One thing that seems to reliably cause burnout is when a person with high flying ambition finds herself in an environment in which she feels stripped of agency.
It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.
Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the learned helplessness theory of depression.
(Tangentially related) I had to run the desktop version of Excel to develop a quick VBA macro for a client. Problem: I've been developing on a Linux box for years and the idea of leaving my cozy dev environment for a plain Windows install gave me chills.
After failing to install Windows in a VM (thanks TPM), I found a way to run Windows apps nearly natively (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps). It works by starting a Windows docker image and streaming the application frame with RDP. As the RDP client handles the copy/paste and other niceties such as shared directories, it's way easier to integrate in my env than the other options.
> For me using synchronization software (Seafile, Syncthing, ...) to do backups is dangerous.
Yep. Just synchronisation on its own for backup is at best better than nothing, a first step. It fails to protect from at least three very common occurrences you need backups for: accidental deletion, incorrect update, or corruption - the broken data is quickly synced everywhere. Adding snapshots and regular integrity checks is essential.
This is happening across the board, not just to IT workers, and I suspect it's the major factor as for why the expected productivity improvements from technology didn't materialize.
Think of your "DevSecOps" people doing 3x the work they should. Do you know what else are they doing? Booking their own business travels. Reconciling and reporting their own expenses. Reporting their own hours, broken down by business categories. Managing their own vacation days. Managing their own meetings. Creating presentations on their own, with graphics they made on their own. Possibly even doing 80% of work on lining up purchases from third parties. And a bunch of other stuff like that.
None of these are part of their job descriptions - in fact, all of these are actively distracting and disproportionally compromise the workers' ability to do their actual jobs. All of these also used to have dedicated specialists, that could do it 10x as efficiently, for fraction of the price.
My hypothesis is this: those specialists like secretaries, internal graphics departments, financial staff, etc. they all were visible on the balance sheet. Eliminating those roles does not eliminate the need for their work to be done - just distributes it to everyone in pieces (in big part thanks to self-serve office software "improving" productivity). That slows everyone down across the board disproportionally, but the beancounters only see the money saved on salaries of the eliminated roles - the slowdown only manifests as a fuzzy, generic sense of loss of productivity, a mysterious costs disease that everyone seems to suffer from.
I say it's not mysterious; I say that there is no productivity gain, but rather productivity loss - but because it turns the costs from legible, overt, into diffuse and hard to count, it's easy to get fooled that money is being saved.
I spent so many hours reading books as a child and feel that my world is larger and richer for it. But even so I'd like to go back and whisper in my little ear, put down the book for a while and go outside and read the world with every sense and then write on it with every tool you can find or make. I love books but have hidden in them as much as built on them. All good things can be abused.
As others have said the C4 model is a great way to address a number of these issues.
I can’t find the right video at the moment but Simon Brown (creator of C4) gives a great talk about creating his DSL, Structurizr, for C4, which he developed during COVID lockdown (if memory serves). There are many videos on YouTube of Simon talking about “C4 Models as Code” so I’m sure any one of those will suffice.
The focus is on creating the model of your system architecture, from which the diagrams you extract are a specific projection of that model. Rather than a diagram be the main artifact. It’s a simple but very powerful concept that I’m always surprised isn’t more widely used.
Structurizr models can also be exported to display as ilograph diagrams, mermaid diagrams and more.
Also very much worth a mention is icepanel, a lovely tool for architectural model that implements the C4 model heavily.
I saw Simon talk at a conference in Sydney about 10-15 years ago and heard about C4 for the first time in that talk, it’s been one of the most influential talks I’ve been to in my career as it made a lot of fuzzy things in my head all start to come together in a way that just made sense.
Every state has different possibilities. Real estate course required by the state, traffic school, driver ed, etc. Look at each state DMV licensing website and look for "course providers" and you can make a course and get onto the State list. All you have to do is get it approved and do any sort of yearly re-approval and you good. People go to the list, pick a course, you provide some sort of certificate (I make a PDF) or submit back to the state with an api. Once your approved it is easy from then on out.
