Not the OP but I agree with you. Synergy, as cheesy as it sounds, is a happy way to look at meaning making. The dance between friends, colleagues, families that keeps us all happy and together...
I found this essay to be supremely logical and insightful but also pessimistic from a unitary point of view.
My days now consist of finding happy people who are doing things I also think are cool. Like, pappy the Japanese pianist on TikTok. God she's so infectiously joyful. Yes it's a plug for her. Heh. Meaning making
I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, there's some problematic etiology of perfectionism that can be healed, like needing to avoid criticism and shame for supposedly doing a bad job and wanting to please people excessively to your own detriment. But striving for excellence because you get social recognition and praise for your work is maybe healthy? If you enjoy what you do and want to make the client happy because it makes you feel good to know you did something great for someone, idk, that would motivate me to be perfect.
When it talked about perinatal experience something clicked for me. I've dabbled in mushrooms and Vipassana and after I left a meditation center I had that same spiritual emergency. But when I did sensory deprivation floats and practiced Vipassana in there, the death anxiety and derealization went away. I had to come back to attachments too but emerging from a pod that's warm and moist did help. Perinatal integration, perhaps.
I know it's a band-aid solution, but for me as someone with ADHD stimulants help a lot - but I don't say this to discount your recommendations which are effective. With stimulants, I'll usually find the right attitude or perspective to accomplish whatever task is at hand. If it's boring, I know I can find a way to automate or delegate its completion. If it's too exciting (too complex to be actionable), I'll redefine it to be actionable. If neither of these apply, I know it's something very novel and creative that stimulants will probably not help with its fruition.
I'm wildly speculating here, but what if dying one's hair increases the odds of getting more romantic action (and thus more social relationships), which itself is associated with increased cognitive flexibility? If Alzheimer's is a lifestyle disease of an unfulfilling, unstimulating life, maybe the key is to seize each day?
How about a feature to collect and present keywords in saved job ads so as to highlight those skills or experience worth most to review, learn and (in preparation for an interview) verbally recite about? E.g., 5 out of 6 saved ads mention Java, 3 out of 6 mention HTML, and 1 mentions machine learning. Then your app would help the user discover what is worth most spending time on in preparation for a potential interview and help to organize the time and notes about that preparation (in the latter case, an example would be fetching common interview questions for Java, then coaching the user by having a mock interview with feedback).
This is what Hired does. The issue is that they suggest stuff that’s not really helpful for me, e.g. suggesting I add Java as a top skill even though I’m a frontend leaning engineer with nearly no Java experience.
One unfortunate problem is how easy it is for employees and employers alike to contrive a situation, with respect to mental illness, to force a desired outcome.
For the employee, good luck proving that management was complicit or negligent in the formation and continuation of a hostile working environment. At-will employment means it's your word against theirs in a wrongful termination suit, assuming someone mentally ill even has the resources and conviction to pursue a legal remedy. And ADA-related laws and protections, even if they can apply to someone with an "invisible disability", are difficult to invoke without social fallout. It's a catch-22.
For employers, how can you discern and remove a truly disgruntled, incompetent, malingering or indolent employee (from management's perspective) in an efficient manner, when perhaps the first-principle reason for those employee's shortcomings are related to mental illness?
ADA ought not to be intertwined with employment, rather there needs to be a more sophisticated social safety net and support programs for people with mental illness, instead of burdening employers with some of the responsibility which they have no business-rational reason to respectfully abide by.
Here's a radical idea: except for drugs with a high abuse-liability, all psychoactive medications could be allowed "behind the counter" like pseudoephedrine. The psychiatrist's role becomes strictly advisory (coupled with medical malpractice waivers), and the patient is free to experiment with whatever substance they like so as to find their best fit. People already "self-medicate" for focus and arousal with xanthines in coffee and chocolate, and for anxiety with anxiolytics like gabanergic ethanol in alcohol and partial serotonin agonist cannabidiol in cannabis. This is just opening the floodgates a bit more for those who aren't afraid to learn about psychopharmacology and work closely with their doctor in managing their mood and attention.
If this sounds crazy or spurious, then you'll probably agree that fixing abnormal psychology is actually as complicated as debugging the world's most complex software system.
I found this essay to be supremely logical and insightful but also pessimistic from a unitary point of view.
My days now consist of finding happy people who are doing things I also think are cool. Like, pappy the Japanese pianist on TikTok. God she's so infectiously joyful. Yes it's a plug for her. Heh. Meaning making