As person with a similarly vicious voice, part of the answer lies in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques - information is the enemy of hyper-criticism (usually, anyway).
The voice of your own critical judgment can be vicious, but if you're on board with that you're not, nor are you somehow supposed to be, some kind of rational Messiah with all the perfections and answers, but rather regular person doing their best, subject to the usual problems and issues that beset humans all the time, it's much easier to remind the voice, almost as if going one voice deeper - giving the hyper critical voice it's OWN voice - that it's being harsh to a standard that virtually no one has ever or will ever meet, that there are reason you or other did things the way they did (even if those reasons include "we didn't have time to research any other way, and the resources that would've made it possible or trivial like it feels now came about after we finished this.").
Anyway - basic idea here is to give you voice a voice and whip back around and overflow into the regular critical space where criticism can be healthy instead of incessant and damaging. I hope it works for you! It works fairly well for me, but I'll admit freely that sometimes I do feel like such a massive twat that BOTH voice roll their eyes at me. XD
+1. If you find it difficult to actually go to therapy, I'd also recommend the book 'Feeling Good'.
A negative voice is really just a bad habit that is hard to even see you have or that there's another way. It sort of just boils down to faking it for a while -- each time you criticize yourself, stop, think about why you are being way too critical and that it's not a really fair logical analysis, and speak to yourself kindly the same way you would to a friend. It feels super fake and pointless, but fake it for a while and all of a sudden you've developed a good habit instead that no longer feels so fake and actually works.
I’m not convinced that it is bad - at least, in moderation.
I am pathologically lazy. I, like a certain student wizard, will go to extreme lengths and effort to be able to be lazy.
I am a procrastinator. I am often afraid to act.
I have a tool, however, and it’s the drill sergeant in my head. He’s an absolute sonofabitch, and on so many occasions has been the voice that has told me to step forward, to pick up the phone, to pull myself together and go face the music. He’s an amped-up version of a drill sergeant I had, crossbred with the gunnery sergeant from FMJ.
He did, however, push me too damn far, and I found myself slowly falling apart from exhaustion and stress - so, like you suggest, I manifested another voice - this one more conciliatory, kinder, more understanding.
I made the second voice the drill sergeant’s wife - when he’s being a total dick, she intervenes, and importantly, he respects her opinion, even if I side with him - I have internalised a lot of his vim and vigour - but if he backs down, I’ll take it - if he doesn’t, then I’ll do as he damn well says.
So, now I’m the puppet of two self-invented alters, but I find they manage me pretty well. When I was building the business, just having sergeant dickhead was perfect - when I started running into the ground, I evolved my pantheon.
Anyway. I’m probably as mad as a bag of cats.
I wonder what proportion of people who do this had absent or disengaged parents.
I received a great piece of advice once. A person asked "If you had a child you loved that looked up to you that was struggling with something, would you be encouraging, patient and instructive to them or would be vicious, degrading, or abusive? --- Of course it would be the former. . . now treat yourself that way."
+1 for "Feeling Good". It is the book that kicked off CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and it gives you great perspective to seemingly simple questions like: what do most people feel, expect, and how to do they treat themselves? When I realized what a counterproductive jerk my inner voice was, I toned it down and it is far more productive now.
Long time fan of Dr Burns (Feeling Good, and his other books), but his mentioning of thoughts as voices reminded me of something I just started learning about: ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, another therapy which is newer) in which you are mindful of thoughts, images, and sensations, but instead of trying to get them to stop you use some mindfulness techniques such as taking the thought X and making it “I am having the thought X” in order to separate your observing mind vs your thinking mind, and other techniques like that. You then connect with your values and take effective action towards those goals despite what you were feeling or thinking, rather than struggling against them which causes more problems. Of course I can’t explain it in a paragraph either but I found a good video yesterday[1] or the self help book that’s good for that is “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris.
I played varsity sports as a teenager, and the most helpful advice my coaches ever gave me was to control our inner voice to be positive. The best way to get out of a slump and back into "the zone" is to be positive and celebrate minor victories, since minor victories lead to more victories and eventually add up to major victories.
It sounds simple, but it's actually quite challenging to control inner discourse since you can't control your subconscious mind.
