Consultant engineer within the power industry. I live abroad (that is, away from the USA) and am interested in linking work dynamics with everyday living.
Well yes, it a consequence of scale, but my purpose here is to question the incentives behind maintaining 500 cars vs. one car. Taking your car maintenance example, I would expect a vehicle fleet administrator to apply the same schedule he uses for the fleet to his daily driver. If he applied the strategy that you describe (which is essentially reactive maintenance) to the fleet, there is a higher probability of one car failing than if he only applied it to his car. Using the same checklist he uses for the fleet for his personal car (let’s assume preventative maintenance) would result in increased reliability.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I don't know if it has a name. Please let me know if it does. For now I will call it the "power bank effect". When your phone battery is constantly low, you buy a portable power bank thinking that you will improve your phone charge as you will constantly have it on you. Actually, you have just added another device you need to charge and you end up just as bad as before, with an empty power bank and a phone with low charge.
Thank you, I had bought David Burn's "Feeling Good" book years ago and it was helpful at the time. Unfortunately, I seemingly lost the skills I had learned (or possibly I never truly learned them?) in my later years. I listened to a few episodes (including the Live Sessions with Lee) and I am really enjoying it. My main focus is improving my relationship, so the effective communication and focus on empathy are especially interesting to me.
I have noticed certain variations in my play depending on my emotional state. I am a casual player (1000 ELO on Lichess) but try to get in at least one game per day. It was a big deal for me to hit the 1000 mark, so I am very conscious of how much above it / below it I am at any time. When I am anxious or thinking about a past fight with my SO, or am stressed out about a current issue, I start losing games like crazy (And my ELO drops significantly). Once everything is fine and dandy, it starts climbing up again. I think chess is very much a game of extreme concentration and any intruding thoughts (which depending on the problem will penetrate with more / less ease) seep through and break that focus.