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Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

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Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#341

Post by spikder »

peepee1982 wrote: post #183
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

It does sound like PTSD or CPTSD. You can treat this yourself with the right resources. For starters, there are journaling practices for processing emotions. And then there are various kinds of meditations. Then there is psychoeducation, which will - over time - help dealing with difficult emotions. Notable authors and researchers in this field: Pete Walker, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Arielle Schwartz.

hmmmm .... PTSD? he's probably just in the same existential funk 90% of the rich world is in. action is the way out, whatever that means for you.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#342

Post by suranyami »

hobo_mark wrote: post #188
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount. Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once ?

That’s a very good question. Hubris? I guess?

What I mean by that, was I was REALLY invested in the project: not the business case, or the brand or anything else about the company, and particularly not the CEO. I REALLY wanted to complete the project as a badge of honour for myself.

I’d built 4 x tech teams of a total of 25 senior devs up from nothing, entirely re-wrote the broken legacy backend systems and switched over flawlessly, under-budget and on-time, as well as gave the other teams I managed the autonomy and trust to rebuild front-end and mobile systems using best practices. We had a great engineering culture that I was proud of.

I had known from the very beginning that the CEO was a loose cannon, but I stupidly thought I had the experience and willpower to keep them under control and largely out of the way of the tech team. I was so horribly wrong.

When the above rebuild of the backend was finished they placed an incompetent buffoon in charge over me, threw out the roadmap I’d created and started micro-managing the senior devs. When he was shouting at one of the senior devs for daring to be 5 minutes late to work, I took him aside and said “you just can’t do that, these people are hard to come by” he fired me on the spot.

So, yeah, hubris.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#343

Post by suranyami »

INTPenis wrote: post #322
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

>For me, it's a battle between "if I do something, someone's just gonna fuck it up anyway" and "I used to love this. I can still get excited by this, right?" I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything. This is a much better explanation of what I was trying to s…

The travel thing is definitely something I wish I could do more of, so if your current employer enables that, that’s a big plus for your mental health.

Do you think your current employer would respond well to an honest discussion about how to make the work you do more, I dunno, exciting? Envigorating? Less stressful? More meaningful? Less contact hours? Some managers would respond well to that. Others, not so much.

Dare I say it, it may also be worth talking to your partner? That’s definitely something I wish I’d done way sooner when I was seriously depressed. My partner has been so understanding and helped greatly get me back to a state where I was getting more joy out of life. For me, it was always this fear of feeling like a failure, something that is definitely intensified by having 2 people depend on you as much as a mother and child do. If they love you, they will really want to help you and you’d be crazy not to ask for their advice at least.

Worth noting that the HR department are NOT the ones to be discussing this with: they work for the company, not for you. It sounds harsh, but NEVER trust HR, no matter how nice they seem most of the time.

> the classic midlife crisis feeling that I haven't accomplished anything

Totally frivolous aside, the Germans have a word for that: “Torschlußpanik".

> From Tor +‎ Schluss +‎ Panik, literally “gate-shut panic”. For safety reasons city gates used to be shut at nightfall (Torschluss, from Tor +‎ Schluss), leaving latecomers no other choice than to stay outside, thereby exposing them to various dangers.

A German once told me “yeah, but in Germany that usually hits people in their 20s”. LOL.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#344

Post by suranyami »

D13Fd wrote: post #247
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

>> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids > As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. As a parent, I'm not so sure. I think every person is different, and some people (myself) respond really well to having kids. They give you a purpose in life and make everything seem more meaningful. Other people absolutely do not get as much out of having kids, and it feels like a grind to them. People are just di…

Oh, absolutely agree. Some people really THRIVE when they become parents, and hooray for them. It’s different for everyone.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#345

Post by suranyami »

dunno7456 wrote: post #299
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

> I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything. I'm stuck in the same position you described, except that I want to, but pretty much everyone around me is actively preventing me to work on anything.

