bostonimproper's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

@Scott 2: I don’t want the specter of work floating over me as I take time off, so I’d rather just quit rather than take a sabbatical. That is, unless they plan to give me health insurance or some extended paid time off, which is something I’ve heard other managers offer to folks they want to retain in case it’s just burnout. I’d happily take the money/insurance/etc. with the intent to quit anyway if that’s something they’re willing to offer (*shrugs*), but in general I’m pretty much done with this place mentally/emotionally and don’t have it in me to belabor the inevitable.

Old ideas, new again

Spring weather and some hiking over the weekend triggered my seasonal reboot. I’m back on the “do I want to do mushroom farming in my kitchen” kick again. These desires to grow things and live a more self-sufficient life comes and goes in waves. I’m kind of tired of how often my moods and interests cycle to the same things but rarely get acted upon (or worse, are acted on and then quickly abandoned).

I have mostly accepted that I am bursty person— in terms of both energy and interests— by nature. I can go deep and build things up very quickly while I’m interested but anything requiring long-term maintenance (however minute) is not appealing. I make an exception for personal relationships because I understand that they need consistency to foster, but everything else in my life is seasonal at best.

This is limiting in terms of what I’m able to do, but I also dislike the dissonant feelings when fighting the ebb and flow.

Probably should figure this out as I get closer to “retirement.” I can easily bumble about through my life, just living and be perfectly content day to day, working on my latest whim. It would certainly feel good. I guess I just wonder if there’s a better way to structure things to keep me “on track” to “do something.” The what and the why as yet unknown.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by Western Red Cedar »

bostonimproper wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 7:33 am
I have mostly accepted that I am bursty person— in terms of both energy and interests— by nature. I can go deep and build things up very quickly while I’m interested but anything requiring long-term maintenance (however minute) is not appealing. I make an exception for personal relationships because I understand that they need consistency to foster, but everything else in my life is seasonal at best.

This is limiting in terms of what I’m able to do, but I also dislike the dissonant feelings when fighting the ebb and flow.

Probably should figure this out as I get closer to “retirement.” I can easily bumble about through my life, just living and be perfectly content day to day, working on my latest whim. It would certainly feel good. I guess I just wonder if there’s a better way to structure things to keep me “on track” to “do something.” The what and the why as yet unknown.
James Clear tends to be one of the favorites in terms of building habits and developing structures to stay on track. I thought Atomic Habits was great, but also really enjoyed Gretchen Rubin's research on the topic. Have you read anything by her? I read Better than Before a while ago, and I think she goes a bit deeper in the four tendencies. She observed that people fall into four general groups: Upholders, Obligers, Questioners, and Rebels.

It's a bit of a simplified Myers Briggs construct. Understanding how you respond to external expectations or stimuli can allow you to structure your life or environment to better achieve goals or stick with them. I find the construct helpful professionally to understand why colleagues and supervisors act and react in different fashions.

If you're interested, her podcasts with Tim Ferriss or Paula Pant (afford anything) were both good and dove into the research and content. An easy way to gage whether it is worth reading her book.

Anyway, I just thought I'd throw it out there. I've been enjoying your journal and envy your courage to dip your toe in crypto. Sounds like you are almost to the finish line!

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Western Red Cedar wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 8:27 pm
James Clear tends to be one of the favorites in terms of building habits and developing structures to stay on track. I thought Atomic Habits was great, but also really enjoyed Gretchen Rubin's research on the topic. Have you read anything by her? I read Better than Before a while ago, and I think she goes a bit deeper in the four tendencies. She observed that people fall into four general groups: Upholders, Obligers, Questioners, and Rebels.
I’m a “questioner” in the Gretchen Rubin framework. From what I can tell, my problem tends to be that outside a few key foundational pieces (e.g. relationships, maintaining a baseline of physical, mental, and financial health), I’m never entirely convinced “the juice is worth the squeeze” in continuing on with a project—especially if it has even a 1% chance of disturbing my core foundation. So I lose motivation once I satisfy the initial high from novelty.

