December Days 02025 #29: w00t
Dec. 29th, 2025 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
29: w00t
I could stand to be happier and feel more accomplished about a lot of things.
What I mean in this context, and for myself, though, is as much a biological thing as it is a mental one. There's a suggestion that people who have the same variable-attention stimulus traits that I do tend to gravitate toward situations that will provide high satisfaction rewards for a relatively small amount of effort, or that are good at providing small amounts of rewards on a regularly-spaced enough schedule that the temptation of "just one more level" applies. There's at least some research and theories that the rason why strong stimulants don't over-run the systems of the variable-attention is that those systems are significantly down those kinds of chemicals, and using the store-bought ones brings a person back up toward a functioning operation range, such that they're not having cravings about stuff.
The disconnection between short term and long term memory also makes time and memory both somewhat difficult to deal with. Time problems mostly manifest as not having a good sense of how long something will actually take, and that I have to put things in my calendar and have the machines remind me of things if I want to do things in the future. If it didn't get in the calendar, it doesn't exist. That's both a truth and a condemnation for me. Memory, however, usually requires a strong stimulus or a strong feeling to recall easily or to stay in a mostly fixed place. If I'm running on a lower level of necessary chemicals for most of my life, that means a lot of the positive and happy memories have to be extra-strong to stay in the easily accessible memory places. The obverse of that is most negative memories have very strong emotional content, and that makes them very easy to store and recall, even more so when those memories are related to behaviors or actions that I have done, or the way that people have talked to me, about me, or around me with profoundly negative feelings toward me or my actions. Those strong emotional ties for negative experiences are the system doing its best to fix (as in fixing a photograph, not repair) in memory the need to not upset people in this manner again. (Or, if it's my brain, the need to not upset anyone at all in any way, or reveal to them that I am anything less than a perfect being. Things that others might laugh off or shrug off as someone having a bad day or possibly a mistake or something in extenuating circumstances are generally things that my brain will latch on to as "this kind of response must never happen again, and therefore we will act accordingly to never have a situation where someone might get mad at us in this way." As with all systems, this kind of attempt is only as good as the situations that are familiar to someone. Knowing that there's all kinds of things that might happen in the future for which there is no preparation tends to produce social anxiety and rejection sensitivity. Most people don't carry that much baggage around with them in their lives, but I can still remember certain feelings from childhood about various topics, and a lot of them involve situations where things didn't go well for me, I got in trouble, or people didn't like me that I wanted to like me, for whatever reason that may have been. (And the same for adolescence, young adulthood, university days…) As you might expect, this is a maladjustment, but it's the only system my brain can come up with as a solution to "Stop being so weird." At least some people have said "You're doing fidget things again, and it's distracting me, don't do them" when it has become an issue, and so I try to have my fidget things be less distracting to others while I do them. The fact taht it's less, instead of none, is an improvement and at least a little belief in myself that people being upset is not DEFCON 1, brace for social nuclear explosions and fallout.
The system that is trying to keep me safe from being in situations where I could generate more negative emotional experiences to add, and find new and novel ways of failing at human (or at least, social human) is, unsurprisingly, also good at keeping me from attempting new experiences that might result in positive outcomes and good emotional feelings and memories. And this is where the approach of indirectness really becomes the most helpful that it can be. Things that I have built up in my head as important, or that have been impressed upon me as important, will usually have a commensurate amount of anxiety about whether or not it was done well attached to it, and in those cases, it's really important to have feedback that assists in this manner. And yes, I will probably fixate on the things that didn't go ideally, even if they went competently, but I can usually manage to put those pieces of feedback in their proper importance if they are surrounded by other and positive feedback. (And, quite possibly, in writing, especially in work situations, so that I can mine them both for things to improve and things to put in my report about the good things that I did this year.)
