2023-11-15 Pre-Traumatic Stress Order

What I Did

FRONT-END:

In this relatively wild season, my spousefriendwoman has been much more productive than I expected:

Apparently, the momentum of my past efforts means the outward-facing publishing schedule will keep going on.

I’ve also updated quite a bit on my toolbox.

BACK-END:

Been pounding away on parsing the thousands of links I’ve scraped.

I moved around lots of stuff, most publicly that my new GitHub profile has whatever old stuff I had made from before.

What I Learned

My family will be going on a vacation for a tiny bit, and it may be the first time I’ve ever had a hiatus that wasn’t connected to a job loss. It feels surreal, and I’ve been feeling displaced.

Sometimes, things just happen, and there’s no reason to over-define meaning to it. Everyone has bad luck, missed opportunities, and experiences mistreatment. People get in horrific accidents, lose jobs, get divorced, get arrested, and experience loved ones dying prematurely simply because of bad luck and/or fate and/or God willing it. There’s nothing special about it, and it sucks.

But, if you’ve been through trauma, it’s very easy to over-assign meaning to the events that happened, as if there was some sort of significance to it, or that you could have done something to prevent it. This typically forces an action plan defined by the past onto the future. Maybe if you had been more educated, or trusted the institutional system, or didn’t trust the institutional system, or had been more organized, or worked harder, then that awful thing might not have happened.

But, no amount of effort can fix what happened. The trauma has come and gone, and you’re left holding the bag. Good luck.

This doesn’t mean it’s hopeless, but the followup activities by most people, effectively, often cause as much trauma as the initial trauma that created the situation. This ripples into a recursive pattern of trauma/solace-seeking/trauma that can lead to a bitter and depressing old age if left untreated.

The solution? Not sure, but being aware of it is a huge beginning stage of the healing. I ran across the Enright Process recently, and it was good enough to make its way onto my unhappiness page.

My theory is to accept what you can’t change, which is a long-standing trend, first purportedly stated by Reinhold Niebuhr, then ripped off and used by addiction recovery groups everywhere:

  • O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

The personal approach I use is more granular, and less sentimental:

  1. If it can be changed, shut up and do it.
  2. If it can’t be changed, risk-assess and then ignore it.
  3. If unknown, halt everything and observe more carefully.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

  • Working in an insurance office right now.
  • Keeping a home together with a woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
  • Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

Haphazardly bouncing through the easiest pickings of my Grandiose Essay Project, which spans most of my Trendless Tech essays, some remaining NotaGenius essays, and my toolbox:

  1. Toolbox piles:
    • Sifting through about 1,209 files scraped from an obsessive hoarder’s scraping of others’ scrapings for anything of use.
    • Cross-referencing those tools with any stored tools that may have relevance to my essays, then writing on the essays as I go.
  2. NAG/TT technical debt – 8 pages:
    • Articles where I thought, “oh boy I need to write on that!” about an existing essay, but never got to it.
  3. TT easy pages – 3 pages:
  4. TT pages I can visualize – 15 pages:
  5. TT pages that are hard for me to conceive the final product – 20 pages:
  6. TT pages which are very large hairballs of many things, or where I have very limited knowledge – 10 pages?:
  7. NAG Management pages have several independent-but-related mechanisms – 13-30+ pages?:
    • Management summarized, in general
    • NAG+TT – Specific management necessary for working with tech.
    • NAG+TLS – Specific management necessary for running a church, which may diverge into quite a bit of Christian history.
  8. NAG Entrepreneurship pages are less elaborate – 11-21+ pages?:
    • Entrepreneurship summarized, in general.
    • NAG+TT – Specific entrepreneurship for the tech industry.
    • NAG+TLS – What it takes to plant a church or start a ministry.
  9. Beyond that, trying to learn math in a way my formal education has failed me 8-16+ pages?:
    • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is.
    • The trek is along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education.
      1. Basic arithmetic
      2. Algebra
      3. Geometry/trigonometry
      4. Statistics
      5. Calculus
      6. Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.