I think one of the commenters on her podcast pointed it out well when it comes to tradeoff decisions (I see how to spend my time on this earth as ultimately a big ol’ tradeoff decision) there is no right answer and a questioner just needs to make the decision and commit, at least for some extended period of time. I think that’s probably the best tactic, at least to enable me to move forward. I’ll probably always be questioning, but at least I’ll have social/skill capital and momentum when at points of re-evaluating.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by Western Red Cedar »

A fellow "questioner" here and I can relate. I tend to take a long time when making big decisions (or avoid them) because things are moving along smoothly enough. I've hacked my own nature and inability to commit to a certain path from time to time by publicly announcing something that I've been deliberating internally, or making a financial commitment that I don't want to walk away from.

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Work

Good news: promo was approved! Bad news: I have decided to still leave my job in June/July. I feel slimey for throwing my boss under the bus; in her short time at the company, she’s done a lot to try and invest in my professional development, so I feel like I’m turning my back on her leaving while knowing the group is way understaffed. That said, day after day, it’s always something new I have to deal with, and I can’t bring myself to care anymore.

I’m knee deep in a bunch of interviews for new jobs; I feel like I’m just going through the motions. They are all objectively good opportunities, but the burnout and “I know the end to this story” cynicism has taken such a hold that I can’t bring myself to get excited for anything anymore. I plan to travel the whole month of August which I am hoping will help me reset.

Crypto investments

Paper lost six figures in the last week and honestly I feel nothing. Definitely felt the euphoria on the way up, though, which makes me worried that gambling addictions might be borne out of not feeling the loss. On the other hand, I’m still sitting on a profit so I might feel it if the market was below my cost basis. I am considering whether I need to block myself from accessing Mint & Coinbase except for when I do monthly net worth tracking in order to avoid paying attention to the fluctuations.

Trust and giving

Recently donated to my first GoFundMe’s. Normally I stick with charitable organizations, but the picture the recipients were painting were so compelling to me and were instances where I could not see charities normally getting involved that I overcame my usual reservations of “is this person going to use this money wisely”, “are my donations going to the right people”, etc. Without going into the details, I have learned information about one of the recipients which makes them a significantly less sympathetic figure to give money to. It is not the case that they overtly lied, but I still feel “tricked” to a degree and regret my donation.

I’m trying to square my feelings here. On the one hand, I am trying to be more open to trusting people. You can’t always do deep due diligence and if we are to help those in need who are falling through the cracks in the system, we need to trust them at their word. On the other hand, it feels like as soon as I open myself up to trusting, I see evidence that I should revert back to being deeply skeptical and cynical, because people will constantly disappoint you if you let them.

macg
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by macg »

There's a meme I saw a while back that sums up my theory on charitable giving, more specifically in terms of to a person, which to me encompasses go fund me... I'm not sure if it could be called an adage (is it too long?), but the story goes...

One time, my father gave a homeless man $50, after hearing his story of how he needed to buy food and medicine.

I told my father, "You know he will probably spend the money on alcohol or drugs."

My father just said, "Whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need, and choosing not to help when I have the means to, says something about mine. "

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Trading my time for (slightly more) money

Good news: I signed the offer for a new job, ~15% raise. The company is in growth phase so the equity has a lot of potential upside as well. Role is pretty similar to the one I have now, but in a different domain. Everyone seems nice enough, and they seem to be hiding the burnout of growth phase tech work pretty well, so fingers crossed? I’ll start in a couple months after I take the rest of summer off for some much-needed R&R.

I thought I’d feel bad telling my manager, but then I learned she was putting me back on a project that I h-a-t-e-d after explicitly telling me that I could stop working on it so I could focus on more strategic stuff. So I feel less bad now.

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Right now I’m trying to figure out health insurance while I’m between jobs. My insurance will last through the end of July but my new job doesn’t start until September, which means a gap in August. Our options right now (for me+my husband are):
1. COBRA - $1800 (most risk averse, least amount of switching HC providers, etc.)
2. ACA plan - $800 (biggest pain in the ass, but still gets us covered)
3. Live with the gap and retroactively apply COBRA if and only if there’s a health emergency

(3) seems like the right option financially but will likely cause us to have significant anxiety in August, especially since we’ll be traveling around so much and doing a lot of hiking in rocky places. (“What if we get into a car accident and end up in a coma?” “How difficult will it be to get our insurance to cover these things retroactively”) We’ll probably still choose (3) because $2K a month is a lot to stomach.