If we required everything to be done in leaps and bounds, we'd never get anything done. Better to re-frame this as "looks to be an improvement on Voith Schneider Propellers". We can recognize the history while recognizing improvements. Progress is made by continual small steps, not giant leaps. If you see giant leaps, it is generally because you just aren't familiar with the topic enough (they do happen, but they are quite rare). Over trivializing improvements and dismissing them because they are abstractly similar only stops the world from moving forward. To reference a clique (something everyone can recite but something nobody knows): "the devil is in the details."
If you read the article, they say that the propeller decrease energy consumption by 22% from conventional shaftline (the video says "up to 25%" though...), that seems like a pretty big win to me. And seems like something that you shouldn't so quickly dismiss.
This kind of issue seems prominent around here and among engineers. Just remember how your work's merit relies so much on the details. What makes you think that this is any different for others? Why conclude that just because you understand something at an abstract level that you understand it at a nuanced level?
Edit: don't use this comment as a reason to downvote them. If you actually like this message upvote them to make this more visible because you're probably frustrated with this issue too.
Unix CLI philosophy, COM, ActiveX, Desktop Widgets, AppleScript, IFRAME's, The microservices movement, iOS Shortcuts, IFTTT, WebComponents, audio plugins, etc -- consumer clients and backend services have continuously explored composability as an engineering approach. Enterprise products often drown in bespoke/internal approaches to it.
It's an obvious idea, sometimes productive, but tends to accumulate incoherence, impedance, and security issues over time so (with exceptions) any given implementation tends to burn itself out eventually.
There are living examples now, there were many examples in the OP's 2005 world, and there will be more in the future.
The OP was frustrated by nobody buying into their own idea, but they write about it like it was innovative and unappreciated rather than common and naturally limited.
I'm unlikely to write a book, but here are a few more tidbits that come to mind.
Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.
Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.
When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.
From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!
There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!
Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc.
Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what he thought was mediocre talent.
n=1 anecdotal reflection here. I've had have chronic low grade inflammation from two different disorders for a very long time, including a GI disorder that definitely triggers my liver to work overtime (experienced in the form of general soreness, occasional stabs of pain in liver area and indications of impaired bile production and/or bile acid malabsorption, or BAM, during my longer flare-ups). So CRP is probably on the menu for me on a frequent basis.
The inflammatory aspect makes me feel like a complete zombie after several days of flaring up. I highly doubt this is a unique subjective experience. In fact, if you do some googling, you will find that chronic low-grade inflammation (as well as disruptions of the GI tract / microbiome) are quite strongly linked to treatment resistant depression, which is another thing I happen to have. I haven't personally read studies investigating it, but I suspect "brain fog" and attention/memory issues are also strongly correlated with chronic inflammation, even of the 'low grade' variety.
When I get into these states, brought on by flare-ups, my mind wants nothing more than to zone out in such a way as to increase the perceived speed with which time passes. Because time is basically the only thing that can get me out of a bad flare-up (as long as I avoid a huge list of foods and activities and strictly follow certain protocols as well). If I could sleep through all of it that would be ideal (a common refrain among the chronically depressed). And at the same time, stress and complicated situations increase the chances that I do something wrong that is likely to extend the flare-up (which to me suggests an adaptive role of depression during chronic health problems).
Even watching movies and TV feel too effortful at times: you have to focus on a storyline, remember what characters said and did, and maintain some emotional connection to the story in order to be engaged and thus have time pass quickly... all which takes effort. Social media truly is the high fructose corn syrup + hydrogenated palm oil of passive time-wasting activities. Getting into "the zone" in terms of mindlessly clicking as minutes and hours pass by in a flash takes almost zero effort once you are accustomed (read: addicted) to it. And everything is so bite-sized and condensed, it is perfectly tailored to someone who is having more trouble than normal focusing, staying engaged, and remembering stuff (even what was said/read 2 minutes ago).
It's an old trick. Hayek described it well, way back in the '40s:
> "The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language."
For my job search process I created a custom note type specifically for interview problems. My general process was go to LeetCode, find a medium/hard problem, hack on it for 30-60 minutes, then look at the solution if I couldn't get there myself. At the end of the problem, regardless of if I solved it or not, I'd create an Anki card with the following fields:
Title
Question
Additional Criteria
Example input/output
Insight (1 sentence maximum)
Insight explanation (can be longer/bullet-pointed list)
Key Data Structure (at most 1 data structure; if there are multiple, use the most important one)
Time complexity
Space complexity
Full answer code (can use syntax highlighter add-on)
Source (can provide link to associated question online; can include link(s) to solutions that the insight and/or code come from)
There are 4 cards that are generated from this template, which test the same question in slightly different ways. They individually ask for the insight, the key data structure, and the time and space complexities.
