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  • My own personal brain drain

    Now that I’ve completed my first full week back at work, I can confirm the suspicion I raised in my New Year’s post marking my return to blogging that the freedom and energy to write and blog that I discovered over the Christmas vacation have been severely reduced:

    Alongside the where … it’s pertinent to ask, when would I write? Maybe blogging is principally something for the holidays, when I’m rested and have time to reflect and to write.
    On the plus side, I am writing about it here!

    The brain drain

    Why is work - the non-physical work that I do- so draining? What am I doing all day that consumes so much energy, despite mostly sitting about, typing and clicking?

    I’m involved in product development and launches, in technical support, in documentation and report writing, with many context and application switches throughout the day. The energy that I burn in these activities can’t be all that much by themselves. It’s the brain itself, I feel, that becomes tired and lethargic - motivation and discipline come in waves, and I do need to drift for a while - to daydream, or make a coffee, or (in the home office scenario) empty the dishwasher.

    Mental tiredness is something that is analysed in depth in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow: that the amygdala running our instincts is the low-energy, high-intensity backup to the frontal lobes that take on most of our controlled, “slow” thought. When the mental energy balance is off kilter, decisions can be made faster, because instinct takes over - but they can be made worse, because of confirmation bias, of assumptions and hopes that the decision was good enough to survive.

    I go for walks, or sometimes for a run during the course of a day, which does help to refresh things - but, at the end of the day, when the work is done and the children are in bed, I find it difficult to decide to engage in another bout of active thinking.

    Audio strain

    At the beginning of the first pandemic lockdown and home-office phase, I hadn’t really given too much consideration to my office setup: I had my decent keyboard, mouse and screen at home, but I quickly found that the laptop audio was killing my ears, and contributing to this energy drain.

    I went through a sequence of trials with various headphones and found that, for longer web conferences, relatively loose-fitting, wired earbud type headphones were better than my professional over-ear ones, as I could hear myself less, the rest of the house could “seep in”, and yet I still had decent sound across the audio bandwidth (those tinny laptop speakers are a killer).

    Slow overthinking, slow overdoing

    Admittedly, I’m not the most energetic of workers or writers, or musicians, or fathers, or engineers, or communicators, or researchers, or sportspeople - I’m a mixed-mode “pulser” rather than a constant turbine. I think I’m pretty good at recognising when I need to “dash” or to relax, but stress does build up over time, as does exhaustion: I can have trouble switching off and sleeping, which is cumulative. Before the Christmas break, I recognised my own warning signs of work-life-induced exhaustion: tiredness with an inability to sleep, an unsettled digestive system and occasional lethargy and headaches. That has all receded, thankfully, but the next accumulation has already begun

    Naturally, we’re back at the start of the work-vacation cycle, so things aren’t too bad: but the combination of this product launch, the Covid pandemic and everything else does mean that blogging here and over at engiphy.net has already slowed down.

    At least it means you don’t have to read too much!

    → 1:33 PM, Jan 17
  • The Prevention Paradox of Brexit?

    For a while during the initial phases of the first lockdown, there was some discussion about the prevention paradox, the risk that beneficial actions taken on a population basis will leave many individuals thinking: what’s the big deal, or, why should I pay that price? 


    A good summary of the prevention paradox is contained within this pre-Covid quote from the International Journal of Epidemiology (emphasis mine):

    ‘[the population strategy] offers only a small benefit to each individual, since most of them were going to be all right anyway, at least for many years. This leads to the prevention paradox: “A preventive measure which brings much benefit to the population [yet] offers little to each participating individual” … and thus there is poor motivation for the subject. … In mass prevention each individual has usually only a small expectation of benefit, and this small benefit can easily be outweighed by a small risk’

    The first Covid lockdowns in Europe helped to slow the spread of the virus. However, since relatively few people knew anybody who had contracted the virus, there was an insidious view that led to the “huh - there’s nothing to worry about” perspective that in turn led to people ignoring the rules at the individual and small group level, because those individuals couldn’t truly process the cost-to-them-benefit-to-others analysis. 


    So… that link to Brexit, then?

    It’s tenuous, I’ll admit, but since it did occur to me in this context, I’ll stick with trying to figure out what it was I thought I meant.


    Having the UK in the EU was a form of prevention paradox because, although the weight of the UK and like-minded countries within the EU - those who were suspicious of ever-further integration - put a significant brake on that integration, nevertheless individuals and groups could still feel that having the UK in the EU was a higher cost to them, whilst never eliminating the risk of superstatism. If I try to parse the definition from above:


    “[A preventive measure] … [brings much benefit to the population] yet [offers little to each participating individual]”


    Becomes…


    [Having the UK in the EU] … [enables free trade and bureaucracy-free travel to the whole country] yet [does not give each individual immediately better conditions, more money, succour in patriotism or prevent "the EU" from smashing “us” and “them all” together]


    Something like that!


    The opposite is clearer: now that Brexit has happened, could the EU now be more inclined to drift towards that federal superstate so detested in principle by those who loved their nations? Perhaps the fact of taking the UK out of the EU makes the thing that many were suspicious of more likely. It’s just that German and Dutch, Polish and Italian opponents of the superstate are no longer supported by their British colleagues.


    Told-you-soism

    You can imagine Brexiters now actively hoping that the EU will fling itself gung-ho into becoming a superstate, purely so that they can say “told you so!” Indeed, perhaps there is even now a secret clan within the European Research Group working behind the scenes to promote and to facilitate the institution of a Grand State of Europe…


    The Brexit paradox?

    Although I think I managed to squeeze the logic into the constraints of the definition of the paradox, I can’t strongly argue that the UK being in the EU was a true prevention paradox; it was just a prevention.


    But this is exactly what I hoped that my blog would do for me - getting me to “think in writing”. This post has also been a thought starter for trying to describe what being European means to me.


    → 1:15 PM, Jan 6
  • 2021

    2021 sparklers light sign

    2+0+2+1 = 5

    2+0 = 2*1... it's a symmetrical year!

    2*0*... OK, I don't need to go further than that.

    2/0/... : it's an infinite year!

    [[2^0]^2]^1] = 1

    Two thousand and twenty one years since... wait: Two thousand?

    What, only two thousand? And twenty one, don't forget.

    Exciting.

    Happy New Year! Wishing you diversions manifold!

    → 12:37 PM, Jan 1
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