Anyway, health insurance in the US is stupid expensive and the whole system is kind of a scam.

mooretrees
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by mooretrees »

I've had to do option 3 when I was between jobs and got injured playing soccer. I had to have a knee surgery. It was extremely easy to sign up for COBRA, just had to pay for the months between when I quit and when I needed surgery. It was really easy. It's up to you to figure out if the anxiety is worth it, but I'd go for option three.

Yep, totally agree with the brokenness of our health insurance. It's the worst.

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Spending the month of August traveling before I start the new job. The past few weeks not working have been bliss— I am so much less stressed, gotten back on an exercise regime, lost a decent amount of weight, let myself fall into interests outside of work, have caught up with tons of in person hangouts with friends and family. and just feel so much more myself again.

I feel often my journal is quite negative because I’m constantly pushing myself harder at my job, plus all the anxiety from the pandemic, so it’s nice to remind myself that I’m actually capable of being happy, whoddathunkit?

In terms of money things, the only thing we’re thinking about is possibly increasing our donations from 10 to 20% of our income. I saw an article about another Boston area couple into Effective Altruism that donates around half of what they make and it made me feel like a curmudgeonly dragon sitting on my pile of gold. I think it’d be interesting to get to that point once we hit our financial goals.

guitarplayer
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

bostonimproper wrote:
Mon Aug 31, 2020 9:13 pm
So, you're saying existential anxiety and ennui goes away with children? Man did my parents miss that memo.
Sorry, I was searching the forum for 'Rudolf Steiner' and 'waldorf' and found @ertyu's post in your journal about finding meaning in life and your above response to it and gosh was it funny!

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

New job, same old problems

I started the new job. It’s okay. I don’t love it.

My team is competent and there seems to be much less political strife here than at my previous company, but the tech debt is quite bad. They really needed someone more senior thinking through the engineering architecture when they were first building things out. Now everything is kind of a mess and very hard to unwind. I’m trying to think of how to explain “no, really, everything is majorly fucked until we get four more heads and have a year to unspool this” to my boss without annoying him. Sigh. I also find the area I’m working in painfully boring. But the payout when I hit my one year cliff should be pretty sweet. So, I guess I could just muddle through it since I kind of have to.

Honestly I want to quit. I was having a very nice time not working. I felt like I was really having a breakthrough toward the end. Now I just feel anxious again. And bored (I’ve been many things at my previous jobs, but very rarely was I bored).

/whine

Crypto culture

I’ve been having a ball falling into the Ethereum rabbit hole. There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in crypto culture. It’s very dynamic. People try hard to make things better. Or at least different. A lot of it is just absurd, but still in a fun way rather than in the Kafka-esque way most absurd things irl seem to be. Obviously, there’s also a lot of unsavory people: scammers, tribalists, conspiracy minded folks. All in all, though, I’m having a good time.

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Chris
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by Chris »

bostonimproper wrote:
Fri Sep 10, 2021 6:48 pm
I started the new job. It’s okay. I don’t love it.
...
I’ve been having a ball falling into the Ethereum rabbit hole.
Gotta ask..... why not work in crypto? I understand at this point you're trying to at least put your year in at the new gig, but had you considered a crypto startup?

bostonimproper
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Post by bostonimproper »

@Chris I had a few recruiters reach out for crytpo-related startups (one was in gaming and the other in domains). Honestly, they didn’t pay well and I felt pretty meh about their ability to execute. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in DAO governance and in the NFT space, but I wouldn’t really want it to be my job that I rely on for my daily living.