Been in that situation before too. Damn that sucks.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#346

Post by suranyami »

itsoktocry wrote: post #332
suranyami wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that. Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of…

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. This would happen to me exactly one time, and never again. I know it happens, but how people put up with such abuse is beyond me.

Yeah, I dunno why I let it happen either.

I’d never been like that with any other job. My only guess is the explanation I gave in my other post above/below.

It certainly hasn’t happened since or ever will again, you can be sure of that.

Noone ever goes to there grave saying “If only I’d spent more time at work!”

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#347

Post by suranyami »

cma wrote: post #237
hobo_mark wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount. Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once ?

If the person is on a visa they can be deported if they walk away without another job. Lots of bad behavior ends up excused because of this risk. A similar situation where this can go on is student/advisor in phd studies, especially when there is no other advisor in the field they can switch to at a small university.

Laws regarding this are different from country to country. I know that the US laws are very biased towards the employer, and the employee gets to be put in a terrible situation.

Australia had laws like this in the past (thanks Liberal Party, you pricks), but they were being seriously abused and eventually rolled back. Abuse still happens though, just less of it.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#348

Post by dkn775 »

easymodex wrote: post #51

My wife went through psychosis in december for the first time and is still recovering. As you can imagine it has been a rough few months and I really want to know, in your experience, do you go back to normal afterwards? How long does it take? She is on antipsychotics and is way out of the acute phase, but she still has unusual behaviour like last week she covered up the TV with a towel and says she doesn't like phon…

She probably wants alone time to indulge her conspiracies and stuff. The stuff is addictively fascinating to unravel. Is she doing any drugs like stimulants? Is she getting enough sleep?

I had drug induced psychosis about 6 years ago. It lasted roughly 9 months with a 3 month ramp up where I didn’t notice it and then the remaining 6 months was absolutely wild. Lost job and was almost arrested numerous times.

I will say that I went to rehab right as it was dying down (the end of the final month) and I had two months of summer after that before I got back to school and work. I was pretty much good after the month of rehab.

Oddly enough AI research is what really kicked it off, then it went into the whole everything is connected, predictive programming, cognitive dissonance is the source of schizophrenia etc

The beliefs I had come up with during this period, which sounded very profound at the time, have mostly faded away, I still think there was some good nuggets I came up with but it was surrounded by so much jibberish I could never make anything of it. She may retain some of the stuff she discovered but it’s not gonna be anything serious. There are little nuggets of profound knowledge that people discover on a psychosis journey that are hard to forget (for example - I realized how much of man’s intentions were towards money power or fame - and learned to identify people who operate with those motivators.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#349

Post by ddingus »

fho wrote: post #194
hobo_mark wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount. Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once ?

Have you ever walked away from a job? It's really hard to do.

I have. It is hard. It gets easier the second time. I have no data on a third.

No regrets.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone else lose their marbles?

#350

Post by INTPenis »

suranyami wrote: post #343
INTPenis wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For me, it's a battle between "if I do something, someone's just gonna fuck it up anyway" and "I used to love this. I can still get excited by this, right?" I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything. This is a much better explanation of what I was trying to s…

The travel thing is definitely something I wish I could do more of, so if your current employer enables that, that’s a big plus for your mental health. Do you think your current employer would respond well to an honest discussion about how to make the work you do more, I dunno, exciting? Envigorating? Less stressful? More meaningful? Less contact hours? Some managers would respond well to that. Others, not so much. D…

Thanks for all the advice, I think we're pretty much on the same page here. It's not hard for me to understand intellectually what can be done, but motivation is a strange beast that doesn't seem to follow logic.

And my employer has been amazing, truly amazing. They basically gave me free reign to find projects on my own that could benefit the company.

No I'm afraid I'm stuck at stagnation and if I don't find another remote-only job that allows me the freedom of work/life balance I've become accustomed to I will just have to suck it up and do some effin work. Which is exactly what I've been doing lately.

Using all the known techniques, pomodoro, timeblocking, dividing tasks up into smaller components, I have managed to do some work lately and it feels good.

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