The Book of Life

"The key to passionate sex is actually caring about the person you're having sex with."

That sounds nice, but it's a load of baloney. I would wager that most people over the age of 20 (25?, 30?) have experienced a significant relationship(s) where the sex tends to be passionate (and frequent) at the very beginning, and tapers off and becomes less frequent, less passionate, more boring as time goes on (and years drag by). In fact, that is the typical progression of sex in a committed, caring relationship. So, no, I would not say that the key is "actually caring about the person".

I haven't read the linked article yet, but the subject reminds me of some work done by a psychologist named David Schnarch, who has built a career and written several books on the subject. These include a book called _Passionate Marriage_, intended as self-help for a lay audience, and _Constructing the Sexual Crucible_, which is more of a technical handbook for therapists and counselors.

See http://passionatemarriage.com/

http://passionatemarriage.com/catalog/15

Alain de Botton also examines the issue in a similar way on the impressive "Book of Life" website. E.g., he says:

"In a wiser world, we would collectively admit that the very rare cases where love and sex did run together were astonishing exceptions with no relevance whatsoever to most of our lives. We would instead learn to pay admiring attention to those who had accepted with a reasonable show of dignity and grace that the…

I think the current version of that is http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong-people/ but I'm a little unsure about the authorship history now.

Edit: I agree with TACIXAT that both of these were written by Alain de Botton; the confusion came about because the older versions were unsigned, so it's easy to worry that the newer version could have been plagiarized. There's also a norm of revealing the publication history of your own stuff when you rework or republish it, so maybe the Times should have said "A version of this essay appeared in The Philosopher's Mail and appears in The Book of Life" to avoid any ambiguity.

You are describing an aspect of Impostor Syndrome. It's super common among programmers – and IMO, all people who have a modicum of self-awareness.

Just search around, you'll see that feeling overwhelmed puts you in great company. :)

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx (also talks about Dunning-Kruger effect, which is related)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/your-money/learning-to-deal-with-the-impostor-syndrome.html?_r=0

http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-impostor-syndrome/

It looks like the author [1] is associated with The Book of Life [2] which is referenced on the site you linked [3]. Likely all owned by the same person.

[1] https://twitter.com/alaindebotton

[2] http://www.thebookoflife.org/

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20160316112501/http://thephilosophersmail.com/category/what-this-is-all-about/

The chapters are longer than you think, they have sub sections:
Chapter 1 ...
http://www.thebookoflife.org/category/capitalism/
Chapter 2 ...
http://www.thebookoflife.org/category/work/

The design is nice and clean but the navigation is unclear between these sub-chapters.