> My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows:
> Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else.
If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning system one day.
HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.
Please OP, close HN, reach out to people, get help, and (importantly) learn to navigate your mind, not fight with it.
> HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state.
Nice paradox you've created there.
> People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.
I don't know that that follows logically. Whatever people they might reach out to in the real world -- be they friends, relatives, therapists -- also actually disagree about things and don't have all the answers. HN comments come from the same general pool of people, who also potentially have experiences and insights a like-minded individual might find valuable.
> You are not going to just build a better planning system one day.
No but you may be able to over time, through trial and error, and connecting with others and hearing about their experiences. I don't think there's anything wrong or unhealthy about exploring it in this fashion and I don't understand your choice of tone.
I do agree that setting a goal for the year of "not making stupid mistakes" is a (stupid?) mistake. It is more of a lifelong journey and process, of striving rather than achieving, and not setting unrealistic expectations for yourself.
Thank you for this reply. I thought the parent comment was blunt, and perhaps honest. But perhaps it could have added some positive and constructive commentary rather than saying what not to do. I hardly think these things are so binary anyways.
OTOH, reading some wise comments on hn can help you get out of your biases.
It was initially some hn comment that convinced me that ADHD is not lazy people's excuse, but an actual thing (even if overhyped on some hn alternatives -- social media). And that led to a diagnosis after some time.
get your eyesight check, at some point in life I was having difficulties staying focus and even started having headaches... and I needed prescription glasses...
Also very important, try to sleep the best you can and do exercise... I remember reading here about exercise in some cases exceeding the benefits of ADHD medications...
If you are overdosing things... don't... caffeine can be overdosed and the effects are nasty and lingering... caffeine is meant to be a zero sum game, where it gets you speed in the morning and when it wears off then you go to sleep... if you over dose it then you are making your body over exert and at some point the body will communicate the results via extreme tiredness, bad humor, etc...
Don't be hard on yourself, from everyone we are the most hard on ourselves when we should be the most kind of them all.
That is re-assuring. Neurodivergence would explain a lot. For the time being, I am still in a state where I cannot get tested (for anyone that has experience with depression, the symptoms go hand in hand with ADD).
I was not planning on opening HN, but it has actually helped me :) I do have to admit I first asked a chat bot what the overall tone was before I opened it up myself.
This is on my list! I do think that in my current environment I mostly hear what I have done wrong, and helping others would probably give a better outcome.
I know that's a very objective way of looking at it, I mean ofcourse volunteering is a good thing! But I wasn't sure if I was mentally prepared for it. I will definitely reach out to one nearby place that I know of.
This... I finally changed my life by talking to a psychiatrist after 40+ years of suffering and trying a myriad of things. Mental illnesses are real and need real treatment.
"HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state" ... I mean in aggregate, sure. But of course there could be people that are offering useful advice, in a well meaning way - that could actually help OP. You're being really negative here, and I think it's unwarranted.
IANAD,
Clinically, the measurement for diagnosis is if symptoms disturb your day to day life. In some countries they need to disturb multiple (1<) spheres of life. (Work, family, health etc.)
Then you'd have people with symptoms, but who's life is not affected by them.
I wonder myself if it's just the first group that is classified as neurodivergent or both.
The best thing you can do for yourself, at all junctures, is develop your own sense of truth. Listen to people, consider what they have to say, but ultimately decide for yourself. Don't place too much faith in any particular source or signifier or heuristic. The rando could have something useful to you, the expert could lead you astray.
Yeah, it's really tempting to try to fundamentally change the way you interface with the world but it's rarely very sustainable. I've found that trying to change my social environment, and also build skills to make specific tasks easier, are more effective options.
As someone that is "neurodivergent," I agree. A lot of advice, especially surrounding executive dysfunction, could be boiled down into a single step -- step 1: do not have executive dysfunction.
Now, I am not trying to say there is nothing anyone can do to improve themselves or their situation, but I do find a lot of advice falls short. Common advice is to set reminders, make lists, etc.. However, none of that is helpful when one has to remember to even create/check the reminders, lists, etc.. I notoriously create to-do lists only to never look at them ever again.
Honestly, if I have learned anything in life, it is that I cannot be left to my own devices. I need lots of forced, external structure which makes me rather uncomfortable because I do not want to burden others with the responsibility of managing my disability.
Me as well, which is a really "fun" time when my specific blend of neurodivergence also causes me to immediately resent said authority and external structure and view it as removing my agency.
What I've learned as I've gotten older is just how much of our struggle comes down to our social model of disability. A lot of these "symptoms" are only disorders because we've built such rigid, uncompromising systems for interacting with and participating in society.
Modern psychology has a tendency to pathologize an individual's ability to conform to this rigidity instead of doing the hard work of promoting the building of flexible environments that are more accommodating of different ways of thinking and working. Instead, we work really hard to force a square peg into the round hole.
It's a lot harder to change the shape of the hole. But I do agree that there is too much emphasis on the pathology of it. I think therapy needs a major rebranding and it shouldn't be seen as something that we do to "fix" "broken" people.
It should just be about more deeply understanding ourselves as individuals, and understanding the world around us (particularly other people), so that we may navigate it better.
I saw a video of a comedian (a woman) doing crowd work, and kind of playfully bullying someone (a man), asking them about their therapy. I thought it was funny, but a lot of the comments were along the lines of "that's not cool, how dare you."
But that audience member was at a comedy club, where comics do that kind of thing. Going to therapy isn't about collectively making sure the world babysits and coddles everyones needs. It's about giving you the tools to handle what you can't change.
I think a lot of people with mental health problems could attest that this is not always very effective, most often you exchange the reality you’ve been living in for some kind words and then inevitably the normalisation of your problem.
Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose.
This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?
I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.
I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.
Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.
He has said a lot f things I agree with, and also some stuff that seems intellectually and morally bananas; particularly around gender and sexuality. There was a point something shifted and he took, imo, a darker turn. Maybe it was his wife's illness, his own addiction challenges, or perhaps he was a victim of his own success and lost too much humility.
Probably a combination of those plus factors we aren't privy to.
I don't really know how to take the measure of a man and probably I'm not qualified to. I don't think he was evil though. People are complicated and not at all black and white.
I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming.
Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code takes time, and sometimes I overthink things and I don't test properly, and I'm also slow, and don't communicate the problem with my team because I don't work consistent hours, because my brain cannot do consistency.
Turns out I have ADHD. Possibly autism too. So I understand your feelings of I just need to be better, because it works for other right? Even tho you know that fundamentally you are right, but it works for others so why not you? I don't have a solution. But sometimes you can't just "be better" and "more consistent", I also wish I could, but maybe it's not possible.
Maybe the only way is to find where we are good and do more of that. If you have struggle finishing things hope on calls with people that are good at finishing things. Talk with them. Be proactive and be open. I also don't do this as often as I should, because I'm also ashamed.
I don't know exactly what the point was to this, but so you know others also fail, even tho they deemed smart and skilled by others.
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk. The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
In the last day I've spent a couple hours in a negativity loop. My wife doesn't know it, but she snapped me out of it and it's nice to see your comment as another reminder to avoid going down that path
Brother(i think), I feel you. Some days the rumination is awful, and it's good you have someone that reminds you of the good stuff.
My kids are like that - total blank slate joy machines at this age. And I assure you - fundamental optimism is ok everyone can improve their outlook and/or lot in life.
We need to remind ourselves that it's okay to feel emotions across the spectrum of humanity. There is nothing wrong in feeling bad or having regret or feeling shame; just as there is nothing wrong with feeling glee or hatred or sadness. They are normal emotions, but what matters is how we respond to these emotions.
IDK why but one of the more damaging things about American culture is the constantly championing of individualism over community or belonging. Having one person you can talk to or spend quality time with is often enough and we should be encouraging more people to find their tribe.
My wife goes through negativity loops too, it hurts to see someone I love think so little of themselves but we're working through it together. That's life, we need to embrace it.
Hah. I feel very much seen by both of these comments, much more than I’m confident to admit.
Something I have been struggling with all my life is deciding whether I am flawed in some way, or the other party/the environment is - because my immediate reaction is always to feel responsible and inadequate, and it takes a lot of energy of confidently feeling superior or right about something. Like, is it a pattern, or am I reflecting to avoid being ignorant?
It's both. All humans and all environments are flawed. You can change yourself and control your reactions to your environment if you want to. You can probably also either improve your environment to some extent, or move to a better environment (not always possible for everyone but HN users usually have that option).
There's no need to feel superior: that's not particularly helpful and will tend to give you a distorted perception of reality. Most likely you're just average.
You'll never have an objective measure of good/bad. You only have your feelings on the matter.
One way is to define what you view as good (or better: define what you view as "better") and just be that as much as you can. Because "trying to actually be better" puts you above the median person immediately, IMHO
Yeah I didn’t read it that way at all. I think that addressing mental health issues requires some frankness with yourself first and foremost. I know some people object to identifying with labels such as ADHD, autism, depressive disorder, etc., but I do not know if that is what the parent intended.
Division of labour is THE big advantage of working with other people. So yes, focus on the bits you are good at and hand the other stuff to people who are good at that part. It's usually worth it.
You just magically found this out when the Mental Health Diagnosis Fairy visited you one night? You spent thousands of dollars for a neuropsych evaluation where the result was 40% reality, 40% chance, and 20% how the evaluator was feeling that day? You self-diagnosed by reading Reddit threads? You somehow magically found the one psychiatrist who is willing to talk about ADHD without immediately assuming you're just trying to score some Ritalin to sell on the street? You got diagnosed by Dr. ChatGPT? What the actual fuck are you talking about? Everybody has ADHD, nobody has ADHD, who fucking knows? It's not possible that you actually know this.
I'm 100% convinced everyone who is like "get help, talk to an expert" has never actually fucking tried, because it's not possible.
No one else has mentioned it here, so on account of my own experiences I feel the obligation to say: Be aware of this developing into suicidal ideation, if it hasn't already.
I get the impression (again, mostly my own experiences, projected onto you) from your intense "the problem has to be me" convictions that you're simultaneously dealing with a lot of self-loathing, and that this self-loathing fills a void of answers to existential questions that no other source in your life can. In other words, your depression has become a maladaptive coping strategy. And if that's so, then it's not a long shot until your maladaptive coping strategies evolve from, "the problem is me" into "the solution would be/will be/should be/is my own death."
