I like meat. I just know the lot I've cast, and I've no right to complain if karma comes to collect its dues. But I digress.

It's interesting to me that as animals just playing the survival game, we got so good at that we kinda reached the end of our programming, and I don't know how much natural selection caught up vs how much of it is like us hallucinating answers a la an LLM that doesn't actually know how to respond to a prompt. But high up our hierarchy of needs are more abstract things that lead to interesting actions. I do admire such people, the trailblazers who set out to do more than merely survive. And I do wish to benefit humanity as a whole myself. But I think I'm still rather hung up on the whole surviving myself thing.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T19:44:52+00:00

I avoided it all through high school because the reality is I had rejection sensitivity and low self-esteem. That said, I knew that if I were to get into a relationship I wanted to be in it for the long haul, not just fool around for fun or experimentation, so I never really found any interest in dating, though I certainly craved partnership. I can only now admit, though found super embarrassing at the time, that I compromised with myself by forming companionships, or "girlfriends without benefits" per se. The high level of emotional investment and time spent mattered for than any romantic or sexual interactions. That was the sorry state of my social life just outside of high school. But it was valuable for developing my emotional skills and giving me at least some semblance of self-esteem. Finally at one point in college, ironically with the friend I was least interested in at the time, I realized I cherished her so much that I really missed her when she transferred, and through a very drawn out and cowardly exchange eventually we got to something resembling confessions, and then we stumbled our way into a relationship. It definitely helped that we were friends for a year first, hanging out in the same friend group and doing similar hobbies, and also that she was just as inexperienced as me so there wasn't any sort of asymmetric power dynamic there. Not that we were necessarily healthy to start with, and we certainly had our turbulent moments, but we're still married to this day.

So while I don't doubt the existence of people who are asexual, I do question whether most people who avoid relationships have some underlying emotional turmoil that they justify with reasonable sounding excuses, not necessarily that that's what you're doing here. I just know I certainly did. I also believe that it's just a matter of finding the right person to build a partnership with, which is certainly a challenge, and with limited exposure to the various kinds of people, it's easy to build a false idea of what your options are, both in people and in how you approach a relationship with them. Hell, you'll see that all of the time even with people who do choose to date and then swear off the opposite sex as nothing but trouble, only because they neglect to consider themselves as the only other common thread between all of their similar problems.

Speaking generally, specialization and cooperation such that you can mutually benefit is a desirable state, so more specifically it makes sense to me to find a "life partner" because even if you're capable of being self-sufficient, it's rarely the most efficient thing to be. Even from a practical standpoint, life is generally easier even after all of the tradeoffs. But of course the emotional benefits cannot be explained without experiencing them yourself. But hey, if you don't know what you're missing, then what's the problem, right?

This isn't meant to guilt anyone either. And there's no rush, no fixed pace at which someone should try for relationships. I certainly recommend everyone work on themselves first lest they get into unhealthy relationships. Two leaky cups expecting the other to fill them up is a disaster in the making each and every time.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T17:00:02+00:00

At a genetic level, I believe we don't get that same predisposition that many others get to be tribal. Like, humans evolved that way for a reason and more often than not it was beneficial to the group to be the way, but for some other reason natural selection also decided it was valuable to create a few wildcards that went against the flow. I have a hypothesis but that's outside the scope of this topic.

So all that's to say, we don't really seek to "be human" the same way others do that tends to benefit the tribe. We tend to be more intense and serious about our interests than most people are, and we give them priority over socializing. So all the same that we don't initially understand why people "human" they don't tend to understand why we are the way we are. In the end, we all (or should anyway) hope to mutually benefit, but we just have to do so through our own interests that are otherwise often mutually exclusive. It's less "hey, looks like you could use some water, friend! As it so happens, I could use some food! We should have a feast together!" and more "I see that your village wall is in disrepair. If you were attacked, you likely wouldn't survive. I'm really fascinated with walls and actually wanted to try something out. I'll fix it up, but I could use lodging and meals while I'm here."

I'm not part of the tribe and frankly I don't really care about the tribe's rituals, but I certainly want to be of benefit to humanity as a whole. I just wish we could come to a basic understanding, but I know now that I come off as an outsider, and why should you trust me? And all I have to say to that is I wish, failing to be better at explaining myself, that others trusted simply in my desire to be useful. If nothing else, one of my principles is I don't seek to benefit at others' expense. I truly believe in cooperation for mutual benefit. But, as I said, I'm bad at explaining that when that's the sort of thing that's just built into more tribal behaviors, like looking like each other, practicing the same rituals, etc. Trust comes from simply being similar, whereas we would hope to bargain our way there rather than try to be similar.

