I'm addicted to being useful • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#71

Post by n4r9 » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #63

n4r9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver. Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. You can help by being curious about what they're say…

> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective. If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot. If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then vali…

It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.

One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#72

Post by choonway » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.

So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#73

Post by ambicapter » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

zhisme wrote: post #45

giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)

> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”.

Is this correct? From the footnotes.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#74

Post by amiga386 » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #7

> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…

It's Not About The Nail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#75

Post by tayo42 » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #59

tclancy wrote: post #7

> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It b…

> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support. I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a w…

The advice to surrive the workplace is to not act like a human lol

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#76

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

y-curious wrote: post #28

amelius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised nobody asks whether you're at fault here, or she is. Next time, maybe ask her to come up with solutions, e.g. do a brainstorm session. If she then says she doesn't really want a solution, you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.

There’s an old adage that is very important to logical people (as software engineers are, for example). “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battle…

That really depends if you like (or are mostly indifferent to) the new table. If you hate it then it becomes a game of "who of us two is more important to satisfy with a table". Definitely not a position you want to be in.

Relationships must be two-way streets, always.

I have made quite a lot of concessions for my wife for the current rented flat -- simply because I did not care about 99% of the things she wanted to change. I only gave her a rather loose framework: "this must fit these physical dimensions as you yourself can see here in this corner" and "I am not willing to spend hundreds to change something that is currently performing to 90% of the standards of both of us" and "how difficult it is to ship and install this?" -- and she has been mature and considerate enough to understand the boundaries and nailed them every single time so far in our 11.5 years together. And she still got almost everything she wanted and is visibly happier with the environment.

When both sides have preferences they feel safe sharing but are still reasonable above all, then things are going smoothly and flow naturally.

Of course there are the rare exceptions where I just gave up and said to her: "OK, I am leaving this to you, figure all the details out and I'll just pay it at the end of the process". I was not unhappy but she did not want to budge on a few things and I ultimately just stashed the old thing in the garage in case she understands she made a bad deal or the new thing was underperforming.

I agree strongly with "pick your battles". You have to be able to read the person in real time. It's actually much easier than most technical people think.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#77

Post by mcv » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.

It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.

I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#78

Post by alphawhisky » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #53

This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play. Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well. Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing. Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play. All stems from inability to have sy…

I like this thought. It is interesting to look at our current societal/economic systems on the earth and realize none of them will survive the death of scarcity.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#79

Post by scjon » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #77

Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use. It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outsid…

I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.

Re: I'm addicted to being useful

#80

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Jan 20, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

lazide wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip - that usually just makes people angrier haha. (Source: twice divorced, and was - per the court - always right, but it didn’t help me one bit). The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.

> The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now. Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solution…

Like with everything, none of the both extremes are good.

What helps me in situations where people talk about it for the umpteenth time is trying to drill down and find the root cause with carefully worded questions. I think I might be ready to become a therapist, lol. Though my fuse is quite short due to my own stress so I don't put myself in the "I am your emotional trash bin" kind of situations.

So to me even the situations you describe can be made use of. Think of it as a long-running background task with many steps; after each retry you get a new exception stack trace. F.ex. during conversation #7 you might understand one or two causes of the problem but at conversation #12 you might already have a nice root cause and you can then try to gently nudge the person towards addressing that.

Of course you are not mandated to. It's all about what you need in this current phase of life as well; you don't have to be people's therapist. It's just what I find super interesting the last year or so -- root-cause analysis of human problems.

But when I understand that somebody just wants to whine and be a constant victim, I mentally check out. Not worth the joules that my brain would spend on that person.