I derive these warnings from these whiffs of absolute, impossible-to-change miseries you mention: "my mind is exploding, I'm not aware of what I'm doing anymore"; "tomorrow it'll be something else I screwed up"; "I'm the only one with these problems."
So, if you have a dark voice inside your head that promises change or absolution only in return for your own physical or emotional injury (perhaps dressed up as "discipline"), be forewarned: This voice is a cognitive illusion. It does not care about you. It will hold your head underwater until you drown, and still be unhappy.
On another note: I would agree with others that you would be a strong candidate for an autism assessment. Like you say with ADD, autism would not a root cause of anything, but it might help you understand your situation more intuitively if it is involved.
This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.
No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression). To understand why it really could be the root cause, you can read up on “executive dysfunction”, which is what ADD really is.
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
Really important to understand that depression can also manifest as poor concentration.
There's a huge problem right now with people getting locked into diagnoses found on the internet and then resisting advice of their doctors that doesn't match. It's scarily common for depressed patients to become convinced that they have ADHD and that ADHD explains everything, then to refuse depression treatment. They can jump from doctor to doctor until they find someone who doesn't care and just writes the prescription, but years can pass before they realize that stimulants aren't fixing their depression.
If you have depression, with or without ADHD, you need to address it. Don't get sucked into the "ADHD explains everything about you" mentality that gets spread on the internet.
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.
Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?
Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects. It's the opposite pattern of stimulants where the patient feels great (unnaturally so, due to stimulant euphoria at the start) and the effects wane over time.
The internet is really, really bad at pushing everyone toward ADHD diagnoses and then pushing them further toward stimulants. There's a darker part of some of the communities then pushes people to keep pressuring their doctors for higher and higher doses and also discourages people from trying therapy.
Outside of the internet I know several people who did the rounds with medications and ended up on the non-stimulant options and preferred them. This is an unthinkable conclusion if your primary source of information is Reddit, X, or TikTok ADHD influencers, but it's pretty common in the real world.
Stimulants have a habit of being enjoyable at first (meaning people like taking them, beyond their attention effects) and then the effects wane over the years, to the point that there are studies showing that the effects of stimulants taken long term in children are minimal to unmeasurable after several years. This is confusing to anyone who has been taking them for years and notices a difference on days when they don't take them, but that's explainable by the fact that it takes months (or longer) for the brain to adapt to not having them in the body. For some reason this same effect is not debated as much when you talk about people who drink 5 cups of coffee per day but then crash hard when they miss their coffee, but it gets protested and argued a lot when we talk about literal amphetamines.
Anyway, please don't listen too much to internet ADHD forums. They're just so, so bad these days with bad advice and poor psychology/therapy takes. You really need to engage with professionals with an open mind and not be single minded about acquiring and taking stimulants if you want to address this problem as a whole. The way the internet treats ADHD as a simple "low dopamine" state (which is wrong on many levels) and then points to stimulants as a "raise your dopamine" drug to neatly cancel it out sounds nice, but it's wrong on so many levels.
Vyvanse is dexamphetamine. I suppose you can say “amphetamines” instead, I imagine the subtleties of the terminology differ quite a bit in different places.
Strattera can help (I mentioned bupropion, another SDNRI). Of course if you try stimulants and don’t respond well, it’s totally fine to just use e.g. Strattera. What I’m advocating against is e.g. “try Strattera first, if it seems to help, don’t bother with stimulants”. (Some places, cultures, or medical systems do have surprisingly strong biases against stimulants!)
To be specific, Vyvanse/Elvanse is lisdextroamphetamine.
But IMO it's not really that incorrect to say there are two main types of stimulants.
You rarely (at least never where I'm from) get instant release methylphenidate. Always some delay mechanism. Shorter - Ritalin, longer - Concerta.
And the lizine particle attached to dextroamphetamine acts as a such delayer, but isn't active by itself -- being only an amino acid. So it's still kind of amphetamine just as Concerta is methylphenidate.
realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.
therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.
working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.
> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while
I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”
but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.
also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time
> Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
This really struck a chord with me. I've spent the last 15+ years building up a craftperson's skillset (IMO) akin to a carpenter's or mechanic's. Yet, people still seem surprised when I tell them I'm not willing to run a slop cannon and excrete software which is _good enough_. I actually enjoy the nuts and bolts of writing and debugging software and using AI feels like cheating (if only myself). I'm really not sure where I go from here. I wish I had a work situation like yours to complain about but I know I'd have hit the eject button the minute someone started mandating anything about my workflow, so it's kind of moot.
yeah! it's pretty cool when I start doing something that used to be difficult and now it's just... not. weird how long your old form sticks with you in your head like that.
yeah, at a local pizza/taproom place. they share tips with cooks, works out to ~$35/hr. I'm not expecting it to replace a tech salary, but it helps offset the savings burn (which was specifically set aside for this). engaging with real people in real life about real things is also an indreeeedibly nice change of pace (even the stressful/tense moments of shit hitting the fan).
I mean you can burnout on kitchen work as easily as tech work. Maybe easier. I know that first hand. The one nice thing is that when you clock out you can not think about it until the next shift. There is some peace in knowing you'll never get a call at 2am because some bird's nest of technology fell apart and people can't order their custom cat pic coffee mugs.
> No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post.
Yep. I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD about a 1.5 years ago... My whole life came into focus. Everything that didn't make sense suddenly started to make sense. What I thought were 15 different issues I was dealing with were really all just symptoms of the one (or two in my case). The internal tension I've always felt was also explained by the competing desires of ASD and ADHD.
Knowing this hasn't really "fixed" any of that, but it has given me an explanation, language to use to explain it, and permission to stop searching for what's wrong with me... which I've been doing for 20 years. It's been nice to have a break.
Finding a label for personal problems typically results in a honeymoon of self-acceptance and relief. The honeymoon usually ends and the problems remain, but now there are possible paths forward.
There are some traps along this path, too. A number of younger people I've worked with (in the double digits now) have gotten ADHD and/or ASD diagnoses and then become overjoyed that "everything makes sense now". But the diagnoses are only useful as tools for knowing what to work on.
The trap is trying to externalize the diagnoses as a get out of jail free card that can be used to justify avoiding hard changes and difficult work. The more difficult version of this is when someone tries to externalize the responsibilities of their diagnosis on others. I've seen a couple situations where someone got an ADHD diagnosis and then took it straight to their employers expecting to receive more forgiveness for late work and mistakes, then getting angry when it didn't change their company's expectations. It's a hard conversation to have with someone who thinks the diagnosis is going to relieve the weight of all the problems they've been facing, when in fact it's only helpful for identifying what they need to work even harder on improving and coping with.
The other thing it does is give a path towards resolution (or at least mitigation) for some issues. Wife was diagnosed adhd, and got a shrug wrt an autism diagnosis. We looked into interventions that specifically tend to work for ADHD, and she’s now thriving. She also tends to respond well to some of the interventions for autistic people that we’ve found useful for our AuDHD daughter, so we’ve taken on the policy of “labels be damned, if it works it works”. The labels sure as shit help with getting started finding your bearings though
ADHD is unlikely to be the root cause as there is unlikely to be any single root cause. Treating ADHD will reduce or eliminate a component of this, but will not address the issues entirely.
Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
Hope you get it worked out OP. I will say, if it's ADHD, it's 100% worth trying to get the best treatment you can.
My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work.
Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs.
If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut out to be a "systems engineer" maybe move to something more forgiving like frontend or something, you will probably be happier.
There is a reason that I am not working on avionics or respirator firmware. I don't have the discipline to follow the processes required to minimize the chance of accidentally killing people and I don't want the legal liability.
You don't have to be working on "important" stuff, John Carmack one of the best and most celebrated developer of our time spent most of his career working on games.
Be mercenary, do not take pride in your work, do your work for money. You will be happier, take pride in who you are and what you do outside of work.
I do agree that working for your career isn't the only options. Sometimes it's just to earn a living.
The things that both of them have in common is that they're sustainable. If you do not like your current position, make it sustainable for the time being. I was unable to do that, twice, so I think I'm at a point where I cannot do what I need to do.
Even the fun work (FOSS) is something I cannot sustain for 40 hrs a week, despite how much I enjoy it.
> stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work
my personal riff on that is 'stop assigning self worth to the quality that others assign to your work'. being able to internally generate self-worth through the act of producing high quality work is a super power.
When you're not personally identified with your work, it stings a whole lot less when someone rips it up. And keep in mind we're imperfect people working with other (often very) imperfect people. It's a mess, and always will be.
Depression is for many people the animal in the room, for some a fox and for others an elephant. You cannot avoid, ignore or hack a chemical imbalance in your brain with societal or personal measures. If you find yourself hopeless and helpless, irrespective if you have attended any form of psychotherapy, take an antidepressant. Don't hesitate and if you are in trouble, contact me, seriously. The author takes Fluoxetine which is the less potent A-D drug among all. If he is really in a heavy depression, he should be on Escitalopram.
Thanks for sharing. You are doing incredibly well for thesw circumstances - you found a therapist, are attending, on a treatment plan and have good relationships in your life.
I think 2026 is a really hard time to be a new software engineer. There is too much tech to learn. AI in the mix. Many are finding it really hard.
Good luck with it all. I have no advice just keep putting mental health first, as you rightly said in the title.
I have a young daughter and when I think about the most critical skills I want her to develop throughout her adolescence, communication is one of the most important ones that will prove to be valuable throughout her life. In whichever career she chooses, with friendships, personal mental health, partner relationships, etc.
She is smart, she is talented and incredibly curious and those things I really do not worry about. What will set her apart from the majority of her peers throughout life will be her ability to effectively communicate and interact with others in a way that is meaningful. It’s benefits go far beyond what most of us appreciate
However succeeding is increasingly harder and harder.
You can be the best communicator in the world but when the world only want to push their story to manipulate you towards their will then the only skill that counts is obedience or being the most aggressive manipulator. I wish that meaningful communication was a key to good and content life.
You still can have your bubbles in the universe though, there it is invaluable, of course. Isolationism on the personal level might be necessary, unfortunately.
I didn't really think about your third bulletpoint, that does make sense.
I think it's also good to be aware when you're lying to yourself. An easy example is how people talk about their gym membership.