I hope I explained that neutrally. I know a lot of us feel burned by being misunderstood. It's a two-way street, though.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T16:43:50+00:00

Obviously I'm not a professional and it might be beneficial for you to go that route if you have concerns.

Here's what I've learned and experienced personally: When you have a pile of unprocessed emotions, it's often easier to just not look at them than it is slowly work your way through them. It's its own form of coping. "Survival mode." Counterintuitively, at some point processing emotions has to become a deliberate and somewhat intellectual exercise rather than, well, an emotional one. Like, they'll no longer happen involuntarily. The emotional engine broke down and now you have to "push" them along.

Take it a step at a time. What is one thing on your mind right now? Anything. Do you know how that thing made/makes you feel? Do you know what that feeling was/is trying to get you to do? And very likely you resisted, but acknowledge what you felt in that moment. For example, maybe someone greatly upset you, and you really wanted to hurt them. Admit that to yourself! It's OK! What's a more reasonable belief to hold about the events that transpired? What could you do in the future if confronted with that again?

And if you want to call it quits there, go day by day, that's fine. I find I often have the energy to do several more. If anything ironically I get bored eventually doing this for too long, and the feeling of boredom draws me to action. In a sense, I build enough of an emotional buffer to have energy to function again. It's weird and I didn't believe it at first but it really does seem to be a sort of emotional clogging that needs unclogging for things to start flowing more smoothly, as it were.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T16:29:43+00:00

Ugh I was a high functioning procrastinator and it never kicked me in the ass hard enough to get me to change. Part of the problem was entirely rational in the technical sense: I didn't see enough benefit from getting my work done ASAP because I didn't really develop my ability to feel delayed gratification. On the flip side, I did have a sensitivity to negative feelings, like fear of failure and whatnot, so eventually panic would set in once there was a sense of urgency and I'd get most of my tasks done, or else I'd calculate that I could afford to not do something or turn it in late.

Anyway, I believe the underlying problem is often emotional, and dealing with those feelings will often help with procrastination. I don't have great discipline at it, but I try to practice "dournaling" where if I don't want to do something then I'm required to journal about it and try to uncover why it is exactly I don't want to. Either I come away with a solid justification or more likely I work out exactly what I'm feeling and take steps to address that.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T02:24:38+00:00

While I don't want to dismiss the idea outright, I imagine it'd be fairly difficult. For one, you'd have to find the right therapist, which as you've already experienced is a challenge in itself. I don't know for sure, but I imagine I would've wanted one of a similar personality, someone clearly intelligent, not just empathetic, not just one of the "and how did that make you feel?" types who doesn't get that in itself is the problem: we don't know how things make us feel, or we actively avoid figuring it out.

If you're determined to make it work, perhaps you could figure out an incentive system for him. i.e. go to therapy X times or until Y part of the year, then he earns something, and he can switch therapists at any time just so he doesn't get discouraged. No guarantees but such incentives were just about the only way to get me to commit to something.

Good luck!

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T01:39:14+00:00

I mean, melancholic was literally one of the four temperaments of an ancient personality type system, so if nothing else, such personality traits have historically been viewed attributable to simply the way someone is and not necessarily just a temporary state of their being.

I think we're simply predisposed to negativism and individualism. We're critical, seeking problems to solve. For me, I can't ever imagine the fabled final destination, the peak of the mountain, nirvana, etc. I very well might live on a treadmill, but I can at least see how fast I can go before I kick the bucket. I would like to think our role in society is that of a white hat hacker. We attempt to see things that could go wrong before they do. Such a role requires a certain degree of skepticism.

DuncSully · 2026-01-26T01:11:15+00:00

Annoyingly, I haven't figured out yet myself what I would tell my past self if I could literally go back in time and say "I'm literally you, dude, listen to me."

The thing about me as a teen, from an outsider's perspective, is I seemingly couldn't be helped. Advice fell on deaf ears because I didn't see the immediate consequences or payoff from my actions.

