Burnout and Mental Health

This is what's truly hosed up about US-based health insurance/services. People are so divorced from the reality when things are 'good' that the horribleness of it is exposed only when you can least deal with it.

Everyone should be required to buy their own insurance, with no employer interference at all. We'd see massive shift in peoples' attitudes, and probably a bigger shift to single-payer, quickly.

I'm self-employed and have had to deal with the expense of health insurance head-on for years. I was happy when we got 'high-deductible' HSA options, as it reduced monthly expense. ACA/Obamacare has more than doubled our monthly premiums in just 3 years, and I still can't afford to get sick at all without incurring hundreds or thousands of dollars in medical bills. :(

I know that's on me. It's a will power thing. But I'm only human. When I didn't have my phone on me, it forced me to really examine if I cared about something or if it was just fleeting. Like, who won the NHL MVP in 1978? If it was still a burning question the next time I was around an Internet connection, I'd look it up.

But 9 times out of 10, I'd forget. And wonder. And my life was better for it.

My current system is that I turn off all notifications except from my mother and wife. My email is not fetched unless I fetch it. I have no games on my phone. I've never had Facebook and haven't posted to Twitter in over two years. But with all that, it's still not the same.

I've relapsed at least twice since that talk. I have a phone. And it's still my boss. But I'm working on a bigger plan to abandon it all together. Whether I can get there or not, that's another story.

This article made me realize that I don't remember hardly anything of the time I spent working at one of my startup jobs. Bits and pieces of specific events stand out, but not a lot. The last six months I was working there I worked at least 60 hours a week, and it crept up to 80 hours a few times. The hours let up after I was hospitalized for a day because of all the stress. I didn't do much else besides sleep and go to work. Maybe that's why, it just blended together.

And I have a crappy memory in general, so I don't know how much of it is because of that. Anything more than a few years ago is kind of hazy.

But still, it's almost like that year and some change might as well have not existed, other than to put a few lines on my resume. But there are much easier ways to do that.

I couldn't agree more. I see a lot of engineers in startups that claim to have X years of experience, but when you read their code, it more like 1*X years of experience. They never progressed passed the 1 year point because they were doing the same things again and again. Most of the time it was not the correct way either but because they have repeated the same process so many times, its the only ways they knew and naturally accepted it as is.

The best programmers I have seen are always those that worked on their own project with very limited resources. You are force to learn and do things out of the box this way. It's definitely a slow learning process but for me, just thinking back on how much I have learnt (and be able to utilize my knowledge correctly) in the last year is mind boggling.