"Oh, I would go, but I am so busy with X", or "I am already doing Y, so I don't really need to go". It's always a non-reason, while the true reason is that they just do not see a reason to go.
I don't get why this happens with work, though. I didn't love my job, but I definitely loved the colleagues, and I felt like I didn't do that bad of a job (ofcourse I see this differently now, I was doing a bad job).
I can sympathize with what you're going through OP. I have similar struggles myself (primarily with severe anxiety) and wouldn't wish most of what I have had to go through on my worst enemy.
I do have one comment though:
You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.
I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.
Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.
The Buddhists call that seeking ground, and they consider it to be a real source of suffering. Their take is that the reality is fundamentally groundlessness, and the more you can relax into that (easier said than done), the less you'll suffer when the inevitable shit hits the fan.
As someone who has had a metric ton of shit hit his fan, this is a hard pill to swallow, but very effective medicine and has helped me tremendously.
In modern terms, you could say it's good to embrace a growth/flexibility mindset and work on the things that help you to build and restore resilience.
Learn to be your own best friend. My DBT therapist is making me work through this Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook [0]. It feels hokey at the beginning, but it seems to actually be working. Improving your internal self talk and becoming your own advocate and supportive best friend gives you the capacity and perspective to change your behaviors to drag yourself out of the muck.
I would suggest building something on your own, choose your own processes, work however you want, with something that gives you motivation, and see if you are able to ship and release the things you build, attract users and lifetime management of the products. Now if that works great the problem is not with you.
> I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore.
Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress, decisions you need to take etc.
You can start with something as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...
I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something you can use to get started again.
It's quite freeing to not have to have all the context in your head all the time.
I would also like to add that I have read multiple comments talking about their struggles with either some neurodivergent diagnosis, or with depression. I've never seen this side of HN, and I am very grateful to have been a part of it.
I haven't met anyone in a similar boat, so seeing I'm not alone is very healing.
This sounds a lot like the shame and frustration people with ADD feel when untreated.
I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.
You're not the only one commenting this. I do have to say it's quite re-assuring to know that this is a possibility.
For the people you know that have ADD, was medication sufficient? Did they still end up taking therapy for their neurodivergence? I wonder how long it takes before I can be a functional programmer again. I know it'll take a while.
I appreciate the candor and wish the best for you.
Sadly, I will also tell you that once you do resume your job search, this post is going to hurt your chances.
It shouldn't. It really, really shouldn't. I don't respect my colleagues who reject people for stuff like this. But I can't change the world.
I don't have a solution other than to make such posts private and share only with people you trust. Or start a new blog on a new domain so employers don't associate it with you.
I used to co-supervise a PhD student who suffered from severe anxiety, she was good but her anxiety stood in her way almost all of the time. You could see that she used up 3/4 of her brain just on being anxious, there wasn't much power left to do the actual work to any standard. It's a horrible disease. (and yeah, she was on medication and diagnosed).
Also, find the right manager and the right role. With a manager that expects a highly regimented routine, you probably aren't going to do so well. With a manager that lets you explore and be more creative, you might do a lot better.
I've found one of my own strengths is in finding ways to use existing features, maybe with slight modifications, together to do the things that customers want, allowing the team to avoid several large projects and the resulting maintenance burden entirely. My first manager understood the value of that and we worked really well together for a few years. After a reorg, my subsequent manager considered it lazy and PIP after six months. I don't fault them, and different management styles work for different people. But make sure you find someone you're compatible with.
The author should probably read The Checklist Manifesto. It's a great book that has some excellent advice about getting things done with higher quality by, not surprisingly given the title, using checklists.
I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression.
I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.
I'm not OP but just wanted to add my own experience with anti-depressants as someone who has battled mild depression and extreme anxiety for years. Ultimately in my case it turned out that I needed to try several different antidepressants that my doctor prescribed until I found one that worked to aid in decreasing my depression and anxiety symptoms with pretty much no side effects. I tried several which did not work for me or had a lot of side effects. Some antidepressants that helped my friends and family in their struggles did not help me. So definitely ask your doctor if they'd be willing to work with you to try and find a medication that works well for you with minimal side effects if they recommend that you take such medications.
We know very little about how psychological drugs work in general. Having to try multiple things to find one that works well for you is par for the course
"while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this" - meh, I don't think that's true. Being human is hard, and in some circumstances can be very fucking hard. If you've had a challenging time in your youth, that makes it exponentially harder.
That's most people. They just keep it inside, assuming everyone else is doing better than they are.
I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.
Also be careful with reaching conclusions too quickly. I ended up breaking a 10+ year long relationship after thinking that was the problem, I ended up even more miserable than before. Begged her to take me back after some years, and luckily we're happily together ever since and still married :) (with lots of changes from the first iteration, obviously)
Wow, without sounding sarcastic, that sounds like a healthy relationship! It really shows maturity to own up to it and choose each other again. Hoping the best for you both :)
I've wanted to write something similar regarding anxiety on a blog of my own for close to a decade now, but I was always afraid to put my feelings to paper, in case they become real. If they stay in my head, I can dismiss them. OP, I hope you feel some relief having posted this; if it helped you, perhaps it could encourage other to let down their walls.
Would you like a tip? This post started out as bulletpoints that were no more than 5 words each, eventually you start typing away like there's no tomorrow.
There's a lot I want to talk about, and not a lot of words until people stop scanning.
Hey, good luck! I've had some depressive episodes where I couldn't do work or even good off for a good week or so, but I'm privileged to have not been chronically depressed and need medication (I have others issues and working on those have prevented episodes). Going to therapy was the best decision of my life, and this year I've progressed enough that I put in almost 100 hours over 7 days for one critical project (which isn't something you should be able to brag about lol, but I'm proud of myself; a year ago I would've had a breakdown on about day 2). It's a journey though, and you'll have good weeks and bad, so just keep in mind that even if this week seems bad, next year's gonna be great!
> Going to therapy was the best decision of my life
Such an under-appreciated tool, going to therapy, granted you find the right person to do it with.
For people who've tried it just a few times but never really had "the epiphany", don't stop trying to find the right individual to have this space and conversations with, as it quite literally can change your life. It might take going through 5-6 people before you encounter "Ah, I actually feel like I could tell this person anything, I'm relatively sure they'll have good insights and understands what I want", but it so worth it once things click.
For software you don’t need to do engineering. You just need to provide value to your employer. No need to make a product perfect, but there is a need to make the product more valuable to your employer. Likely it will not be more valuable if the code is more shiny.
I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.
I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.
After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.
That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
As mentioned by a sibling comment: this is an insensitive take.
It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.
> > That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
Yeah that's BS.
When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.
Still no depression in sight .
The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.
We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .
We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'
Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.
Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside
Just want to add another voice of empathy and encouragement. I have ADHD, I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety at various times, I’ve scored and subsequently been fired from some top-tier SWE jobs because of inconsistent productivity and poor communication.
I know how much it sucks, and how tempting it is to fall into a spiral of blaming yourself. It’s possible to learn to accept yourself and improve these attitudes and behaviors, but it takes time and work and it won’t be a straight line. Use your doctors as expert resources and listen to them, but they’re not all-knowing wizards, and the drugs aren’t magic. Take responsibility, read books, take your own actions. Now you have time to do the obvious things that everyone already knows they should do to be healthy: exercise, eat well, sleep at the same time each day, see your friends and family, help other people, don’t doomscroll or game all day, keep your apartment clean. Find little projects to work on to help build your sense of agency and self-esteem, maybe not software stuff to start with since you have a lot of complex negativity built up around that.
Oh also, on the specific point of thinking you write bad quality software… you graduated in 2024. You’re basically brand new at this. Most people write shit software when they start out, don’t beat yourself up over this.
Sometimes, but I feel like more than 50% are good (or I’ve been lucky) - I read their profiles online at psychologytoday.com and pick a few that seems to fit me. I then call and see if they have open appointments
Therapy is just the new religion; used to ostracize and denigrate and demonize people who don't confess their sins to a therapist and receive absolution
It's another "intelligent design" moment; traditional values wrapped in atheist language as religious language has fallen out of favor
Keep in mind therapists are human meat suits with bills and rent to pay.
It's just more capitalism. You're paying for a friendly ear because you have no friends
You might have depression but reading that post I get autism/ADHD more than anything else.
I note that you don’t really describe the sensations and feelings you experience, it’s framed through being ‘unmotivated’ at work. Inability to describe feelings is a classic autistic trait. I could of course be jumping the gun here but it’s definitely something to look into.
Your description of feeling like you’re the only person in the world who experiences stuff this way also remind me a lot of my own experiences with autism and the accounts of others living with it. Communication difficulties and difficulty reaching out are also rolled up with all that too.
Your descriptions of leaving tasks half done, working irregular hours, and getting distracted with something that’s not in the work item are also very common autism/adhd experiences that I see in myself and others.
It’s good that you are getting tested for ADHD - note that autism and ADHD are quite comorbid and it’s very possible you have both.
The good news is that, whether autism/adhd or depression, you are far from alone in your experiences, certainly very far from alone in this field. It does get better.
Where depression came in for me is I had a lot of self hatred about how my brain worked, and h things other people seemed to be able to do easily I had to force myself to do, with immense effort. In a way, depression is anger turned inward, and it’s very easy to be angry at yourself.
It will get better. It’s about learning how your brain works, what your limits are, and what works for you. Basically, self-compassion, because shame is only a short term motivator. It’s so easy to burn out, and so much ‘advice’ online is about pushing yourself more and more when what works is listening to and understanding yourself.
Everyone makes mistakes. I think OPs problem might be more in how he analyzes, internalizes and reacts to mistakes. I hope he can fix his problems and move on with his life, as a person living with ADHD I can empathize with feeling "broken" and not equipped for corporate life and in a way I am not, but I'll keep going until my energy allows me because... I have no other option. Good luck to everyone out there.
I've been there (without the LLMs and antidepressants since therapy is healthier). The 1 year is quite optimistic from my perspective. Good luck though. Prioritize yourself.
The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.
One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.
I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.
Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.
That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.
Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.
One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.
My mother is a therapist, and I'd like to share a few things I've learned from her over the years.
One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state.
At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your experiences and how you interpret them. It's a gradual process, but it really can make a difference.
You're right, but framed generally like this, it's easy to skip this advice.
