Auriion

The biggest impact to philosophy on my life is the pruning of the toxic people around me. It's kind of funny looking back. I used to think, "man, I wish that these people would just stop making my life difficult". Before my acceptance of philosophy, I would not have created standards for my relationships and thus caused the poor quality ones to fall by the way side. This is the single biggest reason I feel I am so much happier on a day to day basis. I became more honest and ended up with only people who appreciate my honesty in my life. Including my wife, who does not nag, enjoys my existence, shares the same goals in life as me, argues peacefully, so on and so forth. Such a woman would have never entered my life had I just let the inertia of my family continue with me. TLDR; my life is way better now

This makes me both smile and frown for this kid. http://fox2now.com/2014/08/28/video-mommys-big-secret/

I think being more active allowed me to provide more comprehensive feedback to my managers. At the beginning of this issue, I was disconnected and unsure what my expectations were. The more I reached out and demanded feedback, the more my managers seemed to chill out regarding the productivity of my work. Another aspect of the reaching out is that it helps me stay on the same page as my managers in terms of priorities. I would say that I would probably have been fine simply doing that while my productivity was more of a cherry on top, though I personally hate feeling like I'm not being more productive. Like Stefan has said before, I want to be worth more than what they were paying me so my job can be legitimately justified. On top of that, my day just feels better when I get more done. In regards to my team lead, his mannerisms and management techniques aren't what I would call top notch. In learning as much as I can about his past (indirectly), I've found ways to work around his perceived short-comings and has thus caused him to be very happy with me. On a personal level I have a hard time connecting with him still. He's older than me and likes to poke fun at how old he is which kind of alienates me since I don't really care. Ultimately, I made it clear to him that I simply want to meet the business needs as much as I can and he's been receptive to that. Can't complain too much there.

I just wanted to update you guys on my current situation with my job. Since you all gave me many aspects to look at, I figured I would lay my current state to these aspects in an organized fashion. Perhaps someone else who is in a similar situation will find this useful or perhaps it will satiate any potential curiosity. To address my initial issue, my gut pain hasn't come back since about 3 days after the beginning of my probationary period, but there was still this 'gun to my head' anxiety present through out this period. As of last week, my managers and HR agreed that my performance was beyond satisfactory and were happy to continue working with me. What did I do as a response to the feedback you guys gave me? I took a defensive, information-gathering position to start out with while being extra careful to meet all the expectations of my managers so that they couldn't pin me with anything. After I felt I had sufficiently showed that I could be productive and available, I took an active role in acquiring feedback regarding the satisfaction level of my work. I would demand the attention of my team lead when I had issues to convey and acted as a mediator for planning meetings when necessary. This entire time, I felt anxious and stressed and felt like a chicken with its head cut off. I clearly outdid the expectations of my management and was even complimented on how they wished more employees were like me, but I didn't feel particularly happy. My main motivation was the stable money at this point. Now that I'm done with this period, the 'gun to my head' disappeared. Oddly enough, I feel even more productive even though I don't feel as stressed. The energy of the team I'm a part of has been the best I've ever seen it before. Maybe it's just the relief of not being put on the spot anymore, but I'm very happy now with my job life and I feel more connected to my teammates. I'm not sure I would have been able to collect myself and set myself up for success without you guys empathizing/sympathizing with me and sharing with me your opinion of my situation. It means a lot to me! Thanks again guys, and if you ever have any issues you'd like my opinion on, I would be extremely happy to provide it judgement-free!

@DanielB You make a good point. If I were honest I'd say I do feel resentment for being passed over. Up until that point my excitement for my job was very high. Afterward, I stopped doing some of the things I felt a team lead would be doing and left it for the new team lead to figure out. I hate to think of myself as petty but it is disappointing when you work hard and it gets trumped. In the meantime, I've been doing my best to be proactive about my work and concerns to my managers to show that I respond to feedback. They appear to be appreciating it but I still have this fairly constant anxiety now about my work. I do also think that my team lead and I need to talk about this in some more depth so we can be on the same page. @J-William I would say you are correct about your assessment of my passiveness in relation to this situation. It doesn't feel right to say that I'm a passive person in general but that might be my pride trying to convince me otherwise. I'm definitely choose the route of going with the flow over confrontation when it comes to situations I don't agree with just because I perceive it as being easier. I would also say that this passiveness was the best way to handle disagreements with my parents. This is particularly insightful as I now have memories of times judgement was being brought down upon me and the best thing I could do was be passive and submissive. A very similar gut feeling took place then as well.

@Heath Long After taking in your suggestion, I have to admit that I feel a sense of fear in terms of looking for another job. This might be because it's my second job after my duration at a web agency that used to take in projects like crazy and demanded results under crazy deadlines. I managed to leave that job without any hard feelings and got my current job where the overall mentality was completely different. Instead of working late to meet deadlines, I got to go home at 5. Instead of rushed projects with no idea if it was even possible, we had planning meetings. So to go from there to here was such a huge shift for me and I'd hate to move on to another job where it was back to an environment like my previous one. Then again, I simply do not know what other environments are like out there. Did you find in your searching that most companies are run like my first example rather than my second?

