If I have to pick up six things at the grocery store, three at the drug store, and tell two things to the vet, I visualize picking each thing up, or having each conversation with as much visual context as I can muster. Maybe mapping a route through a familiar store, or picturing the phone on the vet desk while ticking off whatever damn things my idiot cat threw up that morning.
Then I just have to remember to go to three places. It's moderately recursive too: map another route from an unusual subway stop, all I have to remember is to get out at that stop on the way home from work, and the rest just comes to me as I arrive at each location.
George Clooney doesn't exactly phone it in, but we've seen this Act 1 before, and the plot eventually, and mercifully, ends on an unlikely emotional beat that neither satisfies nor offends his uncritical fans. 4/10.
Do you have neurological issues? (or suffer from risk factors? such as high blood pressure, overweight, diabetes, sedentarity) I wonder if that could be related (because of PKD's eventual tragic death by stroke). As far as my tiny medical knowledge goes schizophrenia hallucinations usually auditory in nature and not very explicit. There's also the question of the effect of the drug supposedly taken during his dentist procedure ( a compound which seems to have brain effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_thiopental#Side_effects ).
Of course he was probably in general risk for delusional thinking given his job to constantly devise bizarre plots questioning every aspect of reality. But it does make me curious whether he suffered from a neurological condition, or just a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia.
Hope you're doing well, mental disorders are scary :(
Diagnosed, strapped to a gurney, and popped in the system for a couple of months. It was almost two decades ago, I'm fine. But having seen and thought most of the things people describe in these experiences, I find post facto attempts to elevate them (usually based on a few coincidences) wishful thinking.
Agreed. It's a disordered, scary place to be in. Not something to glorify and fantasize as a mythical or sensory experience (especially since unlike hallucinogen drugs it's not voluntary, it lasts potentially all your life and you're not in control).
Basically, I'm an alcoholic. I'm in my mid 30s. I started drinking when I was told I couldn't smoke pot anymore, and kept at it after a number of friends committed suicide and a few others died of cancer.
The thing is, when I am drinking, I can manage the pain of things that will never be okay, even though I must endure them. I don't advocate alcohol, but waking up screaming every morning isn't always an option. And I get to say "basically an alcoholic" because that's a euphemism for "functional alcoholic" which is a euphemism for "alcoholic," but because I can still do my job around people in their 20s, nobody complains, so I don't have to begin the regime of psychoactive drugs that don't guarantee any less liver damage than the alcohol. I can only hope I make it to my 50s, and in my 50s, I will not give one thought to what anyone thinks, because making it to 50 means I survived remembering my dead loved ones for 30 years, and that's good enough.
It sounds like it's not an issue for your business if he's killing code three sheets to Moby Dick and you can't spare a salaried employee to walk him home. If you care for him, as my family cares for me, you will do what they do, and say, "Are you okay? I wondered because you're drinking a lot," and he might say, "No, I'll never be okay, but if it's a problem I can work on it." Or he might say, "Yeah, I'm fine," even though he's not. Point is it doesn't sound like it's a professional issue, since you haven't fired him for drinking on the job, so his ability to code is a moot point. The question is not "How do I approach a talented employee who seems superhumanly talented when he's drunk but then we have to use unpaid company resources to manage him after hours?" The question is "How do I approach someone managing pain in a potentially long-term and self-destructive way?"
> …so I don't have to begin the regime of psychoactive drugs that don't guarantee any less liver damage than the alcohol.
I can't think of any antidepressant or antipsychotic medication that is as bad for your body as the amount of alcohol it sounds like you're drinking.
Some alcohol is fine (probably even good for you), but if you think, "Maybe I drink too much." then you almost certainly drink too much. And that's really bad for you. It won't just screw up your health at age 50. It will hurt your cognitive abilities much sooner.
Honestly, it sounds like you're rationalizing. If you want a drug to distract yourself from psychological pain, there are far less damaging (and less expensive) options than alcohol. Please see a doctor about this. They can almost certainly help.
I can assure you that when/if you reach it, you won't at all feel that you "survived remembering my dead loved ones for 30 years, and that's good enough". You'll want to keep on living.
You may have kids, young or older - your own, your grandkids, whatever - or other family who do not want to see you gone.
I spent a night in a cardiac ward a few years ago. The other s in there were all 80+. They had great stories - one of them had a heart attack in his boat while reeling in a big fish. I got out the next day but the one thing that stayed with me was that even at 80, every one of those guys still desperately want to stay alive.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I want to live to 4398 at the very least. But us 30-somethings mark the age our parents were when we moved out as the point when we would stop having to explain ourselves to anyone because we had ostensibly done our job.
Just a brief note: bot sophistication is off the hook. I worked at an ad network where one of the clients demanded we prove that the mouse had moved prior to "clicking" on one of their ads. No problem, we said, and most of the traffic passed the test. The traffic had referrers, legit user agents, javascript, and they were triggering the mousemove and click events. Out of curiosity, we sent a fraction of traffic to a test page, wherein the actual page was displayed in a full window iframe, then blocked access until the user clicked, and tracked their mouse movements. Easy enough; annoying for a user, but not a deal breaker for most.
The user movement maps we ended up with were straight lines of randomly spaced dots with sudden acute corners. A human could not replicate the pattern with a ruler and a pen pad, and we certainly didn't expect 90% of our human users going for that client's sites to be sitting around with rulers and pen pads drawing lines of randomly spaced dots. We checked the testing code and ran a dozen tests, and we couldn't figure out how a human could replicate it on any browsing device. Our conclusion is that somebody bothered to program a bot that would replicate mouse movement and we accidentally broke it by blocking programmatic access to the page, so it couldn't find a link to click and went crazy.
If I have to pick up six things at the grocery store, three at the drug store, and tell two things to the vet, I visualize picking each thing up, or having each conversation with as much visual context as I can muster. Maybe mapping a route through a familiar store, or picturing the phone on the vet desk while ticking off whatever damn things my idiot cat threw up that morning.
Then I just have to remember to go to three places. It's moderately recursive too: map another route from an unusual subway stop, all I have to remember is to get out at that stop on the way home from work, and the rest just comes to me as I arrive at each location.