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My observation: people make a lot of bad decisions to fulfill a need for validation.
Like dating someone who is a piece of shit, but that's an obvious example.
I see it more often at work: someone wants an exception to policy, and immediately asks the highest-ranking person whose email they have for permission. If you ask for permission, the answer is always going to be no. As long as the thing you are asking for is commonplace and reasonable, just do it and send a heads-up, or something like that. (There's actually a lot of gray area here, because people who want to do something genuinely fucked up also often adopt this "act first" mentality, but you have to just trust your own moral compass--it's the only way.)
If you are a fed who is scared for your job, trotting out your best Faulknerian prose on in reply to the "What did you do this week?" email is not going to help you. It won't impress your manager (who has already formed their opinion of you), it won't prevent the president from vaporizing your agency if he really wants to, and it certainly won't impress Elon Musk.
At best, it will be a temporary balm for the anxiety you are feeling about the possibility of losing your job this week. But the truth is that there is nothing you can do to diminish that possibility. You should instead focus on developing backup plans.