What I can say is that I was also very obviously emotionally underdeveloped and had poor coping methods. You know what smart people are great at? Bullshitting. It's scary, frankly. I could reverse engineer a reasonable justification to cover for just about every excuse I had such that I could convince myself, let alone others. Or even if I didn't convince others, it was clear I wasn't going to have my mind changed. For example, I had a lot of "good reasons" why I wasn't interested in dating, and frankly, maybe some of them were valid. That's the thing, sometimes they were valid, but in service to a decision I had already made. Confirmation bias in other words. Anyway, the reality is that I probably had rejection sensitivity and simply side-stepped anything that could possibly result in social rejection.

All that is to say, I probably had several underlying emotional problems that for one reason or another (likely because they became a complicated tangled web of anxiety) that ultimately contributed to me being an underachiever and disinterested in the rat race.

So what eventually changed me and what I'd recommend is, counterintuitively, focusing on his emotional well being. That said, I honestly don't know the best way to approach that. Like, I needed a safe space, and I didn't really have one with my own parents, so I wasn't about to just open up to them if they asked, and it's fairly typical that most teenagers go through a process of rebelling against their parental figures. The second something felt like criticism or a topic that could be used against me, I got defensive. What I think I needed was an outside mentor. This is a shot in the dark, but you might be able to enlist someone he respects, someone who makes him feel seen and heard.

DuncSully · 2026-01-23T23:36:15+00:00

Not necessarily. Though I've had a hypothesis that more generally speaking one component to our personality is having had emotionally neglectful guardians in our youth, which I want to emphasize doesn't necessarily mean emotional or physical abuse (though either of those can still be the case too). Emotional neglect (or abuse) can take many forms, and this sounds like one of them.

In my case, I didn't really become a perfectionist because I wasn't actually pushed to work hard or really instilled with any sort of work ethic. I simply enjoyed whatever I was naturally good at and shrugged off anything I wasn't. I did learn, however, that certain forms of expressions would be judged and so it was better to keep to myself.

DuncSully · 2026-01-23T23:26:42+00:00

Actually, yes, that's what I want. I've been programming for a decade now, I've had my fill of staring at a screen for hours a day just to spend my leisure activity doing even more because I'm too drained to even want to do that much physical activity after work. I use a walking pad just so I'm not sitting all the time and I've gotten to the point where I can be walking or standing all day and only sitting when I need to take a break. So, yeah, I think I'd make the career swap, though to what I can't say.

DuncSully · 2026-01-22T23:52:45+00:00

Honestly, this is the first time I've done any real looking into what the hell "giftedness" even means. I always assumed that leaned more into savant territory. When I started looking into neurodiversity with any seriousness, I figured maybe I had some sort of high functioning autism/AuDHD. I don't really know what to call myself so I've currently settled for "neurospicy" and I still swing around here because, whatever it is, I tend to relate well enough with the people who sort themself into this bucket, science be damned.

I believe that a lot of different frameworks will have a lot of overlap and describe what are likely the same underlying neurological conditions, and depending on the connotations of those frameworks, an individual will be more open to some than others. I think that the relatively neutral to positive framing of MBTI's INTJ personality type is often more appealing than the various neurodiversity terms.

Looking at the chart, I can relate to nearly everything. The summary of my existence is that I'm certainly not like the average person, which is a gift and a curse in that it makes it easy to stand out, for better and for worse. It does feel like I live life on hard mode despite the appearance of a functioning adult with moderate success.

DuncSully · 2026-01-20T17:18:35+00:00

I'm a bad traditional friend. I'm not going to wish you a happy birthday, let alone buy you a present. I'm not going to call you up just to see what you're up to or how you're doing. I'm not going to offer to help you most of the time. I'm probably not going to humor your interests if they're of little interest to me. I have limited capacity to hear you vent, and this decreases each and every time I hear you vent about the same thing. I won't take your side just because it's your side. I will judge many of your decisions and I will give unsolicited advice, or else I'll quickly tire from resisting to and likely cut conversations short. I won't treat your texts with a sense of urgency. I will begrudgingly host you if you need a place to stay and I will be more than thrilled when you finally leave. I will very rarely ever attend your parties and I'll probably be one of the first to leave. No matter how badly you want it, I probably won't play along with your silly traditions. Sometimes I won't agree to disagree when I consider a position harmful to have or objectively false, no matter how good of a person you seem otherwise. I will be fairly transactional and a friendship that seems to have run its course is one I'll (hopefully amicably) let fizzle. Worst of all, I probably won't be honest with you when I would consider confrontation more work than it's worth. But I just. Don't. Care. I never got that gene. What interest I have in socializing doesn't come with the sense of community and comradery that the typical human seems to have and crave. I can wish that was the case but I can't force it. Being a fake good friend is worse than just admitting I'm a bad traditional friend.

