Patrick McKenzie

Don't stand in the fire.

Come on.

Team leaders, you need to make sure that people are equipped with resist gear before they get there.

Oh, we're having like internal spats about allocation of resources.

Like we need to have a better DKP system.

By the way,

World of Warcraft raid guilds and all other places where intellectual effort comes together in the video game community are much more sophisticated than people give them credit for.

When I started Vaccinate CA, I told people my sole prior leadership experience is having 60 direct reports in a raid guild, and that's true.

And also, like,

we don't rat hole on the subject but like there are parts of vaccinate ca that are very very definitely downstream of the uh like intellectual efforts about managing raid guilds specifically there are multiple people internally who are like yep like we are running the raid guild playbook right now um but um uh be that as it may uh like you can do something with your life like choose to do something something with your life and then if you want to play you know a reasonable amount of video games then play a reasonable amount of video games

And then, like, with respect to individual people, I sometimes worry that you kind of get into... I think I've struggled with depression at some points in my life.

Many people struggle with underdiagnosed, under-treated depression.

I think sometimes you get into a self-destructed spiral measured against, like, your true values and similar values and preferences where...

Due to depression and other factors, you aren't making as much progress on the true goals you do.

You use video games as an escape from that, and not just video games, books, television, etc., etc.

There are many poisons available in life.

You pick your poison, use that to escape.

The amount of effort you put into the poison causes you to have less effort available to do the thing.

So you get less good results than the thing.

So helping people out of those self-destructive spirals is something that we as a society could stand to get much better at.