71–80 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I teach high school. I love working with the kids, but then I look at my 50hrs+/wk (yes, really) and can't help but feel like pushing into business for the pay bump - or find a desk job for the same take home and have my evenings/weekends to myself. Always greener pastures elsewhere...
Well, you get 4 months off during the year (Christmas break + summer). Any other business jobs, you only get 1 month off at most.
Don't make time to untangle. Stay untangled. Live your life. Enjoy it. Have fun. If you have any time left after that, then may be do some of that inconsequential stuff like earning money or achievements. These are nice, if you enjoy doing them, but are not important. Unlike what you've been brainwashed to believe, your life does not depend on those things. Your well-being does not depend on those things. The well-be…
Not really fulfillment like we normally call it, I'd say more like acceptance.
Perhaps many of us are seeking love and acceptance from bosses and coworkers, and overworking ourselves to obtain it.
I believe that building your identity on anything that isn't yours is stressful. Building your ego on your job performance or on the positive feedback you get from coworkers isn't healthy.
It's like emotional sharecropping. You are building your ego on someone else's land.
People need to remember that work is the place where they have "human resource" departments, where they will make cut and dried decisions on who to retain and who to lay off the moment they want to adjust a budget.
I spent several years in my mid-twenties working like the author, pretty much non-stop. At the lowest point, I fell into a weird sleep pattern: I'd crash as soon as I got home around 6:00 in the evening, then wake up around midnight and be back at work by 1:00 am. It took an old friend's suicide to jolt me out of it. I saw a lot of my old buddies at the funeral and started reestablishing those friendships. We played…
For me it was the opposite. The whole time I was overworking I was aware and wishing I wasn't and very much imagining myself doing other things. Now I'm aware and wishing I was back to normal and working. I spent about 4 years working flat out. If I was awake I was working, trying to keep the income coming after the recession hit. Then something snapped. The now ex-wife had to unwind the things I was part way through…
Few things that helped me:
- SSRI - I couldn't recover from the mental pain I had constantly until I visited a doctor and got put on those medications; it didn't solve my problem, but it lowers the pain to manageable levels
- removing distractions - I unsubscribed from every newsletter I could that I didn't absolutely care about, I uninstalled or muted most of the non-urgent push notifications, etc. Not being pinged every 5 minutes lowered my stress levels and made it a bit easier to focus.
- writing - when I find it hard to go forward, I'll dump my thoughts into a text file, and then I'll keep "talking to myself" in the editor; at some point this turns into a list of "next steps" I need to take, and as I'm starting to go through them, things move forward and I feel better
- acceptance - accepting I have those issues and working with them, rather than obsessing over how broken I am, reduced my stress and makes it easier to focus
- calendar - preallocating time for various tasks I want to do, and committing to doing them without distractions (phone set to silent, mail program closed, etc.) for that period of time, regardless of the end output, again makes it easier to focus, and seeing thing moving forward makes me feel better; I stole that one from the "Deep Work" book
But yeah, I still struggle. There are days when I only honestly say I haven't done anything but read HN and respond to e-mails. But more and more, there are days when I'm productive, and I'm beginning to trust my capacity for doing work again, and this improves my self-esteem as well.
#HNPsychology
I'm 28 and have severe hypochondria, so this article was a terrifying read. Having a stroke is my #1 fear. But reading it makes me feel good about having shifted my attitude to work after I got married. I don't think I'll ever be the workaholic that I was in my early 20s, because my priorities have shifted so much after getting married and I've become especially frightened of the idea of stressing myself out to the p…
> On the symptoms side of things though, I now have to go to the doctor. Again. Reading about the buzzing in the right eye and the tingling was terrifying because I've been feeling something similar for the past few months. So onto my 4th brain scan in the past few years... Sigh. Hypochondria is a bitch. I really hope you find a way to handle this that doesn't involve very expensive reassurance from doctors. I experi…
Don't make time to untangle. Stay untangled. Live your life. Enjoy it. Have fun. If you have any time left after that, then may be do some of that inconsequential stuff like earning money or achievements. These are nice, if you enjoy doing them, but are not important. Unlike what you've been brainwashed to believe, your life does not depend on those things. Your well-being does not depend on those things. The well-be…
Have you actually passed two days without any money in your pocket?
I've been thinking about this lately and I've concluded that a big driver of overwork is the misguided quest for fulfillment. Not really fulfillment like we normally call it, I'd say more like acceptance. Perhaps many of us are seeking love and acceptance from bosses and coworkers, and overworking ourselves to obtain it. I believe that building your identity on anything that isn't yours is stressful. Building your eg…
I would go further than that, because I don't think this gets to the heart of the matter. The main driver of overwork is the promise of higher status that certain cultures bestow on those who pursue it [1]. The respect of bosses and the admiration of coworkers are just the consequences. As are the material benefits, like the increased salary and all the things it might buy.
Yet advising overworkers to stop looking to others for positive feedback is not going to work for everyone. A large proportion of people identify as extroverts, people who need validation from others in order to feel good about themselves. And it's unrealistic to expect extroverts to be happy with valuing their self-worth the way introverts do.
[1] Alain de Botton has a great book on this topic entitled Status Anxiety: http://alaindebotton.com/status/
I've been thinking about this lately and I've concluded that a big driver of overwork is the misguided quest for fulfillment. Not really fulfillment like we normally call it, I'd say more like acceptance. Perhaps many of us are seeking love and acceptance from bosses and coworkers, and overworking ourselves to obtain it. I believe that building your identity on anything that isn't yours is stressful. Building your eg…
Nicely put.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you actually passed two days without any money in your pocket?
Yes, I have passed many more than two days without any money in my pocket. As any human being, I've had my highs and lows. I've decided that I like the highs better and money is quite handy in that regard. What I'm saying is - it tends to come to you easier once you stop freaking out about it. As do all things. Struggle is always counterproductive and it is never worth sacrificing your health for money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of shocking lack of empathy in that last sentence. Don't get me wrong, I hate the "you shouldn't say anything offensive" brigade, but equally, no reason to be so caustic. Overwork is a big part of tech culture sadly, posts like these are helpful, even if they are only reminders of things we already know.
"I would easily clock 70 hours of work a week — more if we were on a deadline. I was often the first in the office and the last to leave." - quoted from article. This doesn't sound healthy to me. I wonder if anyone can really argue with that. That's 10 hours per day at least! Adding 8 hours of sleep, only gives him 6 hours to do EVERYTHING else in his life. That's friends, family, leisure, excersise, but also groceri…
He never slept for 8 hours. He mentions in his blog, that he was taking catnaps in place of real sleep. Surely, the restorative effects of sleep would have reduced the probability, if he'd managed to get enough of it. So perhaps it was more like 8-10 hours for remaining things (if you add entertainment to the list, it does take time). And just 4-6 for catnapish sleep.