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Ask HN: How did you get yourself out of a rut?
129 points by atleastoptimal on March 20, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 92 comments
Depression, unemployment, lack of confidence, fear. I'm certain there are many on here who had high potential and feel they've squandered it.

For those who have been there and managed to get out and are now living a life you're proud of, how did you do it?




For me I had a little phase of not understanding the despair and hatred I received for forking Audacity at the time. I didn't understand why people would do that, and neither why they decide to have "fun" being a bully online and lying about things that never happened. When /pol/ and kiwifarms came at me, I wasn't sure how to deal with that, especially because most rumors supposedly happened when I was asleep, not even reacting to what was happening at the time.

So it kind of resulted in a phase that you are describing, where I kind of gave up on open source and gave up on doing the things that I loved to do before.

What I can recommend, heavily: shut off your phone, go outside for a couple weeks, no tech, no internet, nobody nagging or forcing you to do anything. And listen. To nature, to the environment, to what you think. Take with you a notebook and a pen, and write down your thoughts. Persist on not going online, and fight the addiction.

Social detox and meditation is much more efficient than one might think, if you have no predefined goal on what you want to do. If your goals are set by external influences, you won't be happy with it.

Best wishes, I understand how hard it can be sometimes. Don't lose your head in things you don't want to do.


I watched this yesterday and it mirrors your advice about disconnecting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLRmLC2LFT8

A big part of "finding yourself" is likely related to introspection, which is interrupted by constantly being bombarded with attention grabbing mechanisms.


I love love love this- you are 100% right

> shut off your phone, go outside for a couple weeks, no tech, no internet, nobody nagging or forcing you to do anything. And listen. To nature, to the environment, to what you think. Take with you a notebook and a pen, and write down your thoughts. Persist on not going online, and fight the addiction.


Cal Newport's book, Digital Minimalism, is on this topic of disconnecting. It's not what I was expecting going into the book, but it was very interesting and something I hadn't really considered before. People today spend little to no times with their own thoughts, and always have some other form of input pushing their mind one way or another, be in a social feed, podcast, book, news, or music. It is very easy to always use those things to fill any void with distractions.


Omg hey! Good advice.

The one bit I don't understand is:

> I didn't understand why people would do that, and neither why they decide to have "fun" being a bully online and lying about things that never happened.

Like, do you have an autism diagnosis or something? You're claiming mystification at a basic, rudimentary feature of human behavior. It's like not understanding humor or something.


God damn! This hits, and it also hits in its simplicity.

Thanks :)


I have felt a a sort of fog/rut for years now. Figured it was just age. Doc checked my testosterone level and it was super low. About 10% of what you would want.

Started taking T via a gel/lotion and after about two weeks I noticed a significant change in my productivity. The rut/fog was gone, I was working like I did 15 years ago.

Prescription ran out, was out of town, basically missed 10 days. Fog was back, a week on it again and it is gone.

Moral of the story, don't try to "will" your way out - see a doc, make sure everything is working right.


I highly recommend trying HCG which is the safer option initially and preserves fertility. It also prevents testicular atrophy.

Depending on your Hypogonadism however, you may not see great results, if you have primary then it won't do much but for secondary cases you'll see your T levels increase.

In any case, doing TRT + HCG is ideal for most secondary Hypogoands. If cost is not an issue, it's a good thing to add to your protocol and for many people it might be the missing link for libido improvements should TRT alone fail.

I Started with HCG mono, now I've been doing TRT + HCG for 24 months. Best decision I've ever made and it basically saved my marriage. I had no sexual function before.


I know it is a minor things, any change in your hair loss?

I'm asking because because there are studies that links T to DHT to hair loss.


i think it almost certainly will accelerate hair loss if you have MPB, my T has barely risen since starting treatment and even i have noticed the difference in hair loss.


Yes. I don't have a family history of MPB, I've been taking T after a doctor recommended it and my hairline started noticeably receding within 6 months.


Why not take finasteride as well to offset it?


