Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

Social media hasn't been a part of my life for years now. It feels great, I wish I could get back the hours I've spent on social media. I see why people like it and how it can be useful, but if I would want to kickstart another depression I'd install the Facebook/Instagram apps again.

My social life has improved massively since I've quit.

Simply delete your accounts permanently. You'll thank yourself later! And while you're at it, update your /etc/hosts file to block all network requests to FB ;)

I've found solace in the fact that I wasn't blessed with the circumstances, disposition, possibly intellect, or combination of those that led to any of the things you mentioned, and those aren't necessarily within anyone's control.

So you know how to program assembly, and Tycoon games haven't been invented yet. Suppose you have the idea to build a tycoon game and the time and money to do it; unlikely. Do you have literally nothing else you'd rather do for year(s) than work on building a Tycoon game that may or may not be popular? I sure as hell wouldn't want to. I'd rather have a social life, be in nature, or anything else. Ya it'd be satisfying to complete it, but how many people now complete building games that in retrospect were a total exhaustion of their enthusiasm without any substantial payoff?

It's important to consider the things you are lucky/fortunate/skilled at. If you've been employed consistently in any arbitrary position, for 10 years, you're already way further ahead financially or experience-wise than me. I've burnt out 3 times and have lost my job because I didn't realize early enough how to identify the problematic relationships with life and discipline that have caused me tumult. I've had a fine time in other respects, but have zero money and have no prospects for earning enough over my career to retire, buy property, or have children if I wanted them. That said, I can hold a conversation well, am decent at certain things athletically, and have a great relationship.

>I stopped counting the number of times they mentioned that they considered themselves stupid. There is so much negative and toxic self critic in this post that my feeling is that this is the biggest most fundamental issue that I would look at tackling.

This. OP sounds like a great candidate for counseling/therapy from a psychologist who is a licensed counselor. It sometimes takes a few tries to find the right one, but it is worth the effort.

I read your comment last night and it bothered me enough that I had to google it to find it this morning.

tl;dr: Look for things that spark joy and double down on them. Forget about success, focus on fun in the moment.

I beleive you have an unmet need which is causing you suffering, it just may not be what you seem to think it is.

I also started feeling the same way lately. I work with a bunch of PhDs. To me it seems like they are constantly running marathons, writing papers, giving talks etc. Me I'm just a programmer working amongst them, hopefully helping them write better code.

Added to that, I also felt just meh about the work I do, another server deployment, another backend service to deploy etc... Objectively I know it helps the scientists I work with, but it just doesn't feel that way.

Honestly I thought I didn't like programming anymore till I happened upon something that sparked the same joy I used to feel when I was 13 hacking on my Apple ][. It happened to be the Rust programming language (I had been mostly doing Java server side work recently).

I would say that the fact that you are even feeling like this, that you are even asking these questions suggests that you have a divergent mind. Don't stop looking, except don't use 'success' as your criteria, look for the things that give you joy, and when you find one just keep coming back to it.

Note that the joy may not leap out at you right away. It can be that we have gotten out of the habit of recognising fun when we see it, so you might have to make yourself quiet enough to hear it.

Edit: To add a final point. For me I figured that one of my unmet needs was to have my own thing that I could master completely. My side project in Rust became that for me. In that project I was not forced into any compromise, and I understand each and every line in there. Rust actually made this easier for me, because I found that their documentation is aimed at allowing you to reach full understanding¹, which after years of trial and error server side programming with frameworks felt just simply awesome to me.

1: http://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/sha...

> you will not have time to think about how your life sucks anymore

s/to think about how your life sucks/to ingest content that convinces you that your life sucks/gi