OP/reader, more specifically, examine that post. It is an avalanche of negative self-talk. It's a person telling themeselves and the world that they cannot do something. You can take a perfectly healthy person, turn on this cycle, and watch it destroy their lives.
Depression has many causes, but its roots that make it stick are cycles like these. Antidepressants are a parachute, but you have to rebuild the engine and an important part of that is to learn to reframe events and identify and challenge your negative assumptions.
I'm at this point fully convinced that 90%+ of people with depression have either a metabolic disfunction, gut issues, heavy metal poisoning or some other occult infection or a problem.
So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.
You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.
The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.
Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment.
Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.
But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.
That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:
* reframing failures as lessons
* honesty with self about your own role in your depression
* careful build-up of support
* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.
Yeah, you articulated it better than me. Especially in the case where the OP is indicating that a lot of their stress comes from inability to perform or get better in an engineering context. If after a few years you aren't feeling more confident in your skills or aren't more comfortable with your tech stack it's time to re-evaluate. OP mentions they prioritize stability and I think a lot of people get into engineering for the wrong reasons.
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
You're all correct. I'm just not convinced that the person wouldn't have those if they were relieved of the burdens holding them down.
It can be simultaneously true that they are struggling and unlikely to succeed now, and that their natural aptitude is not being realized due to non-work factors.
Hell, one time my friend died suddenly, and I failed out of every project I was on and developed a ton of health problems. Since then, I've gone back to my natural state, but it was hard. Anyone looking at me during that time would have seen a distracted fuckup. I probably would have been given an ADHD diagnosis and drugged heavily, were it not for the acute signal from the proximity of a good friends sudden murder.
There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".
I can't advise for genuine medical cases, but for the average case of anxiety/depression you can over come it. For men I would recommend the following channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ElishaLong
You know it's interesting, because with the right treatment and support, people with diabetes can live long, fulfilling lives. It's the same for depression. It does not matter if it's chronic or acute. There is no cure, it will never go away entirely. It can only be managed.
Elisha Long's content is not for me. I also don't think it's relevant to the topic of mental health.
Speaking from experience, I can say that when I prioritized adequate time to do activities I find challenging and enjoyable, that were deliberately unrelated to my work-life in any way, that my mental health improved.
The depression didn't disappear. But it became manageable.
I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.
One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.
Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.
Too much therapy speak here. You can't think your way out of depression. Only by taking action can you change things. Fix your body first. Then learn to socialize. Then get good at something (ideally something you can make money from). Think in terms of systems not goals. As a man your only way out is action (I can't speak on the female side of things).
Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.
Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.
What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.
I think any stoic would agree with that statement.
Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself.
I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.
I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers).
You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.
My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.
I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity.
>My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these
I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer:
>Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No
>Sleeping enough?: Yes/No
>Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?"
>Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself?: Yes/No (Stop playing videogames, reduce phone use, limit drugs and alcohol)
>Is your work environment healthy?: Yes/No (If 'No' how can you leave it)
> Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? : Yes/No
An easy happiness formula is:
1. Eat right: Maintain a healthy diet to keep your physical energy stable.
2. Exercise: Keep active every day to release mood-boosting chemicals.
3. Get enough sleep: Prioritize rest to reset your mental state.
4. Imagine an incredible future: Daydream about grand possibilities, even if you don't fully believe them at first.
5. Work toward a flexible schedule: Having control over your time is one of the highest drivers of happiness.
6. Do things you can steadily improve at: Progress and mastery trigger the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
7. Help others: Once you’ve helped yourself first, giving back provides profound psychological benefits.
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine: Remove mental clutter and decision fatigue by establishing steady habits
While I do agree with the majority of your post and it's very close to what I've been trying to do on my own, I wouldn't call it easy. It's a simple formula and I think the majority of people would benefit from trying to attempt the formula or a version of it before seeking professional help.
When you're in a negative mental state, none of these things are easy. Eating right, for example, assumes you know what right is, you can afford it, you have access to it and you have the energy to get it. All of those points have their own unique "prerequisites".
A bad mental state can keep you from completing those prerequisites.
A bad mental state can prevent the formula from working even if strictly followed.
There's still value in doing them because it keeps things from being worse. If there's something worse than being depressed, it's being depressed and hungry, or depressed and scared, or depressed and tired.
A bad mental state also messes with your perception. Good becomes bad, bad becomes worse, and worse becomes worst. Keeping a daily track of things ensures that you'll always have an objective source of truth. So that even if things feel hopeless, you can look back and pinpoint the few good moments.
I've been steadily working on my version of the formula for ~4y and the majority of the time I feel content but there are days where its still a challenge to do the right thing and days where I have to force myself to even get out of bed. But I can always look back and see that things aren't that bad. They just feel that way right now.
I definitely understand where your response comes from. You cannot work with people that keep screwing up the work you're doing. It costs the company money, it frustrates colleagues, and you end up just wasting people's time.
The thing is that I have now learned that I cannot do it. To play devil's advocate, I might just be a lazy bum. I still think it's good to be aware that you can walk away from a position that you know you cannot do.
Buckling up will not help me here. I've been upbuckling for two years now, and my buckles keep going down.
You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.
If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge. I have friends in software development and they do not enjoy the practice at all. Everything is just chores to them.
I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
I worked on projects with EEs and MEs for years. Were they not doing "engineering" because they built custom PCBs and the devices they go inside, rather than drawing the wiring plans or HVAC plans for a construction project? Most of them didn't even have a PE.
I’ve studied Electronic Engineering (and interacted with the Civil Engineering classes). And the main difference is that physical laws are inflexible and failure cases may result in deaths, maiming, and material damages. Software constraints are more forgiving in most cases. But that does not means a total lack of discipline has no negative impact. Au contraire, an engineering mindset greatly improves the chances of successfully delivering a project.
I think non-engineering mindsets in any sort of engineering/engineering adjacent role is the cause of a lot of friction.
>Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
I mean same principles apply in general.
> If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge.
Amen.
> I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
The official definition of engineering is: "Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific principles to design, build, and optimize structures, machines, systems, and processes." Software development falls into this definition. If there isn't something in this definition you like then you're in the wrong job. I find joy in optimizing processes. No matter what scale, a well designed and optimized system brings me joy.
You need to communicate better. One of the most important steps is to know your audience. This means you need to understand where they are coming from. Without this understanding, your words are unlikely to be correct and useful. To communicate clearly is to think clearly.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?
HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.
Please OP, close HN, reach out to people, get help, and (importantly) learn to navigate your mind, not fight with it.
> HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state.
Nice paradox you've created there.
> People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.
I don't know that that follows logically. Whatever people they might reach out to in the real world -- be they friends, relatives, therapists -- also actually disagree about things and don't have all the answers. HN comments come from the same general pool of people, who also potentially have experiences and insights a like-minded individual might find valuable.
> You are not going to just build a better planning system one day.
No but you may be able to over time, through trial and error, and connecting with others and hearing about their experiences. I don't think there's anything wrong or unhealthy about exploring it in this fashion and I don't understand your choice of tone.
I do agree that setting a goal for the year of "not making stupid mistakes" is a (stupid?) mistake. It is more of a lifelong journey and process, of striving rather than achieving, and not setting unrealistic expectations for yourself.
Thank you for this reply. I thought the parent comment was blunt, and perhaps honest. But perhaps it could have added some positive and constructive commentary rather than saying what not to do. I hardly think these things are so binary anyways.
OTOH, reading some wise comments on hn can help you get out of your biases.
It was initially some hn comment that convinced me that ADHD is not lazy people's excuse, but an actual thing (even if overhyped on some hn alternatives -- social media). And that led to a diagnosis after some time.
get your eyesight check, at some point in life I was having difficulties staying focus and even started having headaches... and I needed prescription glasses...
Also very important, try to sleep the best you can and do exercise... I remember reading here about exercise in some cases exceeding the benefits of ADHD medications...
If you are overdosing things... don't... caffeine can be overdosed and the effects are nasty and lingering... caffeine is meant to be a zero sum game, where it gets you speed in the morning and when it wears off then you go to sleep... if you over dose it then you are making your body over exert and at some point the body will communicate the results via extreme tiredness, bad humor, etc...
Don't be hard on yourself, from everyone we are the most hard on ourselves when we should be the most kind of them all.
That is re-assuring. Neurodivergence would explain a lot. For the time being, I am still in a state where I cannot get tested (for anyone that has experience with depression, the symptoms go hand in hand with ADD).
I was not planning on opening HN, but it has actually helped me :) I do have to admit I first asked a chat bot what the overall tone was before I opened it up myself.
Thank you very much, I needed to hear this.
Volunteer. Always had good experiences with it and made some nice memories and connections I would not have otherwise.
This is on my list! I do think that in my current environment I mostly hear what I have done wrong, and helping others would probably give a better outcome.
I know that's a very objective way of looking at it, I mean ofcourse volunteering is a good thing! But I wasn't sure if I was mentally prepared for it. I will definitely reach out to one nearby place that I know of.
This... I finally changed my life by talking to a psychiatrist after 40+ years of suffering and trying a myriad of things. Mental illnesses are real and need real treatment.
> talking to a psychiatrist
Would you mind sharing what solutions they recommended for you to try? Also any meds?
"HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state" ... I mean in aggregate, sure. But of course there could be people that are offering useful advice, in a well meaning way - that could actually help OP. You're being really negative here, and I think it's unwarranted.
this place is garbage
It is when folks like you come around and vomit this kind of thing.
And just as quickly he was pulled back into the crab bucket.
Quick correction that HN are people too my friends
What does neurodivergent mean? If there's a spectrum, what is considered normal, and how is that measured?
IANAD, Clinically, the measurement for diagnosis is if symptoms disturb your day to day life. In some countries they need to disturb multiple (1<) spheres of life. (Work, family, health etc.)
Then you'd have people with symptoms, but who's life is not affected by them.
I wonder myself if it's just the first group that is classified as neurodivergent or both.
I can not agree harder.
A rando that knows a little therapy language and has good intentions is dangerous. Turn and run.
The best thing you can do for yourself, at all junctures, is develop your own sense of truth. Listen to people, consider what they have to say, but ultimately decide for yourself. Don't place too much faith in any particular source or signifier or heuristic. The rando could have something useful to you, the expert could lead you astray.
