Ask HN: Words of encouragement for someone lost in life?

I have had a very rough 2 years. The worst of my life. I'm in my late 30s. 2009 was also a very difficult year. The summer of 2004 was the first truly difficult time of my adult life. The main thing all of these have in common is that I was cut off in a significant way from friends and family.

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is that we need love. We need love like trees need the sun. We need to know that when everything else in the world is going to shit, someone is there to hold us and tell us that they'll never leave us. And you need as many of these people in your life as possible.

Everyone around you needs this. Most of them don't get enough of it. Find the people around you who are interested in giving that to you, and receiving it from you. And spend as much time as possible with them.

When you're depressed, never trust your own brain's assessment of your situation. It always shows you a selectively bleaker picture than the actual reality. It's never as bad or as bleak as your brain is making it seem to you.

It's a weird effect because your brain should be doing the opposite, trying to heal you by showing you a selectively happier picture than the actual reality. When your body gets sick, your immune system goes to work trying to cure it. So why doesn't your brain do the same thing when it gets sick - try to heal you instead of making you more sick?

Maybe it's a bug in our programming, who knows. But recognize it for what it is, a flaw in our automatic neurological response to the illness of depression. So the cure can't be automatic, it must be deliberate. Start by learning to see through the flawed response, to see it for what is, like Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time.

Do not trust the false world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth - nothing is as bad or as hopeless as it seems when you're depressed. As long as you're alive, there's always a way forward into a different and better reality. You just have to find it.

To find it, start by relying on experimentalism. Change your routine, your activities, the way you spend your time. It honestly doesn't even matter what you change to, as long as you change to something. Throw a dart at a newspaper on the wall, and if it lands on a new activity, try that. Try everything, even things outside of your comfort zone.

And if the first things you change to don't help, discard them and try others. It takes about a month of trying something new to know whether it's having the desired impact or not, whether it's lifting weights to get stronger, doing a Keto diet to drop fat weight, learning Rust, taking sailing/bjj/dance/etc lessons, or whatever. So stick with each thing for at least a month and then evaluate how you feel and if it's worth continuing or not.

Trying new things rewires your neural pathways in new ways, stimulating positive creative energy. So if you can do those two things - stop trusting your brain and seeing through the falsely bleak picture it's presenting you with, and systematically going out and doing and trying new things to connect new neural pathways, you might start feeling better.

Beyond that, try to think of depression like any other programming or math problem, and always be hacking it. Apply the same systematic, methodical, analytical problem solving skills to depression that you use in programming. Explore the problem space, test different solutions, iterate until you find optimal, or at least sufficient, ones.

PS - and make sure you're getting enough Vitamin D and B12 too. 5000IU daily of D, and I forgot how much B12 but more info here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/ex...

Additionally, some herbal supplements like Ashwaghanda, Rhodiola Rosea, and Chinese Skullcap can help neutralize cortisol buildup that causes anxiety and makes it more difficult to get out of depression.

PPS - also check out the many useful niche subreddits. Some I've found helpful over the years:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gainit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/

https://www.reddit.com/r/EOOD/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ScientificNutrition/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ketoscience/

https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Paleo/

With ten years of development experience you should have some pretty good debugging skills by now but the bug report you submitted is missing the expected behavior as well as the execution environment. Sometimes you can be looking straight at the problem and simply not see it ... At that point you should find a second set of fresh eyes. Finally, make small imprints and celebrate when each new test passes ... You can do this - decide what you want and start making small changes and you'll quickly be surprised at the difference you've made!

Read the Book of Mormon. I was depressed and suicidal. It guided me towards the light.

The key to finding people is to go meet people. This doesn't even mean changing your lifestyle but simply getting yourself out there. One friend of mine met his future wife at a Scala conference. Another did so at an anime meetup. Another in a local very geeky artists group (twice actually for him). Another in a Japanese class. If your issue is not knowing how to interact socially then go read books like "How to Win Friends & Influence People" and watch how other people interact socially. I knew one guy who did an amazing roast of someone during an event not due to natural talent for humor but due to sheer relentless study of that area.