Losing traction

When it comes to discussing the way we behave and react to the events around us, it has been some years now since I realized the obvious flaws of the widespread theory of a unified personality: although it is rather clear that we feel as being a single person most of the time, we all have had times where we did not recognize ourselves or did not even know who we were (perhaps chemically mediated). Besides, there is an undeniable contextual contribution to our actions: we do not behave the same with our bosses as we do with our fellow employees, or with our grandmother as we do with our children.

In yesterday's post I mentioned the book I am reading by Joseph Heinrich, where he points out how this kind of variation is perfectly accepted in relation-mediated societies, but not at all in the West, where they will be dubbed as hypocritical. In our worldview, behaviors shall be "consistent" across the different facets of our live even if everybody would be extremely surprised if we insisted on using the same tone of voice at the football stadium, having dinner with the family and visiting a library. That is why I do not thing that I (or anyone else by the way) has a single personality, but a collection of them that, like in a Swiss army knife, replace one another depending on the need.

Photo: Rob Young

Added to that is also the time, because not only our personality (or personalities) changes from one situation to the next, but it all evolves over time: one day you feel like you are going to take the world by assault and you are able to overcome any obstacle; another day you have had bad sleep and even the slightest difficulty takes you down on your knees. And chances are that the same problem that was insurmountable just a couple of days prior poses no significant challenge the day you are inspired.

Being aware of this temporal and situational variability, it is very important for me to examine my behavior on a regular basis in case I find myself falling short of my own expectations. The introspection step is an essential one, because it is just too easy to let myself be driven by my routines and customs and not even stop to think why I do (or do not do) a certain thing at this point in time. The other factor is that introspection demands a level of honesty that can be hard to bear at times: when looking at my own behavior I frequently find reasons to congratulate myself but other times (and those are the painful ones) I have to admit that I have not been on my best behavior and that I should do something about it.

It turns out that I have been "down" the last couple of weeks, and it has been really hard for me to put my finger on it with any level of precision. Coming back from the holidays into the daily routine was hard in some sense, but it was also comforting to fall back into the well trodden path. I failed to identify neither the reason, nor the way I was disappointing myself, but I was certainly not satisfied so I decided to make an additional introspection effort to find out.

Thinking deep and long about it, I realized that I was simply refusing the challenges that life (or even myself) used to put in front of me. In that sense, I have always been playful and a good sport, trying to make the best out of any task but not feeling particularly down if I failed to deliver: in the end, one cannot be good at everything and even in the things that you are good there is (probably) always going to be someone who is even better. That is why it never was a problem to try to learn Japanese, solve Rubik's cube, type with the Workman layout and many other things that I have tried over the course of my life with varying degrees of success. However, in the last couple of weeks I seem to have defaulted to just the tasks where I had a well-founded expectation to succeed.

Surprisingly, my hesitation was not linked to the amount of work: I have done a number of tasks that required a significant investment of time to accomplish them, but they were just long, not hard; by putting the time I was essentially guaranteed to succeed. But any new task seems to have spooked me: Just a couple of days ago Martin thanked for the thorough set of tests that I had performed on the new version of the software (incidentally, we found an error within five minutes of testing, but then it was fixed and put of for test again) and suggested to try to automate the task so that we could repeat the suite whenever we deemed necessary and that without the need to invest the same amount of labor as the first one.

Under any other set of circumstances I would have immediately jumped to the challenge, but this time I truly felt like a car in the sand: every time I tried to push myself to do it, I lost traction and the wheels just spun in place. In fact I even rejected the idea once which, with anyone less stubborn than ,Martin would have meant the end of it, but he insisted on the potential benefits and eventually I complied. But that let me with the question of why I had not taken up the task in the first place.

It is hard to state it with 100% certainty, but my first impression is that the rising infection numbers and the increasingly severe measures that the government is dictating for the containment of the COVID are taking a toll on me. I had made the plan to go back to the office every weekday, even if it was only in the morning, but the new regulations seemed to point in the other direction. Luckily, the direction has just distributed a note clarifying that the home-office recommendation is only valid for those who can work from home with the same efficiency as they would at the institute. In my case, both the mental health and the internet connection are somewhat shaky, so I do not think I am violating any rule if I go ahead with my plan of coming back to work five days a week. Chances are that I will run into less people than I originally anticipated (that is an aspect that I sorely miss), but I will still have some time on my own in a different environment than my home office. Let us see what the next weeks bring. Have a nice evening.