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How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

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Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#11

Post by muzani »

robotichead wrote: post #5

Weird - there have been both good and bad things for my mental health. For example working from home has been great and bad at the same time. - Great because I have more time to myself, am able to relax faster, I have more time to work on my side project or play video games. - Bad because my routine is really out of wack now. My sleeping patterns are non-existent at times. I feel extremely tired most of the time.

I think part of the exhaustion is that there's no in-between phase from work to home. A commute helps, because I have time to mentally cool down after ending the day. WFH, I get jumped by my kids as soon as I leave my office, but my brain is still working on that software architecture design document.

What helped me was to aim to stop working about 30 minutes before leaving the home office. During that time, just read a book, post on HN, answer/delete emails, all this lighter behavior.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#12

Post by mettamage »

I was looking for a job for 12+ months as I am bad at interviewing. I found one during the height of covid at a startup that seems to be unaffected.

Finally got a chance to prove myself which is going well.

The lockdown gave me time to reflect and reset my habits. I am much more into exercise and yoga.

I got more time to talk to my grandparents as I moved in with them during my miserable job hunt.

So yea, pretty good! The only thing I can’t shake is my job hunt experience. I am pretty mad for working so hard at university and people simply brushing me off as inexperienced and later brushing me off as “missing the hiring cycle”

I wish I partied a shit ton more and I regret doing my best, except for the courses that taught something useful. Like the courses on hacking and that one course where they left us all free to learn whatever we wanted (I learned objective-C). But the UML course, bad intro to programming course or the “pervasive computing” course, what a waste of my years.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#13

Post by Forgotmypass101 »

Dreadful. I am in a country far from anything I know. I had been applying to jobs everywhere in the EU, only to be refused every time. That was before the plague hit, and the UK officially withdrew from the EU. My local job teaching English died with the pandemic (I'm sure it will come back up when the pandemic stops, but for now I have no income).

I had been making games for mobile since no one else wants to hire me as a programmer, but between making roughly $1.00 on that venture, and the stresses of life, I haven't been able to keep focused on that. Some times I feel that the world feels I am useless, and the problem with feeling like that is that I struggle to keep it from being a self fulfilling prophecy.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#14

Post by shahbaby »

mettamage wrote: post #12

I was looking for a job for 12+ months as I am bad at interviewing. I found one during the height of covid at a startup that seems to be unaffected. Finally got a chance to prove myself which is going well. The lockdown gave me time to reflect and reset my habits. I am much more into exercise and yoga. I got more time to talk to my grandparents as I moved in with them during my miserable job hunt. So yea, pretty good…

I'm currently in the job hunt and also starting to question why I got a degree. I definitely learned some useful stuff but no one cares. Instead of 4 years on a degree I could have spent 1 year learning on my own. I wouldn't be as well prepared but everyone is looking for shallow signals anyway.

Spending a few weeks following a tutorial to build some crappy web app will look more impressive to a recruiter than spending a few years going through grueling coursework.

It's not hard to build that crappy web app but it's just weird how it matters more.

I guess being able to showcase what you can do matters a lot more than what you can actually do.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#15

Post by dondawest »

yhavr wrote: post #9

Well, surprisingly good. Assuming I have no job, stuck alone in an asocial country, miss my home, and had a much worse mental state before entering pandemics. TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever. Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman…

I almost spit out my coffee when you mentioned TALEB as a stoic, much less a member of the “big three”

He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#16

Post by dondawest »

kleer001 wrote: post #10

Fan-fing-tastic. Coming to the table with low inherent trait extroversion and even lower trait neuroticism I was primed to do just fine. Mix in a decent home office space coincidentally already setup, a job that lets me work from home, a great wage, absurdly low rent, decent savings, a caring partner also fine working from home, and top it all off with living in a country with a more help-others than individualistic…

Where u at bro

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#17

Post by godot »

duxup wrote: post #8

It's not the virus directly or other issues. It's the side effects. Most of all my kids have been home and my happy working from home world for me, is horrible. Young kids don't understand working from home, and that's 100% understandable... but then I end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up. My wife has to work from home. In the meantime it's summer and there's no baseball, no fairs, no other thi…

You mentioned you end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up; and then left it at that. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

I ask since I do something similar semi-regularly now, and I don't find it to be a negative thing for myself. I was always remote even before COVID (and it sounds like you are too). There are parts of my job that aren't time-flexible (meetings) and parts that are (coding). I just tend to code before kid wakes up, when kid is napping, or after her bed time. For meetings, they have to happen in the morning of the work day and that's fine. Overall, I don't really mind the whole bending of my coding hours to work with my family's schedule. I actually kind of enjoy it this way because I know that when I'm coding, I'm undisturbed.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#18

Post by mleonhard »

dyingkneepad wrote: post #7

Horrible! Even before Covid I was already going through a bad phase, I think I will never be as good as I once was in my job. I make stupid mistakes, I have a hard time focusing, I used to be one of the top performers of the team and now I struggle to do basic tasks without making mistakes. I stop and check my phone or the news every 15 minutes. I have a partner, a baby and a small kid and absolutely no family member…

It won't last. The current situation will pass. Nothing lasts. Everything changes. You will make it through this time. We all will.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#19

Post by duxup »

godot wrote: post #17
duxup wrote: post #8

It's not the virus directly or other issues. It's the side effects. Most of all my kids have been home and my happy working from home world for me, is horrible. Young kids don't understand working from home, and that's 100% understandable... but then I end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up. My wife has to work from home. In the meantime it's summer and there's no baseball, no fairs, no other thi…

You mentioned you end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up; and then left it at that. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I ask since I do something similar semi-regularly now, and I don't find it to be a negative thing for myself. I was always remote even before COVID (and it sounds like you are too). There are parts of my job that aren't time-flexible (meetings) and parts that are (coding). I just t…

It's not a terrible pattern by itself but it can be a bit hard on sleep and such.

Re: How is everyone's mental health at the moment?

#20

Post by user_agent »

dondawest wrote: post #15
yhavr wrote: post #9

Well, surprisingly good. Assuming I have no job, stuck alone in an asocial country, miss my home, and had a much worse mental state before entering pandemics. TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever. Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman…

I almost spit out my coffee when you mentioned TALEB as a stoic, much less a member of the “big three” He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.

The most basic definition of stoicism is "indifference to fate". In that scope Taleb definitely is a stoic. His approach toward stoicism, though, is less philosophy focused and more (that's kind of unique) targeted toward statistics. Ancient stoics don't write about their philosophy in such a way, but the logic remains similar. The whole concept of antifragility Taleb has promoted is pure "opportunistic" stoicism. Taleb is like a Seneca the Younger, minus some charm ;)

Regarding his online presence, anyone knowing his works also knows that he's using Twitter purely to mess with people. He stated that many times in his Incerto series.

Sometimes it's easy to forget what is the actual core of a given philosophy / enterprise / etc. Hence my whole comment. It's worthwhile to know, I think, that stoicism has a very important component comprised of pure logic, which Taleb seems to be hyped about (not without a reason).

I wouldn't call Taleb a member of the top-3 stoics though. He's balancing on the verge of being an outcast rather than hanging out with mainstream stoic crowds.

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