Recently I've felt some anxiety towards going back to work, which has been interesting to reflect back upon.

While at Fractal, I've met some people who seem very brave to me – they are willing to forego conventional job opportunities to pursue things with very low odds of success/impact like starting their own classes.

When I ask them about how they found the courage to do so when they could have gone for very high-status things, they would say that if you think about it, failure doesn't say that much about yourself.

I agree with this on a rational level, but find it hard to square with on an intuitive level. When I asked them about this, they said that “surrounding yourself with supportive people” helps a lot.

Thinking about my recent mindset, I do think this latter explanation has a lot of truth to them. When you interact with a lot of new people (for me, this seems to happen recently in the context of dating), they tend to use employment as a judge of your worth. This doesn't happen when you are usually in a supportive community. I find that when I prioritize interacting with new people, my anxiety goes up accordingly.

What this provides at least, I think, is a tool to help deal with anxiety. If you believe that your community are essentially the correct one, then hanging with a community with aligned norms will help you with the unusual status signals of the real world.

But I think the question this begs is – what is the correct way to look at status? I'm not sure the broader population is by default “correct”. It is just the most popular option currently. And I think that defaults towards “correct”, but is not necessarily always so.

I have some ideas as to ways to look at this, such as the psychological health, connectedness, and the diversity & representativeness of the population composition of the community, but it's something I may want to save for later.

— Categorized under: #interactions, #communities, #sociology