None for me at this point, but pretty early in the process


currently in the same boat, although the gel isn't helping for me. i actually got a letter from the doctor this morning today saying that he basically doesn't believe i've actually been using the gel, so that's going to be fun to deal with lol.


Out of curiosity, how old were you when you got it checked?


44...have had some health challenges in past 4 years including a heart attack. Weight loss flat lined and other things not responding properly to meds so I started searching for answers as to why, found some correlation data with T values and asked for a test.


The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. Not only will you feel good about helping others and get that feeling of productivity, seeing what others are dealing with will also give you perspective on your own problems and a renewed sense of hope and energy”. Volunteer somewhere. Help a friend out. But try to do it in person where you can get more of that human connection.


> The best advice I been given: “when your problems seem overwhelming, get busy solving other people’s problems. …”

As someone in the midst of trying this I can tell you personally it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I think I’m starting to realize that this person is beyond my capability to help and all the time I’ve wasted helping them could have been spent improving my own situation


> it’s not all it’s cracked up to be

> this person is beyond my capability to help

I think there's something to be said about the difference between "solving other people's problems" and "solving someone's problems". If the whole idea is to not be so invested into one life and get perspective, volunteering somewhere ought to be on a different league then trying to sort one specific person's life.


> I think I’m starting to realize that this person is beyond my capability to help and all the time I’ve wasted helping them could have been spent improving my own situation

From my personal environment: there are many people that are beyond my capability to help.


Yep!

It sucks, but libertarians were right. ;p


Came here to recommend doing good deeds for others. I find when I'm doing things for the benefit others I feel a lot better (as long as I'm resourced enough to do it). A therapist used to tell me that gratitude and doing good things for others were the most effective evidence-based behavioral interventions for depression.

That said, depression, fear, and lack of confidence are multi-faceted things with many different mitigating and exacerbating causes. Even diet and digestive ability can play a role! I find light exercise to mitigate the effects, too. But a sense of warm-heartedness toward yourself and others will be helpful no matter what.


It's always a eucatastrophe[1] for me. Some random event occurs and it gives me something to focus on. Maybe a person shows up in my life, or an event, or an idea. Contrary to common belief, trying to pull myself out through sheer will and habits never worked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucatastrophe


I love your website and your games!

So wholesome to see someone still loving to use the 6502 :)


Thanks! That means a lot.


Love your games as well! Have you considered packaging them for Steam and pricing at less than 5 dollars? (i.e. a single pack of all your NES games) - if you promote to a few YouTube retro influencers you might make a few sales. :-)


Thanks. I might sell some one day, maybe as a physical cartridge release as those have better margins. Mostly though I want people to enjoy my stuff, so a lot of what I release is free.


Make it on both steam and cartridge.

Expose you and your work.

Both are beautiful


I went anonymous for this one and it's all my fault. I really messed up. I had it all- wife, stepkids, job, homes. I had a good life. I miss my old life. I miss my baby. But it's all gone now and I can never have it back.

I basically lost everything... due to my own paranoia and listening to family members I shouldn't have listened to who didn't agree with my marriage to begin with, I complained to the wrong people when I should have just gone directly to my wife about my concerns and I let them bud into my life for no reason.

Now my wife is gone, and soon after I lost my job, then as I was driving around getting rid of my belongings, the wheel of my car fell off and then my car was gone, and then I had to sell my properties to get myself out of debt.

And I had just enough to buy a new used car. then I got a job working for a company that provided me with a company vehicle, and then I do some DoorDashing after work when I can. Both are helping me make the payments on the vehicle. I'm technically living out of my personal car. My realtor was nice enough to lend me his driveway to park the company vehicle. I'm over his house a few days a week to pick up the company car for work and they usually put me up in motels or hotels around the state so it takes care of my housing needs when I'm not sleeping in my car. It's just a contract job and will probably be over in a few months but it works for now. Once it ends, I'm planning to leave the state to somewhere warm if I don't kill myself first.

