This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.

I did an internship at a bank way back, and my role involved a lot of processing of spreadsheets from different departments. I automated a heckton of that with Visual Basic, which my boss was okay with, but I was dismayed to learn that I wasn’t saving anyone’s time except my own, because after the internship was finished, all of the automation stuff would have to be deleted. The reason was because of a rule (I think a company policy rather than a law) that required that any code has to be the custody of someone, for accountability purposes — “accountability” in this case meaning “if we take unmaintained code for granted, then we may find an entire department’s workflow crippled at some point in the future, with no-one knowing how it’s meant to work”.

It’s quite a different thing than what you’re talking about, but in terms of the implementation, it doesn’t seem too far off.

“You know how some people use a bell slowly fading out as a meditation tool? That’s the association I have for that sensation.”

Oh man, this comparison is going to stick with me; it’s one of my favourite things I’ve read in recent weeks

Water is so cool. I like how the hydrophobic effects drives protein folding

“I point out this shameful bit of our town history often…”

People who are “anti-woke” often say stuff like “they’re teaching kids to be ashamed of themselves for what their ancestors did”, and I think they don’t understand how healing and healthy it is to call out shameful parts of history. For me, acknowledging shameful parts of history is how I distance myself from those things, by subtextually saying “this is no longer the case, AND ALSO we intend to keep pushing forward”.