Business people are not boring

When I was younger, I thought that business people were quite boring. They never discussed systematic ways to build or destroy things - which is what the sciency and community oriented people tended to do. After working with business people for a few years, from 2005 to 2020, I guess my main learning is that business people are not all boring - but they are boring when they are secretive. That is what competitive people care about: ways they can get hurt, and ways they can gain an advantage over others. This is worse if they are the shy and sensitive type of person, or if they are the sort that cares about relationships because they value privacy, or family safety, or if they fear loss of friends and wealth. So I have concluded that business people are not boring. Only shy and secretive people are boring ... now studies will continue, as there is no reason to stop ...

All I want for Christmas: no drama

2015: GTM drama

2016: QA drama

2017: equity drama

|

2018: relatively low drama, mostly work like pack mule; maybe personal health and wellness drama

2019: train-the-trainers drama

2020: sars-cov drama

|

Can I have one whole year with no drama, please?

Life in society

Life in society is a constant conundrum. On one hand we each have personal preferences, and on the other hand we are engaged in a social contract of uncertain definition. Say for example, if I review my basic tendencies, my preferences, and what I perform out of social obligation, there may be three different things altogether. (An unpopular fellow once called these the id, the ego, and the super-ego. But for discussion's sake, let's just talk in the same way.) Being a mammal of sorts, I may have sympathies for people; but my ethical stance requires that I aim to treat people indifferently in a completely amoral fashion, without regard for life or death, safety or danger, pain or joy; yet despite my amoral preferences, I remain attached to the society I live in, and I play a role as a friend, business partner, customer, teacher, student, mentor, mentee, citizen, antagonist, etc., and so I must adopt the values of such social roles to the best of my ability regardless of my tendencies to be more sympathetic than the norm, and my preference to be less. How about you, how do you do it?

Butthurt Part I: On dating jocks

Me making friends with jocks* as an adult: I think in a decade I've dated maybe ... five? But it's been three in a row this year. (!!!) Well back then I had more important things to do, now I'm just bored, I suppose. I guess this is what it feels like to be a decade-and-a-half into retirement. Funny timing, I must say. Clubbing? Drugs? Are you people stupid, or something? Well guess what, I don't care anymore ... we can hang out, I guess, since it seems you also do other things now. Or did we all, each, respectively, run out of people to date ... and so this is what growing old feels like, when all social spheres converge.

|

Back then I watched them care most for their friends, and lovers, now they have families, and co-workers - overall they still care about the same kinds of things, which I find to be rather daft. But that is what it is to be the socially attached sort of person, I suppose. So none of this was ever very surprising ... generally it was a matter of time, and consequence. Is anyone really any different?

|

* I think for the purpose of this meditation, the term is roughly synonymous with "alpha socialites", not necessarily of an athletic predisposition, though the correlation is real. Maybe I just mean "socialites", IDK ... shit, maybe I'm actually edging towards that low-priority target of becoming a socialite, from 2008's goal-setting cycle.

|

Come to think of it, some of my early heartbreaks simply involved explaining to such people how I understood our friendship, and having them get really angry about it. Over the years I've had more opportunities to just revolve the doors, and widen the top of the funnel - I still think the same, so I still talk the same, but I've met many more tolerant people, than I did when I was younger.

<hr />

Following conversation with a friend who said this sounded resentful:

|

I think my point of view was that wasting brain cells just was not an alpha trait :p

|

But arguably, if you waste braincells you end up mixing more with people who bet on social security, rather than against it. And this gets you into the crowd which cares about (dollar) because it's by definition the fiscally conservative crowd. Because people who care about their relationships, will tend to care about having enough money to build and protect those relationships. So it is competitively advantageous in terms of $.

|

My own positioning has typically been to short the asset class of relationships in general, and to go long on individual study.

|

🤷🏻‍♂️ people are different, but in the long run, everyone gets bored of doing the same thing, and extends their scope

(part 2) (part 3)

Ruby is for nice people, yes, yes ...

Ruby seems to attract a lot of nice people, and I think I know why. Rubyists tend to believe in people, in a humanistic sense, that which is beyond the mere function of a thing. And that's why people like me don't like working in the Ruby ecosystem - everything has a stupid name. Now I have to remember two things, what the thing does, and the unrelated name. I mean, even in real life I don't remember people's names - I just remember what they do. QED, I'm not a nice guy. But Rubyists are nice. Because Matz is a nice guy.