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Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

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201–210 of 361 posts

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#201
> But nobody else will ever know that. I’m functional and back in the industry, but it’s not the sort of thing people discuss at the water cooler.

I think it's part of the problem than this is the case. It would probably even benefit you now, and certainly would have back then if you had talked about these things with more people.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#202
I have a friend who is going through something eerily similar. To be honest I had to do a double take because a fossil fixation was a part of their breakdown too.

It sounds like you are aware of the impact it had on your family, I would just encourage you to very actively try to demonstrate to them that you understand it and want to make sure their life improves as yours does.

In my friend's case, I think pride has kept them from fully acknowledging just how shitty they made the lives of those around them. Everyone stuck by them because we love them. Their spouse in particular feels like they put up with hell and now that the person is healthy again they don't want to spend time making up for "the past".

It's not easy, but if you have the capacity for it, I encourage it.

Other than that, congratulations on getting through and getting back. A lot of folks come out of a break like that and do not reenter work or past hobbies in any meaningful way.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#204
My recent "career life" had been on quite the upswing, until about a week ago when god decided that I shouldn't continue living where I have been for years: five-year-ongoing landslide recently picked back up; septic system stopped working and flooded house, $5800 dollar later "it works"; less than 24 hours later HVAC central unit impeller blows out (almost burning down entire house); then the "fixed" septic backs up again, three days later. Currently soulless, beyond numb. $16-20,000 for a new system, just for the landslide to take me?

Strategizing exit plans, to get on with a new life elsewhere. Maybe this is what I'm supposed to have learnt?

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#206
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount. Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once ?

Have you ever walked away from a job? It's really hard to do.

I know it can be hard. However, walking away abruptly from someone disrespectful ( but with a very short -but polite -explanation) I have already done. Generally people cool off and come back either with apologies or at least explaining themselves calmly. Don't accept this.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#207
I had a really messed up couple of years from 2019 to 2021. At the end of 2019, the company I had spent 2 years at as a software dev (blockchain sector) turned out not to be what I thought. The direction started not to make any sense and so I quit (in quite a dramatic way). It was weird. Looking back, a lot of things didn't make any sense.

Then thanks to a lot of luck, I was able to secure some passive income which allowed me to just sustain myself for the next 3 years through the COVID19 pandemic. It was exactly what I needed to sustain myself down to the dollar. I could probably write a book about what happened to me over the past 5 years or so but I still can't quite make sense of things...

Basically, many people from the blockchain community I was a member of turned against me for no good reason, then COVID19 happened and the government response to it fed into a sense of increasing paranoia. Once you know that a small/medium group of people are conspiring against you (e.g. actively working together to see you fail), it doesn't take much to start believing that maybe a larger group... Maybe the government is also working against you or people like you (though at least with lockdowns and vax mandates I didn't feel like a lone target).

Once you've worked in blockchain sector, all those crazy conspiracy theories about government agencies manipulating people and politicians through psyops don't seem so far fetched. I guess it makes sense. Cryptocurrencies are kind of like foreign states in a way... The sector is probably overrun with government agents.

It's good I distanced myself, it was a real brainf***.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#208

I've just become completely lethargic lately. And there's some sort of mental block stopping me from working. It's kinda insane because I can work on other stuff, but as soon as there's a simple task for my employer my mind just wanders off. And when I really try to focus I just go blank in my head. Can't explain shit. I'm trying to slowly get back on the pony just because I'm ashamed of all the salary I've collected…

In my 20's when i had no partner, i spent so much time working on my employer related stuff, these include learning new technologies, building tools in the off hours to make everyone at my company more productive, being generally driven and passionate etc... Now that i'm in my 30's, the feeling that most of my work is just meaningless drivel to get some arbitrary bottom line up is just overwhelming.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And part is a rebellion against postponing giving time to things that matter personally . 'Yes, BigCo project xyz launches tomorrow and you've got xx people depending on me, but I ... really wanted to spend some time today ... reading a book ... gardening ... watching a movie ... a little shopping ....' Don't underestimate your mind's capacity to rebel against delayed gratification.

...especially the later it gets. "I haven't had enough time to just mess around today - I'm going to stay up another hour. The guy who has to get up at 7 is a different guy!"

"I'm in this picture and I don't like it"

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#210

[flagged]

"and looking for non-existent fossils, which I found. I eventually saw petrified sea creatures everywhere and stopped going to work, or answering my phone, paying bills, etc. Things ended predictably, in horrible slow motion." => I think he just interpreted "normal" patterns in stone as fossils

To be fair, it's pretty easy to find fossils of sea creatures if you look in road cuts that go through sedimentary rock. It's not some rare phenomenon that only occurs in a few places in the world, it just takes a few minutes of Googling and then looking around on Google Maps.
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