This is one of my favourite essays because it completely changed the way I thought about my own skills. Namely, it taught me that a good way to evaluate my own skills is to examine the gap that exists between my skillfulness in some given field and the skillfulness of people who are not in that field or are novices within it.
My takeaway from the essay was not that athletes are vapid or unaware of how much more skilled they are than laymen or amateurs.
My takeaway is that when you're really good at something, to where you can say you're better than a lot of people at it, you're often not aware of exactly how good you are at it and may even see it as banal. Where other people might look at some skill you have and be blown away and wonder what it's like to be so good at something, you just recognize it as your default and unremarkable state.
An analogy I can think of is literacy. Many years ago, I taught myself literacy in a non-Latin script for a language that I had grown up speaking but had never actually learned how to write. Reading in a new script was incredibly slow at first, as I would literally have to sound out every individual letter in my head, and then manually put them together in my head to understand the word. A sentence would take me minutes to read. Over time, I would see words that I had read many times and I wouldn't need to sound out the letters in my head anymore, I would simply "recognize" the word: my brain would recognize the collection of letters as an image associated with a concept.
I realized that I had always done this with English and had never been aware of it. When I read English, I'm not really reading each word as a collection of individual letters; I'm reading each word as an image for lack of a better term that I can immediately associate with meaning in my head, and I think this is how most people read English.
How this is relevant to this essay is that if you were asked about your ability to do this, you would think it something completely banal and regular. You might not even have any particular comment to make, as you'd simply see your literacy as your personal status quo. You've spent most of your life actively training your skill of literacy and have attained mastery, but to you its...just reading. Suppose you talked to someone barely literate, or someone learning literacy in English, about this ability -- to them this ability would be much more impressive because the gap between their skill and your skill is much wider.
I think realizing this about yourself has all sorts of applications: confidence in your ability lets you experiment more or take action when you have less info or security on the outcome of your action. Realizing what comprises a given skill gap would help you teach others how to get to where you are in a way where you teach them at their level, not yours.
It's a ceramic bowl with "thinking of you" written in Chinese on the side. When a person with a mild sickness like a runny nose or a cough is nearby, it fills with soup. People who eat this soup say it's comforting & reminds them of their parents' cooking. Once eaten, a message will materialize in the inside of the soup bowl in the language most familiar to the person eating from it.
I won't spoil the rest.
Side note: the closest game to capture the feeling of reading the SCP wiki is Control. If you enjoy reading the SCP wiki, you definitely owe it to yourself to play Control.
If you have the funds and you're certain you don't want to be at your current role, I couldn't recommend it more.
It was perhaps the best thing I've ever done for myself. I came out of that period not only with a plethora of new skills, but with a greater understanding of my resilience and capability, a more refined understanding of what I wanted out of life that enabled me to choose a job rather than take whatever would put food on my table, and I also ended up with a deepened relationship with my loved ones.
I left a job of roughly 5 years with nothing lined up because the workplace was abusive and devastated my mental and physical health, and I felt I couldn't wait any more.
I was overconfident at how quickly I'd find another role and anticipated a max of 3 months unemployed. I quit shortly before the economic impact of the pandemic, so I wound up being off for 9 months between my old job and my current job.
The downsides were that I had to worry about my finances more, that my self-confidence took a temporary hit (I realized I tied my sense of self-worth to my employment), and that I constantly felt like I should be doing more.
The best preparation I made for myself, which echoes other comments here, was imposing the discipline of structure on myself, and giving myself actionable, manageable weekly goals to keep my forward sense of momentum going, even if that was something like "cook a dish I've never cooked before."
Edit: I would also add that it's important to manage your expectations. If you have a role to return to after, or if you know with certainty you will, this is less of a factor. If you don't, even in a great tech labor market, you should anticipate the possibility of not immediately landing the role you want and plan for that accordingly.
I'm surprised this article didn't mention Worlds(.)com or even Second Life.
For those unaware, Worlds(.)com is an old virtual chat platform from 1995 that still exists today. I imagine it was a lot like VRChat back in the day in terms of its aesthetic and user experience, without the VR and with lower graphical fidelity. Its regulars today are, to put it lightly, very weird and sometimes unsettling people, but that's a topic for another time.
Worlds stands out in that many of its worlds are user-generated and still exist decades after they stopped being used. Exploring Worlds feels like you're exploring virtual ruins, where users made the kinds of worlds they would spend time on after work with fellow users.
You have virtual bars and clubs, virtual gardens, virtual BDSM dungeons, and even some secret areas. For example, there is a room only accessible by going behind a waterfall in another area, and it is a dark chamber with 2 floating roses in the middle, where Nights in White Satin plays. You get the sense someone made this for their partner. There is a "Hall of Fame" area with photos of the old users who spent time there, which prompted me to wonder how many of them were still alive.
The reason I was reminded of Worlds, outside of the obvious connection to the subject matter, is because of the article's idea of virtual space as a mechanism to experiment with identity. Worlds to me feels like a living, breathing, almost archaeological example of autobiographical virtual architecture.
Came here specifically wanting to post these links! Seconding this recommendation; I've never come across a single content creator that manages to tie together so many disparate concepts into a cohesive whole the way Geller does. You can almost forget that architecture is one of his main themes because his analysis covers such a wide breadth of topics but manages to make them all relevant to his central theses.
"Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions."
Agreed with all of your post, I think this is the most crucial point here. Genuine, skilled psychoanalysis is less about being some master discerner of psychological motives, and instead being very good at giving the subject of analysis a lot of psychological safety to express their innermost thoughts and most personal life experiences. Unless you build that kind of (responsible and professional) intimacy for lack of a better term, you're largely just projecting imo.
Not OP, but as someone who holds this view (who also used to engage in the practice): a lot of armchair psychoanalysis is based less on a genuine understanding of the other person's life and circumstances, and more on the assumption of what their life and circumstances must be combined with a surface-level knowledge of psychoanalytic practice.
Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.
My takeaway from the essay was not that athletes are vapid or unaware of how much more skilled they are than laymen or amateurs.
My takeaway is that when you're really good at something, to where you can say you're better than a lot of people at it, you're often not aware of exactly how good you are at it and may even see it as banal. Where other people might look at some skill you have and be blown away and wonder what it's like to be so good at something, you just recognize it as your default and unremarkable state.
An analogy I can think of is literacy. Many years ago, I taught myself literacy in a non-Latin script for a language that I had grown up speaking but had never actually learned how to write. Reading in a new script was incredibly slow at first, as I would literally have to sound out every individual letter in my head, and then manually put them together in my head to understand the word. A sentence would take me minutes to read. Over time, I would see words that I had read many times and I wouldn't need to sound out the letters in my head anymore, I would simply "recognize" the word: my brain would recognize the collection of letters as an image associated with a concept.
I realized that I had always done this with English and had never been aware of it. When I read English, I'm not really reading each word as a collection of individual letters; I'm reading each word as an image for lack of a better term that I can immediately associate with meaning in my head, and I think this is how most people read English.
How this is relevant to this essay is that if you were asked about your ability to do this, you would think it something completely banal and regular. You might not even have any particular comment to make, as you'd simply see your literacy as your personal status quo. You've spent most of your life actively training your skill of literacy and have attained mastery, but to you its...just reading. Suppose you talked to someone barely literate, or someone learning literacy in English, about this ability -- to them this ability would be much more impressive because the gap between their skill and your skill is much wider.
I think realizing this about yourself has all sorts of applications: confidence in your ability lets you experiment more or take action when you have less info or security on the outcome of your action. Realizing what comprises a given skill gap would help you teach others how to get to where you are in a way where you teach them at their level, not yours.