Ask HN: I don't want to be a founder anymore

The real sad thing here is that some people are seeing sex with their wives as a "favour", something like a one sided affair....

You are exactly correct. I am describing an enabler, and that is exactly what your loved ones will turn into if you tell them you are depressed.

When your SO asks you for help, you give it to them. Unfortunately that is the opposite of what a depressed person needs.

Depressed people need to make changes to their lives. You can't do that when you have someone being your crutch.

And I just want to be clear because some people in this thread seem to be misunderstanding, this is nothing to do with being female or male. I would give the same advice to to a woman as to man.

Option 2 : Suck it up and work on improving the situation. Instead of throwing in the towel and going on a quest for self discovery, find ways to avoid stress. Take up yoga/gym classes or play some video games in between. Take your wife shopping, have quick power naps just google and see what works for you. You are not the first person to be in this situation, discuss with your peers on how they handle it and try to see if you can incorporate some of their good habits.

You're having a company which you started and which you say is profitable, don't throw away all that due to some temporary situation. Instead of running away, face it and see how you can improve on it !

>It seems so stress free.

Try it.

Or talk to someone who works at walmart, or a bagger at a grocery store. See if they would like to be in your shoes. Might help put things in perspective, and it seems to be that just a change in perspective is all you need..

Before attending college I worked at walmart for several months, and I also spent a few months working construction. You do not want to work in either of those environments.

You're a person with intelligence, agency, and presumably the strong drive to succeed at various goals that motivated you to start your company in the first place. Your skill set and ability to learn new skills is such that you are useful for more tasks than stacking shelves, pushing carts, or hauling and shaping re-bar.

By and large the people I met at walmart were, to say it bluntly, not very smart and were consequently aggravating to interact with because of this. There are people in this life who struggle to reach full competency at stocking shelves, dusting, pushing carts, or other menial retail oriented tasks despite an earnest effort from them. A work environment like walmart is structured to run a billion dollar business using these people, and to do this their workers are subjected to a system that at times seem arbitrary and overly restrictive but ultimately necessary given their labor pool. So not only will you be inside of that system, but you will be required to find ways to work with coworkers who have managed to reach levels of incompetence that you wouldn't otherwise think was possible had you not seen it with your own eyes. This is not to say that there are no intelligent people working in the various walmart stores, and I did meet some during my tenure. However those people were few and far between, and were usually there due to unfortunate life circumstances beyond their control.

General labor construction work involves working with the same people, but without the strict and arbitrary system. This is replaced with coworkers that show up drunk and high starting as early as 7 AM and while this isn't a problem in some work environments, in a work environment involving power tools and heavy equipment this can be life threatening not just for them but for you as well. If you choose to train in a specialty such as electrical or other, you'll be fairly well separated from these people but then considering the amount of effort you have to go to in order to get these jobs you might as well just use the skillset you have in programming. You'll get payed more and you won't be working in environments with toxic dust, ambient noise levels capable of causing permanent hearing loss, and repetitive physical movement that slowly destroys your mobility so that in your old age you're completely sedentary (my electrician grandfather can no longer lift his arms above level despite several attempted corrective surgeries)

I don't know what the solution to your problem is but I do know that working in a grocery store or basic construction is not the correct course of action if you desire to reduce the amount of stress in your life.