cephalopod 68.5% @octopus@cybre.space

you can't just put 50 blocked tickets on a kanban board and say you're agile*

*actually you can and that's in a nutshell why agile is shit

t-shirt with a gay pride DNA helix and the text:

I Contribute To My Cousins' Evolutionary Success

I try to end my days on a positive note which is why I always stay awake past midnight

and I think a lot of that is coming from a stage 4 place: I know that doing the _right_ thing is sometimes going to mean doing something wildly divergent from group expectations & norms — and that's okay. there's no reason to internalize their disapproval as shame.

except I still do, or I don't but the effort of keeping it out *costs*, and eventually I *run out* and break down and let something slip.

so I solve that problem by staying away from groups that I'd be tempted to identify with.

likewise, from people radiating difficult or corrosive emotions. I know they're not mine, and that I shouldn't (have to) experience them. except I totally do, so I self isolate and run away from any TV shows more challenging than kid's cartoons.

or it's like, I have a stage-4 mental workspace I *can* inhabit — and do, when I'm doing abstract thinking!

but as soon as I leave it, what walks out and (fails to) implement the plans decided on in that space — that aspect of me is operating at a much lower level.

(workaround: try to do tasks without leaving the 4-workspace / triggering a context? but I think the reason I do that is because being in "plan mode" and "action mode" simultaneously requires too much energy.)

I also notice that: while I think I really do have at least some stage-4 (glimpses of stage 5, even?), I'm also going to a lot of effort to avoid stimuli that would cause problems for stage 3. which suggests I'm not nearly as done with 3 as I'd like to think.

because I *do* get sucked into other people's emotions, and into groups/teams that I'm part of. and I know I *shouldn't*, because I can't process other people's most of the time; and giving part of myself to a team that doesn't take care of it *hurts*.

current thoughts are more like — seeing myself as a stream, with substreams of different viscosity & speed — different streams for different levels of functioning — braided together.

so 2 *and* 3 (and 4??) streams are all active, and available, and it's like I'm spending more time with the 2-stream on top than is maybe… good… (more than the superego wants, but not more than the gestalt wants? because part of me *likes* not having to be at a high level of functioning.)

it's easy to verbally answer moral questions using kohlberg stage 5 or 6 reasoning

but in practice, most of my decision making these days goes like "is bed more cozy than tongue is dry?"

maybe the answer is: viewed as a pervasive developmental disorder, autism should make a mess out of developmental stage orders

maybe it's that I'm currently in an environment with parents so damn supportive that it's like I'm their high-school kid again, and I'm melting to fill the shape of my container

maybe the theory is kind of bs, and kegan is unifying too many mental faculties that often correlate, but don't have to & sometimes they wind up scattered all over the place

maybe I'm at a higher stage in a ego-structure sense, but I'm also really bad at using specific skills (depression? executive function?) that unlock at stages 2 & 3 (but aren't necessarily mastered)

maybe I'm replicating dysfunctional stage 2 behaviors, but for dysfunctional stage 4 reasons

big question for myself, of course, is: where am I?

it's easy & tempting to overestimate your development, and I think somewhere said most people do? and at only a little past 30, typical would be stage 3, or early transitional 3-->4. reference classes are good and important so that should weight me a lot towards stage 3.

on the other hand, I've always been way ahead of my agemates in a lot of ways

and I've always been way *behind* them in a lot of other ways, too

I feel very strongly that I'm at one of the "crisis" points where the previous stage is failing & the new one isn't built yet

I see a lot of myself — or at least, how I'd like to be, if I were functional as a human being — in stage 4, and descriptions of the stage 4-->5 crisis of meaning resonates a lot

but Lewis makes even 4-->5 transitional people sound *super* rare, 5s maybe even hypothetical?

and

if I'm somewhere in 3.5~4.5,

why the hell am I having so many Stage 2 problems??

anyone else spent a lot of time thinking about how you'd respond if you were a politician getting interviewed about your formative experiences / moral foundations, or what JSON is?

ah sorry the interview was significantly later, he just sat there sobbing after the speech

you ever take 2 hours to read 5 pages because your brain won't stop re-running your life history against each new implication, instead of waiting until *after* you've finished reading the explanation of the theory you're speculating about applying?

there's an amazing story in here about a NY politician, where the exact moment his stage-3 understanding of responsibility/obligations collapses is recorded

he basically starts breaking down, then stands up and gives a speech, like — there's a bunch of different people/groups he needs to please and no matter how he votes he's basically selling out to *somebody* — even if it's just selling his vote for the respect of his son! — and dramatically flips his (deciding) vote on a abortion bill

then he has the rest of his breakdown on interview where he tries to make sense of all these different obligations and just *can't.*

"people have several critical periods, well into adulthood" is a theory with a lot of implications for mental safety? with individual differences compounding it gets harder and harder to assign particular stage transitions to particular years

but ideally you'd try to schedule major life changes not exactly during the times when the old way of meaning is collapsing & the new way isn't stable enough to rely on yet?

maybe try to have those at the more stable inflection points (kegan also calls his stages "balances" or "truces"), to provide impetus to grow without breaking them down totally

one way kegan mirrors & departure from psychoanalytic is that, yeah, "separating yourself from your mother / primary caregiver" (as in realizing you are separate entities) are big steps in both

but in kegan's model, the "understanding yourself as distinct from <stuff>" step happens again and again, at *every* stage of development

so, both might ascribe some problem to a "failure to develop a distinct identity" or something, but in psychoanalytic that has to go back to your mom screwing up during infancy, whereas under kegan it could be any step

like maybe you were beginning to reach towards seeing yourself as a new kind of thing that *has* a role, rather than being defined by one, and then during *that* critical period your life went kablooie & that transition never succeeded?

it's really hard to not talk over people and I have about zero chance of understanding what someone said if I was also talking, and I don't like asking people to repeat themselves

or just their microphone moving further away from their mouth mid-sentence, or audio quality in general being crap (was it this bad when everyone used landlines?)

thinking about it after, if you're gonna have a 2h+ convo, at some point it probably makes sense to do that over voice?

idk, I'm still weird about voice stuff & idk how much is real audio issues vs just being more comfortable with text

mostly though I read until exhaustion, then talked about it with a friend until exhaustion, and now I just want to lay on my stomach and digest

peeked inside Kegan's 1994 book (In Over Our Heads; intended to be more accessible than the 1982 one introducing his theory) and I'm starting to understand a bit of my confusion w/r/t Chapman's read of it.

in *this* book, he calls stage 3 "Traditional", stage 4 "Modern", and stage 5 "Postmodern", rather than using numbers or his original technical terms

that at least explains where the thinking of stage 4 as something associated with modern, industrial, scientific advances came from (and it might be! but he's certainly smuggling his thesis in through his names)

he also explicitly identifies 1-->2 as being centrally about the concept of "durable categories", with some very set-theory looking diagrams, which seems related to Chapman's identifying 4 as "systems thinking"

> For over fifty years, in volume after volume, Jean Piaget published the results of his studies. I often wonder which is the greater impediment to our understanding him: the opaque, involuted, Latinate quality of his writing; or the absolute clarity of the fact that he was fascinated by and respectful of the minds of children.

(Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self, 1982)

I could spend some more time thinking about the ways I disappoint myself & maybe if there's something I both should and can do about it, or I can play some video games

that and the answer to the ever-burning question of "yeah yeah that's nice, but what stage am *I* on?" is shaping up to be "a very confused mess of elements from 2 thru maybe 4ish"

mix of burned out a bit on the topic + realizing most of what I thought I knew about it is probably ungrounded + it's probably gonna be really hard / dense + idk