I do have a diagnosis of ADHD (I probably should have mentioned that in my post). I think that I struggle with knowing what the essentials are, especially given that I’m in this situation as a result of cutting my life down below even the essential essentials. A lot of the stuff that’s causing mess isn’t necessarily clutter that could be gotten rid of, but important stuff that needs to have a home
I have a reasonable amount of space for the stuff I need, but I’m in a weird position where, when it’s tidy, my room looks weirdly sparse and empty (with the exception of various boxes). It looks like the home of someone who has recently moved in.
Are you able to talk more about how you have been slowly finding places for things? Like if you come across an item that has no clear place to go, how do you approach that problem? For me, I usually start with “okay, if you don’t know where it would go, perhaps it’s unneeded and you should throw it out”. Whilst there have been times when that has been true, and I have binned the item, by now, the majority of the times I ask myself this, it’s something that I definitely do need, but I’m not sure how to go about carving out space for the item.
I appreciate the perspective in your second paragraph. I am aware of how tumultuous history makes me better at handling huge, high stakes crises (despite struggling to cope with minor issues), but I hadn’t considered how that dynamic could be affecting this quest.
When you are aiming to give everything a place, do you tend to do it from a bottom-up, item-by-item perspective, or a top-down, categories-then-items approach? For example, the top down mode is like if I defined a category like “nail-care”, and then listed/gathered the items that belonged to that category (nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file, etc.) and designated a home for that category. The bottom up one might start with me actually using the nail clippers and then thinking “where should this one item go?” I find it especially hard to find homes for individual, loose items like this, but if I don’t put them somewhere, then when I stumble across other things in that category (cuticle oil etc.), I can’t find the nail clippers, which hinders the ability of categories to begin to form.
I find categories useful because my working memory is trash (likely ADHD related, which I should have mentioned in my post). Like, by encapsulating a list of 3 items (e.g. nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file) with a category, it abstracts away a lot of unnecessary information and I’ve reduced the problem from “find homes for these three items” to “find a home for the nail stuff”. Currently, the default place for most of my stuff is for it to be spread across a couple of large boxes, and that makes it impossible for categories to form. I also often find myself paralysed with dread because I have historically found it useful to ensure I return items to their designated places, and my inability to find places for things causes me to just not use the things.
I do have a diagnosis of ADHD (I should have probably mentioned that in the post).
“Build systems that work for you today and get you closer to where you want to be.”
The problem is that I don’t think there are any systems that work for me today, in the sense that I am so deeply unfulfilled with my life at present that trying to build around me as I am now just leads to a sense of stagnation that really harms my morale. I think the key part of the above snippet is the “and get you closer to where you want to be”, and that’s the million dollar question.
I’ll check out the book you recommended, thanks.
I have found that a similar approach has drastically decreased the amount of unnecessary stuff I have over the course of many years. The problem that I’m faced with now is that the various high quality things that I mindfully bought are functionally out of reach because everything is boxed up and disorganised.
It’s so good. I moved somewhere with a large Chinese community, so items like this are stocked in my local supermarket. I had heard about it and assumed it was overhyped, but after trying it, I see how versatile it is.
Fla already explained the rough logic behind it, but I also think a big part of it is that people have a habit of approaching advice like this too dogmatically. For example, guidance that says “commenting your code is not a substitute for sensible structure and variable names”, and someone may read that and go “I shouldn’t use comments, got it”. Certainly I have seen (and written) code that overuses comments in a manner that the average comment has pretty low information value — for me, this was because I was inexperienced at writing code other people would use, and comments were things that I felt I should do, without properly understanding how to do it. Like if there’s a line that says a += b, I don’t need a comment that says “# adds b to a”. That misses the point of comments entirely, and would make important comments harder to see, and the code harder to understand.