Yeah, it's really tempting to try to fundamentally change the way you interface with the world but it's rarely very sustainable. I've found that trying to change my social environment, and also build skills to make specific tasks easier, are more effective options.
As someone that is "neurodivergent," I agree. A lot of advice, especially surrounding executive dysfunction, could be boiled down into a single step -- step 1: do not have executive dysfunction.
Now, I am not trying to say there is nothing anyone can do to improve themselves or their situation, but I do find a lot of advice falls short. Common advice is to set reminders, make lists, etc.. However, none of that is helpful when one has to remember to even create/check the reminders, lists, etc.. I notoriously create to-do lists only to never look at them ever again.
Honestly, if I have learned anything in life, it is that I cannot be left to my own devices. I need lots of forced, external structure which makes me rather uncomfortable because I do not want to burden others with the responsibility of managing my disability.
> I need lots of forced, external structure
Me as well, which is a really "fun" time when my specific blend of neurodivergence also causes me to immediately resent said authority and external structure and view it as removing my agency.
What I've learned as I've gotten older is just how much of our struggle comes down to our social model of disability. A lot of these "symptoms" are only disorders because we've built such rigid, uncompromising systems for interacting with and participating in society.
Modern psychology has a tendency to pathologize an individual's ability to conform to this rigidity instead of doing the hard work of promoting the building of flexible environments that are more accommodating of different ways of thinking and working. Instead, we work really hard to force a square peg into the round hole.
Its incredibly isolating, tbh.
It's a lot harder to change the shape of the hole. But I do agree that there is too much emphasis on the pathology of it. I think therapy needs a major rebranding and it shouldn't be seen as something that we do to "fix" "broken" people.
It should just be about more deeply understanding ourselves as individuals, and understanding the world around us (particularly other people), so that we may navigate it better.
I saw a video of a comedian (a woman) doing crowd work, and kind of playfully bullying someone (a man), asking them about their therapy. I thought it was funny, but a lot of the comments were along the lines of "that's not cool, how dare you."
But that audience member was at a comedy club, where comics do that kind of thing. Going to therapy isn't about collectively making sure the world babysits and coddles everyones needs. It's about giving you the tools to handle what you can't change.
Reach out to... people?
Yes, people. Friends, coworkers, family.
I think a lot of people with mental health problems could attest that this is not always very effective, most often you exchange the reality you’ve been living in for some kind words and then inevitably the normalisation of your problem.
Is help narrowly chemical here or is help in general? Someone else replied suggesting psychiatry - curious if that is what you meant.
Work forces you to see your own motivations and character and you have to manage yourself like you might manage a very valuable employee that you cannot afford to lose.
This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?
I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.
I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.
Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.
"The way a person treats you is a reflection of where they are at in their own life"
“Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping” - Jordan Peterson
Nice basic advice but ironic coming from him
Broken clocks and all.
There's no shortage of other clocks to cite.
I wish he hadn't said that ! :-)
He has said a lot f things I agree with, and also some stuff that seems intellectually and morally bananas; particularly around gender and sexuality. There was a point something shifted and he took, imo, a darker turn. Maybe it was his wife's illness, his own addiction challenges, or perhaps he was a victim of his own success and lost too much humility.
Probably a combination of those plus factors we aren't privy to.
I don't really know how to take the measure of a man and probably I'm not qualified to. I don't think he was evil though. People are complicated and not at all black and white.
Addiction, fame, loss, he was early on the anti-woke stuff, which became a major cultural flashpoint, money.
Believe it or not, he was a pretty good academic at one point.
I know this pattern from myself.
I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming.
Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code takes time, and sometimes I overthink things and I don't test properly, and I'm also slow, and don't communicate the problem with my team because I don't work consistent hours, because my brain cannot do consistency.
Turns out I have ADHD. Possibly autism too. So I understand your feelings of I just need to be better, because it works for other right? Even tho you know that fundamentally you are right, but it works for others so why not you? I don't have a solution. But sometimes you can't just "be better" and "more consistent", I also wish I could, but maybe it's not possible.
Maybe the only way is to find where we are good and do more of that. If you have struggle finishing things hope on calls with people that are good at finishing things. Talk with them. Be proactive and be open. I also don't do this as often as I should, because I'm also ashamed.
I don't know exactly what the point was to this, but so you know others also fail, even tho they deemed smart and skilled by others.
If you recognize yourself in that post, then what you recognize is called negative self talk. The only advice I have for you is to learn to recognize how this pattern makes things worse and to learn (or be taught) how to stop that pattern. The blog post is a textbook self-flagellation and I have no doubt author returns to it to feel worse about themselves in some twisted attempt to motivate positive change.
In the last day I've spent a couple hours in a negativity loop. My wife doesn't know it, but she snapped me out of it and it's nice to see your comment as another reminder to avoid going down that path
Brother(i think), I feel you. Some days the rumination is awful, and it's good you have someone that reminds you of the good stuff.
My kids are like that - total blank slate joy machines at this age. And I assure you - fundamental optimism is ok everyone can improve their outlook and/or lot in life.
We need to remind ourselves that it's okay to feel emotions across the spectrum of humanity. There is nothing wrong in feeling bad or having regret or feeling shame; just as there is nothing wrong with feeling glee or hatred or sadness. They are normal emotions, but what matters is how we respond to these emotions.
IDK why but one of the more damaging things about American culture is the constantly championing of individualism over community or belonging. Having one person you can talk to or spend quality time with is often enough and we should be encouraging more people to find their tribe.
My wife goes through negativity loops too, it hurts to see someone I love think so little of themselves but we're working through it together. That's life, we need to embrace it.
Hah. I feel very much seen by both of these comments, much more than I’m confident to admit.
Something I have been struggling with all my life is deciding whether I am flawed in some way, or the other party/the environment is - because my immediate reaction is always to feel responsible and inadequate, and it takes a lot of energy of confidently feeling superior or right about something. Like, is it a pattern, or am I reflecting to avoid being ignorant?
It's both. All humans and all environments are flawed. You can change yourself and control your reactions to your environment if you want to. You can probably also either improve your environment to some extent, or move to a better environment (not always possible for everyone but HN users usually have that option).
There's no need to feel superior: that's not particularly helpful and will tend to give you a distorted perception of reality. Most likely you're just average.
You'll never have an objective measure of good/bad. You only have your feelings on the matter.
One way is to define what you view as good (or better: define what you view as "better") and just be that as much as you can. Because "trying to actually be better" puts you above the median person immediately, IMHO
Okay, this is a genuine question because I was trying to avoid negative self talk.
Why did you read the message and think of negative self talk? I'm just trying to learn more about your point of view.
I was just pointing out things where I struggle.
Yeah I didn’t read it that way at all. I think that addressing mental health issues requires some frankness with yourself first and foremost. I know some people object to identifying with labels such as ADHD, autism, depressive disorder, etc., but I do not know if that is what the parent intended.
Probably because the entire article is the author describing themselves in a negative way.
Division of labour is THE big advantage of working with other people. So yes, focus on the bits you are good at and hand the other stuff to people who are good at that part. It's usually worth it.
> Turns out I have ADHD
You just magically found this out when the Mental Health Diagnosis Fairy visited you one night? You spent thousands of dollars for a neuropsych evaluation where the result was 40% reality, 40% chance, and 20% how the evaluator was feeling that day? You self-diagnosed by reading Reddit threads? You somehow magically found the one psychiatrist who is willing to talk about ADHD without immediately assuming you're just trying to score some Ritalin to sell on the street? You got diagnosed by Dr. ChatGPT? What the actual fuck are you talking about? Everybody has ADHD, nobody has ADHD, who fucking knows? It's not possible that you actually know this.
I'm 100% convinced everyone who is like "get help, talk to an expert" has never actually fucking tried, because it's not possible.
No one else has mentioned it here, so on account of my own experiences I feel the obligation to say: Be aware of this developing into suicidal ideation, if it hasn't already.
I get the impression (again, mostly my own experiences, projected onto you) from your intense "the problem has to be me" convictions that you're simultaneously dealing with a lot of self-loathing, and that this self-loathing fills a void of answers to existential questions that no other source in your life can. In other words, your depression has become a maladaptive coping strategy. And if that's so, then it's not a long shot until your maladaptive coping strategies evolve from, "the problem is me" into "the solution would be/will be/should be/is my own death."
I derive these warnings from these whiffs of absolute, impossible-to-change miseries you mention: "my mind is exploding, I'm not aware of what I'm doing anymore"; "tomorrow it'll be something else I screwed up"; "I'm the only one with these problems."
So, if you have a dark voice inside your head that promises change or absolution only in return for your own physical or emotional injury (perhaps dressed up as "discipline"), be forewarned: This voice is a cognitive illusion. It does not care about you. It will hold your head underwater until you drown, and still be unhappy.
On another note: I would agree with others that you would be a strong candidate for an autism assessment. Like you say with ADD, autism would not a root cause of anything, but it might help you understand your situation more intuitively if it is involved.
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
> (untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression)
Really important to understand that depression can also manifest as poor concentration.
There's a huge problem right now with people getting locked into diagnoses found on the internet and then resisting advice of their doctors that doesn't match. It's scarily common for depressed patients to become convinced that they have ADHD and that ADHD explains everything, then to refuse depression treatment. They can jump from doctor to doctor until they find someone who doesn't care and just writes the prescription, but years can pass before they realize that stimulants aren't fixing their depression.
If you have depression, with or without ADHD, you need to address it. Don't get sucked into the "ADHD explains everything about you" mentality that gets spread on the internet.
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.
Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?
Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects. It's the opposite pattern of stimulants where the patient feels great (unnaturally so, due to stimulant euphoria at the start) and the effects wane over time.
The internet is really, really bad at pushing everyone toward ADHD diagnoses and then pushing them further toward stimulants. There's a darker part of some of the communities then pushes people to keep pressuring their doctors for higher and higher doses and also discourages people from trying therapy.
Outside of the internet I know several people who did the rounds with medications and ended up on the non-stimulant options and preferred them. This is an unthinkable conclusion if your primary source of information is Reddit, X, or TikTok ADHD influencers, but it's pretty common in the real world.