I found this note type to be critical to my success in the following interviews. In two cases, I was asked literally the same exact question I had already added to Anki; I was able to write out the solution from memory in one go. If you'd like to use my note type directly, I've exported an example here. [0]
In my Instant Pot it's about 3-4 minutes to bring maybe 4 oz of water to pressure, 4 minutes to pressure cook, maybe a minute to release pressure and I'll do 8 eggs. So that's like half the cooking time.
Cooling time is the same. I plunge the eggs into an ice bath for 5 minutes before refrigerating.
I don't really do it for the time savings though. I mostly do it because it gives me a more consistent result. My egg yolks are always cooked exactly to the same doneness and the eggs are always easy to peel, even when starting with fresh eggs. (Freshness is the primary determinant of how easy eggs are to peel with older eggs being easier to peel than fresh eggs.)
I found that making them using the Serious Eats recipe I didn't always get consistent doneness (it's a lot harder to get the water temp exactly the same on a gas stove even with a thermometer). I also found they weren't always easy to peel.
So yes, the Instant Pot does save me time even with eggs where the time savings is minimal. More importantly it gives me a more consistent result with less attention from me.
YMMV.
On Rissoto, yes it's easy on a stove. But it requires you to stand there for 30 minutes lading in broth a little at a time. At least that's always the way I've done it to get a really nice result. On the Instant Pot, I can add all the ingredients at once an hit a button and 30 minutes later it's perfectly done w/o having required 30 minutes of my attention. I don't do it for the time savings. I do it because it's easier.
On beans, I didn't own a pressure cooker already.
On the yogurt, I never had consistent results trying to incubate naturally. I also tried a Yogotherm, coolers, my oven, the counter. Nothing worked. So I resolved that I needed to buy an incubator and when I learned the Instant Pot could do that and more, I bought it. It was like $80 on sale. I've been making perfect yogurt for like two years now.
Here's my recipe for creamy and nicely tart Bulgarian yogurt.
(I basically clone White Mountain.)
Fill four mason jars with whole milk. I use the Whole Foods brand ultra pasteurized whole milk. Screw lids loosely in place. Put jars into Instant Pot on top of the trivet. Fill with water till it comes up about 3/4 the way up the jars. Place lid on Instant Pot and set it to sous vide setting, 190° for 30 minutes.
When done pasteurizing, remove the mason jars and place them in cool (not cold or they will crack) water. I do this in my sink. After about 15 minutes remove the lid from one and check the temperature is below 110°. If not wait a bit longer. You could just let them cool on the counter top too but I'm a bit impatient with this step.
Add 1 tsp of starter to each jar and stir lightly. Put mason jars back in Instant Pot. Place lid on. Incubate for 8 hours. Once it's done incubating, place jars on counter for an hour or so, then move to the fridge.
For a starter, I use White Mountain Bulgarian Yogurt for a fresh batch. Then I can chain my own yogurt along as starter for months at a time.
I prefer to mix things into my yogurt when I eat it so I like to keep the yogurt itself nice and tart and don't mix anything in to the jars.
I make the yogurt in the mason jars from the start so I don't have to transfer it when it's done.
When we compare the opportunity that space tech provides to that of both Avro and Blackberry, the question to me is how have the incentives changed? Culturally, we have an attachment to K-selection over r-selection of companies, meaning that instead of creating the conditions for an ecosystem of competitors to thrive, the CDN governments pick winners and turn them into state codependents who are surprised to lose to more agile companies who came up through competition. We're the talent, but not the money.
It's a mix of a cultural naivety about economics and a business establishment who do just fine with a few banks and the natural resource sector - as why risk investing in early stage anything when that money is safer in bank stocks and extractive industries? Canada doesn't really benefit from space tech either, as the economics of space exploration are about mineral exploitation, which is Canada's stock in trade, and asteroid mining is a direct competition to our strip mining the north.
