Ask HN: I’m Lost. Help?

Hahaha thanks, this made me legitimately laugh out loud

I think what you're going through right now is a lack of meaning. You had a clear meaning, purpose, and drive when you were working on your startup. All of that gradually dissolved as the startup was acquired, the pandemic started, and you got more isolated from the things you care about doing and the people you care about working with. A messy cofounder relationship doesn't help there, either.

I'm not unfamiliar with this feeling, actually. I've had occasional stints of depression and one of the biggest hallmarks of feeling depressed is a total lack of meaning. Nothing seems interesting. Every idea I come up with feels shallow and lame, or feels like it won't make a difference in the way that I want. If I can actually come up with any ideas at all. You mention a lack of passion as well, but I feel that they kinda feed off each other - finding meaning means finding passion, finding passion means finding meaning, etc.

I say that two emphasize two things.

First, I don't believe your current state of meaningless-ness is permanent. Nor is it impossible to control. It is illusory, and if you work on the root cause, then you will find that you can in fact control how meaningful you find things. Meaningless-ness will fade away. So how do you do that?

Well, second, I suspect you might be mildly depressed. This is not actually too surprising to me, though I can imagine it would be surprising to you since you illustrated a lot in your post about how outwardly good your life looks. It does look good from the outside! But really there is a good deal of change and upheaval there, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it took you some time to process it.

I would encourage you to go talk to a good therapist. You sound exactly how I sound when I get mildly depressed, and, to put it mildly, therapy is awesome. It's made a big difference in my life. If you are already seeing a therapist, perhaps it's time to switch it up?

Therapy is the high order bit towards resolving this, but there are a number of other smaller hacks you can do. Start an exercise routine (if you don't have one). Spend time with people you care about and who like you (if you aren't already) - I know the pandemic certainly wreaked havoc with my social calendar. Walk outside in nature. There are many more things you might like as well. In my case, it was often unclear to me which activities I actually liked, and it was useful to do things and then study how I felt afterward, to see if I actually liked them or if I was just telling myself I did. (I found out a lot of surprising things this way, like I didn't like some friends, but I was undervaluing others, for instance. I also found that I really liked going outside, even though I never realized this was the case before!)

Anyways, hopefully that helps a bit.

Legit, TeamBlind is full of crazies (like myself) but it's a great source of entertainment and ideas. It also gives you a good insight on what's going on in the market, and to see other high achievers also feel the exactly same as the OP; PhDs earning 600k for Google complaining about their work or thinking they need to do a startup, etc...

Help me do what you did... Mentor / teach

1/ invest in relationship with your body. get a good exercise routine + nutrition + sleep. Exercise hard.

2/ see a therapist / psychologist / coach. it is amazing what a difference having someone to talk to can do to help reframe perspective

3/ find/start/rekindle a hobby that interests you and you kinda suck at. go deep down the rabbit hole and enjoy the experience of improving at it quickly

4/ invest in your mind; hope this doesn't come across as hippy-woo-woo but yoga and meditation. Sam Harris' app "Waking Up" goes deep on theory & practice. Yoga is such a fun/challenging form of exerise. Sounds like you can afford an at-home instructor :)

5/ journal! getting thoughts out of your mind onto paper helps to work through thoughts & feelings. a useful prompt a) how am I feeling? b) how do i want to feel? c) what will it take to get there. keep iterating on this (both in micro sense of day-to-day, and macro of finding your next passion.

Good luck <3