Stimulants have a habit of being enjoyable at first (meaning people like taking them, beyond their attention effects) and then the effects wane over the years, to the point that there are studies showing that the effects of stimulants taken long term in children are minimal to unmeasurable after several years. This is confusing to anyone who has been taking them for years and notices a difference on days when they don't take them, but that's explainable by the fact that it takes months (or longer) for the brain to adapt to not having them in the body. For some reason this same effect is not debated as much when you talk about people who drink 5 cups of coffee per day but then crash hard when they miss their coffee, but it gets protested and argued a lot when we talk about literal amphetamines.
Anyway, please don't listen too much to internet ADHD forums. They're just so, so bad these days with bad advice and poor psychology/therapy takes. You really need to engage with professionals with an open mind and not be single minded about acquiring and taking stimulants if you want to address this problem as a whole. The way the internet treats ADHD as a simple "low dopamine" state (which is wrong on many levels) and then points to stimulants as a "raise your dopamine" drug to neatly cancel it out sounds nice, but it's wrong on so many levels.
Vyvanse is dexamphetamine. I suppose you can say “amphetamines” instead, I imagine the subtleties of the terminology differ quite a bit in different places.
Strattera can help (I mentioned bupropion, another SDNRI). Of course if you try stimulants and don’t respond well, it’s totally fine to just use e.g. Strattera. What I’m advocating against is e.g. “try Strattera first, if it seems to help, don’t bother with stimulants”. (Some places, cultures, or medical systems do have surprisingly strong biases against stimulants!)
To be specific, Vyvanse/Elvanse is lisdextroamphetamine.
But IMO it's not really that incorrect to say there are two main types of stimulants.
You rarely (at least never where I'm from) get instant release methylphenidate. Always some delay mechanism. Shorter - Ritalin, longer - Concerta.
And the lizine particle attached to dextroamphetamine acts as a such delayer, but isn't active by itself -- being only an amino acid. So it's still kind of amphetamine just as Concerta is methylphenidate.
> untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression
realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.
therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.
working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.
> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while
I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”
but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.
also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time
We won't need many software developers in another few years time anyway. Cooks are nowhere close to being replaced by technology.
> Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
This really struck a chord with me. I've spent the last 15+ years building up a craftperson's skillset (IMO) akin to a carpenter's or mechanic's. Yet, people still seem surprised when I tell them I'm not willing to run a slop cannon and excrete software which is _good enough_. I actually enjoy the nuts and bolts of writing and debugging software and using AI feels like cheating (if only myself). I'm really not sure where I go from here. I wish I had a work situation like yours to complain about but I know I'd have hit the eject button the minute someone started mandating anything about my workflow, so it's kind of moot.
Fitness also contributes to most common physical tasks becoming trivial, you can literally jump out of bed in the morning if it strikes your fancy.
yeah! it's pretty cool when I start doing something that used to be difficult and now it's just... not. weird how long your old form sticks with you in your head like that.
>quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook
Are you doing entry level line cook work or something?
yeah, at a local pizza/taproom place. they share tips with cooks, works out to ~$35/hr. I'm not expecting it to replace a tech salary, but it helps offset the savings burn (which was specifically set aside for this). engaging with real people in real life about real things is also an indreeeedibly nice change of pace (even the stressful/tense moments of shit hitting the fan).
I'll re-enter tech later... maybe.
Oh interesting,that doesn't seem to bad.
I mean you can burnout on kitchen work as easily as tech work. Maybe easier. I know that first hand. The one nice thing is that when you clock out you can not think about it until the next shift. There is some peace in knowing you'll never get a call at 2am because some bird's nest of technology fell apart and people can't order their custom cat pic coffee mugs.
I will discuss this with my GP. You're right that fluoxetine is a serotonin kicker, and it didn't stop my dysfunctional habits.
Ofcourse, no pill is magical, and I have no expectations of that. At least fluoxetine fixed my sleeping habits.
> No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post.
Yep. I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD about a 1.5 years ago... My whole life came into focus. Everything that didn't make sense suddenly started to make sense. What I thought were 15 different issues I was dealing with were really all just symptoms of the one (or two in my case). The internal tension I've always felt was also explained by the competing desires of ASD and ADHD.
Knowing this hasn't really "fixed" any of that, but it has given me an explanation, language to use to explain it, and permission to stop searching for what's wrong with me... which I've been doing for 20 years. It's been nice to have a break.
Finding a label for personal problems typically results in a honeymoon of self-acceptance and relief. The honeymoon usually ends and the problems remain, but now there are possible paths forward.
There are some traps along this path, too. A number of younger people I've worked with (in the double digits now) have gotten ADHD and/or ASD diagnoses and then become overjoyed that "everything makes sense now". But the diagnoses are only useful as tools for knowing what to work on.
The trap is trying to externalize the diagnoses as a get out of jail free card that can be used to justify avoiding hard changes and difficult work. The more difficult version of this is when someone tries to externalize the responsibilities of their diagnosis on others. I've seen a couple situations where someone got an ADHD diagnosis and then took it straight to their employers expecting to receive more forgiveness for late work and mistakes, then getting angry when it didn't change their company's expectations. It's a hard conversation to have with someone who thinks the diagnosis is going to relieve the weight of all the problems they've been facing, when in fact it's only helpful for identifying what they need to work even harder on improving and coping with.
The other thing it does is give a path towards resolution (or at least mitigation) for some issues. Wife was diagnosed adhd, and got a shrug wrt an autism diagnosis. We looked into interventions that specifically tend to work for ADHD, and she’s now thriving. She also tends to respond well to some of the interventions for autistic people that we’ve found useful for our AuDHD daughter, so we’ve taken on the policy of “labels be damned, if it works it works”. The labels sure as shit help with getting started finding your bearings though
ADHD is unlikely to be the root cause as there is unlikely to be any single root cause. Treating ADHD will reduce or eliminate a component of this, but will not address the issues entirely.
It's scary how your first paragraph describes by recent (but not long term) experiences. Looks like I have some checks to do as well.
Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
Hope you get it worked out OP. I will say, if it's ADHD, it's 100% worth trying to get the best treatment you can.
My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work.
Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs.
If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut out to be a "systems engineer" maybe move to something more forgiving like frontend or something, you will probably be happier.
There is a reason that I am not working on avionics or respirator firmware. I don't have the discipline to follow the processes required to minimize the chance of accidentally killing people and I don't want the legal liability.
You don't have to be working on "important" stuff, John Carmack one of the best and most celebrated developer of our time spent most of his career working on games.
Be mercenary, do not take pride in your work, do your work for money. You will be happier, take pride in who you are and what you do outside of work.
I do agree that working for your career isn't the only options. Sometimes it's just to earn a living.
The things that both of them have in common is that they're sustainable. If you do not like your current position, make it sustainable for the time being. I was unable to do that, twice, so I think I'm at a point where I cannot do what I need to do.
Even the fun work (FOSS) is something I cannot sustain for 40 hrs a week, despite how much I enjoy it.
Time will tell, though
> stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work
my personal riff on that is 'stop assigning self worth to the quality that others assign to your work'. being able to internally generate self-worth through the act of producing high quality work is a super power.
Good refinement.
I like Paul Graham's "keep your identity small" piece: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
When you're not personally identified with your work, it stings a whole lot less when someone rips it up. And keep in mind we're imperfect people working with other (often very) imperfect people. It's a mess, and always will be.
Depression is for many people the animal in the room, for some a fox and for others an elephant. You cannot avoid, ignore or hack a chemical imbalance in your brain with societal or personal measures. If you find yourself hopeless and helpless, irrespective if you have attended any form of psychotherapy, take an antidepressant. Don't hesitate and if you are in trouble, contact me, seriously. The author takes Fluoxetine which is the less potent A-D drug among all. If he is really in a heavy depression, he should be on Escitalopram.
Thanks for sharing. You are doing incredibly well for thesw circumstances - you found a therapist, are attending, on a treatment plan and have good relationships in your life.
I think 2026 is a really hard time to be a new software engineer. There is too much tech to learn. AI in the mix. Many are finding it really hard.
Good luck with it all. I have no advice just keep putting mental health first, as you rightly said in the title.
I have a young daughter and when I think about the most critical skills I want her to develop throughout her adolescence, communication is one of the most important ones that will prove to be valuable throughout her life. In whichever career she chooses, with friendships, personal mental health, partner relationships, etc.
She is smart, she is talented and incredibly curious and those things I really do not worry about. What will set her apart from the majority of her peers throughout life will be her ability to effectively communicate and interact with others in a way that is meaningful. It’s benefits go far beyond what most of us appreciate
I agree with you.
However succeeding is increasingly harder and harder.
You can be the best communicator in the world but when the world only want to push their story to manipulate you towards their will then the only skill that counts is obedience or being the most aggressive manipulator. I wish that meaningful communication was a key to good and content life.
You still can have your bubbles in the universe though, there it is invaluable, of course. Isolationism on the personal level might be necessary, unfortunately.
On your goals:
1. It's okay to make mistakes. Pain + reflection = progress.
2. Try to shift your perspective so your sense of worth isn't tied to your work.
3. Anytime you say "I should", "I need to", usually this is sign you are blindly following some sort of cognitive script [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMghRYqk8o&t=1844s
The “should” trap is a big one. I found The Work by Byron Katie to be a very effective self-guided method for addressing those thoughts.
I didn't really think about your third bulletpoint, that does make sense.
I think it's also good to be aware when you're lying to yourself. An easy example is how people talk about their gym membership.
"Oh, I would go, but I am so busy with X", or "I am already doing Y, so I don't really need to go". It's always a non-reason, while the true reason is that they just do not see a reason to go.
I don't get why this happens with work, though. I didn't love my job, but I definitely loved the colleagues, and I felt like I didn't do that bad of a job (ofcourse I see this differently now, I was doing a bad job).
I can sympathize with what you're going through OP. I have similar struggles myself (primarily with severe anxiety) and wouldn't wish most of what I have had to go through on my worst enemy.
I do have one comment though:
You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.
I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.
Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.
The Buddhists call that seeking ground, and they consider it to be a real source of suffering. Their take is that the reality is fundamentally groundlessness, and the more you can relax into that (easier said than done), the less you'll suffer when the inevitable shit hits the fan.
As someone who has had a metric ton of shit hit his fan, this is a hard pill to swallow, but very effective medicine and has helped me tremendously.
In modern terms, you could say it's good to embrace a growth/flexibility mindset and work on the things that help you to build and restore resilience.