Our R&D tax breaks skew the incentives to achieve the opposite of their intent, where some of the work on the research does get done here, but the resulting IP, revenue, and market cap gets owned by US parent entities. They use Canada as an engineering maquiladora for cheap and directly subsidized labour. An actual competitive policy would reward investment and growth of an ecosystem and not merely subsidize the piecework toil that investment pays for. We could collect from a greater number of M&A windfalls instead of just skimming income tax revenue off software developers as well.
However our politics are too hobbit-like to create a serious venture ecosystem, so sure, some people will use the relative comfort of the country to produce some space tech, but I don't see the case for investing in space tech here when you can invest in more favourable markets and just use our cheap engineering talent to get you to your exit. Canada is mainly services firms that don't produce any IP or durable or acquirable value. A lot of people say it's broken, but the other thing about this place is that it's almost never broken, it just works for someone you can't see.
As advanced countries' systems for marriage and child-rearing continue to fail, there is a constant demand for cope. What if we learned to love being single? What if we substitute friendship for marriage? 64 ways to enjoy retirement on your own! This is the collective version of listening to an alcoholic explain why he doesn't have a problem.
Work Attitudes and Work Organization in the Soviet Union (date unknown - ? 1985) [re-formatted]
"Over the past two decades there is abundant evidence of Soviet concerns with the problems of job dissatisfaction and poor work morale. The evidence appears in a score of sociological studies of work attitudes and in the more "popular" periodical literature on labor problems.
The kind of work discontent which is apparent, however, does not appear to be potentially "explosive" in nature. It manifests itself chiefly in
- indifferent job performance,
- poor work discipline, and
- high rates of job instability.
Job dissatisfaction is not confined to any one sector of the work force, but the discontent of relatively highly educated young workers in routine, low skilled jobs has been particularly troublesome.
Continuing problems of poor work morale and lackadaisical job performance have elicited Soviet interest in Western experiments in work re-organization (work "enrichment"programs, job rotation, autonomous work teams), and initial steps have been taken to introduce a modest Soviet version of the "humanization of work". The urgency of mobilizing disciplined work commitment becomes all the more pressing as the Soviets enter a period of intensifying labor scarcity, in which economic growth becomes increasingly dependent on the growth of labor productivity rather than on additions to the work force"
OP > "Now, I would personally feel shame if I did these things".
The Ideal Communist Worker
Within a communist society, people are expected to act in the interest of the Communist Party and the majority of society. Specifically, the individual is expected to work and act to promote the betterment of the community. Chairman Mao Zedong elaborates, “At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate to the interests of the nation and the masses. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight are most contemptible, while ... working with all one’s energy, whole hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.” Hence, communists are expected to work diligently and thoughtfully in order to ensure he or she provides the most benefit to society.
As a result, any worker in the computer field is expected to manufacture computer products without the wish for acknowledgment or excessive monetary reward.
I designed and maintain several graph benchmarks in the Linked Data Benchmark Council, including workloads aimed for databases [1]. We make no restrictions on implementations, they can any query language like Cypher, SQL, etc.
In our last benchmark aimed at analytical systems [2], we found that SQL queries using WITH RECURSIVE can work for expressing reachability and even weighted shortest path queries. However, formulating an efficient algorithm yields very complex SQL queries [3] and their execution requires a system with a sophisticated optimizer such as Umbra developed at TU Munich [4]. Industry SQL systems are not yet at this level but they may attain that sometime in the future.
Another direction to include graph queries in SQL is the upcoming SQL/PGQ (Property Graph Queries) extension. I'm involved in a project at CWI Amsterdam to incorporate this language into DuckDB [5].
Loyalty in general can be thought of as a line of credit for employers and employees to informally "borrow" from each other to smooth things over. Explicitly enumerating all of a given job's duties in an employment agreement is functionally impossible, and a key part of what people mean by an employee's "loyalty" to a company is that willingness to go slightly outside of their expected duties. Meanwhile, a company's "loyalty" is willingness to tolerate downturns in returns on a given employee and protect employees' jobs even when doing so might cost them in the short term. A company's "loyalty" might take the form not punishing an employee for being unproductive for some time after a family tragedy or keeping employees on the payroll during an economic downturn even if that might cost them.
If you want to completely get rid of that, even the slightest imperfection in designing the bounds of a given employee's duties is going to result in whatever processes that person relies for grinding to a halt and everyone being trapped in a constant run-around of "That's not my job".
