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.
>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.
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.
If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?