Learn to be your own best friend. My DBT therapist is making me work through this Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook [0]. It feels hokey at the beginning, but it seems to actually be working. Improving your internal self talk and becoming your own advocate and supportive best friend gives you the capacity and perspective to change your behaviors to drag yourself out of the muck.
[0] https://a.co/d/029g4obS
I would suggest building something on your own, choose your own processes, work however you want, with something that gives you motivation, and see if you are able to ship and release the things you build, attract users and lifetime management of the products. Now if that works great the problem is not with you.
> I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore.
Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress, decisions you need to take etc.
You can start with something as simple as "I downloaded the code from 'X', 'Y' is the shell command I used to build the project, now how do I reproduce bug 'Z'? Is there an existing script I can run or do I need to ask someone for a command, blah blah"...
I find this is very useful when working on unfamiliar tasks or when I'm finding it hard to get traction on a task (due to procrastination or anything else). Just writing something has a way of making yourself get any clarity you can, and if you lose traction again, the notes you wrote are something you can use to get started again.
It's quite freeing to not have to have all the context in your head all the time.
I was actually doing this in my last month, which was probably too late in my trajectory.
I even kept daily voice notes on all the issues I had that day, and what I should do to fix it. It helps, but it wasn't enough to save my job.
I would also like to add that I have read multiple comments talking about their struggles with either some neurodivergent diagnosis, or with depression. I've never seen this side of HN, and I am very grateful to have been a part of it.
I haven't met anyone in a similar boat, so seeing I'm not alone is very healing.
This sounds a lot like the shame and frustration people with ADD feel when untreated.
I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.
You're not the only one commenting this. I do have to say it's quite re-assuring to know that this is a possibility.
For the people you know that have ADD, was medication sufficient? Did they still end up taking therapy for their neurodivergence? I wonder how long it takes before I can be a functional programmer again. I know it'll take a while.
I appreciate the candor and wish the best for you.
Sadly, I will also tell you that once you do resume your job search, this post is going to hurt your chances.
It shouldn't. It really, really shouldn't. I don't respect my colleagues who reject people for stuff like this. But I can't change the world.
I don't have a solution other than to make such posts private and share only with people you trust. Or start a new blog on a new domain so employers don't associate it with you.
My story has a lot of similarities to yours…
I got diagnosed with ADHD 2 years ago, at age 35.
It was one of the most important things I’ve ever done.
I strongly encourage you to keep looking into this.
Please be gentle to yourself. You’ve been fighting your whole life with one hand tied behind your back, and no one even knew.
I used to co-supervise a PhD student who suffered from severe anxiety, she was good but her anxiety stood in her way almost all of the time. You could see that she used up 3/4 of her brain just on being anxious, there wasn't much power left to do the actual work to any standard. It's a horrible disease. (and yeah, she was on medication and diagnosed).
Also, find the right manager and the right role. With a manager that expects a highly regimented routine, you probably aren't going to do so well. With a manager that lets you explore and be more creative, you might do a lot better.
I've found one of my own strengths is in finding ways to use existing features, maybe with slight modifications, together to do the things that customers want, allowing the team to avoid several large projects and the resulting maintenance burden entirely. My first manager understood the value of that and we worked really well together for a few years. After a reorg, my subsequent manager considered it lazy and PIP after six months. I don't fault them, and different management styles work for different people. But make sure you find someone you're compatible with.
The author should probably read The Checklist Manifesto. It's a great book that has some excellent advice about getting things done with higher quality by, not surprisingly given the title, using checklists.
I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression.
I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.
Wishing you the best OP.
I resonate with you word-for-word. I kind of assumed people were also struggling, but I didn't realize how much struggling it ended up being.
I will post an update every now-and-then. It might not be very software-related (sorry dang!), so I will try to not post all of them on here.
I wish you the best as well! And you are free to contact me, I think talking to someone in a similar boat helps a lot.
I'm not OP but just wanted to add my own experience with anti-depressants as someone who has battled mild depression and extreme anxiety for years. Ultimately in my case it turned out that I needed to try several different antidepressants that my doctor prescribed until I found one that worked to aid in decreasing my depression and anxiety symptoms with pretty much no side effects. I tried several which did not work for me or had a lot of side effects. Some antidepressants that helped my friends and family in their struggles did not help me. So definitely ask your doctor if they'd be willing to work with you to try and find a medication that works well for you with minimal side effects if they recommend that you take such medications.
Wish you all the best. Mental illness sucks.
We know very little about how psychological drugs work in general. Having to try multiple things to find one that works well for you is par for the course
"while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this" - meh, I don't think that's true. Being human is hard, and in some circumstances can be very fucking hard. If you've had a challenging time in your youth, that makes it exponentially harder.
That's most people. They just keep it inside, assuming everyone else is doing better than they are.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Stop thinking about it and go talk to someone. You are likely just delaying your healing and happiness.
Good luck!
I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.
Also be careful with reaching conclusions too quickly. I ended up breaking a 10+ year long relationship after thinking that was the problem, I ended up even more miserable than before. Begged her to take me back after some years, and luckily we're happily together ever since and still married :) (with lots of changes from the first iteration, obviously)
Wow, without sounding sarcastic, that sounds like a healthy relationship! It really shows maturity to own up to it and choose each other again. Hoping the best for you both :)
I've wanted to write something similar regarding anxiety on a blog of my own for close to a decade now, but I was always afraid to put my feelings to paper, in case they become real. If they stay in my head, I can dismiss them. OP, I hope you feel some relief having posted this; if it helped you, perhaps it could encourage other to let down their walls.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Would you like a tip? This post started out as bulletpoints that were no more than 5 words each, eventually you start typing away like there's no tomorrow.
There's a lot I want to talk about, and not a lot of words until people stop scanning.
Hey, good luck! I've had some depressive episodes where I couldn't do work or even good off for a good week or so, but I'm privileged to have not been chronically depressed and need medication (I have others issues and working on those have prevented episodes). Going to therapy was the best decision of my life, and this year I've progressed enough that I put in almost 100 hours over 7 days for one critical project (which isn't something you should be able to brag about lol, but I'm proud of myself; a year ago I would've had a breakdown on about day 2). It's a journey though, and you'll have good weeks and bad, so just keep in mind that even if this week seems bad, next year's gonna be great!
> Going to therapy was the best decision of my life
Such an under-appreciated tool, going to therapy, granted you find the right person to do it with.
For people who've tried it just a few times but never really had "the epiphany", don't stop trying to find the right individual to have this space and conversations with, as it quite literally can change your life. It might take going through 5-6 people before you encounter "Ah, I actually feel like I could tell this person anything, I'm relatively sure they'll have good insights and understands what I want", but it so worth it once things click.
For software you don’t need to do engineering. You just need to provide value to your employer. No need to make a product perfect, but there is a need to make the product more valuable to your employer. Likely it will not be more valuable if the code is more shiny.
I started doing a lot better at work when I stopped smoking weed and started getting a quick workout in before work each day.
I agree mental health is important and have struggled with similar issues... but it is hard to read prose in fixed-width typefaces. Please consider a more readable serif variable-width typeface.
Many of us are used to monospace all day long in terminal
I have worked in environments where as the day wore on, my performance plummeted.
After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.
That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
As mentioned by a sibling comment: this is an insensitive take.
It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.
> > That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.
Yeah that's BS.
When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.
Still no depression in sight .
The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.
We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .
We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'
Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.
Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside
Just want to add another voice of empathy and encouragement. I have ADHD, I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety at various times, I’ve scored and subsequently been fired from some top-tier SWE jobs because of inconsistent productivity and poor communication.
I know how much it sucks, and how tempting it is to fall into a spiral of blaming yourself. It’s possible to learn to accept yourself and improve these attitudes and behaviors, but it takes time and work and it won’t be a straight line. Use your doctors as expert resources and listen to them, but they’re not all-knowing wizards, and the drugs aren’t magic. Take responsibility, read books, take your own actions. Now you have time to do the obvious things that everyone already knows they should do to be healthy: exercise, eat well, sleep at the same time each day, see your friends and family, help other people, don’t doomscroll or game all day, keep your apartment clean. Find little projects to work on to help build your sense of agency and self-esteem, maybe not software stuff to start with since you have a lot of complex negativity built up around that.
Oh also, on the specific point of thinking you write bad quality software… you graduated in 2024. You’re basically brand new at this. Most people write shit software when they start out, don’t beat yourself up over this.
Good luck.
How do you all find a good therapist? I'd imagine it takes some trial and error to find one that fits?
Sometimes, but I feel like more than 50% are good (or I’ve been lucky) - I read their profiles online at psychologytoday.com and pick a few that seems to fit me. I then call and see if they have open appointments
26% of social psychology is reproducible
Roughly 50% of cognitive psychology is reproducible
Worse or barely as good as a coin toss
Here's a psychiatrist arguing Americans have become addicted to therapy and lost their nerve for normal irrational aspects of reality: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
Therapy is just the new religion; used to ostracize and denigrate and demonize people who don't confess their sins to a therapist and receive absolution
It's another "intelligent design" moment; traditional values wrapped in atheist language as religious language has fallen out of favor
Keep in mind therapists are human meat suits with bills and rent to pay.
It's just more capitalism. You're paying for a friendly ear because you have no friends
You might have depression but reading that post I get autism/ADHD more than anything else.
I note that you don’t really describe the sensations and feelings you experience, it’s framed through being ‘unmotivated’ at work. Inability to describe feelings is a classic autistic trait. I could of course be jumping the gun here but it’s definitely something to look into.
Your description of feeling like you’re the only person in the world who experiences stuff this way also remind me a lot of my own experiences with autism and the accounts of others living with it. Communication difficulties and difficulty reaching out are also rolled up with all that too.
Your descriptions of leaving tasks half done, working irregular hours, and getting distracted with something that’s not in the work item are also very common autism/adhd experiences that I see in myself and others.
It’s good that you are getting tested for ADHD - note that autism and ADHD are quite comorbid and it’s very possible you have both.
The good news is that, whether autism/adhd or depression, you are far from alone in your experiences, certainly very far from alone in this field. It does get better.
Where depression came in for me is I had a lot of self hatred about how my brain worked, and h things other people seemed to be able to do easily I had to force myself to do, with immense effort. In a way, depression is anger turned inward, and it’s very easy to be angry at yourself.