Things that are, however, ephemeral, or that I'm doing because it seems interesting, or otherwise can approach not as a Big Important Thing, but as an interesting and neat thing, or are asked with long deadlines, or other kinds of ways of de-escalating the situation until it's something that my own brain believes isn't going to carry the potential of serious social consequences (or other serious consequences), those things I can throw my full effort at and produce things that are good enough without having to worry about whether they need to be perfect. (I'll be apologetic that they're not perfect, but I can get to "good enough!" much faster when it's something that my brain hasn't decided requires perfection.)
Surprising nobody except me (and mostly in a Surprised Pikachu way), when I actually do the thing, and it's received well, there are happy feelings and memories that come with it, at least for the moment. (There's always going to be the weasels that say "Beginner's Luck," or "They're being polite," or any other self-effacing statement, because it's dangerous to believe you do things well, because doing things well means that you might have confidence in doing a thing, and if you do it wrong, people will make fun of you (childhood and high school memories) or will reprimand you and try to get you fired (first supervisor at work).) Paradoxically, and probably in relation to the variable attention stimulus trait, or perhaps some other thing that might very well run in the family, but that I haven't sought any kind of diagnosis over, competency, expertise, and practice at doing things makes for less big bursts of happy chemicals and good feelings. Even when it means I'm tackling harder problems and doing more complex things on the regular. Learning new skills is good, practicing new skills is good, practicing the things that I have expertise and competency in is not so good, unless there's some other kind of external reward awaiting at the end. So, y'know, getting better at RPGs is fine, because the reqards along the way are important for upgrading gear, unlocking new areas, and going after the optional superbosses. Getting better at ficcing has the rewards of comments and kudos that come in. Getting better at essay-writing often means getting to see my own work in conjunction with other people, some of whom I think of as much better than me. Getting better at things that don't have a nice reward waiting for me at the end? Not so much for me. Those things tend to get optimization brain turned on them, so as to find out some way of getting them all done competently and appropriately, but quickly, so that I can get back to the things that are novelty, or conversation, or otherwise valueless things like Pocket Monsters, game currency, achievements, and so forth.
It's too bad the idea of web badges never really took off in the same way that game achievements have, because I think it would be really nice for me to have a digital sash, or a virtual ita-bag of the various things I've picked up over the years, or lessons that I've taken, all of those kinds of things, but alas, that's still mostly related to gamer things and within various applications, rather than being able to have a ready-made aggregator of these things. Or for me to have some easy way of pulling all of that information into one space and arranging it in my chosen form. (I could do that, I have the skills and knowledge to code up a static page, but I feel like those kinds of things would be more impressive if all of the appropriate data came with the badge, so that someone could see not just that I plucked an image from somewhere, but evaluate something to determine that I really did complete what I'm saying I did. Because sometimes what I need, to remind myself that the things in my head are very skewed toward specific experiences, is to look at a list of accomplishments, badges, achievements, good comments, or other things, so the sight of those tokens can trigger memory recall for those happy things in my life. Those memories are still there, it just takes more effort for them to return to the surface in the absence of a triggering object or memory.
And there are some great happy moments in there, once I can pull them out of memory, or see the artifact associated with them.
There's a few possibilities there, and throughout my life, there are plenty of times where I'm contributing a "w00t!" to someone else's accomplishments as well, and that also gives me a little bit of joy that someone shared with us a thing they accomplished, so that we can give them happy feedback and encouragement where wanted.
I wish that our lives ran on the maxim "more w00t, less d00m." But since we're not there yet, I have to remember, and have other things and people help me remember, that not everything in my life has been terrible, even if my self-protective systems only want to remember the bad things, or think of the good things as not making up for the bad things, or the possibility of another bad things happening.
29: w00t
I could stand to be happier and feel more accomplished about a lot of things.
Comparison is the death of true self-contentment, said John Powell within my lifetime, attributing it to many experts. Chasing what otehrs have is a sure way toward never having enough or knowing when to stop chasing things and enjoy what you already have. Even the people at the top of the wealth rankings, I suspect, are not content with what they have, and instead strive to find new ways of making ever-more money or hoarding ever-more resources to themsevles, as the chits and score-counters of how they've spent their lives, and the signs of their avarice that, if the world were closer to just, would have them visited by spirits that will try to turn them aside from their path by showing them that they will, in fact, die unloved, unmourned, and having done great deeds of evil or allowed them to come into being when they could have stopped them.
