> I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave.
It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.
Reminds me of the poor fellow who jumped off a Facebook building because their manager blocked their transfer. I bet you wouldn't tell them "they could have gone to a different company". Visa issues non-withstanding, a rational, hopeful frame of mind is not always available to us at all times. (Not even talking about the stresses of immigrating itself).
Depression, despair etc are illogical narrowing our frames of minds and not being able to see any out. Kind of like getting stuck with a coding problem until you walk away and take a break, except you can't think of a way of walking away. (Or your "way" may manifest itself as psychosis or self harm.)
Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!
Interviewing is probably too hard to contemplate if you're depressed. Especially if you've been around long enough to remember Google-style torturous brainteaser interviews (whether or not those were real.)
If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.
I was curious about the first bit - the lower social class stuff is mostly right, I think, because of the huge gap between national narrative and reality on US socioeconomic mobility [0].
Fantastic analogy. The same fundamentalist narrow-mindedness only about "growth at all costs"; no regard to content of that growth. Just make the stock go up.
Kind of like King Midas wanting to make everything gold. No regard to the interiority of the objects, nor their real use. Just make them gold on the outside.
It's kind of a hot take, but as someone who passed through young adulthood during peak social paranoia about suicidal jihadi terrorists lurking behind every tree, it's really interesting to see, every now and then in anecdotes like this, a weird sort of jihadi capitalism appear. It's like, in our current incentive structure, we find ourselves hitting the accelerator toward our own doom: this poor fellow at amazon; the now-famous "deaths of despair" all over rural America; global climate disaster; etc. Truly all gas, no brakes.