[hinkley]

Any serious investigation of stress and how to cope with it will lead to a conversation about activities that energize you, and activities that soothe. Pairing these with stressful events (especially ones you can schedule) can take the edge off. Self-soothing becomes problematic when it is unacknowledged and thus unregulated. Like binging on whatever ice cream is in the frigde after a hard day at work or a difficult conversation with your partner, versus having a little of your favorite ice cream as a reward for making a difficult call to a relative or going to that appointment you've been putting off.

Scrum has been so co-opted by management that it tries to disallow any sort of self-soothing on a project. I am forever having to misrepresent the importance of work that I 'needed' to do that perhaps not everyone else sees the wisdom of. Either hiding it entirely or overselling it. Because if I have to deal with the consequences (including dealing with other people who are affected) of this goddamned piece of code any longer I'm going to quit, and what will happen to your precious schedules then?

"Refactoring" 1st Ed is, through this lens, formalized self-care represented as philosophy instead of psychology. For many of us it feels good (or at least, not doing it feels awful) but we can't say that, so we make it about ethics.

There was a videotaped interview with Joel Spolsky a ways back, and I couldn't tell you a thing about what he was being interviewed about except for his answer to the warmup question, which was delivered half jokingly, about how over time his job has changed to psychotherapist, and that his bookshelf has slowly converted to a few technical books and a lot of psychology books. Of course we cannot be serious about such things, so he had to joke about it.