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Ask HN: How are you holding up?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#101

Post by dcolkitt »

TheMerovingian wrote: post #34
screye wrote: post #16

Really badly, but could be worse. I am entirely sure that I have moderate-serious depression since the lock down started. I rely entirely on external structure and physical separation of spaces to keep myself sane. So WFH has been disastrous for me. I have been eating worse, not working out, stopped pursuing hobbies/side projects and have been incredibly unproductive at work. Thankfully, a year of good results prior…

Anecdotally, cutting my coffee intake to near-zero levels has allowed my anxiety to simmer down. Perhaps this may help in your situation.

Contrapoint, research shows that coffee seems to act as a fairly effective antidepressant[1].

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000486741560313...

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#102

Post by throwAwayAcc88 »

markm248 wrote: post #74
throwAwayAcc88 wrote: post #48

I love getting to spend extra time with my SO. And I love not having a commute. My quality of life has gone up immensely. But I live in a tiny, 1 bedroom, city-center apartment. The desk I work at all day, is the desk that I also would come home to after work, and unwind/relax at. There is no other space available in this apartment where I can put up an "office". It is simply too small. The best option I have is to s…

Transition to managing a team is difficult in normal times! I've been doing it for 10+ years and still suffer from the lack of direct feedback and a feeling of being unproductive. Be sure to remind yourself that your ability to impact is broader now and the results are longer term. Even when it doesn't feel like it, your team needs the leadership you are providing.

My company did a round of layoffs as quickly as possible last March. I managed to get my team through that, and am still trying to help the people I had to let go find new positions on the side. I've seen the impact I've had, legitimately keeping my people sane.

One of my devs actually caught the virus, and broke down to me in the hospital when he tried to explain why he might not be able to come back to work, ever.

I know I have had an impact.

But now that we're through the looking glass, and the adrenaline has worn off, and this is just the new day to day normal, its just frigging hard.

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#103

Post by PokemonNoGo »

screye wrote: post #16

Really badly, but could be worse. I am entirely sure that I have moderate-serious depression since the lock down started. I rely entirely on external structure and physical separation of spaces to keep myself sane. So WFH has been disastrous for me. I have been eating worse, not working out, stopped pursuing hobbies/side projects and have been incredibly unproductive at work. Thankfully, a year of good results prior…

I hear you. I echo your experience to the letter. It got to me so I had 6 weeks of sick leave. On antidepressants for the second time in my life. Never felt so alone. Working from the office these days because I can't imagine sitting home alone again. Went on a weird tinder bender and knocked out 20 dataes over 7 weeks only to be social...

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#104

Post by kieckerjan »

Jetroid wrote: post #60
randomsearch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have room for all those spaces in your house, you’re extremely luck. I work, sleep, and exercise in the same room. I’m not unusual in that respect.

Hence why I said house/space. I currently live in a single (small) room, too. Every room has four walls. My room is dedicated like this: Northern wall: Desk with laptop. Go here for work/creativity. Southern wall: My bed is here. Sleep only. Eastern wall: My worktop is here for cooking. Western wall: I drag my chair over here when I want to read or watch something. Floor in the middle: Exercises. You don't need to ha…

If you have only one desk that you use for work and recreation, here is a little hack: switch chairs. I have a work chair and a "lazy" chair. Same desk, different feeling. Works for me.

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#105

Post by loulou24 »

I lost a friend because I lost hope that we could have normal conversations without frustrating or even hostile arguments over politics.

I banged my head on this for months and finally had to acknowledge (on my birthday, to make it even more depressing) that there was no hope.

And that's really painful.

Plus the circumstances don't make it easy to deal with this extra feeling of loneliness.

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#106

Post by Grimm1 »

I went from being alone for 9 weeks to not being a lone at all for the last 6 weeks at my parents. Different but more tolerable downsides. I'm doing mostly fine and still grinding away on work but wake up finding that I'm more and more angry about everything being disrupted from covid at an age where I should be out kicking ass and taking names and angrier still that I think I'm doing the rational and community focused thing by staying inside minimizing trips to the store and then watching people shirk and go on like nothing is happening.

I know it's temporary but how things have gone during lockdown have changed my opinion on my country and a lot of the people in it and that's not temporary.

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#107

Post by euroclear »

leashless wrote: post #4

Seems less bad to me than the year or so that followed 9/11. Bad and bad enough though.

I lived in lower Manhattan on Sept 11. The following months were full of anxiety as no one knew if there would be more attacks (hijackings, bombings, perhaps a chemical attack on the subway like what had happened in Tokyo some years earlier). The city was full of missing person posters, who you knew were people who would never be seen again.

After 9/11, a lot of people avoided the subways or going to terrorist targets like Times Square, but life outside of the immediate area around the WTC continued, and even the World Series was played in the Bronx shortly after. 9/11 had a terrible impact, but things returned to almost normal much more quickly than they have with covid-19.

Re: Ask HN: How are you holding up?

#108

Post by toyg »

Hang in there, bud. It will get better, or the world will change enough to make our lives more tolerable somehow.

I joke that I barely noticed covid19: I was already socially-isolated enough (have been working from home for almost a decade, and in many ways I was/am already depressed for my own reasons) that the only change was my hair getting pretty long and my kids getting bored at home. I know I cannot complain - got a steady job just before the lockdown, my financial situation is not terrible, I have a garden to milk any ray of sunshine that Northern England might grant us...

BUT

I've given up on therapy, as there is no way for me to make any progress on my personal problems in these circumstances. I was supposed to spend a couple of weeks on a beach for the first time in years - it didn't happen and it might not happen for many more months. My parents can only see their grandkids every few months and now we're well overdue. I live in fear that my new employer will eventually feel the hurt and they'll have to cut, with LIFO putting a big target on my back. Even if I keep this job, my dreams of independence were shattered last year and there is no way to try again in these circumstances.

So it's shit really, but what can we do? Sometimes the planet just tries to kills us and all we can do is endure.

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