> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you mind sharing what solutions they recommended for you to try? Also any meds?
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.
A rando that knows a little therapy language and has good intentions is dangerous. Turn and run.
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.
Its incredibly isolating, tbh.
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.
Edit: some people have replied saying why religion is helpful. Ok. But that doesn't answer my question of why is it showing up so much on HN lately.
I do sense the same thing you do, though; that there’s something of a religious revival swelling, at least in the West that’s overwhelmingly represented here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/10/20/growing-shar...
Economist via archive: https://archive.ph/M7NW0
If that means we should burn all the bibles I leave as an exercise for the reader.
That is contingent on actually believing in the religion, no? In my experiences, church attendees do not tend to take kindly to people attending with anterior motives.
When I was in school, I attended a few churches to meet new people. They were rather apprehensive when they learned I did not believe in any of it and was just faking it all.
You're there to learn. It's called Bible study for a reason.
When I came back to church after 10 years as an avowed agnostic/atheist I didn't believe. I did listen and pay attention a lot better than I did as a child. Listening with an open mind and an unhardened heart make a difference.
There are different types of churches too. In my experience most "mega churches" truly cater to this more curious audience. It's more of the movie going experience where you can walk in like anyone else, without having to know anybody, sit down and just listen to the service. Then get up and leave without talking to anybody if you don't want to. Messages tend to be tailored to the idea that any given week you're going to have people who have never set foot in a church before in life.
When I came back, I went to one of these for about 6 years (New Spring Church in South Carolina). Eventually, I wanted more and we switched to a more traditional church with Adult Sunday School and a men's (or women's) Bible study one night a week.
Churches are welcoming places but everybody there is going to be different. If you tell somebody you don't believe, some people are going to be thankful that you're there and others aren't going to have any idea what to say. That's pretty normal. Faking it is a little different though. No reason to fake it. Just be honest that you don't believe but you're here and willing to listen.
I’m pretty sure quite a few people who bring children to church don’t literally believe in the stuff themselves and just think the social elements and the morality are good for their children.
Were you trying to meet friends or trying to date though? If the latter I think it would feel a lot weirder.
Also if it bothers you to lie by omission I think one could come up with an explanation that wasn’t simply “I’m faking” and is more along the lines of “my grandparents were Christian and I think we lost something culturally when a lot of people stopped doing this” or something like that, assuming those are true for you. God is a metaphor, etc etc.
As arrogantly and incorrectly once thought in my youth, these people are not stupid. In my experiences, some, not all, can kind of pickup on it. It's usually a corroboration of mounting little slip-ups. Perhaps I am not a talented actor.
For example, I never grew up in any church systems, and the Christian bible is full of key characters and proper nouns. So, when I pronounced the name "Job" like a place of employment, it raised some eyebrows. How was I supposed to know lol?
> Were you trying to meet friends or trying to date though?
It depends on who I was interacting with. With the amount of testosterone pumping through my veins at the time, if I were interacting with an attractive female, you better believe I was trying to shoot my shot. Never caused any weirdness, but I absolutely agree it could.
> assuming those are true for you
Kind of. Half my family was nominally Christian, and the other half was persecuted and slaughtered by Christians.
I do appreciate you trying to assist in this endeavor though. I think you have made some fair points. I just wish churches were not one of the few remaining institutions for one to get this sense of community.
Which it might be, and it might not be—any more than we can conclude that the solution to “my throat hurts” is “take antibiotics.” (If it’s bacterial, that could cure it near-instantly; if it’s viral, it won’t do anything and might hurt in the aggregate)
In that analogy, to my thinking, church is maybe like “gargle some salt water”—the underlying biological processes may or may not be addressable by modern medicine, and you should probably talk to the doctor too—but the salt water may well make you feel better regardless.
And some people hate salt! More power to them! But I’m not coming at the folk remedy person for offering “have you thought about it.”
For that matter “church” can take many forms, even ostensibly secular ones. My raver friends, for example, speak of the dance floor as “church,” and think about it rather explicitly in terms of spiritual reconnection.
Sometimes the secular and the organized churches even cross paths…
Anyone can find a community nearby, churches aren't the only way.
Glad it worked out for you, but it doesn't for many people and that's okay. There are other communities out there.
Also Church is no substitute for mental health professions. Would you tell someone to "pray the cancer away?" I hope not, you'd tell then to speak to a qualified professional. That's where therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or even guidance councilers come into play.
This isn't accurate at all. Christian churches welcome everyone but there are no zoning laws directing people to specific churches. Many happen to be very homogeneous as a side effect of people often being more comfortable. There are numerous "black", "hispanic", "chinese", etc churches that are out there by perception but not by requirement. None of these churches are going to turn you away if you don't look like them anymore than a predominantly white church would.
Regarding women, I'm not sure what you've been reading to make that suggestion? There's probably no institution in the world that cares for women more than the Christian church. Strong families are part of the bedrock. Visit one on Mother's Day sometime. Check out the low cost and sometimes even free child care available (Mother's morning out, VBC, etc). Jesus treatment of women was radical in the context of the time period.
Glad you go to a good church, but some of them ain't that and refusing to believe this is extremely dishonest. Especially when people like Jerry Falwell had open disdain towards certain Americans right up to his death while having major influence with several US presidents.
> women bodily autonomy (being anti-abortion)
Pro-life has never been anti-women and this is a political hot button topic that isn't getting settled on HN. The conceived child has it's own life, it's own DNA and the goal is to protect that life. If the baby is a girl, then pro-life is the only real pro-woman stance. Churches also offer extensive support for mothers, single-mothers and their families.
> want to take away the right to vote from women
I have no response to this other than...what stuff are you reading on the internet? This is nonsense.
> openly attack children (yes attacking trans children is attacking children)
Nobody attacks children. This is not a church topic. Protecting children is a church topic. Children are innocent.
> believing the civil rights act was a mistake
Again, I have no idea what you're reading on the internet but this is not something that comes from church. I vaguely remember some political agitator in the last couple of years going viral for saying something to this regard and then it went away.
To all you downvoters Jesus is watching you and will send you to hell for it. -John 3:16
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.
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.
Believe it or not, he was a pretty good academic at one point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.
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.
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?
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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
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.
Are you doing entry level line cook work or something?
I'll re-enter tech later... maybe.
Ofcourse, no pill is magical, and I have no expectations of that. At least fluoxetine fixed my sleeping habits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
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 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.
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.
I haven't met anyone in a similar boat, so seeing I'm not alone is very healing.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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'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.
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 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.
Wish you all the best. Mental illness sucks.
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.
Good luck!
Thank you so much for sharing.
There's a lot I want to talk about, and not a lot of words until people stop scanning.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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. :)
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'd like to add that for certain kinds of people, the process of doing this on your own is near torture.
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.
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
In my opinion the prerequisites are a natural aptitude and a genuine curiosity.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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 literally do all 8 of those things and I'm depressed as fuck. Maybe mental health is harder than you think?
> [list of eight things that may be extremely difficult for people with depression]
.
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.
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".
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.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?