I totally agree. I am a person with strong internal dialogue, with a critical edge that is balanced between the criticized and criticized, and an underlying approach/attitude that "it's all good, don't worry, gonna be great".
Some people puke in their mouth to embrace positive loops in their head. They think it is so fake. But it works. And of course I'm lucky and grateful.
A back and forth of willing and continual self criticism and self-love, based on a deep self optimism -- that's an example of wisdom I'd hope to pass on to my kids.
I love a good name, one that is spelled such that many/most native speakers of the language will pronounce it approximately correctly when they see it, and isn’t too difficult to spell, but also lets a person feel a baseline differentiation - to not be drone#6472567.
I am <banal name>#4235862, and I DO find that annoying. Often cannot even differentiate me from the many holders of my name by adding my last initial, or even my entire last name.
Grass is always greener, I guess. I would love to be unsearchable on the Internet. There are fewer than five people in the world with my name as far as I know. One of them, younger than me, did start playing college football about a decade ago and all of a sudden took over the top search results, which was good, but it's still pretty easy to distinguish us with any kind of real search.
(My first name is nothing unusual, this is due to my last name. I gave my kids what I would consider fairly common first names, though again due to the last name there are only a few others of each.)
I really get pissed when popular software takes on humann names. Like for example , the name “Siri”, Alexa, Cortana are all dead names now and the poor souls who are named that right now!!! Also people named Jason who work in tech (.json files)
I find "Jason" hilarious because I have multiple coworkers with that name... I wonder how often they turn their heads whenever someone talks about JSON. Fortunately, where I live, almost everybody pronounces JSON with stress on the second syllable (jase-ON / [d͡ʒɛɪs'ɒn] or [d͡ʒɛɪ'sɒn]) so it's not quite a homophone. I have a friend who works for a company where people actually do pronounce JSON like "Jason", and he's ranted to me so many times about how the way his coworkers pronounce things is weird (he's also ranted about how they pronounce "epoch" like "epic").
And at least Siri isn't used much in the Anglosphere... I still feel sorry for people in Nordic countries who can't use that name anymore, but I honestly didn't even know it was a human name until after the Apple product came out.
Oh, and my cousin has a kid named Alexis. Somehow, I have a feeling that they will never ever get an Amazon Echo. It would be too awkward if Alexa pipes up whenever she's trying to talk to her kid.
I have a depressingly banal name and have experienced pretty serious annoyance about it. I wouldn’t say depression, but when society already makes me feel like a faceless drone, being <banal name>#476 exacerbates the problem substantially.
Sometimes mental illness turns a person into the moral equivalent of a natural disaster. We don’t exactly blame natural disasters for arriving. They didn’t intend malice towards us. But we don’t therefore let them destroy our homes or kill us because there was no malicious intent behind the disaster. We batten down the hatches, make our homes storm and earthquake proof, we douse fires in water and build protective cellars.
Sometimes when mental illness turns a person into a malicious abuser, we have to protect ourselves regardless of whether we blame them fully for their actions or not. Nature turns the person into a disaster (sometimes, it’s not like EVERY case is like this), and when it does that, we’re justified in doing want it takes protect ourselves, to keep from being abused or harmed - not blaming them doesn’t mean we have to go out and stand in the storm, so to speak.
This is a great perspective for reconciling the "not their fault" idea (which science seems to support overall) with practical measures in daily life. Excellent.
The issue is that an extremely sensitive negotiation (interviewing and hiring process) is utterly disrupted by their presence, so nobody is in a good position to legally challenge them. If almost ANY non compete is in place, the potential employer is highly likely to make the decision not to bother with the candidate. Proving that it was because of the noncompete is difficult (making it difficult to prove real damages).
They would almost certainly fall apart in court, but the systems they disrupt don’t survive long enough to move them into court.
There isn’t some function we can feed a different argument here to value agreeableness more highly though. I generally agree, but that more collaboration would be good isn’t so much the question - the question is HOW these tweaks can be done.
As a start, we could stop exalting and rewarding powerful sociopaths.
