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Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

ramones.dev

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Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#161

Post by ramon156 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #86

My 2c, stop looking for excuses, stop assigning your self worth to the quality of your work. Mistakes happen, bugs are impossible to avoid. You may need to add rigid processes to your work to avoid the most egregious examples, but you just have to live with the fact that you will write bugs. If you find you write more bugs than your peers and they have more impact than your peers, that's fine maybe you are not cut ou…

I do agree that working for your career isn't the only options. Sometimes it's just to earn a living.

The things that both of them have in common is that they're sustainable. If you do not like your current position, make it sustainable for the time being. I was unable to do that, twice, so I think I'm at a point where I cannot do what I need to do.

Even the fun work (FOSS) is something I cannot sustain for 40 hrs a week, despite how much I enjoy it.

Time will tell, though

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#162

Post by jrowen »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #99

> My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows: > Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else. If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning syste…

> HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state.

Nice paradox you've created there.

> People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.

I don't know that that follows logically. Whatever people they might reach out to in the real world -- be they friends, relatives, therapists -- also actually disagree about things and don't have all the answers. HN comments come from the same general pool of people, who also potentially have experiences and insights a like-minded individual might find valuable.

> You are not going to just build a better planning system one day.

No but you may be able to over time, through trial and error, and connecting with others and hearing about their experiences. I don't think there's anything wrong or unhealthy about exploring it in this fashion and I don't understand your choice of tone.

I do agree that setting a goal for the year of "not making stupid mistakes" is a (stupid?) mistake. It is more of a lifelong journey and process, of striving rather than achieving, and not setting unrealistic expectations for yourself.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#163

Post by bluecheese452 »

alwa wrote: post #148
pibaker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's going on with all the open proselytizing on HN these days? I don't remember seeing them five years ago but now in every thread about personal struggles there is someone trying to convert people. Always to the same religion, too. Edit: some people have replied saying why religion is helpful. Ok. But that doesn't answer my question of why is it showing up so much on HN lately.

Feels a lot more like an offer than a hard sell to me. I do sense the same thing you do, though; that there’s something of a religious revival swelling, at least in the West that’s overwhelmingly represented here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/10/20/growing-shar... Economist via archive: https://archive.ph/M7NW0

Feels completely inappropriate to me. Imagine someone came in with cancer and were told to pray it away. This is is the mental health version.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#164

Post by ramon156 »

neuralkoi wrote: post #21

On your goals: 1. It's okay to make mistakes. Pain + reflection = progress. 2. Try to shift your perspective so your sense of worth isn't tied to your work. 3. Anytime you say "I should", "I need to", usually this is sign you are blindly following some sort of cognitive script [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMghRYqk8o&t=1844s

I didn't really think about your third bulletpoint, that does make sense.

I think it's also good to be aware when you're lying to yourself. An easy example is how people talk about their gym membership.

"Oh, I would go, but I am so busy with X", or "I am already doing Y, so I don't really need to go". It's always a non-reason, while the true reason is that they just do not see a reason to go.

I don't get why this happens with work, though. I didn't love my job, but I definitely loved the colleagues, and I felt like I didn't do that bad of a job (ofcourse I see this differently now, I was doing a bad job).

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#165

Post by ramon156 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #94

> I do not feel like I have the mental space to keep track of everything I need to do, and I do not even feel like I am aware of what I'm doing anymore. Have you tried keeping a document logging what your thoughts/steps while doing a task were? I find this helps me stay on track. You don't need to write it in a clean way, just bullet points to reconstruct the steps you've taken, progress, decisions you need to take e…

I was actually doing this in my last month, which was probably too late in my trajectory.

I even kept daily voice notes on all the issues I had that day, and what I should do to fix it. It helps, but it wasn't enough to save my job.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#166

Post by econ »

bsoles wrote: post #149
brightball wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah, so good for our souls?

Yes, but it isn't a requirement for doing those things. Atheists are just bad at doing things together.

If that means we should burn all the bibles I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#167

Post by ramon156 »

jxckshit wrote: post #28

This sounds a lot like the shame and frustration people with ADD feel when untreated. I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.

You're not the only one commenting this. I do have to say it's quite re-assuring to know that this is a possibility.

For the people you know that have ADD, was medication sufficient? Did they still end up taking therapy for their neurodivergence? I wonder how long it takes before I can be a functional programmer again. I know it'll take a while.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#168

Post by ramon156 »

Xortl wrote: post #10

I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression. I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it wa…

I resonate with you word-for-word. I kind of assumed people were also struggling, but I didn't realize how much struggling it ended up being.

I will post an update every now-and-then. It might not be very software-related (sorry dang!), so I will try to not post all of them on here.

I wish you the best as well! And you are free to contact me, I think talking to someone in a similar boat helps a lot.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#169

Post by feoren »

m1aw wrote: post #6

I know this pattern from myself. I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming. Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code tak…

> Turns out I have ADHD

You just magically found this out when the Mental Health Diagnosis Fairy visited you one night? You spent thousands of dollars for a neuropsych evaluation where the result was 40% reality, 40% chance, and 20% how the evaluator was feeling that day? You self-diagnosed by reading Reddit threads? You somehow magically found the one psychiatrist who is willing to talk about ADHD without immediately assuming you're just trying to score some Ritalin to sell on the street? You got diagnosed by Dr. ChatGPT? What the actual fuck are you talking about? Everybody has ADHD, nobody has ADHD, who fucking knows? It's not possible that you actually know this.

I'm 100% convinced everyone who is like "get help, talk to an expert" has never actually fucking tried, because it's not possible.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#170

Post by ramon156 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #30
zeafoamrun wrote: post #24

I thought I was depressed but then I got divorced and realized my depression was situational from being in an awful relationship. Consider causes like this as well, it is hard to see when you're inside it.

Also be careful with reaching conclusions too quickly. I ended up breaking a 10+ year long relationship after thinking that was the problem, I ended up even more miserable than before. Begged her to take me back after some years, and luckily we're happily together ever since and still married :) (with lots of changes from the first iteration, obviously)

Wow, without sounding sarcastic, that sounds like a healthy relationship! It really shows maturity to own up to it and choose each other again. Hoping the best for you both :)
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