It will get better. It’s about learning how your brain works, what your limits are, and what works for you. Basically, self-compassion, because shame is only a short term motivator. It’s so easy to burn out, and so much ‘advice’ online is about pushing yourself more and more when what works is listening to and understanding yourself.
Check what companies he worked for and never work for them. He's got his CV on his website.
Everyone makes mistakes. I think OPs problem might be more in how he analyzes, internalizes and reacts to mistakes. I hope he can fix his problems and move on with his life, as a person living with ADHD I can empathize with feeling "broken" and not equipped for corporate life and in a way I am not, but I'll keep going until my energy allows me because... I have no other option. Good luck to everyone out there.
I've been there (without the LLMs and antidepressants since therapy is healthier). The 1 year is quite optimistic from my perspective. Good luck though. Prioritize yourself.
The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.
An admirable start down a self-discovery path.
One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.
I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.
Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.
That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.
Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.
One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.
My mother is a therapist, and I'd like to share a few things I've learned from her over the years.
One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state.
At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your experiences and how you interpret them. It's a gradual process, but it really can make a difference.
I believe you can get through this. :)
You're right, but framed generally like this, it's easy to skip this advice.
OP/reader, more specifically, examine that post. It is an avalanche of negative self-talk. It's a person telling themeselves and the world that they cannot do something. You can take a perfectly healthy person, turn on this cycle, and watch it destroy their lives.
Depression has many causes, but its roots that make it stick are cycles like these. Antidepressants are a parachute, but you have to rebuild the engine and an important part of that is to learn to reframe events and identify and challenge your negative assumptions.
> At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist
I'd like to add that for certain kinds of people, the process of doing this on your own is near torture.
I'm at this point fully convinced that 90%+ of people with depression have either a metabolic disfunction, gut issues, heavy metal poisoning or some other occult infection or a problem.
So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.
You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.
The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.
Many improve in 4 to 6 months. Some take longer.
Comment and I'll DM the Pdf guide to fixing your life!
Most of y’all need to buck up. If day to day engineering tasks are so challenging for you maybe the anxiety and depression you’re feeling is your system telling you that you are in misalignment.
Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?
This is one side of the elephant.
It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.
But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.
That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:
* reframing failures as lessons
* honesty with self about your own role in your depression
* careful build-up of support
* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful
I think the point was that there are people who don't need all this extra work, it just comes naturally. And they are more suited to engineering than people who need to spend a lot of energy on emotional and mental regulation as well.
Yes - you are identifying a non-depressed engineer. A depressed engineer can become one of those by removing the depression.
No, the point is that not everyone is cut out to be an engineer. If you find yourself being depressed as an engineer, one possibility is that it's really not the job for you. Not everyone is capable of being an engineer, and being prone to emotional disregulation is probably a good indicator. Not to say you can't muddle through, but the original post was saying that you should at least ask yourself if you'd be happier elsewhere.
Yeah, you articulated it better than me. Especially in the case where the OP is indicating that a lot of their stress comes from inability to perform or get better in an engineering context. If after a few years you aren't feeling more confident in your skills or aren't more comfortable with your tech stack it's time to re-evaluate. OP mentions they prioritize stability and I think a lot of people get into engineering for the wrong reasons.
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
You're all correct. I'm just not convinced that the person wouldn't have those if they were relieved of the burdens holding them down.
It can be simultaneously true that they are struggling and unlikely to succeed now, and that their natural aptitude is not being realized due to non-work factors.
Hell, one time my friend died suddenly, and I failed out of every project I was on and developed a ton of health problems. Since then, I've gone back to my natural state, but it was hard. Anyone looking at me during that time would have seen a distracted fuckup. I probably would have been given an ADHD diagnosis and drugged heavily, were it not for the acute signal from the proximity of a good friends sudden murder.
This is ableism.
There is no cure for depression. Like there is no cure for diabetes. There is a big difference between having the disease, and feeling sadness brought on by circumstances. There is no such thing as simply "removing the depression".
100% of diabetes is chronic.
1% of depression is chronic.
>The good news is that with the right treatment and support, most people with depression can make a full recovery. (https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/depression-in-ad...)
I can't advise for genuine medical cases, but for the average case of anxiety/depression you can over come it. For men I would recommend the following channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ElishaLong
You know it's interesting, because with the right treatment and support, people with diabetes can live long, fulfilling lives. It's the same for depression. It does not matter if it's chronic or acute. There is no cure, it will never go away entirely. It can only be managed.
Elisha Long's content is not for me. I also don't think it's relevant to the topic of mental health.
Speaking from experience, I can say that when I prioritized adequate time to do activities I find challenging and enjoyable, that were deliberately unrelated to my work-life in any way, that my mental health improved.
The depression didn't disappear. But it became manageable.
I think there are methods and patterns to be learned. Engineering is mostly a succession of problems, with a somewhat illusory prize at the end. But a lot of people currently in software development are not trained well to withstand the journey. And for some, it’s just that they have been doing it since high school or something.
One of the thing that is important is to segment the work and have checkpoints and mini bosses. You don’t climb a mountain in one go. That’s one of the reason I dislike LLM in coding is because coding is my down time after a deep thinking session.
Another thing is to have an end goal in mind, and plan the journey according to those. You do this by having enough information about the business domain. I’ve seen people rush blindly into solving problem and get a burnout in the process. This also help with pacing yourself to a sustainable rate of effort.
Too much therapy speak here. You can't think your way out of depression. Only by taking action can you change things. Fix your body first. Then learn to socialize. Then get good at something (ideally something you can make money from). Think in terms of systems not goals. As a man your only way out is action (I can't speak on the female side of things).
Right, it's very easy to dismiss the general therapy talk. I'm not a fan myself.
Exercise, cultivating positive fear responses, self-challenge are all important.
What you're pinning as "therapy talk" is just that last one - you need to think critically about how you approach life problems, not just accept the most negative interpretation of events and your inner monologue.
I think any stoic would agree with that statement.
Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself.
I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/@ElishaLong
I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers).
You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.
My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.
I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity.
>My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these
I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer:
>Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No
>Sleeping enough?: Yes/No
>Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?"
>Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself?: Yes/No (Stop playing videogames, reduce phone use, limit drugs and alcohol)
>Is your work environment healthy?: Yes/No (If 'No' how can you leave it)
> Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? : Yes/No
An easy happiness formula is:
1. Eat right: Maintain a healthy diet to keep your physical energy stable.
2. Exercise: Keep active every day to release mood-boosting chemicals.
3. Get enough sleep: Prioritize rest to reset your mental state.
4. Imagine an incredible future: Daydream about grand possibilities, even if you don't fully believe them at first.
5. Work toward a flexible schedule: Having control over your time is one of the highest drivers of happiness.
6. Do things you can steadily improve at: Progress and mastery trigger the chemicals in your body that make you happy.
7. Help others: Once you’ve helped yourself first, giving back provides profound psychological benefits.
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine: Remove mental clutter and decision fatigue by establishing steady habits
While I do agree with the majority of your post and it's very close to what I've been trying to do on my own, I wouldn't call it easy. It's a simple formula and I think the majority of people would benefit from trying to attempt the formula or a version of it before seeking professional help.
When you're in a negative mental state, none of these things are easy. Eating right, for example, assumes you know what right is, you can afford it, you have access to it and you have the energy to get it. All of those points have their own unique "prerequisites".
A bad mental state can keep you from completing those prerequisites.
A bad mental state can prevent the formula from working even if strictly followed.
There's still value in doing them because it keeps things from being worse. If there's something worse than being depressed, it's being depressed and hungry, or depressed and scared, or depressed and tired.
A bad mental state also messes with your perception. Good becomes bad, bad becomes worse, and worse becomes worst. Keeping a daily track of things ensures that you'll always have an objective source of truth. So that even if things feel hopeless, you can look back and pinpoint the few good moments.
I've been steadily working on my version of the formula for ~4y and the majority of the time I feel content but there are days where its still a challenge to do the right thing and days where I have to force myself to even get out of bed. But I can always look back and see that things aren't that bad. They just feel that way right now.
> An easy happiness formula is
I literally do all 8 of those things and I'm depressed as fuck. Maybe mental health is harder than you think?
> An easy happiness formula is:
> [list of eight things that may be extremely difficult for people with depression]
.
I definitely understand where your response comes from. You cannot work with people that keep screwing up the work you're doing. It costs the company money, it frustrates colleagues, and you end up just wasting people's time.
The thing is that I have now learned that I cannot do it. To play devil's advocate, I might just be a lazy bum. I still think it's good to be aware that you can walk away from a position that you know you cannot do.
Buckling up will not help me here. I've been upbuckling for two years now, and my buckles keep going down.
Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?is=YnnSt1292XjiGbEE
You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.
If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge. I have friends in software development and they do not enjoy the practice at all. Everything is just chores to them.
I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
You said it friend.
Take any long-running successful project, and you’ll find that they practice an engineering-like discipline to make it sustainable.
And the difference will be as stark as steak is from stew. To be clear, “engineering-like” is not “engineering”.
I worked on projects with EEs and MEs for years. Were they not doing "engineering" because they built custom PCBs and the devices they go inside, rather than drawing the wiring plans or HVAC plans for a construction project? Most of them didn't even have a PE.
I’ve studied Electronic Engineering (and interacted with the Civil Engineering classes). And the main difference is that physical laws are inflexible and failure cases may result in deaths, maiming, and material damages. Software constraints are more forgiving in most cases. But that does not means a total lack of discipline has no negative impact. Au contraire, an engineering mindset greatly improves the chances of successfully delivering a project.
I think non-engineering mindsets in any sort of engineering/engineering adjacent role is the cause of a lot of friction.
>Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".
I mean same principles apply in general.
> If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge.
Amen.
> I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.
The official definition of engineering is: "Engineering is the application of mathematics and scientific principles to design, build, and optimize structures, machines, systems, and processes." Software development falls into this definition. If there isn't something in this definition you like then you're in the wrong job. I find joy in optimizing processes. No matter what scale, a well designed and optimized system brings me joy.
You need to communicate better. One of the most important steps is to know your audience. This means you need to understand where they are coming from. Without this understanding, your words are unlikely to be correct and useful. To communicate clearly is to think clearly.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?
Rare and needed reminder in the big '26