On support

All in all I would say that I'm fairly responsible as a person. This manifests itself in various different ways and when I typically start doing something, I want to do it properly and strive to keep within the given timeframes. In practice this means that occasionally I put in decent amounts of time and effort at work, which I guess most people do. It's also sometimes called commitment.

Based on empirical evidence, the reactions to this sort of effort and commitment are interesting, to say the least. They vary very widely from just acknowledging that "yeah, that's life" to the oh-so-traditional "you're working too hard, you should take it more easy". It's very seldom that I've heard very many encouraging things, which has led me to wonder why that is. It's actually surprisingly often that I encounter the "you should take it more easy" reaction, and somehow I always get this impression that this is just something that you should say to attempt to discourage the person from putting in more effort into something and as such tries to inhibit the progress of the other person. I know that this may be quite a strong interpretation and that there are others as well, but on some level it just feels that when someone tells you that, they're in fact trying to tell themselves that it's ok that they're not putting in as much effort and obtain some sort of better consience. It's something that happens when the other person feels that they're not ahead in the game and might be feeling threatened.

And as usual, this has been slightly provocative in an attempt to bring out another aspect to this phenomenon. So take it with a grain of salt...