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!