It was weird to realize that, especially how smoking masked it so well. I mean, on one level it does make sense and may be a reason some people also knit or crochet or work on something during social time, especially if somehow the physical component helps. Maybe even people you see on their phones when in groups; it isn't "you're not important enough for my attention" (obviously, I do it too) but maybe a mental offset?

Or to put it another way; diluting it to workable levels with your brain, especially if your brain for whatever reason gets overwhelmed easily by working in an unpredictible environment. No matter how much you're enjoying it, your brain is working about ten times harder just on predictive algorithms when it comes to people than say, crocheting. And if that's literally all it's doing at that moment, yeah, it's going to burn through your well a lot faster than if you combine it with easily predictible actions; crochet pattern, knit pattern, a simple app game. Yeah that sounds counter-intuitive, like 'wait, that's twice as much work' but this isn't zero sum brain work. It's balancing brain work; amount of energy isn't the problem, it's the proportions assigned.

Moderating a panel takes a lot of work, but I feel energized after, especially large panels: why? Half of it is scripted (to me), aka the point of the panel; the only predictive work is what people will say, but only within predictable bounds, the subject, and I'm moderating because I know it so my brain isn't working as hard. Why norabombay takes no energy from me? I've known her for nearly a third of my life which means 'familiar' aka predictable (though no, she's not, she's goddamn nora the awesome of 'wait, what?').

We keep discussing/reviving/debunking multitasking within the conscious mind, but in the end, what if conscious multitasking is being able to shift one or more tasks into category: predictable and only keeping one that requires the brain to deal with the unpredictable? What if it's supposed to? The common idea is 'do the one thing' to get it right and then you feel like a failure because you can't and feel like your brain is just not up to it, but it's possible the problem is we're not giving it nearly enough; the 'more' just needs to be running in a different area? Our brains outclass the sum of every existing computer combined into one superduper computer and runs our entire body in background processes, but you're saying we can't do two things at once consciously? For fuck's sake, my metabolism alone probably needs base-52 to express concurrent functionality, but my mind runs in sequential binary? Sure, because evolution strapped a mental toaster to the most sophisticated machine every accidentally assembled in creation.

So, we could solve a lot of problems teaching everyone to knit, crochet, or play high-predictability games in conjunction with low-predictability tasks, or figure out how the brain actually wants to run instead of deciding how we think it is and back engineering the evidence. Like interesting fact: I take notes at any and all work meetings. I don't read them after; I almost can't, they look like goddamn sanskrit to most people. Less bored, but fact: I can remember two thirds of everything said, and the easiest to read parts of my notes are stuff I won't easily remember. That's not an accident, but I know I'm doing it, but it's not something I think about, any more than I think about each crochet stitch in a scarf; that's a task that experience with my memory makes very, very predictable.

...or you know, I've only had one cup of coffee, so, I am overthinking.