Ask HN: What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?

IMO Here is the problem with what you are saying. Who actually cleans toilets today? Immigrants (largely illegal ones). This is just like the goods we import from China. There is a slave class of people who clean toilets and work in Chinese factories. I agree with the economic principles where innovation will drive improvement, but illegal immigration and free trade interfere with this.

I hope that basic income passes in Norway. It would be quite interesting to see what happens.

Do the least amount required in your current job to pay the bills, then, on the side, improve your skills. You don't need to climb up the corporate chain and suck dick until it's your dick being sucked.

The "Good HS grades -> Good college -> Good junior level job at a corporation -> stick at that corporation until you get a good senior level job" is firmly stuck in the 60s, 70s and 80s for a reason. The highest salaried jobs in programming are going to kids job-hopping from company to company in the Bay Area, graduating from average colleges (some minority not even having a degree) working at top companies who's HR departments publicly disavow the previously worshiped legitimacy of the GPA (word is, Google HR isn't even allowed to look at your GPA).

I recently glanced over this test Andreessen-Horowitz was giving out to recruit software engineers for some in-house development thing they were doing. In the description for the application, they said : "A resume is a plus, but you don't need to have it."

I know that, obviously, people with college degrees from top colleges have a higher rate of success in the corporate marketplace. Killer resumes and years of experience will likely get you very far. Sticking around at a successful company for a lot of years will likely get you a very respected senior role with really awesome stock options.

But the point is, for whatever very small but still existent minority, 19 year old college dropouts that have done 3 6-month jobs are still getting hired. Which means that a killer resume and corporate ladder climbing aren't hard-and-fast requirements anymore -- the only hard-and-fast requirement is merit. Obviously years of working within a single environment will get you a lot of merit, and obviously Google will start locations in Ann-Arbor and Pittsburgh just cause UMich and CMU are there, but that's just because Google values those areas for their high rate of merit, not for their pre-existing prestige.

And what OP is describing certainly shows that he is not properly developing his merit.

Now, in the 60s through 80s, there weren't really too many resources available to improve your merit on your own. So if you were in a shitty position you mostly just grit your teeth until you got in a slightly better position to improve your merit that involved less teeth-gritting and more enjoyable skill growth, and then used that skill growth to get into a slightly better position, ad infinitum where the base case is your retirement. So the best advice was to stick in a single corporate environment until you stopped being a junior and started becoming a senior because there was no more efficient way to develop your merit.

But nowadays, there are resources aplenty and much more efficient ways of developing merit. It's very easy to get cheap access to field-defining textbooks and online lecture videos and PDFs and ebooks and cheap personal computers with which to tinker around with and yadda yadda yadda, all of which can be done by any reasonably smart and dedicated but unexperienced young person, all of which is a much better use of said young person's time than climbing the corporate ladder until you got a job that didn't make you want to kill yourself.

So it's very possible to develop your skills and your merit without the prestige that you used to need in the form of a killer resume or long corporate history or stellar college grades.

So as long as you mastered your data structures & algorithms, your theoretical computer science, so as long as you mastered programming principles and can really say you're an expert in a language because you spent many man hours hacking away with that language at home, so as long as you know your OO, so as long as you prep up with the plentiful blog posts there are about mastering interviews (even for specific companies -- Steve Yegge has written a couple blog posts about mastering the Google interview, and for specific languages -- and I've very recently come across a very useful and thorough blog for knowing the ins-and-outs of Java for mastering interviews that demand expertise in that language), you can get an awesome job. Even if you never land a interview with Google or Facebook (because at that scale, so many hopeless hopefuls apply and you couldn't possibly scale HR with the rate of applicants, so you sort of have to rely on less-than-perfect prestige requirements like college degree from a decent college or networking with other good companies in the Valley. But I'm saying that the modern age allows for extremely low barriers for finding quality applicants and getting quality knowledge to become a quality applicant, and while there are certain institutions where you still sort-of need to reply on prestige, for the most part the industry is becoming a lot better) , you can definitely land a phone screen with an awesome software shop at least better than whatever shitty position you're currently in, and then you can get the interview after you display competence in the screen, and then you can land the job. And after that, it's all improving : improving your skill with awesome workmates in an awesome environment, and then eventually moving on to greener pastures at ... greener?... companies if it is your desire to do so.

Note that I'm not saying getting a more fulfilling job is easier by any means. Top companies will still only take top people. Just that, as barriers between companies and applicants lower and modern technology makes judgment of qualification more efficient, "top" is going to rely more on merit than prestige. And you do not gain any merit from staying at a shitty job.

