4 ms·
To me, this reads like somebody who's surrounded by successful people who were already so ambitious they have converted their anxieties into more ambition. For
by Willish42 4y ago
To me, this reads like somebody who's surrounded by successful people who were already so ambitious they have converted their anxieties into more ambition. For every one of these Silicon-Valley-personality-type people, there are tens of others working menial jobs who are not in the 90th+ income-percentile who struggle leaving their house and have panic attacks at their part-time, hourly, no-benefits job who do not have this privilege of "disconnecting for mental clarity" or whatever else this blogger purports as the solution.
There are many better determinants for success than whether somebody has anxiety and is productivity-obsessed. The entire reason anxiety/depression/etc. are classified as disorders is because they disrupt well-being, which in the U.S. is largely measured by "ability to keep working in a job and stay alive". There are plenty of people with these disorders who aren't nearly as successful or ambitious, and plenty of successful and ambitious people who don't have an anxiety disorder. This association lies somewhere on the spectrum between "weird pattern I've noticed in my social bubble and decided is a near-universal law of nature" and "harmful misrepresentation of mental health disorders"
- shahmeern 4y agoI dont think the author is really proposing a solution. They're just proposing that anxiety and ambition are orthogonal
- bluepizza 4y agoI don't understand what orthogonal means in this context. I tried googling and failed terribly. Could you ELI5 for me?
- Willish42 4y agoIf anything, parent comment's usage of orthogonal might've been a typo/mistake. People usually use orthogonal as a metaphorical term to imply "no correlation" [1]. My read of the OP is that anxiety powers others' ambition, that they are portraying the relationship between the two as correlated/causal rather than orthogonal. edit: to clarify a bit further, I believe the term comes from how vectors that diverge along some dimension form a right angle, rather than a correlation (i.e., if one vector is (0, 5) and the other is (4, 0), they form a right angle )and are orthogonal, meaning "wherever you are on the (4,0) line doesn't correlate with where you are on the (0, 5) line". This might be a bad explanation but it's how I've understood it from working somewhere where coworkers use the term a lot. [1] See "software engineering" definition here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orthogonal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orthogonal
- kukx 4y agoIn short orthogonal means independent.