I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.

He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.

The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.

But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.

> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats

This actually happened to me professionally.

A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.

I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.

What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)

He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)

Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.

And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...

Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...

I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)

> We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming

In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.

When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.

Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.

There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.

I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.

In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.

The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.

a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly

but more importantly:

b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.

c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.

people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.

And you start of with

> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong

and end on

> This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.

on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.

PS: clattering teeth

Anyone who has a restless dog in the evenings can see DMN create anxiety.

Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at. He scans out the window like I scan social media. He’s got extra energy that seems to need to go somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be looking out the window scanning for threats, barking, sounding meaner than he actually is.

It’s like he manufactures anxiety out of nothing else to do.

To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice.

To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.

> but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work

This is mindfulness work, what you just described.

Do you have any resources that helped you come to that realization or helped make habitual the process of noticing your DMN is being activated?

I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.

In addition, being able to see when dopamine is rising, feel it, label it, engage your parasympathetic nervous system and know that a dopamine spike is temporary, the craving for TV, news, sweets, social media, or other will pass... that is liberation.

We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.

It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.

I read it as just being context dependent. The "Tripoli" vs "Triple E" bit in the article was to me another anecdote on how we resolve ambiguity based on what we have in our mind's stack at the moment:

> A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”

Agreed. I don’t really have an inner monologue, so articles like this do not resonate with me. I occasionally think these sorts of thoughts, like “hmmm- should I have perceived that interaction differently than I did in the moment”.

But unlike my partner, there is no little voice that keeps following that thought. The thought comes, is considered, then moved onto something else.

Honestly, having a negative inner voice sounds miserable. But I agree, by not really considering these sorts of things, I do think I wound up with a low EQ. Working on addressing it, but it takes time and experience

FYI HN does edit out the "Why", but OP can go in and modify the title after submitting.

That makes one wonder what happens if one was to submit a story titled "Why"

I found the shortened one accurate and also thought provoking

Wait to you get a teenager. I measured my skin. A good 100 microns thicker.

> The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you.

That's not a given. That's the rational response on their end, but not only is no one perfectly rational, but some people are very, very irrational.

It can sometimes[1][2] be the case that the best option is to be among those who don't attract any attention at all.

Separately:

The spiraling described in this post is worth consideration, but equally worthy are the odd disparities in professional life (or life in general) and the negative consequences that aren't the result of internal forces like paralyzing self-doubt.

Consider an article that starts just like this one, except it focuses on the different consequences experienced by Dawn who is regularly forgiven for things like tardiness and mistakes in her work in contrast to more severe outcomes for Hila, who after arriving late—perhaps for the first time, even—is perceived to be fucking up because that's in her irresponsible nature[3]—even if a sober, objective analysis would reveal that Hila is actually exceeding the expectations one would have for any employee (and her transgressions are well behind the line of courtesy that is extended to Dawn)—for no other reason than Hila being younger or newer to the company.

This can result in a similar spiral of defeat, but it's a kind of defeat by external forces rather than self-defeat.

1. Depending on your environment/experience, you could even say "very often"

2. See also <https://hn.algolia.com/?query=copenhagen%20strikes%20again&t...>

3. See also <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error>

I generally agree but in my experience it becomes more complex when you cognitively decide on one thing (to assume the best), but don’t feel it. How you feel influences how it’s going to happen in major and in subtle ways. Your return friendliness may be received as snarky or sarcasm, or at least detected as insincere, to give one example.

In general it seems like you should assume the outcome you want, so you behave in a way that's conducive to that outcome manifesting itself. If you always assume the worst, then you might protect yourself from rejection but you end up pushing people away.

So assuming someone is friendly even if they aren't is a better strategy than assuming everyone dislikes you.

Indeed, the default should be to assume the best intentions of people. Also, people can have a bad day and be snarky. Next meeting they might as well be friendly.

Staying positive and not letting (potential) negative feedback derail you, works like magic in the long run.

If someone is really picking on you, or they genuinely disapprove of your work, you will find out in due time.

For people trying to sit more in the middle, forcing a neutral balance is another way to do it: don't burn bridges and don't over assume people's feelings.

That means not one-upping snark, but also keeping a healthy default distance with people you deal with professionaly.

One might miss some genuinely heartful exchanges, but it also makes the worst times way easier to deal with. Compensating for keeping too much distance is usually easy, repairing problematic exchanges is way way harder.

> When you're not feeling good enough it's sometimes helpful to remember that even people who create negative impacts often get into positions of power and stay there for one reason or another. i.e if they can do something very badly then why are you so worried about whether you are worthy?

How does this help? For all you know they’re a snarky something to people beneath them but not to the right people. Or they are snarky to everyone but they’re the kind of pointy-elbow go-getter that got to where they are inspite or even because of that. Are any of these alternatives good?

And now they get to be snarky to people beneath them and only get a tiny sliver of pushback because the mind of the underling has all the time to ruminate but no incentive to push back with anything.

Just more Polyanna HN job advice.

I think it should be said that abusive, toxic work environments can creep up until you're in one, and hearing things like people should just have a tough skin. What would be a more specific way of putting that?