idiot mode I suck at resting. If I'm mildly sick with, like, a cold or flu, I get all excited to take a day off and watch lectures or dabble in OSINT. I had COVID when the OceanGate Titan thing was going on and you don't even want to know how many screens I had propped up around me in bed while I supervised the situation. I kept staying up too late because 'things were happening.'
This past weekend I convinced myself a great way to spend a restful sick day was to launch a little Shopify store. (My friend and I wanted hats made, and I thought, why buy hats when we can sell hats?)
In theory, this sounds like a harmless personality quirk, but in practice it contributes to burnout and it certainly doesn't help me get over a bug when I'm sick.
So I'm trying a new thing that I'm calling 'idiot mode.' Idiot mode is where I have to pretend I'm an idiot for a few hours, so that I can actually rest. “But you're already an idiot,” you might say, to which I would reply that you're probably correct. But in idiot mode, I'm a different kind of idiot. I have to place an artificial cap on my mental burn, kinda like a rev limiter. This is to prevent me from accidentally tripping into fixation. Fixation happens when I get so caught up in some subject or phenomenon that I lose all sense of time and bodily awareness. I'm particularly vulnerable to new fixations when I'm bed-bound and mildly unwell. In that scenario, I'm not in a good place to be doing actual work, and I can feel that. But passive information consumption feels okay at first. And it can quickly trip into fixation, at which point I start ignoring my body altogether. This is the danger zone when you're trying to recover from a bug! Hence! Idiot mode.
In idiot mode, with my mental rev limiter on, I have to consume dumb stuff. It's a great time to catch up on the bubble-gummiest of pop culture. I'm feeling a little unwell still tonight so I'm going to try it and report back.