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I don't do things I don't want to do - I've also set my life and career up to prioritize that. Being overly accustomed to that mode may be part of the problem,

I don't do things I don't want to do - I've also set my life and career up to prioritize that. Being overly accustomed to that mode may be part of the problem, because inevitably there are things you have to do that you don't want to do - and those things seem harder, even if they're trivial, when you really want to master your own time. Yet I'm pretty good at getting those out of the way. That's not my specific problem with phone calls. Phone calls always open up a Pandora's box of more problems. Perhaps if you feel like armchair diagnosing this: I clean my house almost obsessively every day; my desktop has only two text files on it called "Immediate" and "Todo"; my inbox is always cleaned out by 5 or 6pm before I let myself relax. Then I go get fucking wasted and make new friends and end up drinking in parking lots. But I can't call the fucking tree guy or the mechanic or the accountant. It's not the conversation I'm worried about. It's that I know there will be one new thing on the list. When the list is cleared, I will be free. I will take my clothes off and walk naked to the airport. [edit] I just want to clarify: I do think that I'm good at life in my own peculiar way. Just not "good at life" as most people would define it ;)

comboy 3y ago
Seems like you want to avoid calls if possible. If not then to me it helps to think in packages. So there is no "I need to make a phonecall". There's option A - "I make a phonecall and the then I have this" or "I don't make a phonecall and there are those consequences". What's the key to me here is that both options are perfectly fine. I.e. "suffering + some reward" or "no suffering and no reward". Or sometimes both options require some suffering. That is not a problem though, that is life. But suffering is really something different without anxiety. If it's unavoidable anyway there's a peace about it. And I'm sorry if I come off as an armchair diagnostician, I have no clue about your life obviously, it's just that this kind of thinking made such a big difference to me that it feels bad not sharing it.
- noduerme 3y ago
  no, I think it's quite interesting to diagnose this from a code point of view... this is why it really sucks that I have literally no one in my life who writes code or understands my job (or can chop things up into logical if/else statements like this ;) I probably should look at my own messy internal call stack from this pov a bit more often. My best friend as a kid was raised in Zen Buddhism and we learned to code together. This is the kind of way he would look at it. So I appreciate it.

comboy 3y ago

Seems like you want to avoid calls if possible. If not then to me it helps to think in packages. So there is no "I need to make a phonecall". There's option A - "I make a phonecall and the then I have this" or "I don't make a phonecall and there are those consequences". What's the key to me here is that both options are perfectly fine. I.e. "suffering + some reward" or "no suffering and no reward". Or sometimes both options require some suffering. That is not a problem though, that is life. But suffering is really something different without anxiety. If it's unavoidable anyway there's a peace about it. And I'm sorry if I come off as an armchair diagnostician, I have no clue about your life obviously, it's just that this kind of thinking made such a big difference to me that it feels bad not sharing it.

noduerme 3y ago
no, I think it's quite interesting to diagnose this from a code point of view... this is why it really sucks that I have literally no one in my life who writes code or understands my job (or can chop things up into logical if/else statements like this ;) I probably should look at my own messy internal call stack from this pov a bit more often. My best friend as a kid was raised in Zen Buddhism and we learned to code together. This is the kind of way he would look at it. So I appreciate it.