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Recovering from Burnout and Depression

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Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#211

Post by dnautics »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #80
jly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is more true than many would like to admit. Maybe 'most work' as meaningless isn't the way I would phrase it, but I know many including myself that are often creatively and technically challenged, work an average number of hours, but feel the mental stress of burnout purely because of the guilt and resentment of spending so much time on the specific job function, itself. To put it a little more abstract…

This is one of my big problems with the idea of money being so separated from actual good these days. It also creates huge wealth gaps, and I have no idea what could be done to re-align it. Basically, I believe that the concept of money as it exists today is deeply broken and should be aligned with something which benefits humans vs something which is required in small to moderate quantities to not suffer yet which p…

Money is very broken currently.

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat."

Doesn't that sound familiar? The quote is, ironically, by John Maynard Keynes, the very person policymakers cite to justify stealing from the poor and giving to the rich via inflation, in the name of "stability".

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#212

Post by Bakary »

malkia wrote: post #176
cortesoft wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is more about how you see life in general than about your job and work. Quite simply, I love life. I know this isn't true for everyone, but it is for me. I find a lot of things meaningful and exciting. I love watching people on youtube excel at their random hobbies, I love seeing people compete in sports, I love talking about random things with friends and coworkers. I love the feeling I get when I s…

There was a Game Designer Book (or collection of interviews) where someone (forgive me, I forget the name) classified games into two categories: one with goal (game-like), and the other ones without (toy-like). For example Mario Bros is about saving the Princess (Goal), while Age Of Empires is not (toyette). Wondering if this applies back to life. Some people put goals, others just like to play with life, to experien…

There may not be a true distinction between these two life-modes. If you chase a goal, you are still experiencing life as a "toy" but with an added layer of abstraction and meaning you've built yourself that prevents you from seeing it this way.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#213

Post by Bakary »

colordrops wrote: post #191
55555 wrote: post #15

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge t…

As I've grown older (and hopefully wiser) I've taken a position that is a lot more meaningful but with a lot less compensation. I do often think about finances and worry about my retirement, as I have children. But I will say that making a lot of money and wishing you were doing something more with your life is a lot more painful and damaging that doing something worthwhile and wishing you had more money.

Most people never get either of the two situations you describe.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#214

Post by Bakary »

taco_emoji wrote: post #106
crush-n-spread wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submit that the working person greatly benefits from having a strongly held, over-arching life goal. Then even if he or she is working a soul-draining job for, say, a social media company, they will be content knowing it is a necessary step towards their goal.

> strongly held, over-arching life goal Like what? I believe that I'm an incidentally self-aware thermodynamic curiosity; setting any sort of lifelong goal feels like an attempt to fool myself into feeling important.

This line of reasoning feels like it's missing an important piece. If you consider yourself to be unimportant, then why is vanity a bad thing? It won't matter either way, except that you may feel better and be more active.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#215

Post by ge96 »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #164
ge96 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of lighter versions of jQuery and it's not really like I'm against jQuery in this particular case internet speed is really bad... and I did not know of a way to async load scripts and not have the $.is not defined problem. Mainly though the jQuery library itself is 80KB (jquery-min)... the downloading speed thing (watching network) it's hit and miss, I mean I see a 1KB file take nearly 1 second to download…

> I mean I see a 1KB file take nearly 1 second to download so why wouldn't an 80KB file take 80 seconds to download. This does not follows though, TCP doesn't works like that, the initial congestion window is usually small and grows as more packets are received, that's why using Keep-Alive is so important, so you don't have to rebuild the socket and TLS connection before every request. Add some ping into the equation…

Yeah I'm not 100% clear on the console waterfall thing, it shows stuff like 'this file was waiting to start downloading for some milliseconds..." then the time to download.

I use Apache, I haven't touched the KeepAlive I guess that is something to look into, a direct ping has a latency of around 300-400ms pretty high I realize... I rent through OVH and their closest data center relative to the Philippines is France... supposedly they have one coming somewhere in Asia like Singapore or something...