I really appreciate your connecting with my situation. I actually started to tear up which was finally a relief since I had felt like crying this whole time but it wouldn't come out. My guess is knowing that someone could relate to me and that I'm not alone in this helped me feel ok with showing some emotional 'weakness'. I will also say that until I read this, I had a feeling that I didn't have anyone to relate to so it made me feel like I'm the exception and that there's something wrong with me. My feeling in my gut is now no longer a feeling of unbearable pain but more of a knot now. That's a good point actually. My previous managers were always more understanding and worked with me when they didn't agree with something I did. As a result, attendance was never really an issue since I was always in the loop on what's going on. If anything I use it as an excuse for my lack of sense of importance to the morning meeting. I always tended to feel like my reports fell on deaf ears since it was usually, "Yes, I'm still on this project. Not done yet. But it's progressing". I keep trying to think of past events that felt like what I'm experiencing now emotionally. I've definitely had a childhood of physical abuse, minimalization, weak father figure, religious indoctrination, and a general lack of connection to my parents. So it might be that it was a constant thing I had to deal with rather than a few major incidents. I definitely connect with the term "failure" since it's something I never want to be perceived as and it feels relevant to the current circumstances. In fact, the sheet they handed me was full of my failures according to their standards.

Hey guys, I'm not sure I understand what's going on with me here so I'm curious what you all think is the issue. I work with a web development company as a senior developer. I've been here 3 or 4 years and my happiness level with it has had its ups and downs, but never the kind of down I've experienced yesterday. The lead up to this event was that I had my team lead, whom I had a good connection to, leave for another job. Not so long afterward a new developer was hired and then after some time was promoted to team lead over me. He is an experienced individual with more time under his belt than me so it made sense. However, my connection with the new lead wasn't as active as it was with my previous lead. Then I decided to take on a project with a longer timeline. This ended up kind of isolating me from the rest of the group including my team lead. I thought things were fine though because my team lead and I would have one on one's roughly once a month and the conversations were lively and positive. He seemed ok with my isolation in light of my longer project duration expectations. Then one day I had missed my second morning stand up in a row. This wasn't professional of me, I know. It was due in part because of my nose being so deep in the project I was working on. My team lead's manager then expressed his dissatisfaction with my lack of attendance which was warranted. I agreed and told him that I would not isolate myself so much with this project anymore, especially since it was coming to an end soon. He further pushed the conversation into his dissatisfaction with my performance in general. I know I haven't been producing as quickly as I had liked but I didn't think it was a huge issue. So, I told him I would address my performance more directly and apologized. That was the end of the conversation. So at this point I am trying to get things done at a more urgent rate and trying to listen for feedback so I can react to it more sensitively. Then the next day I get called into HR's office with my team lead and my manager. I was told I had a fork in the road and that if I wanted to make my managers happy that I had to address the points on this sheet of paper they handed me. Most of the items on the paper outlined what my manager brought up in the previous conversation. Some items were related to my team lead's dissatisfaction with how I was during meetings. These were a surprise since we had one on one's that were very positive as I mentioned before. I leave HR's office rather confused and when I got home, I started having pains in my gut that wouldn't go away. It was almost as if I wanted to cry but my body wouldn't let me. I tried just talking out my stress, playing a video game and eating a good dinner. Still, pain. I went to bed early and I basically fell asleep due to pain exhaustion. When I woke up, it came back. What's going on here? I have an empirical understanding of what's happening but my gut won't stop hurting. The pain is almost like how you would describe heartbreak but in the gut instead. I.e. it doesn't feel like a physical emergency. The only thing that seems to have addressed the pain is literally filling out this spreadsheet of the status of my work they're having me fill out twice a day. Is it related to my body's need to please authority? Any feedback appreciated. I'd like to make sense of this. Thank you

I find this an interesting point as it highlights the value we currently have from the information that was passed down to us from our ancestry regarding the common threats to human life. Even if you argued that humans would still retain their language and instincts, it could be counter-pointed by the fact that the threats on this new world may be completely unrecognizable to the instincts that were evolved to deal with earth-based events.

I'll look into the Allison Glopnik content you suggested. Also, I would never personally suggest people be transported or made to lose their memories by force. It was just a means to satisfy the clean-slate requirement of the hypothetical.

Hey guys, I'm curious to get your feedback on this hypothetical: Say a healthy number of humans were transported to a brand new habitable world similar to Earth. Then remove the past memories of these humans by inducing amnesia somehow. These humans, besides the amnesia, have healthy brains and were not abused as children. My curiosity here is as to the likelihood these humans would fall into statist community organization or would they resemble a community similar to an anarcho-capitalist society? I.E. Would simply the presence of healthy, intelligent brains influence the formation of statist or free societies if there was no reference to any past history? I understand this is a hypothetical that doesn't have a feasible premise. In other words, I'm not proposing this hypothetical to show a way we can solve our problems in today's world. It's merely a mental exercise to explore the evidence that supports one outcome or the other for curiosity's sake. I'd appreciate hearing your opinions!

I came to this thread to answer this question: Is the fact that the size of the blockchain is getting increasingly larger a good reason to disregard bitcoin as a valid currency? Judging from the feedback here, the answer appears to be: No, for the following reasons: You don't need to download the entire block chain. Servers that provide full blockchain services have no control over the bitcoin supply. Bitcoin does some excellent size management and is continuing to better optimize its disk space. Memory technology and data transfer rates continue to go up in size and speed; further staving off the effect of an enormous blockchain. Thanks Bulbasaur, Wesley, and Magenta!