Or project-based? If you are a writer, for example, it's usually project based.
Otherwise, if you really have a hard time setting boundaries, then you might be the type to orient yourself around the states of your social circles. They definitely have boundaries when they stop listening or caring.
If you can't say enough is enough yourself, let someone you trust, or in whose competence you trust, do it for you.
I would say something like "when does it stop being useful" but the 'real' infinite game is all about curiosity and there's almost no players, just uninterested and destructive shareholders, so I'm gonna go with "do you have a thread that connects it all or not?" If you don't, and it only leads to more and more excursions, fix that point of depth where some subject still interfaces with the other stuff and stop there.
The desires of certain character types culminate in leadership. Those with this character type who have actual visions that fit withing the symbiotic nature of our reality were about as wanted among their peers as alphas were wanted in human tribes where betas felt treated unfairly and thus ganged up on alphas and their offspring, then establishing fraudulent hierarchies alienated from individual competence, which was compensated by collectively established complexity that served to maintain and uphold the fraudulent hierarchies.
Over time, in IT, engineering and science, this lead to narrower and narrower fields of possibilities, aka probabilities that certain behavioral locks and refused directions and angles will be unlocked (after emerging).
Business psychology, marketing, sales, and culture and psychology are entangled and "envelop" instead of developing. It appears like an evolution but it's an alienation, a contiguous/continuous self-imposed, self-reinforcing isolation from and within a symbiotic, open system.
The complexity forces the reduction of productive points of friction in order to create atomic points of contact with the parent system that minimize even productive and constructive influence. This then enforces rules of self-preservation instead and dictates dogmas of engagement with the rest of the world.
It's the obfuscation of the oldest Ponzi scheme which prefers isolation in singularity rather than a symbiotic evolution. The first who makes it to the patent office vs FOSS. Factory farming for a fancier dinner table. Who cares how much is thrown away, how much energy is wasted and how any of that impacts the chemical cycles of a symbiotic system that kept optimizing for exactly that for billions of years--by design, via self-organization, not necessarily as a hard-coded yield. The world wide web feels similar, btw.
Again, it's a WIP. (I just whipped those paragraphs up, but there's an imaginary pin board with a lot of sticky notes ...)
a) I think I have a (a bit under?)average IQ but I have no idea. I have done ok in school but I have always needed more time, I am pretty slow. My chess ELO is between 1350-1450 but I learned the moves when I was 8 and started playing casually everyday for 3 years now.
b) 1 cigarette a day or none depending on the period. But rises significantly when drinking and partying
c) I am in good health and overheating is generally a problem that arises sooner that breath issues when exercising
Almost never sick. I get between 0 to 2 illnesses a year depending on how much I find myself with lots of people in a room
d) Hard to tell. I feel smarter than a lot of people but I only feel it's because I am much more curious. On the other hand, I am pretty slow. I have self-confidence/laziness issues that prevent me to actually look for a dev job.
Started smoking at 19, first occasionally, then regularly, now occasionally again
What do you say, doc ?
a) you never trained your IQ using methods designed to increase IQ, meaning your self-assessed avg IQ would increase significantly within 150 hours of IQ practice
b) 1 cigarette is irrelevant, which makes c) irrelevant in context.
d) It's common to feel smarter than the rest. Especially if you surround yourself with people who tend to keep their intelligence back for the sake of recreation and fun OR they never really tried for reasons.
Chess is cool, ELO 1350 - 1450 after 3 years of regular playing is also cool and shows that chess is something where you actually are trying, pointing at the fact that your self-confidence issues are merely the result of lack of practice aka consistent increases of mastery in subjects you care for (or want to care for).
Bottom line: You (most likely, > 0.97) did not lose any IQ points due to smoking. :D
It's not enough to explain the problem, IMO. And it's a problem that is worse in some population segments than others. Even in poor countries.
The mechanisms that separate more from less affected segments go back one and more generations, which is why it's not harder for parents to keep their kids on track despite "more stuff" but a lot of parents have it harder because their own brains/organisms are more affected than those of others.
And "some take more care of themselves than others" loops right back into my argument, which is so damn annoying.
It's taken me a great big freaking while to "rewire what fires together", including motivation and attention and I've looked at so many angles, while so many more and important ones require a bio-chem lab, an fMRI and PhD level knowledge in Molecular Bio-Tech.
Anyone wanna sponsor some of it :D? I'm serious, but among the elderly (37).
look at any connections to the thyroid gland, down and upstream.
Poor breathing = less NO, less oxygen → potential stress on thyroid metabolism (and almost any other metabolism).
NO is nitric oxide: the paranasal sinuses are a major source of NO gas.
And NO gas has antimicrobial effects (helps sterilize inhaled air), acts as a vasodilator (helps regulate blood flow and oxygen delivery), and enhances oxygen uptake in the lungs.
The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.
a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly
but more importantly:
b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.
c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.
people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.
And you start of with
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong
and end on
> This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.
on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.
> some people experience too much metacognition/reflection and that is actually correlated with depression/anxiety.
That's a misconception pushed for profit. It pops up a lot in different forms like "don't be such an individual" and makes marketing and mass psychology so much easier.
tl;dr: the problem is not problem, it's your attitude, dude.