If your job is making you miserable then by all means, find another job.

But every job has tasks you don't want to do, has projects that you don't 100% agree with the direction of, etc. Every job.

The problem at hand is a relatively unknown psychological issue.

There are many theories about motivation. Most of them don't account for a specific type or situation, where someone is just not able to do a certain piece of work, without having a reason like lacking the time, health, skills or energy. These types are often just dismissed and dubbed underachievers, because, for some reason, they fail to acomplish tasks which they should be perfectly able to do. They procrastinate and do a million other things first or just give it up completely.

It doesn't matter whether this task is about work, university grades, doing lab-experiments, the laundry or else.

== The theory ==

There is a austrian psychologist, Brigitta Rollett, who coined a term called "Anstrengungsvermeidungsmotivation" which translates to "effort avoidance motivation" or "stress avoidance motivation".

The first essential postulate of the theory is, that having the "motivation" to avoid stress, or efforts that cause stress, isn't an illness or failure, but rather an evolutionary advantage to prevent burnout and similar issues. All people tend to avoid activities, which cause them stress or more specifically the very basic emotion of disgust. People have different pattern and triggers which lead to the feeling of disgust. This is heavily primed by upbringing, schooling, bad experiences etc. You seem to be disgusted by "useless features". (I am too. :))

The second essential postulate of the theory is, that this disgust is more or less "invisible". Most of the time it goes unnoticed. It is such a strong emotion that people never even want to "go near it", because it would cause them IMMENSE emotional pain. This pain can even translate to physical symptoms like head-aches etc.

This is how the afore-mentioned "underachievers" are explained. They don't have a problem per se. As long as nobody forces them to do the specific tasks they don't like to do, they live happily ever after. People with a high IQ tend to learn a lot of these "disgust" pattern, because on the one hand they are often confronted with teachers, who don't understand them or meet them with antipathy and on the other hand they never needed to learn to deal with "repulsive efforts". Contrary to most people they get by, without ever having really stressed themselves. Should they come into a situation, however, where they HAVE or WANT to deal with a task, which for them is linked to disgust, they fall into complete despair. They do everything to get away from the triggered emotion. It's literally TERRIBLE for them to do some kinds of work, which aren't a problem for most others.

There have been many scientific studies, tests and validations of this (in german).

== Your situation ==

First you have to acknowledge and understand that what you are experiencing is an irrational and immensely intense emotion.

Emotions don't think. When you encounter one, you have to decide how to act on it. If your job sucks it's probably a good idea to just work somewhere else.

But you like your job. In your case, the emotion just tells you that you HATE this type of work-situation. And for whatever reason you are not able to just acknowledge that, bite the bullet and move on. (Which is how people are able deal with most bad emotions.) In this particular case your brain throws one hell of a fit. Neurologically speaking and simplified, your rational forebrain looses control over your amygdala and the "more emotional" parts of your brain.

== What you can do ==

You can always make sure the situation never happens again, and avoid the dreaded tasks, but this probably won't work without giving up programming.

What you have to apply are the same strategies which are needed to conquer other emotions-gone-wild like irrational fears.

~ You NEED to work on it SLOWLY but STEADY. ~

* The bad news: I hate to tell you this, but if you want to change your behaviour, you NEED to sit down and start doing the exact work which triggers this cascade.

* The good news: Each day, or session, you only need to conquer it ONCE.

Sit down for the task and start with the tiniest bit. Just open the first file. When you FIRST feel the terror overwhelming you, you HAVE to force yourself to keep at it and wrestle it down. When you feel the terror approaching a SECOND time, you can stop. If you have the energy to continue, do it, but I doubt you will. Don't stress yourself too much, or it will backfire. (You won't)

This might sound incredibly stupid, but be proud of yourself at this point, because you have just delivered an immense piece of emotional work and it's ok to be tired now. Even if you just typed three words.

Keep repeating this practise each day, twice a day or how you see fit, and slowly but steady the terror will fade. It will come slower, lighter, less often. If you keep doing this, i will GUARANTEE you that these shenanigans will stop. You will slowly replace the old neurological patterns which trigger your pain. (And pain is exactly what it is.)

Unfortunately there is no faster way for this. You can look into hypnotherapy, which can accelerate matters a bit, but working on emotions always takes it's time. I have applied these techniques myself for a couple of situations. It was immensely exhausting, but it's worth it and it works.

Good luck.