One potential mitigation...move some place where the cost of living is dramatically lower.
Depending on your field of expertise, it can make a big difference. The bigger safety net reduces stress levels.
Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#22Listen to some talks by Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell. It helped me a lot to take a step back and accept here and now instead of worrying about the future. In other words, the only way you are going to end up looking back on a life full of good memories, is to make it good here and now(!), not in the future.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#23Practice gratitude for the things that are going right in your life. Try and be kind to yourself. People you perceive as “successful” may themselves be facing internal hardships. Placing self-worth in externally-controlled goals sets you up to feel bad about your place in life. I used to beat myself up about my current progress and constantly comparing myself to others. Once I stopped doing that and instead focused o…
I second this. I used to think practicing gratitude was stupid, or at least not really worth my time. I have recently picked up stoicism and one key techniques seems to be "practicing negative visualization" - basically imagining how much worse of you could be. I found that once I really think through all the hardships that I could find myself in I appreciate my current situation much more and feel much happier.
Curiously, I think I also get more done now because I feel better, am in a better mood and spend less time anguishing about all the things which are not perfect or could somehow be better. It has also made me aware that many people do find themselves in various hardships and my appreciation for my situation has really grown again through this.
Stop being so hard on yourself and cut yourself some slack - if you're the perfectionist type (like me) it does a lot more harm than good!
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#24I started going to the psychologist to work on my anxiety/depression and so far I'm seeing good results.
A good psychologist will work on understanding the root cause of your depression, make sure you acknowledge it, and change your thoughts and actions so you can cure it.
I recommend giving it a try.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#25The majority of people aren't successful. 9 out of 10 startups fail. On HN you tend to hear from the success stories (survivor bias) Maybe have some other goals in life that you can achieve and be happy. A family. Painting. Music. Sport. I'll never bee a pro-kiteboarder, but I still enjoy it.
The people who work at failing startups are often successful people. They get other jobs.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#26Sell everything you own, buy some land in the country, quit your job and just chill out. Grow a garden, raise some chickens, go to farmer's markets and sell your wares. The happiest people I know quit tech years ago and became small-time farmers.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#27Zuckerberg is a few years older than I am and I compared myself to him back in the day. It's pretty easy to get depressed if you compare yourself to others.
I've found that focusing on yourself and not giving a shit about what other people think worked for me, that and just doing the best you can.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#28define and potentially reevaluate what success means to you. chances are that goal will shift considerably with lifes up and downs over your next 20-40 years, not once but several times. Acknowledging these changes, reduce a lot of stress, as you realize most of what you feel strongly about doesn't matter any more in a few years
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#29You could try SSRIs, they worked for me
Please visit a psychiatrist; Let them decide if you need SSRIs.
Re: Ask HN: How to stop feeling depressed about whether you will be successful?
#30One thing nobody seems to have brought up, is who is reinforcing these anxieties in you.
Is it your parents, is it your friends? Is it school?
4 year olds aren't depressed about being successful - they just live their life.
As you get older, your parents think your happiness is related to making money, having a family, stuff like that.
They're right to some extent. The crucial point is since you have anxiety about this issue, what has happened is their incompetence (this is a crucial point, incompetence breeds anxiety), has created anxiety in them, and they have infected you with it.
They're anxious you're not good enough, they're anxious your grades aren't high enough, they're anxious, anxious anxious. They're comparing you to their friends' kids and they're having an internal competition - they want to tell their friends how well you're doing. Their self esteem is tied to your 'success', success they've defined for you without asking you if that's what you want (This doesn't always happen, but it is extremely common)
All this is unfortunate and extremely common. Your parents/friends are just incompetent at being happy, sorry. They mean well, they just don't know how to live happily and spread that around.
The possible solutions are:
- to succeed, according to your parents' worldview, to shut them up
- to disagree with their worldview and create your own (redefine success for yourself)
- to do a combination of the two - succeed to some extent (get higher education), but also distance yourself away from them, so that their regular dose of anxiety doesn't get in the way of your self discovery
This is something everyone goes through, and doesn't get talked about enough, because most people are not aware of what really happened - they just think everyone is insecure to some extent, and that it's ok. It's not ok, but only a few will be curious enough to rediscover what THEY actually want out of life. That's what a mid-life crisis is - when people finally reach a peak in reaching what everyone else told them would make them happy, and they're not. So it's something you figure out now, or mid-life, or after, doesn't matter when really :)