• What is underclocked?
• Feeling when you look at someone and they don’t have anything interesting to say about what they’ve been up to
• Being underclocked is horrible. It’s when you have nothing driving you. When you start asking “so what”? When you start searching for meaning.
• Culture encourages consumption over production? “Funemployment” “Work life balance”
• Moral question: what is the value of human who only consumes resources and doesn’t produce any? Do they have equal intrinsic moral worth to others?
• Symptoms: playing a lot of video games, wasting time on social media, sleeping a lot

• Periods of life when I was underclocked:
• Years 1.5 to 2.5 at Google, after having been promoted and when our product felt like it had been stagnating
• ~1 year, living at home with parents, and freelancing/wasting time
• Time between Streamlit and Manifold

• Things to shake you out of it:
• Novelty in your environment
• School, with rotating semesters, did a pretty good job of this for me
• So many of my friends are underclocked, a few years out of school. Easy to get to a place of complacency “hey, work isn’t that hard, and I’m getting paid a lot and have a lot of freedom”
• Travel and coordinating logistics
• Challenge, uncertainty, stress
• A cool project that takes on a life of its own

• Point of confusion: people who avoid talking about work because it seems like it could be boring. These people aren’t underclocked, just shy
• Note to self: I definitely shy away about going in-depth about current work obsessions. Do less of this!