871–880 of 898 posts
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30 minutes of cardio everyday isn’t for everyone. But anyone who does it will have adaptations as a result.
All 30 minutes of attempted meditation per day does for me is dramatically increases my desire to punch someone. If that counts as an adaptation then sure.
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No. Meditation does not "work for everyone" no matter how hard you no-true-scotsman it and I'm sick and tired of reading this. Source: Dad was massively into all that woo, spent my whole teens trying, even spent a week at an ashram in India. No, meditation is not for everyone.
IMO ‘woo’ and ‘ashram’ is exactly the wrong way to go about mediation, for westerners. I'm automatically revolted by most kinds of spiritual stuff, but people I respect kept saying meditation helps to control the brain's attempts to wind itself up with drama. So finally I found the app ‘Headspace’ where a guy mumbles into my ear, with zero spiritual load and no cheesy music. What it does for me is I relax muscles inc…
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Yes, I'm in the UK. And yes, it does appear to be worldwide.
It's like, what do you do after you realise The Hoax? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2VIUcuF3KE
Not really. My country is being ripped apart, everyone seems so hateful against the other, the government talks about record employment level and pay while people are using foodbanks and sleeping in the streets. My own life is great by the standards that people usually use to measure success. But it feels so empty. I'd rather check out and go and live in a cave on a hill, but all the land and caves have been parcelle…
I recently experienced months of sleeping problems. Where I wouldn't sleep for days. Or would sleep a few hours. I would be exhausted and my head would hit the pillow and BAM adrenaline and I can hear my heart pounding and I'm awake. It got so bad I would go into the basement and destroy a wall that I kept repairing. I would cry in frustration. I started to have suicidal thoughts. It was harming my marriage and made…
Not for anything because my situation is completely different. But I went through a difficult period too. And I actually realised I had stopped doing any kind of recreation at all. It sounds crazy but learning how to do nothing again is really hard. I couldn't actually game at all. I tried but I felt like I was doing a shift. So I started with driving and listening to soccer on the radio (something I hadn't been acti…
Dunno about exercise, as I couldn't do intensive exercise then, and light didn't work as well, even if prolonged.
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I'll also back the others on the topic of meditation in that it should show at least some result. I suspect, though, that you might've tried meditation with some spiritual flavor or something oriented purely towards the awareness and self-control aspect. Personally I've come to meditation from the body angle instead, and that's when it clicked for me. I detailed the workings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20960513
One point of meditation is that you aren't really ‘doing nothing’: the brain still needs to be occupied at first—but the attention is redirected from whatever it's hung up on at the moment, to breathing deeply and listening to the body, and the guide's voice also helps. This breaks the loop of anxiety and physical tenseness, which then lets you set the mind loose. Frankly this sounds like it should work for your exact case.
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IMO ‘woo’ and ‘ashram’ is exactly the wrong way to go about mediation, for westerners. I'm automatically revolted by most kinds of spiritual stuff, but people I respect kept saying meditation helps to control the brain's attempts to wind itself up with drama. So finally I found the app ‘Headspace’ where a guy mumbles into my ear, with zero spiritual load and no cheesy music. What it does for me is I relax muscles inc…
I forget what they're called, but the Headspace things where someone talks about a sleepy village or laundromat they're wandering through are incredible. They create this strong sense of nostalgia and comfiness for some long lost childhood memories I don't think actually exist.
Apparently they also have ‘sleep music’ and soundscapes with names that sound rather newagey and are probably of the sort that never attracted me. Now, oldschool dub music, of the 70s' kind—that worked wonderfully both at home and for subway dozing. Dub is so completely non-aggressive and non-busy that I don't get such warm feeling from anything else. I remember lying in bed and suddenly wondering why my thoughts follow a weird rhythm—turned out it was the bass in a track that got mixed in the fading awareness.
Bill Laswell's mixes are my favorite: https://billlaswell.bandcamp.com/album/trojan-dub-massive-vo...
