After quitting my 2nd crap job in Nov I prepared to give everything I have and build a new box, but first recorded 50+ lectures in a couple months knowing that I’d be impaired by my coming poverty (now 5mo in) and look forward to again thinking how I used to think. Poverty is extreme mental anguish, and I’m not even homeless until the end of the month (never been). And yet my decision making ability is already getting weak, I can barely think beyond whatever is in working memory or beyond tomorrow, forget big parts of days despite coding and live streaming it. (Eg. I know that I’ll never perform on a coding interview now, gotta attract opportunity). It’s my 3rd time being in poverty; tangental to pain but far from orthogonal so it feels like a decent anecdote. Variety is the spice of life, without resourses to eat or travel and with social connections rejecting the majority of the time, there’s both no point to turning on that circuitry and negative reinforcement for doing so... so the fact of mental handicap in subpar circumstances feels like common sense by now. Energy conservation, homeostasis.