That said, given that companies have been increasingly unwilling to extend even the most basic loyalty to its employees, the right move for workers is to become more transactional. Normally, the accrued "credit" gained through loyalty might dissuade you from switching jobs even if you get a nominally better offer, but if that's no longer a factor, workers have no reason to hesitate about just looking at the bottom line on their employment agreement. This might be damaging to the broader economy since job hopping has considerable productivity costs, but on the individual level, it's the clear right choice.
I see job postings with "must be able to multitask" and "high intensity environment" and I think the 80s called and it wants its 8 ball of coke back.
It's common knowledge - or should be - multitasking is a productivity loss, not gain. And the last thing the world needs is another headless-chicken culture where working hard and frantic is confused with smart and efficient.
in person therapy is a waste of time/money for most people unless you're so wealthy you can afford the wise old superstar in their field (most of the best have already dropped dead of old age).
less charitable: those who knock the easy/free/practical-yet-harmless-woo are kinda just protecting the value of their profession / special modality, consciously or unconsciously imo, like doctors who don't accept basic fasting thats been around a thousand years, eating keto/carn, or benefits of natural immunity... lol
I say don't be loyal to any 'experts', steal whatever works from their cheap books and youtube and other resources across modalities and put together a hodgepodge of stuff for yourself!
Research and libgen and then buy physical books and highlighters and a journal and especially a medium/large STUFFED ANIMAL with expressive eyes to mimic eye contact while to talk out loud to instead (like rubber ducking with trauma) and do it yourself. You can process feelings privately, keep a journal of progress and try one book/method at a time at your own pace.
Most normal people (esp men) can't cry in front of strangers, but can cry in private.
ONE session of therapy is $50 to $150, and only gives you one hour with barely ONE insight or emotional moment a session. Thats after many sessions of fighting defense mechanisms and intellectual tricks to maybe get to the real meat of what's painful.
The classics of the field are mostly books that cost $10-15 as paperbacks on amazon and each can provide MONTHS of insight /catharsis if you DO/work thru feelings that arise as u read each chapter instead of just reading it and throwing it aside for the next book.
People just race thru and don't APPLY anything, that's as useless as reading a programming book and not trying any of the code/psets. Slow it down, only one chapter a week, the same way in person therapy is only one hour a week, the insights/feelings that you chew on the other 6 days until the next session. Make a schedule and DIY.
Unplug your alexa and phone and u can say stuff out loud to your plushie that you cannot legit say to a therapist-- they are truly a stranger with LEGAL BUREAUCRACY and social programming makes them often unable to handle realities of anyone unlike themselves.
Therapists gossip and share stories at parties and know little about real privacy in the digital age where two random anecdotes can google-fu most clients.
The lame psych majors you met in college are the same people your insurance will cover a pathetic 10 sessions with. They get bored and tune out or jump to their fave diagnostic buckets when they can't untangle your issues and unconsciously need to make themselves feel more competent.
The money is bad so they compete for clients and aren't going to tell you hard truths that would HELP you when that risks being dropped, a bad review, bad word of mouth, or risk of legal/license headache.
You are just paying for a 'legitimized' comfort zone, rather than a strong helpful truly honest person to guide you out of your own misery-is-safe-and-familiar comfort zone.
Incentives are not on your side.
The types of people that become therapists are not emotionally hardy, mentally strong, stable, world-weary people with a strong sense of character.
If you knew any in real life as friends, you would never hire them.
Seriously consider what you disclose and reset your expectations.
more ranty side points----------
therapy is like the 80-20 garbage/quality ratio of all fields, especially the affordable ones most likely a mediocre broken person with their own baggage/desires/ego they'll project onto you.
Good luck being a hot girl, philosophically and politically anything but a very liberal humanist, having any personality type that isn't already a feely crier who understands your emotions, any one with working class common sense, anyone with aggression, bitterness and/or less 'nice' presentations of symptoms or a myriad other demographic factors. These aspects SO OBVIOUSLY influence the undercurrents between mediocre therapists and patient but they swear as professionals do not or are just further 'grist for the mill', eye roll...
You're not gonna magically book an appointment (with or without insurance) and get like Irvin Yalom wise jedi soul that can cut thru your bullshit with affectionate firmness, nor will you get the smart self-dignified composure of Melfi/Paul HBO fictional therapists that created standards of excellence not realistic in real life....
