Ask HN: Career trajectory? I'm terrible

I think we can consider the OP's case as falling under

> Depressed mood may not require any professional treatment, and may be a normal reaction to certain life events...

I invite you to step out of yourself for just a moment. Position your perspective within someone else of your choosing; a co-worker, a manager, an interviewer. Read both the post from today and the one from several months back. Ignore the particular details of the narrative itself. Instead, see what you can pick up on, sense, about the _author_ of the narrative. Then, observe how, what you sensed about the author, makes you, the observer, feel.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

As the observer, did you pick up on desperation, despair, defeatism, confusion, and anguish?

How well do you think you'd be able to hide those mental states in person or even just on the phone?

I think we already know the answer to that question.

Being around a person that's experiencing acute non-positive states induces acute non-positive states in others. Considering that most people spend the vast majority of their time preoccupied with both moving towards feeling good and moving away from feeling bad, they would do everything in their power to avoid being around such a person.

It's not even about the words that would be coming out of your mouth. It's easily detectable before so much as a single word is uttered. Your posture, facial expressions, respiratory rate, inflection, intonation, etc., will tell anyone, everything, in an instant.

This is why the places that you have interviewed with have not hired you. It has nothing at all to do with your technical competencies, because your technical competencies were not, in fact, evaluated. They shut down, disqualified you virtually immediately based solely on "lack of cultural fit", went through the motions, and then fed you a generic line.

When people spoke about the "experience they want," I don't think you quite understood the subtlety. They were not referring to your technical background. They were speaking to what they wanted in terms of the experience of having a new hire at the office: a positive, uplifting, energizing experience.

As an aside:

* Trying and failing is good, not bad. Why? Because you're learning. Not trying at all is bad.

* No-one wanting to hire you doesn't mean what you think it means. No-one wanted to hire Steve Jobs.

* Similarly, just because the few companies that you've interviewed with didn't extend an after does not mean that you colossally effed anything up.

* You can't say that "no-one" wants to hire you. You've interviewed at only a tiniest fraction of potential employers.

You may or may not feel better knowing that the roadblock is your disposition, as opposed to your technical competencies, but at least you now know the truth.

The question is _why_ is this your disposition? The answer is quite obvious.

In your short post from today alone, I have counted a staggering thirty two occurrences of first-person pronouns. Here's what your post looks like with all of the other words removed:

I...I...I...my...I'm...I...

I...I...my...I...me...I...

my...I...I...I...I...my...

I...I...I...I...I'm...I...

I...me...I'm...I'm...I'm...

I...I'll...I.

It's no wonder at all that you are the way you currently are; you are stuck -- trapped -- instead your own head. Replaying and re-analyzing the past, over and over, worrying about and agonizing over the future, over and over. When other people are speaking to you, you're not really listening -- they don't have your full undivided attention -- you're off in your head doing something else. When you're eating, you're not tasting your food, you're too distracted talking to yourself. You are perpetually lost in thought. This is why you're struggling with trying to get good on your own and struggling with trying to do stuff on your own.

Your self-identity is far too strongly, unnaturally, and unhealthily, intertwined with things that it should not at all be intertwined with. You are not your career; You are not your skill at programming. Your value as a person is not measured by your career progression; your value as a person is not measured by your programming skill.

This is the point where you have a decision to make.

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and the bullet that you spoke of may very well, at some point, find you. Considering that you've already made suicidal statements, it may be sooner than later. Let's hope that you don't take the blue pill.

You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and you show yourself just how deep the rabbit hole goes. You enroll in an MBSR course in your area, or find a Mindfulness retreat, or listen to headspace.com, or find a good Mindfuless book. Mindfuless will allow you to dissolve those negative emotions, gain insight, not be stuck in your own head all of the time, attain full control of your internal state, and so much more.

Only then; and not before; will you have transformed your disposition such that you'll easily find a job that will progress your career, have successes doing your own stuff, and be able to do the best work of your life. None of these things will ever be possible if you're constantly experiencing negative emotions which are inducing pain, and distracted by negative thoughts that are constantly stealing your attention, as this will only serve to cause others to feel uncomfortable, unsafe, and/or ill at ease around you.