[blinkingled]

> because without a focus on raising a family and/or participation in organized religion, our careers/workplace have become the "things" that we now try to put all this meaning behind, and what was once separated from our "life" (e.g. work/life balance) has become our life, and the psychological burden of being forced to be 100% emotionally invested/devoted to our work has consequences.

This resonates with me a 100%. We forgot that we aren't machines and our mind and soul needs variations - clutching on to something, letting go/resting and moving on to something else is necessary physically and psychologically.

Absence of that we have sustained stress and resulting bad consequences.

[lanstin]

Even within a purely work perspective, we arent machines. My productivity (as perceived by the impact of my work not Lines of Code) gies up and down. I will have a good year and save millions of dollars or make a platform that ends up employing dozen software engineers for many products and then you know have years where I make some python framework used by five people have 10 percent better latency. There is a certain tendency by management to reward me in the up years and punish me in the down years but for me as a human they aren't two things. Stuff just goes in cycles. I don't get the big years without the fallow years. I focus on learning stuff each year and trying to get people to always improve things a bit, and it all works out. At least i have learned a lot of cool stuff. And management still hasn't come up with floating promotions where you are a Senior blah blah blah for 24 months then can ebb back.

[high_5]

We don't only need variation, we need rhythm. We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday, where weeks whoosh by like days, rattled with the constant flurry of calls, messages, notifications and whatnot. There is no pace if one does not set it by himself.

[blinkingled]

> We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday

I seriously think this is causing mental dysfunction - depression for instance. Of course I don't know of any way to prove this other than experience - we react to same situations in the same way and we feel stuck/frustrated when we experience repeat cycles of the same thing - that has got to have some negative impact.

I think we can do some things to make it work better but ultimately lot of things are determined by your workplace culture.

[davidjnelson]

Disabling most notifications is a great way to deal with this. Then you can check stuff when you want/need to.