We do use Cloudflare but we currently use a free Cloudinary account to host our images and I cached them locally to get around that API/hr request limit. So while Clouflare helps with minizing possibly closer... the "processing" of stuff like querying with PHP/MySQL takes place on the server... I used this awful JOIN or COUNT statement that took like 300ms to execute it was bad... haha. Minor fixes.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#216

Post by ge96 »

theparanoid wrote: post #170
ge96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking mysel…

"if Facebook can do it why can't you?" Just tell them to fuck off. It feels amazing to figuratively tell someone to just fuck off.

Yeah it's somewhat of an exaggeration, but the concept is the same some viral site with garbage-clickbait-content and this guy's like 'Why don't our photos/site load as fast this site' and I'm like... well We don't have expensive technology, we don't have teams of engineers... I'm a guy with two hands and Google... pounding away at the keys like an Ape looking for ants.

Oh well. Someday I will escape! haha

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#217

Post by Bakary »

mkalygin wrote: post #124

Recently I was feeling very frustrated about my work, about what I do in my life. This was lasting for about 1 month. I've noticed that in such periods I compare myself to others and intentionally think that I'm worse. Like literally the most useless person in the world. Usually I find any particular metric (even meaningless) and compare. This is very self-destructing activity. What helps me in fight with burnout is…

I've heard about this thought process often and I feel that the root cause is that tying your self-worth to your "usefulness" to others or to society at large is ultimately self-defeating.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#218

Post by boomlinde »

Mz wrote: post #160
jgamman wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last sentence. Seriously?

It's probably a terrible way to frame it. Maybe a better way is to say something like "People whose lives do not revolve solely around pursuit of the almighty dollar." I would like to think there is a happy medium and that there are people who have their priorities straight and are also not poor. But there seems to be a dearth of evidence for this thing I would like to believe. It seems like those unwilling to sell t…

> It's probably a terrible way to frame it. Maybe a better way is to say something like "People whose lives do not revolve solely around pursuit of the almighty dollar."

Yes, but the notion that the lives of those in poverty revolve less around the pursuit of money seems far removed from reality. Poor people struggle to make ends meet. This means taking awful jobs they don't want, eating low quality food, not affording sick leave etc. Only wealthy people can afford not to worry about it. I can not "place a high priority on money" for a year and still make ends meet while not worrying for a second that I won't be able to get another well-paying job by the time I feel like it. It's because I am not poor.

Sure, there are vagrants and hobos whose lives revolve around the pursuit of food and shelter rather than money, but that's kind of the exception that proves the rule.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#219

Post by Bakary »

projektir wrote: post #190
biot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I'm not saying that I live under a nihilist viewpoint. Even if free will is little more than an illusion masked by seemingly infinite complexity, I happily buy into the illusion and (for the most part) operate as if I have unlimited agency / free will. My comment was more to say that you have to stop asking "why" at some point and just go with the flow otherwise you descend into meaningless.

I mean... but you do. You just said that if you keep asking, you end up with a "nihilist" view and descend into meaningless. So your overall philosophy right now is that form of "nihilism". That is, after all, why you do not find the value in asking "why". I strongly disagree with that and I believe this kind of thinking is not actually as logical or as rational as you were lead to believe, and properly asking the wh…

My understanding was that the whole point of going with the flow is to avoid thinking too much.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#220

Post by cerberusss »

bholdr wrote: post #123

Very interesting and very nicely written! I was thinking about this myself lately ( https://medium.com/@yansh/who-do-you-want-to-be-in-life-ca8f... ).. I think the advice to slow down, take a break, refocus is key to figuring things out, however, not everyone can afford to do so. It's a risk, and there is always a trade off. So I wouldn't frame the article as a guide, because it's different for everyone.

> however, not everyone can afford to do so

So start saving. This was actually my biggest takeaway from the article. The couple had more than 6 months of living costs stashed away, which I think is a very good idea.

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