Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?

I turned out to be a total failure. I am to finish my uni next semester, but I was unable to find any sort of internship so I will have issues graduating. I am very lazy person. I don't have any sort of worth and I'm a disappointment to my parents.

ACE 0, happy childhood, very problematic puberty and adolescence. I was bullied.

Much later in life I discovered I was what is called a Sigma male and everything made sense.

I created my own company but was poor for a while(but very happy to do what I wanted). People probably felt sorry for me but I did not care about their opinions.

Very happy now. Not poor anymore.

ACE of 3 after I started living with my grandparents. ACE of 8 if you include the first 2 years of my life.

I am doing mediocre:

Career: bad

Love life: fantastic

The rest: hardcore self-dev mode

I am an insomniac and it’s fucking up my life. The ability to hold down a job because of it is really hard, unless I do intellectually easy work, which programming isn’t for me.

I also had a horrible career start. I had top marks at my university but I didn’t know anything about hiring cycles. So I just chilled for a year and then had a rough time finding a job, took a job I didn’t want for the sake of it and then had a few patches of jobs that I didn’t feel fully okay with, except for my last job but then tech layoffs happened and interviewing became hard.

Some people say I should become a dating coach as opposed to a dev but I have no idea on how to do the marketing and sales for that. I currently feel tech is more sustainable.

It’s funny:

I taught people in 3 month coding bootcamps when I still was a CS student and they are more senior than me.

My friend that studied business doing no programming on the side is nowadays more senior than me.

I paid a career coach $5000 which is a lot on a yearly salary of $35000 (if I have a job), but it’s not helping. It’s probably in part because I am Dutch and he is better in the US market.

I feel it’s a cruel joke. I did all the “moves” to not launch a career at all.

I could use some help but I don’t exactly know what kind of help as my blind spots career-wise are big (otherwise I wouldn’t have overindexed on uni, 2 bachelors and 2 masters). It doesn’t help that I am immigrating to the US at some point (marriage) for my current job search in NL.

I am currently also in therapy in the diagnostic stage. I probably will be diagnosed as autistic (at 33+ of age) but the jury is still out, could also be adhd or both. I sought help for my insomnia.

I currently meditate 2 hours per day since 2 weeks ago. I don’t think I will ever stop that again. I can feel that it helps a lot, especially with executive functioning (prefrontal cortex - doing your tasks) and somewhat for sleep too.

Is #5 really that bad? Kids can be real shitheads sometimes, but you have to be willing to really go through with it.

ACE of 4, gifted child who literally got the passion for education beaten out of them. I feel like my childhood, or dealings with my parents might have actually been pretty bad...but better than the present day. I was bullied as a kid, and never really supported during it, which made me incredibly angry and aggressive and I walked around for maybe the first 25 years of my life actively thinking I would get drawn into fights at any time. Doesn't help when your parents will also beat your ass for perceived disrespect, bad grades or public failings.

My parents also are just malicious, non-cooperative, myopic people, and my dad is an alcoholic who basically went my entire life never getting checked until my mother walked out on him a few months ago, as a result of him doing a handful of things so repulsive my younger sister (the emotionally intelligent one of the family) cut him off and my mother realized that she didn't actually have to spend the rest of her life tethered to this person. My mom isn't great, but good for her. In the interim my dad has become even more of an alcoholic and he sleeps for 15 hours a day, only getting up to eat, pee and pretend he's not an alcoholic while he teaches classes on Zoom.

I've had a rough go the last few years with employment/career, but things might turn around for me in as little as a few hours. It's a combination of having to deal with poor boundary management in some situations, and bad situations outright. I'm not where I'd like to be in life, but I'm not old--just old enough to consider that I won't be here forever. But every day I become more aware of how my childhood set the stage for my life.

I don't consider adult life to be hard, when things are working well -- it's just that they often don't. I'm okay with life, but only because I have the tools to make it what I want. The day to day kind of sucks.