Ask HN: Why Is My Happiness Tied to My Productivity?

This really resonates with me. The part about purpose is something that I've seen as a separate struggle but you might be right and they're the same. I've brought this up to family and friends but they don't really understand. I tell them that I feel empty because I don't feel like I have a purpose. I don't feel like I'm doing anything meaningful. If my work ended tomorrow, people would quickly find another solution or probably just not need another solution.

My friends have moved at a different pace than me. They're married and having kids soon so I expected to see them less. I think sometimes I purposefully distance myself because of this fact.

I do have hobbies like reading and drawing but I also get stuck trying to figure out how I can make those into projects instead of just enjoying them as they are.

I find myself in your story, especially "dealing with my career is easier than facing those other parts of life I'm less adept at navigating". It feels easy to just dive into work and avoid everything else. Even the last part. Thinking about what I would do if I didn't have my job as a constant. I'm sorry to hear about your feelings of lack of purpose. I read a quote that I don't really remember fully but it was something along the lines of you don't know the answer because it's not the right time. So I'm hoping that the answer to my question of purpose reveals itself in time.

Thank you for sharing your story and insight. It's given me more to think about.

Just begin telling yourself you should have never had to earn your parents love with external outcomes. The love should have been free (this realization can make you break down and cry and it’ll be a really good cry, trust me). Really internalize that. Don’t be pissed about it, but always remember that daily.

Some small therapy (a few sessions) can help to articulate it and get it out. Should be okay. Basically you have to realize you have a dysfunctional version of self love from all of it.

You wouldn’t treat your own kid like that so that’s all you need to know. I was just reading a /r/ptsd (which is something you might have) about a girl who was single in her 30s and feels like a failure to her parents for not being married and having kids. It’s utterly fucked parenting, I hear about it all the time.

Also, your parents invalidating this is a form of gas-lighting. You’re gonna have to love the fuck out of yourself somehow, every last bit of you. Every little hobby, every little post, every little attire, every little imperfection, every little achievement. Your family didn’t know how to love properly and now you don’t.

As you start this process, you will feel shame. It’s part of the process. What kind of adult judges their parents like this? A fucked up one (seriously). Not fucked up as in “bad”, fucked up as in the conveyor built in the factory dropped you and you are fucked up. That’s okay, and your ass is going to have to deal with it (the most adult thing you’ll ever do, and it’ll take awhile).

PTSD is real.

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Lastly, people in life are not stupid. Everyone may not know everything, but just about everyone’s subconscious knows the truth. You can prove it to yourself by simply observing your emotions, they didn’t come out of thin air. You didn’t just hang out in a vacuum in space and return to Earth feeling this way and that way about things. Shit happened, you and the universe know it. Your soul will not let you rest until you heal it.

Best of luck!

Rent a private office. Preferably with 24-hour access. Wifi is a bonus and commonly included. It helps to have dedicated workspaces. A coffee shop could work if it has a good setup for coding & good coffee. Create the space for the project, and then you'll have the time for side projects.

As for design it takes time but being able to dedicate time to the top-down grand scheme and then go bottom-up is crucial for any size project. What are the fundamental requirements? Keep it simple. Deconstruct all aspects into single-purpose functions. One input, one output, & repeat. The ongoing pattern is to change the level of abstraction used for reviewing the project at any range, from a function to the whole project. These reflexes take time to build, and working on a side project daily is an excellent way to discover what patterns work best for your programming style and the project you're working on.

And big project ideas provide a field of side projects to discover. So wade into the water and find some fundamental piece of your larger idea. And then zoom in on that. When you're considering optimizations of compiled code to run a single binary on a static empty container image, you've gone deep enough.

Well, productivity is good. It's good to solve important problems and to move them out of other people's way, so that they can solve more important problems to move out of others people's way, and so on and so forth. It's probably a good and natural thing to feel happy when you've been or are being productive. I don't see a problem with that in a vacuum, that just seems normal.

What's less normal is tying yourself to being unhappy to being unproductive, which obviously sucks when you're in a productivity lull. I don't know what the solution is but I think that's the half of the equation I'd focus on.

Our minds thrive on the little dopamine hits we get from accomplishing something worthwhile. It can be something simple like cleaning your bedroom or losing 5 pounds. It can be coding a new feature or fixing a perplexing bug.

If your day is full of little victories, you can live a happy, fulfilling life; even if you don't do something grandiose like curing cancer or setting a world record.