What I mean in this context, and for myself, though, is as much a biological thing as it is a mental one. There's a suggestion that people who have the same variable-attention stimulus traits that I do tend to gravitate toward situations that will provide high satisfaction rewards for a relatively small amount of effort, or that are good at providing small amounts of rewards on a regularly-spaced enough schedule that the temptation of "just one more level" applies. There's at least some research and theories that the rason why strong stimulants don't over-run the systems of the variable-attention is that those systems are significantly down those kinds of chemicals, and using the store-bought ones brings a person back up toward a functioning operation range, such that they're not having cravings about stuff.
The disconnection between short term and long term memory also makes time and memory both somewhat difficult to deal with. Time problems mostly manifest as not having a good sense of how long something will actually take, and that I have to put things in my calendar and have the machines remind me of things if I want to do things in the future. If it didn't get in the calendar, it doesn't exist. That's both a truth and a condemnation for me. Memory, however, usually requires a strong stimulus or a strong feeling to recall easily or to stay in a mostly fixed place. If I'm running on a lower level of necessary chemicals for most of my life, that means a lot of the positive and happy memories have to be extra-strong to stay in the easily accessible memory places. The obverse of that is most negative memories have very strong emotional content, and that makes them very easy to store and recall, even more so when those memories are related to behaviors or actions that I have done, or the way that people have talked to me, about me, or around me with profoundly negative feelings toward me or my actions. Those strong emotional ties for negative experiences are the system doing its best to fix (as in fixing a photograph, not repair) in memory the need to not upset people in this manner again. (Or, if it's my brain, the need to not upset anyone at all in any way, or reveal to them that I am anything less than a perfect being. Things that others might laugh off or shrug off as someone having a bad day or possibly a mistake or something in extenuating circumstances are generally things that my brain will latch on to as "this kind of response must never happen again, and therefore we will act accordingly to never have a situation where someone might get mad at us in this way." As with all systems, this kind of attempt is only as good as the situations that are familiar to someone. Knowing that there's all kinds of things that might happen in the future for which there is no preparation tends to produce social anxiety and rejection sensitivity. Most people don't carry that much baggage around with them in their lives, but I can still remember certain feelings from childhood about various topics, and a lot of them involve situations where things didn't go well for me, I got in trouble, or people didn't like me that I wanted to like me, for whatever reason that may have been. (And the same for adolescence, young adulthood, university days…) As you might expect, this is a maladjustment, but it's the only system my brain can come up with as a solution to "Stop being so weird." At least some people have said "You're doing fidget things again, and it's distracting me, don't do them" when it has become an issue, and so I try to have my fidget things be less distracting to others while I do them. The fact taht it's less, instead of none, is an improvement and at least a little belief in myself that people being upset is not DEFCON 1, brace for social nuclear explosions and fallout.
The system that is trying to keep me safe from being in situations where I could generate more negative emotional experiences to add, and find new and novel ways of failing at human (or at least, social human) is, unsurprisingly, also good at keeping me from attempting new experiences that might result in positive outcomes and good emotional feelings and memories. And this is where the approach of indirectness really becomes the most helpful that it can be. Things that I have built up in my head as important, or that have been impressed upon me as important, will usually have a commensurate amount of anxiety about whether or not it was done well attached to it, and in those cases, it's really important to have feedback that assists in this manner. And yes, I will probably fixate on the things that didn't go ideally, even if they went competently, but I can usually manage to put those pieces of feedback in their proper importance if they are surrounded by other and positive feedback. (And, quite possibly, in writing, especially in work situations, so that I can mine them both for things to improve and things to put in my report about the good things that I did this year.)
