

Ask HN: Why So Stressed? - cblock811

It seems like lately there are a lot more posts about people who are extremely stressed, to the point of possible self harm. Is there something going on these days that I&#x27;m oblivious to? It&#x27;s a bit concerning to see these posts becoming more frequent.
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panjaro
Why Stressed? Let me tell you why I'm stressed and since last week thinking of
turning of my life.

1\. It's not ok to just be a programmer who goes to office, finishes work and
comes back home. 2\. It's not ok to just know about few things. You need to be
full-stack engineer, mediocre developers are bad as the internet says. 3\. Oh
what are you doing at job, real programmers leave their job and pursue your
dreams. 4\. Oh you don't have a dream Very bad. You need one. 5\. Oh you don't
have passion you must have one. Look at all the founders, genius people who
have become millionaires. 6\. Oh you know javascript and jquery. Yes you can
learn any new framework but Do you know Angular.js? How about Node.js. 7\. Oh
you work only with C#. A good prgrammer needs to know python if possible
haskell etc etc. 8\. Oh you have worked for 5 years but do you have a blog? do
you have contributions to open source, do you have github account with regular
commits? No? You're not good programmer. Sorry no job for you. 9\. Oh you know
a bunch of things but you don't know more than those silicon valley
programmers. They are genius. Why aren't you genius? 10\. Oh you are
approaching age 30 but you're not famous. Why aren't you. Some kid made an
app, some guy created this great business...why didn't you. 11\. Add the list
goes on.....

I have realized even if you are good at what you do, it's not enough. You have
to meet right people at right place in right time who can give publicity and
credit to even your small work. That makes you look good. But people who are
not at the right place at right time, they think how the hell did that guy do
it. How is he now regarded as great. Then the mind goes crazy. People feel
down and depressed.

I did the same. I left a perfect job. Why? Well a programmer takes risk,
learns new things. After a year? I have no job, no income, I'm unhappy,
depressed. Because I was chasing a mirage.

~~~
draper625
This perfectly encapsulates my feelings as well right now, even though I'm not
as old. I wanted to make games, start a business, or make cool apps. Now I
spend 9 hours a day in an "enterprise" role resetting passwords and writing
trivial backend code for third party apps.

I'm a night owl, but I get up every day at the crack of dawn, and I'm too
exhausted almost every evening to be social or work on side project ideas. I
have a project at home that I really believe in, but with my exhaustion in the
evenings and life's endless distractions filling my time in one way or
another, it's been over a month since I really got in the "zone" for a few
hours working on it.

I went to a shitty school, so now I try to study algorithms and other fancy
whiteboard interview-esque things I need to know (and didn't get a solid
foundation on) if I ever want one of those fancier developer jobs at a company
with 21st century environment, policies, etc. It gets so tiring to forgo time
with family and friends to study in your spare time and write cover letters to
places you'll never hear back from. And I live in a small town that I want to
move from, how am I supposed to take enough time off unnoticed to do any
meaningful amount of phone calls and in-person interviews?

At the end of the day, it's easier to play a few games of Halo, go to bed, and
say you'll get a little closer to somewhere you want to be tomorrow. And
that's what I told my self a year ago. Will I be in the same situation next
year? I've worked full time enough to see how easy it is to just give up on
any dreams and settle for making the only focus of your life raising a few
kids in a nice neighborhood house with white picket fence, and forgo efforts
of reaching your full potential in favor of worrying about things like mowing
the lawn and keeping beer in the fridge.

------
DanBC
Suicide is an extreme form of self harm. It's very common - one of the most
common forms of death, and the most common for men under 49.

Then you have a wide variety of depression, anxiety, amd stress. These
problems are very common. If you include the milder end it's easily one in
four people. (See eg the office for national statistics which also has this
figure).

Some of that is situational. Some of that is long term entrenched behaviours
and thinking. But it's very common. When you're talking to people who have
very stressful work - not startup founders so much (who'll have understandable
stresses) but office workers with TPS reports it's not that surprising to see
people talking about it.

People aren't taught concepts like "resiliance", or how to talk to each other
to spot potential problems before they get too serious, or how to seek help if
help is needed.

For example: you'll often see people on HN talking about exercise as a
treatment for depression, and they are convinced that it is and that we have
loads of evidence for it. Exercise is almost always a good idea, and it may
help someone avoid getting depression (although there are plenty of athletes
with mental health problems) but the evidence for exercise as a treatment just
isn't very good yet. And if it does work it's possibly not endorphins.

There are a couple of campaigns I particularly like.

Time To Change is a UK organisation that tackles mental health stigma.
[http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/](http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/)

I particularly like the work they're doing around men. [http://www.time-to-
change.org.uk/talking-about-mental-health](http://www.time-to-
change.org.uk/talking-about-mental-health)

There's another UK charity that particularly tackles male suicide: the
campaign against living miserably.
[https://www.thecalmzone.net/](https://www.thecalmzone.net/)

And there's an Australian org with a typically robus Australian name (which
they don't censor on the website): soften the fck up:
[http://www.softenthefckup.com.au/](http://www.softenthefckup.com.au/)

------
MalcolmDiggs
I think it's a combination of a few things:

1\. It's that post-college freak out that many many young people have ("What
am I doing with my life!").

2\. Many people who jump into startup life let the demands of the job strip
them of their old healthy habits (like eating well, working out, drinking
rarely, hanging out with friends) and this compounds their anxiety and
depression.

3\. It's not particularly socially acceptable to cry for help in person. While
we're totally used to seeing it on HN I can't remember the last time I heard
of anybody at a startup being candid with their coworkers about their
depression. You can often tell it's happening to someone, but nobody talks
about it. Which only makes people feel more isolated and depressed.

But all those things have been constants...nothing is new about them. Why are
we seeing the posts becoming more frequent now? I think it's just that people
are becoming more comfortable with expressing their feelings online. I don't
think more people are stressed, just that more people are talking about
it...and this is the medium in which it's _okay_ to do that in 2015. Hopefully
2016 will be different, hopefully it will become more and more acceptable to
have those conversations in person.

------
ak39
Why? Because a lot of folks have bet more than just the farm. Their life
savings, their careers, reputation, personal relationships, their health -
everything for their respective ventures. And business, like always, remains
brutal.

Not lately, always.

~~~
cblock811
Yes startups have always had these risks but my point is that lately we are
seeing more posts from people about these stresses.

------
throwyawa
Where I work I feel stress/burned out. A lot of it is the under currents of
the culture where I work. There is a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. Some
senior devs are outright sarcastic and hard to deal with. I try to avoid or
minimize the cross over of my work with those people. Sometimes I engineer
solutions or try not to involve certain people so I can get things done
quicker, in line with expectations of time taken which is always less than you
need to do it properly.

I am expected to get up to speed with things in a nano-second, work on
spaghetti code and break down months long projects into sub-day chunks and
provide deadlines (with justification based on a plan) within a few hours.
Then when inevitably the plan slips there are signals of 'disappointment' and
'how can we improve / move faster' next time.

We have a process management system that is in practice worse than any other
Scrum / Waterfall I have worked with. Think getting an algorithm to schedule
your work, but your boss has other ideas, but you need to keep the algo AND
your boss happy.

[Insert 1000 other rants here]. You can imagine.

Anyway solution is simple. I am looking for a new job.

------
delbel
Came here to share a breathing technique I picked up a few weeks ago that
helps me deal with stress called the 4-7-8 breathing method. It's promised as
a go-to-sleeping technique but that didn't work 100% for me. However, it helps
me feel relaxed and centered!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4G31LGyog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4G31LGyog)