Another area where I often see this overly rigid mindset is the acronym “DRY”, which means “don’t repeat yourself.” It’s a decent principle, and it’s helped me to identify larger structural problems in my code before. However, some people take it to an extreme and treat it as an absolute, inviolable law, rather than a principle. In some circumstances, repeating oneself would improve the overall code.
If I had to choose between code that had sensible variables and structure, but no comments, and code that was opaque but heavily commented, I’d probably choose the former. However, in practice, it’s a “why not both” situation. It’s less about the comments than how well they’re used, and identifying comments as a code smell may be an attempt to get people to approach code readability slightly differently and using comments more wisely.
Well damn. I wasn’t expecting to be adding a new book to my reading list as a result of this thread, but y’all’s enthusiasm is such that I feel I have to.
Borrowing a passage from David Graeber:
“At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.”
Or phrased another way:
If the question at hand is “bad actors exist. What should society do about them?”, Anarchism as a school of thought is an attempt to answer that. It’s not a solved problem, so Anarchism is far from the only possible answer to that question. For example, someone else might argue that an authoritarian government is the best way to solve the bad actor problem. Of course, I would disagree with this hypothetical person, but my point is that social movements like anarchism arise in response to some crisis, tension or problem in society — if society was working well for everyone and everyone got along, then anarchist thought would have never emerged. Whether you feel it’s an effective answer to the problem is a different matter, but to properly analyse it, we need to recognise what anarchism is trying to do.
This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded “you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?”. They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.
So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn’t long after this that he started teaching. It’s a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)
I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered https://rosalind.info/ and cursed the fact that I hadn’t had access to that when I was learning.
“I became sexually active at 26 after folks from the kink community noticed my nerdy vibe, and they schooled me in some basic human interaction.”
Solidarity fist bump. My own experience was somewhat different, but there is the common ground of learning communication skills on a lag, and learning from a niche community of lovely weirdos
Oooh, give me some of the words on your words list. I have one of my own, and accordingly, will share a random selection of recent entries: “that”; “nuisance”;“apotheosis”; “knobbly”; “vehement”; “perfidious”; “befitting”; “timid”; “verisimilitude”; “knack”.
During COVID, I had a mental breakdown when I finished a university exam (which had been at home, on my computer) and was desperate to be anywhere but at my desk, sitting at my computer. However, I was also desperate to decompress with my friends, but they were in my computer.
When the UK switched to using plastic for the denominations of money that come as notes (£5, £10, £20, £50), people who use cocaine found that the new, plastic notes had a tendency to cut or scratch their nose. Because the £5 notes were the first ones to be switched to plastic, and they have Winston Churchill on them, apparently this phenomenon was termed “being Winstoned”. E.g. “careful with that, you don’t want to be Winstoned”.
I have no other point to make, I just think that this is hilarious.
No sexy man companions? Psh. And they call us man haters
No, Anarchism is one of the approaches one can take when we acknowledge that there are bad actors, and that there is no magic method to make everyone get along. If there were such magic, there would be no need for Anarchism.
I’m not saying that leeks are onions (though they are alliums, i.e. of the same family). To me, whilst they do taste quite different to onions, there is still a flavour that I would describe as onion-y
I mean, whilst it might not be the worth thing that could happen from trying this, the thing that already has happened is bad enough: I threw away the majority of stuff that I owned, which did involve getting rid of a lot of clutter, but also involved getting rid of a bunch of important and/or necessary things. Some of those things were necessary enough that they got repurchased. However, because of difficulties in organising what I do have (even when that’s only the bare essentials), then I am living in chaotic inconsistency.
To give a concrete example, I have asthma and I’m meant to take a preventer inhaler twice a day. My asthma is practically non-existent if I keep on top of that, but I haven’t been able to be consistent with it. That led to me having to have paramedics come out a while back because after a flare up, I also wasn’t able to find my blue reliever inhaler. Fortunately I live in a country where that doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, but that kind of situation is what I’m trying to avoid — the cumulative impact of not having the things that I need to be okay