I appreciate you describing brain fog as psychological torment.
I think most severe/life-disrupting cases of long COVID are indistinguishable from ME/CFS. (I think it would be correct to say long COVID "causes" ME/CFS.) As someone living with ME/CFS: yes, the cognitive dysfunction is torture. And pushing to do stuff anyway just makes things worse -- this is called post-exertional malaise.
The comparison to sleep deprivation is good, but I'll note that the brain fog I regularly experience due to ME/CFS is much worse than any sleep deprivation I had ever...
Sounds like we feel similarly about a lot of this stuff. For a few years now, I've been trying to keep my phone notifications very low. The devices I generally use for reading/writing do not get any notifications.
Despite these ideas mostly not being new to me, I got value from this post for two reasons:
1. This validates my own experience. It moves me away from believing "I am personally easily distracted, so I keep distractions low" and towards believing "maybe a lot of people are perpetually semi-distracted by their notifications." Although I'm not ...
Personally, I don't really blame you or think less of you for this screwup. I never got the impression that you are the sort of person who should be sent confidential book review drafts. Maybe you'd disagree, but that seems like a misunderstanding of your role to me.
It seemed clear to me that you made yourself available to confidential reports regarding conflict, abuse, and community health. Not disagreements with a published book. It makes sense that you didn't have a habit of mentally flagging those emails as confidential.
Regardless, I trust that you've ...
Thank you so much for writing this. I've had a lot of the same questions myself, and I really wanted to see someone's Fermi estimates on them. This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to see.