It seems easier to masturbate than to post this.
Edit: I am wrong, it is astonishingly easy to post here.
Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
71–80 of 227 posts
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#72Now there are two depression threads on the front page. We usually don't allow that (I mean same-topic frontpage threads, not depression threads). Normally the easy answer would be to downweight the follow-up [1], but this post is nicely reminding the community that HN polls are a thing. So I don't know what to do! I'm tempted to put up a poll asking whether to keep the poll or the original thread, but I have to go o…
This poll isn't particularly well formed, particularly it lacks an option for chronic depressive symptoms, every day.
It seems likely the options are lacking in the lower end of the spectrum as well, there's a big jump between not at all and several days worth of symptoms
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#73Now there are two depression threads on the front page. We usually don't allow that (I mean same-topic frontpage threads, not depression threads). Normally the easy answer would be to downweight the follow-up [1], but this post is nicely reminding the community that HN polls are a thing. So I don't know what to do! I'm tempted to put up a poll asking whether to keep the poll or the original thread, but I have to go o…
Just stay calm and let it happen Dan :)
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#74I definitely feel worse since daylight savings started. Now when work is done, the sun is completely gone. A few weeks ago, there was at least a hint of it and an evening walk could be done during a sunset. Not so much anymore. It feels like I'm working even more now and I know I'm not even working that many hours physically. (Mentally tho...) I do know that I let more negative thoughts in as the night grows. It's one of the reasons I hate short days and daylight savings. The more night, the more I'm inside wishing I could get out of this shit hole.
Felt depressive symptoms? Almost everyday for over a decade. Would I say I'm depressed though? No. And that's not due to stigma of it or something. I see a therapist but I don't feel depressed and he doesn't seem to think I'm depressed. There's something special about what I'd consider depression. Something where you're depressed because there's a hopelessness to your situation and it's somewhat unreasonable to feel that way for as long as you have. I think of it like: "Is someone who is being tortured everyday in a prison cell and know there's no chance they'll be able to escape depressed if they're acting sad all the time?" could maybe make it in an area but are not and might not ever... it's draining. When you're completely on your own for it and no one you've ever grown up with has ever gotten anywhere near where you're at or done things like you've done... And the work is terrible and the people are horrible. And no one can support you except yourself...
It just... well, it's draining. So, I feel drained most days. Depressed? Not really. Again, if the context was different, I'd feel fine and be quite happy day to day (give me money, give my a nice manager, give me decent work). It's that the context is so bad. I tend to think of depression as... almost no matter the context, you're gonna be sad and not enjoying things. I still enjoy stuff - it's just that I have that nagging thought of how I need to keep pushing... I need to get further because I'm still so far behind from what I wanted to be. And I don't know how to get there because I've never seen anyone like me do it.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#75Well...Although I am happy in 'regular' life, it seems the more you linger over the constant stream of humanities affairs the more desperate (and depressing) it seems...
HN promotes interesting discussion; MacOS breaks because Apple's servers are pooped, Google is sued for using mobile data to send them data, privacy concerns in every major OS while the EU is focused on taking down content in record times and abolishing encryption or mandating access to every data record created by any EU citizen that must be stored for the rest of time, increasingly AI is used to judge our posts for compliance and sometimes it makes mistakes such as when Youtube goes haywire and bans/deletes you because it doesn't understand nuance/context as you try to raise a twitter/reddit/PR storm and "we're very sorry this happened, your channel is blessed again until next time", at the same time there's misinformation everywhere as the world's top authorities such as the POTUS is knowingly spreading FUD causing anger and division in society and leading to real world consequences (even death in some cases) as it is apparent Twitter is out of control yet they love the attention said POTUS has provided their platform yet if you look at comments/replies it's just insanity, yet we keep feeding the algorithms that are implicit in our own bias and whatever is promoted to us must be the truth whilst opposing viewpoints are hidden in favor of your own beliefs that these algorithms keep you locked in to, as people's entire experiences of what was once the beautiful web had to offer is now witted down to just a few small platforms, giants such as Amazon use its leverage to remove competitors it dislikes and is often 'the' marketplace people frequent impacting smaller businesses as they struggle to compete on Amazon's terms as local services (such as libraries) need FB to advertise their affairs to the local community otherwise the information doesn't exist and again has real-world consequences...And yet we carry on day by day as if everything is fine and dandy...
...So yeah, life is great! but don't worry, I am sure some super AI knows who is writing this message and will ding me a few points on the scale...Let's hope it's enough to keep them at bay and not get sent off (there was news a while back about an 'AI' studying for suicide references in a games chat and alerting the authorities, I kid you not).
Welcome to 2020.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#76Wow what happened to all the normal people? I am not depressed and never have been depressed. Life has never been easier or safer for most people and we have a poll result where 2/3rd of people are claiming to be clinically depressed?
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#77I feel low some days but I was able to figure out my symptoms were the result of burnout.
And coincidentally the best advice for dealing with it is I got from HN comment that really gave me a huge insight into why i was feeling the way I was feeling and a simple fix to remedy it somewhat.
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unknowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
link to original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#78Now there are two depression threads on the front page. We usually don't allow that (I mean same-topic frontpage threads, not depression threads). Normally the easy answer would be to downweight the follow-up [1], but this post is nicely reminding the community that HN polls are a thing. So I don't know what to do! I'm tempted to put up a poll asking whether to keep the poll or the original thread, but I have to go o…
Merge the threads into a single poll which also links to the non-HN poll in the question. Engaged people will do both polls, you won't be shortchanging either of them.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#79Now there are two depression threads on the front page. We usually don't allow that (I mean same-topic frontpage threads, not depression threads). Normally the easy answer would be to downweight the follow-up [1], but this post is nicely reminding the community that HN polls are a thing. So I don't know what to do! I'm tempted to put up a poll asking whether to keep the poll or the original thread, but I have to go o…
After reading the comments on the original, I expected to see a "Poll: Did you know that HN has polls?"
I certainly didn't know about the feature.
Re: Poll: Have you experienced depressive symptoms over the past two weeks?
#80Yes, more like past months or so.
Simple interactions like doing grocery shopping leave a sinking feeling in my stomach for like hours. Motivation is down the drain as well.