Most practitioners are kinda weak people seeking status and comfort and easy wins, difficult patients annoy them subconsciously, they emotionally flinch from them and truly do nothing to earn the trust necessary for 'real' therapy magic to work.
(Everyone recommending "get therapy!" on every thread online is just a middle-class reaction formation, an automatic unthinking refrain when THEY can't handle their own emotions of uselessness/systemic helplessness against the pain and grim reality of being an individual in the world.)
The way I heard the joke was "a data scientist is someone who's not good enough at math to be a statistician, and not good enough at programming to be a software engineer."
"I remember feeling derisive about marketing as a young techie — it wasn’t creating the value. Nowadays, I often marvel at how much amazing value is present that people just don’t know about. If only there was a way to bring it to their attention…"
To anyone who has felt similar, the way to navigate class in situations like that is to really practice not giving a flamingo. Not in an antagonistic or reactive way, but to have spent a few years really cultivating a paucity of firetrucks.
The author was treated well because she wasn't a threat, and the people at that party could tell she was a civilian in their conflict. Outsiders are necessary because they polinate between tribes, and if you get invited to something like that, embrace your freedom. Think of it like spending a week in LA and Hollywood, where it can be dazzling, but then it starts to sink in that these people can't leave. That's what being middle class is like, it's the incentives and behaviours that result from belief you can't leave and it's "up or out," which is hilarious (in an existentially horrific way), because there is no "up." There is no "there" from "here," because not a single member of a legitimate elite got there with permission or assent - only the acquiescence of peers. You only ever win your place at that table. Elite is always the conseqeunce of mastery and achievement, and not flattery or prestige. It's not so much zero-sum as untouchable achievement. The rest are hangarounds.
Being a member of an elite and elitism have as much in common as a rockstar and their fan club. Nobody wants to be around fans, they'd much rather be able to find people who they can share their appreciation of things with. If you gave up firetrucks and just got amazing at being a musician, or even just being amazing at whatever you do, you would be more welcome among rock stars because you have that level of achievement in common, and not just taste.
While I came from a middle class family, several years ago I decided to drop out of the middle class because after really struggling with it, I decided it was a competition without a prize. If you have to struggle to maintain status, it was never yours. Struggle for achievement, but never for status. Being middle class isn't about income. It is predicated on the idea you are an impostor who must get ahead of all the other impostors by sustaining the narrative that none of you are impostors. Indeed, admittedly people who lose at games are always the most generous with their insights into them, and misery does love company, but whatever the case, I have the relative luxury of affording to share these views.
Like how "all political careers end in failure," I was losing at something in which I didn't think anyone actually wins. However, like pursuing elite achievement - progress and success at being middle class means you also have to love the conflict for its own sake, just like loving a sport to be the best at it. Being a member of an elite means to have won a place as a peer among the very best in a field. Striving can be a real crab bucket, and I don't think it's something one should enter into lightly.
A friend put it well with an analogy to "indoor cats" and "outdoor cats," where they have very different skills. Outdoor cats are romantic and generally better at catching mice and being a cat, but they can't use a litter box, they destroy furniture, spray everywhere, and they cause a power struggle whenever they show up. Indoor cats catch mice as necessary if at all, but are really good at maintaining the durable relationships that secure their welcome, and being declawed makes them behave more strategically, even if they can revert to apopleptic wildness when an intact outdoor cat comes around. Obviously my bias favours outdoor cats, but with a sincere respect for the skills indoor cats must develop to live. Vive la difference.
The adage of "first rule of being an insider is don't criticize other insiders," applies so strictly that the things insiders ignore about each other often seems completely insane. What the author was writing about at that party was the opiate and glazing effects of proximity to power.
Some of my more progressive friends were offended when I told them my lack of a degree now qualified me as working class, and that with my new class consciousness, I was going to use my gifts and advantages to advocate for my proletariat brothers and sisters, and I think they felt it as a betrayal of the game, and it sounded a lot like just losing and giving up. Maybe it was, though I think it just clicked for me that one doesn't recruit courtiers to storm a castle, and we don't need to because the one thing we know for sure about them is that they always forgive you when you win.
Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.
It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.
Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the learned helplessness theory of depression.