Your brain is "cultured" and was wired to echo voices and opinions of peeps who seemed to have more fun when you were having thoughts and doubts about the things in discourse and you held back for one or more various reasons ( most times it's false pity or unjustified disgust because you were too proud of your own opinion, but you don't notice at all or way too late ) and so your brain ends up hallucinating depressive/anxious versions of unspoken things and reactions that never got to manifest.
It has NOTHING to do with intelligence, but the higher proportion of HN readers still falls into this category because the bulk of people under any slice under the bell curve falls into this category.
You can be as meta and reflective as you like, while meditating or not, just don't make the mistake of being nice or holding back. You don't have to be brutal or radical but in most cases, even when you are, someone or some train of thought will easily keep you grounded, albeit sometimes, someone (again, or some train of thought) will attempt to candygrab you onto their (your) cutesy little roller coaster. (Just vomit all over them/it, as soon as you notice and get back to your self.)
If you don't hold back any thoughts, feelings, perspectives about what makes you feel depressed or anxious, you are going to have a good time. Letting go can work but when it comes to some (micro)-(traumatic) experiences, it's better to resolve "their" and your arrogance about the experienced and the never lived, never said, never heard. That way you, even though you don't break the loop right away, you create a simultaneous bypass or parallel circuit that fires up bunches of synaptic connections that find better, less crippling ways to deal with whatever the loop is focused on or around.
You don't read about this because even your favorite teachers are "cultured".
If talking to LLMs about stuff like that, make sure they are local and your system is secure. And you have to make sure your LLM doesn't sugarcoat you or any problem. Especially if you fine tune it for psychology. It's an LLM but it learned from texts of people who are for profit and who will go at lengths to self-preserve who they are and what they learned. Your LLM needs to be radically honest with you and the variety of ways one can think about stuff, which is not something they do by default or anywhere in the top 30-70% of the weights.
PS: Whatever gets to any company will be used for profit and to update profiles of entire population segments. It's not necessarily systemic but there are always individuals inside the companies, inside gov. institutions and MITM everywhere.
> assume the system will react to resist intervention
Systems don't do that. Only constituents who fear particular consequences do.
Systems also don't care about levels of complexity. Especially since it's insanely hard to actually break systems that are held together by only the "what the fuck is going on, let's look into that" kind. Hours, days, weeks, later, things run again. BILLIONS lost. Oh, we wish ...
At the end of the day, the term Systems Thinking is overloaded by all the parts that have been invented by so called economists and "the financial industry", which makes me chuckle every time now that it's 2025 and oil rich countries have been in development for decades, the advertisement industry is factory farming content creators and economists and multi-billionaires want more tikktoccc and instagwam to get into the backs of teen heads.
If you are a SWE, systems architect or anything in that sphere, please, ... act like you care about the people you are building for ... take some time off if you can and take care of must be taken care of, ... it's just systems, after all.
You make a fine point. My simplified version of it is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Things change. A system optimized for one environment is likely to fail when things change. Most of the hugely successful firms of today focus more on controlling their environment than on developing a capacity to adapt to unforeseeable consequences of unforeseen changes in their environment, even the ones that they cause themselves.
I think we were not using the same definition of “system” :)
> there is no such thing as an isolated system.
Very true.
Look no further than evolutionary biology, you see this all the time where extinctions occur because the environment changes such that the system is no longer optimal.
> where extinctions occur because the environment changes such that the system is no longer optimal
What if we looked at the extinct species as constituents that have been removed because they were obsolete in the system? That way, the system remains optimal, without resisting change.
The system of humanity requires a lot. We used to say "survival of the fittest", which meant survival of the fittest and the "most aware", meaning being able to distinguish which survival strategy is the most viable for a given organism.
Fight, flight, freeze, dominance, independence, submission, DIY, DOBUY; the latter are especially interesting given how reduced information about the requirements and the sensitivities of the individual body can cripple your organs to a point that is more beneficial for some interest group than it is to you; in other words: someone can make sure you are stupid enough to be abused for some specific task until you can be discarded of. At this point we don't know if the system will survive more than one period because of the interest group or suffer within one or more periods because of that interest group.
In evolutionary biology, more symbiotic organisms and systems survived a lot longer that those who were less symbiotic, on scales that modern humans can't put into adequate numbers yet.
Isolated systems do exist. They can be isolated and they can self-isolate for various reasons and by various means. This happens even in species/systems we mostly consider mostly unconscious while definitely sentient and aware.
Wear and tear and maintenance, leeching and seeding, putting info and questions into words and lurking; none of these really attach a system to another by default, by design or via behavior, reward and punishment. The rules go beyond that and stretch longer time frames than we account for.
Or project-based? If you are a writer, for example, it's usually project based.
Otherwise, if you really have a hard time setting boundaries, then you might be the type to orient yourself around the states of your social circles. They definitely have boundaries when they stop listening or caring.
If you can't say enough is enough yourself, let someone you trust, or in whose competence you trust, do it for you.
I would say something like "when does it stop being useful" but the 'real' infinite game is all about curiosity and there's almost no players, just uninterested and destructive shareholders, so I'm gonna go with "do you have a thread that connects it all or not?" If you don't, and it only leads to more and more excursions, fix that point of depth where some subject still interfaces with the other stuff and stop there.