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by selfhoster11 1589 days ago
Fear of project failure is the signal that the company (= your employment prospects) will be damaged. Frustration with how difficult the work is, is a signal that the current path is unsustainable, and that burnout will set in, thereby damaging your ability to work (= your employment prospects).

It's perfectly rational to be concerned about these things. We are not machines - or rather, we are machines that have mental/psychological/monetary needs that have to be met in the course of our daily employment.

1 comments

There is no purely logical reason to ever actually do anything. It all starts with what you want and what you don't want. You may of course derive logically sound paths to get what you want or avoid what you don't want, but that's something else.

If you explain these logical steps to someone else, what you're doing is showing them that they too will likely be affected by what you're suffering, that is, showing them they have a reason to fear too.

We are getting into the weeds here. Unless you are trying to tell me that there is no logical reason to trying to meet the bottom few tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, in which case, while you may be right in a very strict sense ("nothing and nobody matters"), it's an extremely nit-picking position.
That is actually exactly what I'm saying.

A message's ability to provoke some form of action is entirely dependent on its ability to create some form of emotion, be it fear and indignation or hope and optimism. The most effective rhetoricians are exactly those that are very good at producing those feelings. From Hitler on one side as the archetypal rabble-rouser; to MLK on the other end of the spectrum, who created profound optimism and hope. It isn't because of their syllogisms that they were convincing rhetoricians.

Merely knowing a fact is rarely sufficient to provoke action, unless that knowledge itself creates an emotion (an idea can have aesthetic value, for example).