And slowly, I think, we are. E.g., the MeToo movement has forced some powerful sociopaths to face at least a small amount of accountability. Rich people at least occasionally go to jail if their crimes are egregious enough.
I wish people would stop spreading this myth and actually follow current science when calling out biological difference between women and men. Testosterone does not cause or create aggression. The link between testosterone has the same root as the link between emotional instability and estrogens, which is deeply seated into gender roles and gender discrimination.
Consistently when people look at aggression the same findings pops up. Men more likely to engage physical aggression, women are more likely to engage low-risk aggression, and women and men show to be equally likely to engage in verbal aggression. Unless Linus goes around and are physical violent with fellow developers then his gender has nothing to do with it.
Take a look at this nice lecture from a professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences (https://youtu.be/2bnSY4L3V8s?t=30m17s). Recent studies into testosterone levels has shown that it has no relation to initiating aggression in both men and women. What it did find is that different level of testosterone impact how much of an defense behavior is triggered in response to social status threats. An interesting fact is that higher level of testosterone in women actually have a bigger impact compared to men, but men on average showed a larger response.
That might sound like aggression but here is the deal. If you create a social structure which rewards cooperation and social status is maintained through non-aggressive behavior then testosterone is correlated to lower aggression. That mean that it should tell you a lot about the community or company if testosterone correlate to aggression.
Perhaps more importantly, there is lots of evidence that exclusively male environments seriously amplify the effect and make aggression a fundamental part of the culture. Even very aggressive men tend to behave differently in mixed gender groups.
Man, so many memories. I was involved in a MUD called Dragonstone and had so much freaking fun, when I first entered college I had to stop cold turkey because every time I tried to announce that I had to quit to get my homework done, saying goodbye to treasured online associates made me so sad I couldn't follow through on leaving.
I also started one of my own, which gave me my first brush with people doxxing me (not as serious back then - I was more worried that one of them would figure out how to hack my computer - I was not a terribly sophisticated user of the internet back then - probably still am not today. XD)
I learned a bit about algorithms from our head coder, and we put our heads together to make an herbalism system that he should still be quite proud of, I think. Listing each room as a terrain type, a list of herbs that could grow in that terrain, and a random chance that the herbs would grow in any given room.
Man, what a strange time and exciting time that was! :)
On the other hand, I valiantly tried a number of variations of “learn C++ in a weekend” when I was a teenager, and finding most of them too difficult/annoying, presuming prior knowledge I didn’t have, I decided programming just wasn’t for me and focused on my violin playing. Now I’m neck-deep in bioinformatics and machine learning, enjoying more than almost anything else ever.
In other words, I’ll cop to thinking you’re weong about this, and that sometime in the future, you or someone else will return to a thread similar to this one, wishing that someone had flattened out and simplified at least some of the technical aspects of this stuff so that you could move forward without such massive frustration that you would give up even despite substantial (but not invicible) motivation.
Well, banning the practice is the first step towards doing exactly that. The whole world is a lot more understanding of the stance, "Sorry, we cannot go and rescue [person X]," when person X got in trouble because of illegal activity they were performing - and there are few more effective methods of making someone adopt the stance espoused by your proposed note, "I forbid you from rescuing me," than making the practice illegal.
So, essentially, I agree, I just think this is the proper way for Nepal to go about de-prioritizing this particular problem. :)
The voice of your own critical judgment can be vicious, but if you're on board with that you're not, nor are you somehow supposed to be, some kind of rational Messiah with all the perfections and answers, but rather regular person doing their best, subject to the usual problems and issues that beset humans all the time, it's much easier to remind the voice, almost as if going one voice deeper - giving the hyper critical voice it's OWN voice - that it's being harsh to a standard that virtually no one has ever or will ever meet, that there are reason you or other did things the way they did (even if those reasons include "we didn't have time to research any other way, and the resources that would've made it possible or trivial like it feels now came about after we finished this.").
Anyway - basic idea here is to give you voice a voice and whip back around and overflow into the regular critical space where criticism can be healthy instead of incessant and damaging. I hope it works for you! It works fairly well for me, but I'll admit freely that sometimes I do feel like such a massive twat that BOTH voice roll their eyes at me. XD