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Ask HN: Are you depressed?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#151

Post by kortex »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #144

Extremely. Mostly can't focus, can barely get out of bed at all some days. Some people are trying to help with various aspects of this, and they're doing some good, but they're poorly coordinated and there's secondary damage when they get things wrong. Out of money. I was trying to get my career back into play via Triplebyte + one or two contacts around the beginning of the year; I had some minor success, but my inte…

Good luck! Glad you found a more stable source of meds, that's clutch.

Try to find ways to talk up that resume. I was under-employed for a long time but I was also working out of the hackerspace every day. I milked eeeeeevery project I even tangentally got involved in. Helped some kid flash an arduino? "Tutored microcontroller development". Have 2-3 projects you can really talk in detail on, and the rest is just fluff.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#152

Post by skeeter2020 »

Razengan wrote: post #107
op03 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a dog or three.

I was going to recommend cats but then I guess they’d just make you more depressed with their condescension :)

Don't fight your cat's nature; you will lose.

They're very loving - on their own terms. I personally prefer the dumb loyalty of a dog but YMMV

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#153

Post by kortex »

mandaputtra wrote: post #147
kortex wrote: post #146

Yep. But surprisingly not as bad as I expected, given COVID, and ADHD+bipolar going into this mess. I've been reeeally depressed in the past, this isn't that. But feeling very burned out. Focus and working memory is really suffering. I'm too busy/tired to be bored but I feel novelty-deprived. I'm barely exercising and I know that's contributing but forming exercise habits is hard for me. Would be great actually if an…

Starting with just 5 minutes run, or maybe 1 minute push up per-day. Start small, then you will feel not enough and then you make a big leap. I also getting started to loose weight. just lost 5kg, still 20 to go.

Thanks, yeah that's the current approach. I tell myself that consistency is more important than intensity or duration, like just 1 set counts, but it seems like what happens is I build up to larger workouts, then subconsciously set an expectation to match it, then psych myself out (even if I technically only need to do one small set)

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#154

Post by watermelon59 »

rexpop wrote: post #134
watermelon59 wrote: post #61

Well, let's see. My wife left me shortly before the pandemic started. I tried leaning on alleged friends for emotional support and they bailed on me. I don't have any family here in the US. The pandemic hit and I had to stop practicing my sport. My work output has been 10-20% of what it used to be even though I don't have kids to deal with, or any of the things that are driving folks crazy. It takes me around 2h to m…

Damn, that's a shitty hand you've been dealt. I hope you find your luck turning around, and I hope you can allow yourself to operate at 10-20% without too much judgement; an individual can only accommodate so much at once. Thank you for sharing this on HN. It's always good for us, as a community, to acknowledge the less ebullient, bullish sides of our lives.

Yeah, it hasn't been easy. But I still count myself lucky, since a lot of people everywhere have had it much worse.

Regarding work, I was a dumbass actually. I didn't share with any superior what was going on, spent months both hating myself and also fearing being "found out". But recently I felt so overwhelmed that I had to bring it up. I was afraid to do it, only to find out I should've done it much earlier. My manager and my skip-level were incredibly understanding and accomodating once I shared with them, and even offered to reduce my "available capacity" when planning next quarter's work, with no reduction in salary or anything. Truly amazing.

I'm still quite low in productivity, but it's great to have the space to be so while I sort things out.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#155

Post by dasyatidprime »

dasyatidprime wrote: post #144

Extremely. Mostly can't focus, can barely get out of bed at all some days. Some people are trying to help with various aspects of this, and they're doing some good, but they're poorly coordinated and there's secondary damage when they get things wrong. Out of money. I was trying to get my career back into play via Triplebyte + one or two contacts around the beginning of the year; I had some minor success, but my inte…

Speaking of which:

I don't normally post things like this out of the blue, but if anyone has small software things they might be willing to commission me for within the next few-to-several months where turnaround time isn't “right now”, that could help a lot, so don't hesitate to poke me at my profile email address, low-effort one-liners accepted. (I have a partial source of work lined up for once I can focus again, but it's fraught in its own ways.)

My most native domain is oldish/systemsish/Unixish (Go, C, shell scripting, Perl…) but I can be fairly polyvalent in environments overall. Have done some previous work on things like Tor and OpenVPN. Ideal is something like “this bug/feature-request has been nagging at us and could use a fresh set of eyes”. Specific strengths historically include informal-methods precision of modeling and ability to haul The Good Stuff out of semantic mud. Specific weak areas include PHP being too psychologically taxing, Node.js likely being the same (which, ah, er, ouch given current SV culture), and flakiness from the depression itself (expected to improve with medication, but not 100% and exact curve unknown).

Posting this as a separate comment so it's easier to delete on its own if it turns out to be inappropriate. Also, to avoid surprise: I don't make my legal name too immediately visible from profiles etc. presently, but anyone who's transacting with me will get a confirmation of it privately.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#156

Post by jokab »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #117

I lost my father recently and this has been the toughest period in my life. I grew up in India in a middle-class family and my father always went through unimaginable hardships just so that he can buy us chocolates and pay our tuition. He was still young at 65 and there was so much that I wanted to see and share with him. Realizing that this is not ever going to happen itself kills me from the inside. I'm doing okay…

That was beautiful.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#157

Post by seotut2 »

What's the point of this? Yes, I am severely depressed among other issues I am facing. I haven't had a job in 3 years, after burning out and started having panic attacks. The finances are so stressful that are making me just numb. I can't make any decision, the executive part of my brain appears to have shut off.

Also, depression is not an illness. It's a defensive mechanism, just a symptom of a certain body state. It's a completely natural response.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#158

Post by httpsterio »

Fuck yes. I left a stable job because I have a plethora of health issues and wanted to put the little energy and productivity I have into studying, so I went to Uni. I've burned through my savings (6k or so) in 11 months now and I'm almost going broke as my sick leave wasn't approved any longer.

My body literally don't cope with stress as my pituitary doesn't produce enough cortisol, testosterone or thyroxine. Now that I got the reject letter from our government, I've been panicking and feeling borderline suicidal because everything seems so hard and I feel like I can't do it. Fuck being sick.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#159

Post by dasyatidprime »

kortex wrote: post #146

Yep. But surprisingly not as bad as I expected, given COVID, and ADHD+bipolar going into this mess. I've been reeeally depressed in the past, this isn't that. But feeling very burned out. Focus and working memory is really suffering. I'm too busy/tired to be bored but I feel novelty-deprived. I'm barely exercising and I know that's contributing but forming exercise habits is hard for me. Would be great actually if an…

For basic-level exercise in the form of “walking around outside a lot”, I've been playing Happy Surveillance Pets aka Pokémon GO—as hypocritical as it sort of is with my software philosophy leanings. May not work if your version of “outside” is either too far away from civilization for the shared AR part to work or too high-risk to be going out in a lot (I live in a medium-density area of city, which seems roughly ideal).

I was able to keep up some ad-hoc home bodyweight exercises with Habitica (gamified habits) + Forest (pomodoro-ish app) earlier in the year, but that fell apart a few months later when the depression got worse, and I haven't managed to pick it up again yet.

Re: Ask HN: Are you depressed?

#160

Post by httpsterio »

seotut2 wrote: post #157

What's the point of this? Yes, I am severely depressed among other issues I am facing. I haven't had a job in 3 years, after burning out and started having panic attacks. The finances are so stressful that are making me just numb. I can't make any decision, the executive part of my brain appears to have shut off. Also, depression is not an illness. It's a defensive mechanism, just a symptom of a certain body state. I…

Oh hey, are you me? Do you have any underlying physical health issues?
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