u/Disastrous_Gap_6473

I got into this because I enjoy the deep work. At this level (senior, shooting for staff) I don't think there's any left for me to do. Everything is easy but it's all happening at the same fucking time.

Kube charts are broken because of SA permissions on our secret store. If I change and push this enough times it will work. DB schema needs a tiny change. Easy, push it and open PR. Feedback on another PR, all easy stuff, correct it, push it, the DB schema PR is finished building, I got tagged in a design thread but the discussion is already moving on without me, more PR feedback, address it, commit, push, the kube charts thing failed CI again and I need to change/commit/push it, that design thread is going off and I have to say something or it'll look like I'm checked out, I forgot about the schema change PR and it finished building half an hour ago and I could've queued for the QA environment but now it's backed up, there's three PRs waiting for my review so I can use the time to oh, wait, no, C-suite is wading into eng channels and I gotta make sure I'm seen, design thread is going off again, kube charts failed and honestly I'm not sure if this will just work on enough pushes and maybe I have to tag in delivery tooling and god knows when they'll get back to me but at least the QA environment is unblocked oh shit that was twenty minutes ago and there's people waiting behind me and my deploy failed anyway and it'll take five minutes to rebuild and now there's a meeting for somebody else's project that's blocking mine that I need to be in (mostly to be seen) and the fucking DB schema thing never actually got QA'd it's just been *sitting* there

I'm not good at this. I've gotten better at it, but I still suck at it. I want to delegate it to someone else, but if I did I'm not sure what I'd even do all day. All this bullshit is what my project needs most right now.

36m who's been on SSRIs for years, now combined with wellbutrin and propranolol. Combined with a lot of talk therapy, they seemed to help me with my acute anxiety and OCD. In those ways, I'm a lot better off than I was before, and I've never felt the sense of being "numbed" that some people describe.

That said, I've had a sense for a very long time now that I am doing something wrong, somehow. That the work I spend my life doing, while intellectually stimulating, is not "meaningful" enough in some nebulous way. That the time I have outside of work is largely being wasted -- maybe because I'm not spending enough time creating things? Or that I need to do more for other people? I don't know. I've made some changes over the past few years, and I can definitely feel them, but it all happens so fucking slowly. I'm often happy on a day to day basis, but if I look too hard at my life I get the uncomfortable sense that I am just running out the clock.

From everything I've read, this sounds like good territory to explore with psilocybin. But I'm also terrified of changing myself in a way I don't like. I have the sneaking suspicion that many of the things I value about myself and my personality are simultaneously bound up in what makes me unhappy -- I tend to be a very cynical person, for instance, and while I'm not proud of being unhappy, I am proud of my stubborn, analytical streak which I know comes from the same place. Or, honestly, who knows what else might change in me? Could I lose my ability to effectively do the job that supports my lifestyle? Could I stop loving my two cats?

I guess I see two problems here I'm trying to work out. The first is just thinking about the magnitude of the risk I'm taking on: if I try this, what, realistically, am I putting on the table? I gather that it depends on the dose, but it also seems like you need to get into deep waters at some point to see meaningful benefits.

The second, more confusing one is, "can I even have a good experience, if this is what I'm bringing into it?" I'm familiar in broad terms with the idea of set, and it seems like coming to a psychedelic experience with the question "why am I unsatisfied with my life" and a big heap of fears about what I might find would be a recipe for trouble.