Okay, fellow egos, I've got something to share with you, and request constructive attempts at solution. It's not something I share lightly, as even to scum like me, there's still things that are exquisitely intimate, but as I can't be the only one with this problem, I surmise that it's better to open source it, and crowd source the solution. Obviously, I've already studied what resources there are on the mesh, and consulted what colleagues I have access to, but so far the only thing I've learned is how this certain mental queasiness looks on an avian body. But I'm getting ahead of myself... A few words of context for those who don't know me: I'm a psychotherapist and psychosurgeon by training, but since this is a rather new problem, especially at the scale that I think it might exhibit itself these days, I'm at a loss what kind of reframing might help. (Another few words for the non-shrinks: Reframing means deconstructing the interpretation of an observation that is causing negative outlooks, and replacing it with a more positive one. It's one approach to augmenting what we do with your nervous system with pills and psychosurgery, and what we used to get the big bucks per hour for.) So, now how best to approach it... I spend most of my time as an infomorph, and like just about everybody, I back myself up every now and then. I've got a nice simulspace for that, a remembrance of Earth that was: Mountains under the mild spring sun, babbling brooks, the smell of pine, all painstakingly reconstructed from how I remember it when my parents dragged me along a hiking trail once or twice a year when I was still too young to appreciate it. It's fascinating what you start to miss when you can't have it anymore. Well, now it's doubly fucked... Anyway. Suffice it to say, I've constructed that space for maximum calming effect. At a certain place in that space, there's a button hovering right in the air. I press it, I'm backed up, it goes green, everything is fine. If I miss hitting it for too long, or a trusted friend triggers the process, I'm reinstantiated right then and there, but the button goes red, so that I know. Minimized continuity loss, at least in that particular moment. I guess you know the disorientation of reinstantiating in an unknown body, in an unknown room, when your last memory is going to your friendly neighborhood bodybank to just get your twice-a-year (or more often in our line of it's-not-work-it's-a-calling) scan. So, that's good to have. The thing is that recently, I find myself getting more and more anxious in the moments before pressing the button, and that anxiousness setting in sooner and sooner. What if the button will go red, not green? Of course I know all the platitudes that one can tell a patient. "The point is, you're still there. It's better to lose some time than to lose all time." The thing is, they don't convince me. They don't get me into a sufficiently positive frame of mind to press that button confidently. I can only imagine how much worse it must be for you people who do not have that crutch of a static surrounding... I also find it surprising how little published literature there is on the reframing of the phenomenon. when I still practiced clinically (or rather, in a corporate clinical setting, pre-Fall), backups were a quite new thing, and most resleeving was morph-to-morph, not reinstantiation. In the meantime, of which I seem to have missed much, we've seen most of transhumanity reinstantiating at least once under traumatic circumstances, and with indentured labor often being extremely risky (Venus, I'm looking at you!), there are also cases of resleeving often. Therefore I can't believe that all we have towards a solution is "Trigger Dopamine in an amount proportional to the time since the last backup." That's a cop-out, a hack, an provisional interim arrangement, not a solution. So, fellow shrinks and neurotopiary enthusiasts, dear people who have talks with friends about problems like this: What do you say that actually does help?