Ask HN: How are you holding up?

I very much agree with all of this. Number 1 and number 5 stand out to me the most because they are things I've had to work on the most. For number 5, I don't pray, but I've begun keeping a journal, and that lets me vent to myself and keep an archive of my thoughts, which has been incredible. Just turning thoughts into real words is extremely helpful for understand a situation and also a great way to blow off steam.

I am not having a great time and I'm not entirely sure why. A broad list of factors:

I'm slowly passing the this-is-mostly-easy threshold in University. I expected that, but it's still somewhat sad. Before, I could put in the time and finish any homework on my own, now I get stuck on exercises or lecture notes fairly frequently. I've noticed that I easily obsess over the meta ("I should have read the notes vs watched the recording, that cost so much time") and I'm making some progress as far as not feeling guilty for not performing perfectly.

I'm also not sure what I actually want to do. I was cautiously eyeing academia because I like the idea of intellectual freedom (in CS, so not as concerned about the culture war) and enjoy teaching, but I haven't really found a field that fully interests me yet. Both theoretical CS and technical CS sound intriguing, but I haven't found a sweet spot that is a) easy enough to be tractable and b) significant enough to be rewarding. I think this is mostly hitting me right now because of a lowered sense of self-efficacy and mild burnout that makes any problem look uninteresting, but I still yearn for some long-term goal that excites me and I can't find one.

I had surgery last week and have been mostly tuning that out. I'm not in any pain, but do have to wear a compression vest that gives my breathing issues if I use my ADD medication. So I'm a bit more foggy and unfocused then usual, which to be fair is still much better than having to gasp for air all day.

My relationship of five years couldn't handle the stress so now I'm crashing with my best friend / co-founder.

Could be worse I guess.

Any suggestions for doing so would be helpful to me (and hopefully the OP). If you have any specific ideas, please reply. When you don't have a small group of people to begin with, this is really difficult advice to follow

> trying to ignore everyone's amazing and enriching family activities posted in photo albums on Facebook when our kids are sat in pyjamas on the Nintendo Switch at 2pm

Keep in mind that people only post when they've made the effort to get the kids dressed and doing something enriching. My wife and I, without children, only post something when the dogs are doing something cute or we've made some impressive food or when we've finished a project.

We don't post anything about when we're showering at 4pm because we worked all day in pajamas or when we're searching amazon for an upholstery cleaner because our office chairs start smelling like body odor.

There's JUST as much fail going on in families that are posting all that "look how sparkly we are" stuff. There's the families of teenagers who have given up trying to stop them going out, even after explaining to the teenagers "your parents are 50 and if you get them sick they may die." ... But Mom's "anxiety sourdough" is definitely on point, so she's got that going for her, which is good!

But I agree with the other posters that you should probably turn off or at very least timebox social media consumption. And the "kids in PJs at 2pm playing on the Switch" is one type of coping mechanism (because kids have different stresses right now too with not having enough social interaction and some of your stress rolls downhill on top of it), so don't necessarily stop allowing them to have outlets, but maybe set a focus for a while on something like hygiene and get everyone to bathe by a certain time every day. Everything else... well, let it go, let it go, let it go...