Things that are, however, ephemeral, or that I'm doing because it seems interesting, or otherwise can approach not as a Big Important Thing, but as an interesting and neat thing, or are asked with long deadlines, or other kinds of ways of de-escalating the situation until it's something that my own brain believes isn't going to carry the potential of serious social consequences (or other serious consequences), those things I can throw my full effort at and produce things that are good enough without having to worry about whether they need to be perfect. (I'll be apologetic that they're not perfect, but I can get to "good enough!" much faster when it's something that my brain hasn't decided requires perfection.)
Surprising nobody except me (and mostly in a Surprised Pikachu way), when I actually do the thing, and it's received well, there are happy feelings and memories that come with it, at least for the moment. (There's always going to be the weasels that say "Beginner's Luck," or "They're being polite," or any other self-effacing statement, because it's dangerous to believe you do things well, because doing things well means that you might have confidence in doing a thing, and if you do it wrong, people will make fun of you (childhood and high school memories) or will reprimand you and try to get you fired (first supervisor at work).) Paradoxically, and probably in relation to the variable attention stimulus trait, or perhaps some other thing that might very well run in the family, but that I haven't sought any kind of diagnosis over, competency, expertise, and practice at doing things makes for less big bursts of happy chemicals and good feelings. Even when it means I'm tackling harder problems and doing more complex things on the regular. Learning new skills is good, practicing new skills is good, practicing the things that I have expertise and competency in is not so good, unless there's some other kind of external reward awaiting at the end. So, y'know, getting better at RPGs is fine, because the reqards along the way are important for upgrading gear, unlocking new areas, and going after the optional superbosses. Getting better at ficcing has the rewards of comments and kudos that come in. Getting better at essay-writing often means getting to see my own work in conjunction with other people, some of whom I think of as much better than me. Getting better at things that don't have a nice reward waiting for me at the end? Not so much for me. Those things tend to get optimization brain turned on them, so as to find out some way of getting them all done competently and appropriately, but quickly, so that I can get back to the things that are novelty, or conversation, or otherwise valueless things like Pocket Monsters, game currency, achievements, and so forth.
It's too bad the idea of web badges never really took off in the same way that game achievements have, because I think it would be really nice for me to have a digital sash, or a virtual ita-bag of the various things I've picked up over the years, or lessons that I've taken, all of those kinds of things, but alas, that's still mostly related to gamer things and within various applications, rather than being able to have a ready-made aggregator of these things. Or for me to have some easy way of pulling all of that information into one space and arranging it in my chosen form. (I could do that, I have the skills and knowledge to code up a static page, but I feel like those kinds of things would be more impressive if all of the appropriate data came with the badge, so that someone could see not just that I plucked an image from somewhere, but evaluate something to determine that I really did complete what I'm saying I did. Because sometimes what I need, to remind myself that the things in my head are very skewed toward specific experiences, is to look at a list of accomplishments, badges, achievements, good comments, or other things, so the sight of those tokens can trigger memory recall for those happy things in my life. Those memories are still there, it just takes more effort for them to return to the surface in the absence of a triggering object or memory.
And there are some great happy moments in there, once I can pull them out of memory, or see the artifact associated with them.
- Degrees mounted on the wall.
- A small poster at my desk that has both the artist and the demon from 100 Demon Dialogues, in a playing-card style format, so that it can be examined either side up, with the artist saying "You can," and the demon saying "You can't." It's a reminder of a night at convention where, as usual, the convention space didn't have great signal, and the Wi-Fi, even for people who were vending, was spotty at best, and some people were trying to purchase some of the books and artifacts from the author of this book, Lucy Bellwood, and from the person she had been in conversation with, Erika Moen, who you might know from a comic called Oh Joy Sex Toy or a teen-focused guide to sexuality called Let's Talk About It, both of which have made the censorship brigades very unhappy about accurate access to information. The panel was called "Boats and Boners 2: 2Boat, 2Boner" because Lucy really likes talking about tall sailing ships and Erika is known for sex education books.