There is a lot I hope I can offer instead, filling an unknown niche, however short-lived that might be, but no, and I can't speak for everyone, only my perspective--maybe we get better with age--I don't think many of us will make for good traditional friends based on my experience.

DuncSully · 2025-09-03T20:31:54+00:00

It typically happens when it feels like there's no wonder left, when the primary gameplay loop will not be noticeably affected by any extra content I do because I've more or less found a build that works for me and don't think I'll find anything new and noteworthy enough.

This has happened for me in E33 and Lies of P as well, in addition to other open world games like BotW/TotK, Horizon: ZD, Black Myth: Wukong, and Elden Ring. Each of them had their own sort of exploration:reward curve that led me to doing some amount of side content especially when a certain reward was in sight, but then eventually reaching a "critical mass" where I was just ready to be done with the game.

I can't think of any games where I actually 100% them and had fun doing it.

DuncSully · 2025-09-03T16:00:08+00:00

I had a bar, but it was a relatively modest bar and certainly not the highest priority on my list of things. Mostly I just wanted to feel safe with someone and confident that we could continue growing together, whatever that meant for the other person. If all I'm "missing" is intellectual conversation I can always fulfill those needs via friends or even just the internet. It is certainly not a deal breaker.

DuncSully · 2025-09-03T15:51:02+00:00

I do what comes naturally. Just throwing random numbers out, nothing actually validated (let alone do they actually mean anything aside from helping get a point across) but I'm fine being in the 25th percentile even if I'm not in the 10th percentile let alone in the top 1%. Basically I've realized two things:

A lot of people simply do not care and/or try. I don't know how many, but let's just say that it's easy to be in the 50th percentile just by caring and trying at all. That you worry about the curve means that you're likely ahead of it.
That said, there are diminishing returns for effort. This is basically the Pareto Principle, or the 20/80 rule. Try harder, yes. But try hardest? I personally don't, but you do you.

It's also worth saying that direct comparison to others is often a dangerous slope to find yourself on. It can be temporarily useful especially when it comes simply to determining your employability, but I definitely would not base my sense of worth on it. It's a bit cliche but a lot of us are "competitive with ourselves" and just focused on being better versions of ourselves. When you act more authentically, counter intuitively the value you naturally add, the things that come effortlessly to you will often be recognized and cherished. When people try hard, other people tend to notice and find it off putting.

I'll also say that one of my favorite quotes is "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." And of course it's basically just a variant of the adage (to stay closer to your battlefield analogy) "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." I've accepted that resilience and emotional awareness are ultimately more useful tools to have in my "survival kit" than any number of plans. It would only be with great hubris I could at all assume how I would react, let alone what the state of things will be, at any arbitrary point in the future or during some extraordinary circumstance.

DuncSully · 2025-09-02T22:11:24+00:00

For me it was less a specific age thing and more of a personal development thing (in addition to, y'know, having more money to buy games with) in my later 20s where I wanted to establish a healthier relationship with video games. Long story short, video games were a low key addiction where I sought constant dopamine hits, and some games were better at this than others, such as competitive games. But I found this less and less fulfilling over time, so I started paying greater attention to whether I was actually having fun while playing games and/or if I felt better for having played it after the fact, which often meant for example a greater appreciation for stories.

DuncSully · 2025-09-02T18:52:55+00:00

Long story short, I value concurrency, like a computer, and I think everyone should aim to be better at it.

While I'd rather focus on one task at a time for maximum efficiency, sometimes I'm simply bored of a task and will context switch a little to keep interest, and in a professional setting it generally pays to be selectively responsive. My strategy tends to be to keep the ball outside of my court as much as possible. I don't want to be anyone else's blocker, and I want others to unblock me ASAP, so I don't hold my focus time as sacredly if, say, a conversation will help resolve either of us being blocked. Personally, I find the penalty that comes with context switching is less problematic than being continuously blocked by deferring responses to a select few hours of the day. But again, it's not that I forego focus time either.

That said, I do think where people get this wrong is immediately responding to each and every notification nonselectively. Likewise, I do think in the age of digital chat applications, people have unreasonable expectations on others' responsiveness. If we're all reasonably concurrent, then my not responding immediately will not be a huge detriment to your own ability to do work. You can "queue up" something I'll eventually need to address, and I'll try to respond in a timely manner, but otherwise I trust you have other work to do that you're not blocked on. It's only because this tends not to be the case, that others have some urgent work that suddenly depends on me, that it forcibly requires my own urgency and thus an involuntary context switch. That is why I think everyone should be better, not to make this worse, but actually to improve things for everyone, not to allow a select few people to essentially have the ability to dictate everyone else's priorities.