At the end of the day, I guess I just think a job is a job is a job. I feel like work has kind of killed my interest in ML/DS. Why ruin my enjoyment of crypto by bringing work into it? After I reach FI, I’ll probably spend some time engaging lightly with the community. I’d like to run my own staking node. Plus I’m learning Solidity now. And at some point I think it might be fun to write a blog where I do some blockchain analytics. But I just want it to be for me, for fun. Keeping it as a hobby takes the pressure off to “win” and “be good at it” which I think would erode my enthusiasm.

bostonimproper
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Post by bostonimproper »

Minor “duh” moment today. Just realized that the labor shortage is being driven by two major demographic shifts that Covid has accelerated:
1. Retirement of baby boomers, who have been holding onto part time jobs below a living wage with a death grip (and the cost benefit for them just doesn’t work anymore) and
2. Working mothers (millennials/echo boomers) dropping out of the labor force as childcare remains spotty.

I’d been thinking mostly about (2), which will correct once kids are fully vaccinated the pandemic is “over”. But I hadn’t been thinking about (1), which may mean a much more lasting effect than I’d imagined.

Which is to say, over the next decade or two, skills and labor > capital.

bostonimproper
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Post by bostonimproper »

I’m starting the shift to calculate retirement plans in earnestness and am looking up local rates for health care (about what I expected) and college tuition (woah). I have learned that my alma mater is now charging fully $80K for tuition/room/board per year. When I went (about 10 years ago) it was half that, though I expect need-based aid eats up a lot of the sticker shock as it did for our family. Still, wtf is going on with college costs. Meanwhile, our flagship state is $30K/year. How does anyone afford all this? (Presumably oodles of debt?)

bostonimproper
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by bostonimproper »

Hello darkness my old friend

Lots of anxiety lately. But it’s weird. I can feel it physically even if it’s not registering with me emotionally. I am literally vibrating in place.

It’s from work, but also not. My job is a good one, objectively speaking. But I think my body has learned to care too deeply about work and that inflames my anxiety in some weird ways. Lighting candles after I finish work helps the tension unwind. Not feeling (with my emotions/brain) the stress that my body is clearly going through is a red flag though. It’s a bit scary, to be honest.

I’m doing all the usual self-care. Exercising almost daily. Eight hours of sleep. Haven’t had sugar or caffeine in who knows how long.

The weirdest things trigger it. I’ve been sitting in a lot of 1:1’s with high level people as part of my onboarding and there’s this overly-friendly thing that they do that I hate hate hate. I’m always thinking: “why the fuck am I in a meeting with this person?” (because my boss told me to) and can’t help but thinking they feel the same. Except they are much better at masking their feelings with magnanimous smiles and chill backgrounds of their newborn’s nursery (look! the rich are people too!). I feel demented, feel like crawling inside myself for being around people who are too nice to me. Except they drop off the call even faster than I do— a reminder that all the emotional labor is just transactional in the end.

zbigi
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by zbigi »

Yeah, corporate management culture has a bit of a kabuki theater vibe to it. That's one of the reasons, I prefer to stay in engineering jobs, even though I've had some managerial roles in the past - as an eng, nobody holds it against me if I'm "maladjusted" (i.e. behave like a human being, and not a corporate drone/psychopath) - everyone understands that technical people are flawed this way, and makes appropriate accomodations :)

bostonimproper
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Post by bostonimproper »

Life keeps keeping on. Work has stabilized. Sometimes I still have pangs of imposter syndrome, which unfortunately gets worse when I realize how much they are paying me. Anyhow, I should be able to peace out in a year. And then the post-retirement life begins.

My husband and I are not seeing eye to eye on this crypto thing. They told me the other day that they “don’t like that I have gotten into crypto”, which, given that it’s this area that I find interesting (one of the few that has sprung up organically, when I thought fun in my soul had completely died) hurts my feelings. It’s probably one of the dumbest privileged 21st century disagreements ever, but it is still there.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: bostonimproper's journal

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

How invested into crypto are you? If my partner put their retirement savings significantly into crypto I would see it as irresponsible and would be concerned I would end up paying for them. That said, doing so with the right coins in the recent past would have created a huge windfall so maybe the crypto person would be right but the stress and conflict would still damage the relationship.

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