Since the card readers weren't working and the day was ending, I checked my wallet, knew I had enough in convention cash to make thigns work easily, and just paid for the order in cash, to make sure that the sale didn't get lost. The next day, since I was coming back to get the book (which I had purchased earlier in the day) signed and illustrated with the demon saying my personal demon's phrase ("You're not good enough."), I asked if the other people had all of their things worked out for them (since I had to jet to another panel…or to catch the bus). Lucy brightened, and mentioned that she'd talked to other people about the kind thing that had happened that night, and the kind gesture of paying in cash when the signal wasn't great, and that she'd hoped that person would come back, since I'd mentioned wanting to get my book illustrated. The message itself is good for me, but it's also a reminder that I do often try to be helpful with what I have, and that if I had greater abundance than I do now, I might very well be able to do more of these kinds of actions. (But also, that small kindnesses go a long way.) - I still have the memory of playing under John Williams's (yes, that John Williams) direction for an arrangement of his. There is the pair of gloves that shook the hands of John Williams for that one, along with some other artifacts of the time.
- Thinking of university days, while I was never going to be more of an intramural athlete, playing against other students for fun and the beer leagues, I did have a moment of tactical brilliance with regard to one of the flag football games we were playing. The other team had people who could outrun us and a passer who could throw with accuracy. Eventually, I realized this was happening because we were spending all our time trying to keep pace with their receiving group, and I said, "Hey, we should try putting some prssure on the passer." It turns out the passer was not nearly as good when having to run and avoid being tackled, and we ended up winning the game because our players could manage both the offense and the defense parts after that. So that's a contribution, right?
- I've got so much art of things on the walls, and things that would want to be on the walls, if there were still wall space for them. I'm probably going to have to invest in poster books, so that I can rotate out things that I still want to keep nice, but no longer have wall space for, so that I can put up new art. It's a reminder, for me, that I have greater freedom to display my fandoms and support the work of artists that I didn't have before, because of my ex truly sucking up all the money in the relationship.
- I do get complimented on having a nice voice for doing the announcements around closing time, when it's my turn. I have to trust them on this, because my voice sounds very different to me than it does to other people, but I'm willing to believe that I have that going for me, for someone who doesn't know anything about me and is judging me solely on the surface. That I also come with more than just a good voice is an extra bonus, clearly.
- There are a lot of memories in my life that have to do with solving puzzles and feeling pretty good about it, especially hard puzzles, or puzzles that required a lot of effort and thinking about how to go about getting at them. (Puzzles, in this case, also includes homework that I've been assigned, or some of the bigger writing projects that I've been assigned or assigned myself to complete.) I always try to create solutions and writing and things that I will enjoy reading, and sometimes I do go back and read old things, often when a new comment appears, and I think a lot of my writing holds up to my own taste over time.
There's a few possibilities there, and throughout my life, there are plenty of times where I'm contributing a "w00t!" to someone else's accomplishments as well, and that also gives me a little bit of joy that someone shared with us a thing they accomplished, so that we can give them happy feedback and encouragement where wanted.
I wish that our lives ran on the maxim "more w00t, less d00m." But since we're not there yet, I have to remember, and have other things and people help me remember, that not everything in my life has been terrible, even if my self-protective systems only want to remember the bad things, or think of the good things as not making up for the bad things, or the possibility of another bad things happening.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-30 12:05 pm (UTC)Your description of easily getting bad memories and the rejection sensitivity that comes with it is something that I'm all too familiar with... (and while I understand the instinct of "never let this happen again", that would mean you need to become a hermit, so I think it should be taken with a whole load of salt!).
Learning new skills is good, practicing new skills is good, practicing the things that I have expertise and competency in is not so good, unless there's some other kind of external reward awaiting at the end.
Hmmm, my own experience is quite different; I tend not to care about rewards all that much, and I prefer showing improvement at a skill I am already good at. It does help with internal motivation, but I'd love to be able to appreciate rewards more.
Your list of accomplishments sounds quite nice! (Maybe it would be a good idea do to the same thing myself?)
I wish that our lives ran on the maxim "more w00t, less d00m."
It's also easier to do things that way, I find!