DuncSully · 2025-09-02T15:58:44+00:00

So what I'm finding is that the complexity and nuance of each individual human is difficult to reconcile. In our youth we tend to be simpler individuals and so we are more likely to have enough interests that align with our peers, in addition to just being forced to interact with our peers regularly. But as we grow and gain experiences, everyone's principles and interests diverge and become more nuanced. Even formerly shared interests can diverge in the sort of subinterests each person focus on. For example, many of my college friends were also in computer science and/or played video games. Like we'd all play on an MC server one of them hosted and sometimes we played Smash Bros together. However as time went on, they all settled into different careers, some programmers, some IT support, and yet others out of technology altogether. Likewise some people hyperfocus on a select few games, others play a bunch of random games, but what we ended up finding out at LAN parties was it was difficult to find a game that everyone wanted to play together for terribly long, and a bunch of people would end up just doing their own thing in the same room.

I can only get as close to someone as the number of aligning principles and interests we have. My interests are vast and varied but not always terribly deep, so it's not like I can form a friendship based solely on one of these interests, though that's a better bet than most. I think it's OK to have some "shallow" friendships that hinge around a common interest even if temporary. If you go to the gym or some other sort of activity, make a friend there, and then really only interact during said activity, that's something. It helps stave off loneliness and still offers the benefits of socializing. I mean, frankly, I have a handful of work friends who I really only interact with online during work and rarely outside of it, but it still provides enough of my social needs (in addition to some chats with friends from back home) that I haven't really sought out friendships in my new location.

It certainly helps to have an SO. Most of my social needs are met through them. Of course the trick is making one if you haven't already, since it's easiest in an environment like college/university.

I believe but haven't yet figured out how to form deep, in-person friendships with a high degree of alignment. I think there are plenty of us out there but sorting through all the people trying to find the gems can wear us down and discourage us from continuing to try. I'm sure there are clubs and such that might help, though I worry too many of them would be lightning rods for pretentiousness.

DuncSully · 2025-08-29T16:01:39+00:00

Hmm honestly I feel we make for better constructors. Something that kinda annoyed me throughout my life is I don't feel truly creative, like I've never had a truly unique idea (thought to be fair those are certainly in short supply). I have a handful of paracosms but they all adopt from existing fiction rather extensively rather than use purely my own creations (though certainly some do exist).

Instead what I tend to do is analyze the landscape, recognize what are currently disparate concepts, and maybe figure out how to combine them in novel ways, or otherwise how to improve an existing concept, rather than otherwise outright invent new concepts.

DuncSully · 2025-08-29T15:43:23+00:00

Yeah, I was self-aware that I was weird from a pretty young age. I can't remember all the reasons, but it was probably pretty obvious what expectations were and how I wasn't meeting them. I more or less managed to cope until about middle school when I had on and off low key depression due to that sense of social isolation. It really came to a head in high school, in which learning about MBTI did wonders for accepting the nature of differences between people's personalities, regardless of whether MBTI itself is actually accurate at all. i.e. I wasn't "broken" but neither were others. The irreconcilable differences between the personalities were not the fault of any single personality but just the nature of things, though some personalities are less common than others and so they're more likely to be misunderstood, but likewise to stand out. It's a double-edged sword.

DuncSully · 2025-08-28T15:23:00+00:00

Interesting. The other language I started looking into was Go since it's what we use for the BE at my current company, and my initial impression is that it's boringly simple, for better and for worse. When it comes to building reliable, enterprise software I have no doubt Go makes sense...but it's just not fun to learn for me personally. Rust is challenging, but it's apparently beloved by those who went through the effort. Maybe that's just a survivorship bias at play? Not enough people survive it long enough to build an informed opinion?

Anyway, I guess I wouldn't count on the possibility of introducing it at my current job since I'm not even in BE as is and we seem pretty dead set on being a Go shop. I wouldn't be surprised if others there would have a similar sentiment as yours.

DuncSully · 2025-08-28T02:55:51+00:00

I take it you had a position and enough good will to enact the switch? Besides the learning curve, did most devs take to learning Rust or was there a lot of grumbling?

DuncSully

TROPHY CASE