In the first few weeks of working from home, my depression definitely got significantly worse. I'm pretty sure that, perversely, I enjoy my job because of the high levels of stress and anxiety (teaching) that normally distract from deeper-seated unhappiness. By removing all the distracting stimulus from my day-to-day, my mental health fell off a cliff fast.
In recent weeks I've mellowed out into a new normal. Have you heard about the idea of the hedonic treadmill? It's the idea that being happy is a temporary response to a positive change in your life and eventually your emotional state returns to normal, even if your life continues being great. I'm beginning to think it works the other way too: I've returned to my not-so-great emotional baseline, even though my quality of life is objectively worse.
I'm sure others will chime in here with what strategies have worked well for them but I thought I would add this observation because it surprised me and is perhaps counter intuitive. All the best getting through this.
I like Crunchbang for political, not technical reasons. It doesn't matter to me if every package is vanilla Debian.
Crunchbang provides an opinionated set of defaults for what a composable, 'minimal' Linux desktop might look like. These days, I would build what I want from a Debian base install. But the reason why I would care to do so, is that distros like Crunchbang showed me that the composable approach worked so well. It makes new Linux users care about playing with their environments, which, for good or ill, is a venerable long-time Free Software user preoccupation.
When I read the 'science of man' and/or 'natural rights' accounts of political society and morality, I am struck my how astute Kant's critique was--that what we call conventional morality can't be found in anthropological conjecture.
But outside of the question of morality, his accounts of political society rest heavily on Enlightenment doctrine--it's basically a tale of the passions. That was the Enlightenment, not so much the rehashed civic humanism/republicanism playing itself out on the streets of Paris. And as for his infamous maxim "Argue as much as you like, but obey" and his specific engagement with questions about what the Enlightenment meant, I would say this is pretty much the mainstream of Enlightenment thought. Sure, sovereignty might lay with the nation, but to emphasize the will of the nation, rather than its legitimate representation, is something fairly unique to Rousseau and the hard-core of the Jacobins.
I know there is a body of scholarship that pins the end of the Enlightenment to Kant, but I'm not familiar with it. Could I have the elevator version?
Edit: Perhaps I've overstepped the mark here. I'd be interested in any recommendations that link Enlightenment to a positive discussion of virtue--ie. not a discussion of Enlightenment and 'why virtue is no longer required [compared to the classical republican polities]'.
> There are always exceptions, but you will have to be exceptional in their eyes.
This is spot-on. People take certain prejudices to their modelling high school dropouts. These are formed by the sheer repetition of observation. Dropping out is something Bad Students do. It's low status. Even an average student who drops out will have the story of their life coloured in terms of: 'he could have done _even_ better if he had stayed in school.'
So to get social approval for dropping out, you have to be exceptional. Such that their predictions of your future outside of mainstream education are so positive, that the 'low status drop out story' can't be made to stick to you. The balance of probabilities isn't enough to get social approval for your actions, the argument has to be overwhelming.
It's unfair, in a way, that there isn't a cultural idiom to support people who, for good reasons, don't want to learn through the high school track, but who aren't amazing individuals.
But in another sense, dropping out to learn faster is in itself to state that you are exceptional--that you have a iron-clad self-belief in your capacity for self-motivated learning. You shouldn't expect anyone to believe this about you; it's a trait that habitually we assign to people after they've been successful, not before. It's natural for people to model others as falling near the median, until they've demonstrated otherwise.
I''m less productive with fewer obligations. Most people are the same. You need to be _certain_ that you are naturally inclined towards setting useful goals and then following through. (I've wanted to write a novel for the past five years. All I have to show is a thin pile of abandoned drafts and margin-doodles.)
Soft skills matter. And removing one huge social component of your life without another to fill it has been, for me, a disaster. If you are 'neuro-typical', but still believe you will be more productive by removing 'wasted' social interaction from your life, you are wrong. If you are miserable, you can't sustain productivity. (And, not least, you might go crazy.) Even anti-social might sometimes be better than non-social.
This is HN, so I share a lot of beliefs about how lousy a state high school education can be. But culturally, we're not geared up as a society to support dropping out as a genuinely equal tract to education and employment. Be careful.
> here in the UK, the very same PM has trebled the costs of going to university for English and Welsh students, pricing many out
As far as I was aware, under the new scheme, graduates only start paying back their student debt once (and only if) their income crosses a certain threshold. That seems like a fairly good deal to me--a crude approximation of saying 'you only pay for your degree if you get financial value from it'.
> This whole thing is a bizarre contradiction to me.
I agree that education is a special case within international trade. But I do think that it is a matter for India and not Britain to curtail the ability of Indians to study abroad, if India believes that is (a) fair, and (b) beneficial to their domestic education system. I don't find it at all bizarre or morally perverse that the PM should act as a cheerleader for influential domestic interests such as our higher education system, especially when full fee-paying international students effectively subsidise UK students. And I've never seen Cameron say he wishes to reduce the number of fee-paying foreign students attending accredited UK institutions.
And a also disagree with the implication in your comment that the UK general taxpayer subsidies higher education too little. More higher education than a free market would provide is beneficial, but after a certain point the net benefit to society of the next marginal student buying subsided education would be less than the added public benefit. If you watch the front page of HN, there's occasionally an article or two about a higher education bubble; people are (probably) already buying more education (and certainly in some sectors if not others) than the job market can stand.
I like the idea of free education as a 'right', naturally or socially constructed. But moving towards that reality in Britain has to come from innovation slashing the marginal cost of education, and in the short term, by increasing the number of full fee-paying foreign students. Allocating revenue or large tax rises to up the number of students in higher education are going to be politically infeasible for at least a generation. (Not forgetting the looming demographic crisis on top of the current downturn.)
In recent weeks I've mellowed out into a new normal. Have you heard about the idea of the hedonic treadmill? It's the idea that being happy is a temporary response to a positive change in your life and eventually your emotional state returns to normal, even if your life continues being great. I'm beginning to think it works the other way too: I've returned to my not-so-great emotional baseline, even though my quality of life is objectively worse.
I'm sure others will chime in here with what strategies have worked well for them but I thought I would add this observation because it surprised me and is perhaps counter intuitive. All the best getting through this.