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Ah sorry. That does sounds relaxing, even in jest. I'm trying to get out of for-profit tech and into the non-profit space to do data/FOIA/investigative work. It's still "tech work" at the end of the day, but without the deep dread of making rich dudes richer.
You can join a research lab as a software engineer, or even start a PhD.
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I don't know if I have a real strategy here. I just give my rate early in the process and don't make it sound like it's negotiable. Some people don't call me back, and I suspect my rate is why. I do offer a lower rate to nonprofits. I've gotten one client through Craigslist (oddly) but despite ads on a bunch of websites, the rest of my work has come through referrals. I suspect the biggest thing is just being in a go…
how long did it take before you got enough work through referrals? and how much does your location matter to find clients? i am unable to find any local clients but i also can't easily move to anywhere else because i have a family with school-age kids which you don't move on a whim. people keep recommending upwork and similar places, but the quality of the offers there is not good either, and i end up competing with…
What I think I would do is reach out to anyone I know and let them know that I'm open for business and looking for clients. All of my employment jobs have worked that way, so I think it's probably a good first step for consulting too.
After that, I'd probably contact companies with job listings and offer to help them as needed with an hourly rate. They can always keep my number in their contact list in case they get into a bad spot and have trouble finding devs later. I know there's good job boards on SO, AngelList, and the monthly HN thread. I've been at plenty of companies where we wish we had an extra dev to get us out of a bind or pick up some extra work without committing to a full time hire, so I assume most small companies would be happy to be introduced to me, in case I'm needed later.
Then there's upwork, toptal, and a few others. Those sites really sketch me out because it seems like a race to the bottom, and it seems like it'd be harder to build relationships with clients when you're one of thousands that they picked from for this particular task. After all, they can just dump you and get another from the same web interface. Maybe I'm wrong about this and should give them a try.
This thread has really made me do some hard thinking about what I want in life, and I think I could put in another year or two and become semi-retired, take some time off, and then try to do a little consulting work and see how it goes. I've been paralyzed by fear to try, because I'm not sure if I'd be able to go back to employment if I fail. But after reading all these replies, that seems like a level of risk I should be willing to accept.
I also secretly hope (though I have no idea if it's true) that if I had a few months off work, I'd start building something so interesting than YC would want me. I don't actually know if I'm capable of that, because I've never had the time to experiment and find out, but that seems like a worthwhile attempt just to know what my actual capabilities are when unconstrained by work.
Also, I know this thread is getting old now, but I'd just like to say (in case anyone checks back) that I appreciate the replies here so much. I've never had so many people understand how I feel before. And reading all of the different life experiences that people have shared makes me realize that there is hope for me to do something else, and that I might not be trapped here until I'm dead, which is how it seemed before I started talking about this.
I'm shocked at how many people seem to be doing OK or have minor complaints. For me, I've realized that if I have to do anything for 40+ hours a week on a schedule, after a couple of weeks, I'd prefer being dead. I could be a professional ice cream taste tester or race car driver, and after about 3 weeks of showing up at a fixed time and putting in 8 hours, I'd still be ready to off myself again. When I have week-lon…
As a newly-minted member of the "40 hour / week" working club I have to agree with you. It's not okay. I'm not okay. This lifestyle is bullshit. I recently shuttered my successful IT contracting business of 15 years. The reasons aren't worth going in to in detail. The fucked US health insurance system, out-of-control medical expenses, the Trump administration, and minor pre-existing medical conditions scared me (my w…
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My point is that they don't really give a shit. I'm not saying that's a bad thing per-se, there's only so much a human being can genuinely care about and devote effort to after all, but such actions are shallow to the point of being somewhat insulting.
I feel the same way. Another example is when someone famous dies and various internet forums get flooded with "RIP" comments that mean absolutely nothing to anyone other than the poster saying "Look at me, I'm also part of this!"