My best friend's son died at the hands of a negligent daycare, he escaped his crib, knocked a stroller over on to himself which wasn't supposed to be there, and suffocated to death. My friend called me that night to tell me. It's been 5 years and I think about it every single day. Frankly it has turned me from a person with zero anxiety to one with a good deal. I've checked on my younger daughter's breathing every single night since then. She's 7 years old and I still can't stop myself from checking on her. My friend is one of the good-est people I know. A genuinely good person. Why him? And if him, certainly why not me?
I've had nothing like this happen, but somehow I get this--I was spooked by anecdotes about SIDS before having kids. When we had our daughter, and she was sleeping in her crib in our room, the first couple of months I'd basically wake up when she wasn't making noise, would then in dazed half-sleep wait for her to make any noise to confirm she was still alive (or check, sometimes), and could only then fall back asleep again. This only really quieted down one year in, when the statistical risk goes down. I guess it's fairly easy to get hypersensitized to dangers like this.
> My best friend's son died ... It's been 5 years and I think about it every single day.
Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
They exist, but cannot be predicted nor controlled. Hopefully, the following help quell anxiety resulting from considering all which could happen.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.[0]
Or:
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the
rest as it happens. Some things are up to us [eph' hêmin]
and some things are not up to us.[0]
Or:
If there's a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?[0]
> Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
That's very true. And for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN has a very dense concentration of them, that's very hard to not do, because we've been trained to do exactly that, for professional work.
Cybersecurity is exactly that. What are all the remote possibilities you can come up with, and how do you defend them? Then reality hits, and it's so much worse than you ever feared, because you didn't think that Intel would release chips that couldn't keep secrets if you asked in the proper way. "I speculate, with my little gadget, the contents of all of physical memory..."
What's SRE, ops, any of those fields, but trying to imagine the remote possibilities of how things go down, and how you can mitigate it, or at least fail cleanly? And then, of course, reality hits, and you end up with someone shutting down a datacenter edge router with a dial up modem, because they'd been sufficiently paranoid about things to insist that there would still be a POTS route in, for when everything else went wrong and in-band signaling no longer worked. Which, of course, happened.
The high reliability hardware sorts, I expect, deal with something similar. "But what if a super high energy cosmic ray flipped this bit?"
I don't know how to turn this off when it's not helpful. I've done it too long. :/
>> Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
> ... for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN has a very dense concentration of them, that's very hard to not do, because we've been trained to do exactly that, for professional work.
I can definitely relate. Working in various teams quite similar to what you describe, I'd say these examples are fine exemplars of the "sometimes it helps" category.
Luckily, these are engineering related and not arbitrary familial threat vectors, real or imagined, as the latter are often (not always) not quantifiable to a statistically meaningful degree.
> I don't know how to turn this off when it's not helpful. I've done it too long. :/