I made a few really bad decisions that cost me everything. I won't get into it as I already mentioned the consequences of my actions. I destroyed my life. I am now just living a very quiet life. I removed my social media presence. I'm not much involved in the tech world anymore. And I'm living mostly like a nomad. Life as I knew it is gone. I fight depression everyday... hoping I don't wake up, sometimes wondering if I should just drive into oncoming traffic or off a cliff and hopefully that will take care of things. After I lost my wife, I tried starving myself for nearly 6 months in hopes for death, but all I did was lose 50 pounds. I'm just existing now. I lost all purpose in my life.


Thank you for sharing.

Life rarely fails to prove that there is no limit to how bad it can get. Perhaps all our grand narratives of love and moral truth are the veil we keep between ourselves and the undeniable reality of what everything at some point decays into.

I think what is important is that you are alive. You can still think. You still have the freedom to create a future. Far more paths lie ahead for you than what is easy to imagine.

This is a little cheesy, but if anything, I promise you this. Reading what you have written, I will, with serious aim, seek to be to a better person to myself, my family, and those I may come to know in my life. I have not been perfect, I have wasted so much time, but as long as I am alive, I have free will; I can choose.

I want you to remember then that the path I'm now set on, whatever greater amount of good that I do than I would have otherwise, it was because of you.


There is always another chance. As long as your heart is beating, your body is functioning, there is hope, even for the hopeless.

Try and find a source of strength and connect with it, then it will give you the hope and strength you don’t have now. Or it may be a friend, a religion, God, a community, a historical figure, a living figure, that energy is out there and when you connect with it you will feel it again.

I hope you find it, sending a healthy portion of blessings your way.


It’s probably a bad idea, but having a child seems to have made things significantly better in some ways. I’m still prone to anxiety, but existential fears have been greatly reduced.

I attribute this mostly to lack of time to think too much, so you can probably find different ways to achieve the same effect.

I think somewhere along the way I’ve also become adult enough to realize that there will be days I accomplish absolutely nothing and that that is fine.

I stop comparing myself to the best people in the world, and start comparing myself to the best people in my immediate environment, and I feel a great deal better about myself.


I've had the same experience with kids.

After having kids, I'm living more day-to-day, and I don't care about so many things I used to care about.

For me, seeing my kids smile washes away any feelings of anxiety and dread.


I suppose this is one benefit of having kids young: you can go straight from school into a purposeful life without the intervening anxiety and dread that a lot of people experience.

I was one year out of grad school (age 24) when my son was born. My peers are just now having their kids 10 years later, but I definitely don't regret it.


>It's probably a bad idea


> but having a child seems to have made things significantly better in some ways

A child answers the existentialist "why I'm here? what's the point?" question on a primal, fundamental level. The child needs you, your purpose is to care for it.


This phase lasts until they are teenagers, and the questions come back but stronger.

Unless you enjoy the answer to "why I'm here" being "driving my teen around to hang with their dubious friends", "nagging about homework", and "human paycheque."

Just sayin' :-)

I love my kids, but children are not the answer to getting meaning into your life. Having a mid-life crisis in your late 40s & 50s long after you've had kids is a cliche for a reason.


I'm not that far along with my kids, but from my friends & family I see some examples of involved parents having a very close relationship with their children well into their adult years.

> children are not the answer to getting meaning into your life

Because the meaning may end (after many years/decades)? That seems strange, what answer to this hunger for meaning is guaranteed to fulfill you forever?


I'm pretty close to both my teens. But the relationship shifts. And every month you feel that they "need" you less. And they tend to go through a phase in mid-adolescence when they really make that clear, too...

If your primary answer to the question "why I'm here? what's the point?" is taking care of your kids, you're going to end up with a widening gap as they age into adulthood, move out, and you spend and spend less time with them and they become more independent.

Oh well, I'll get back to you in 5-10 years when they've fully adult-ed.


> If your primary answer to the question "why I'm here? what's the point?" is taking care of your kids, you're going to end up with a widening gap as they age into adulthood, move out, and you spend and spend less time with them and they become more independent.

It's my primary answer which will do its job for many years. Again, it's not like you'll find a life-long meaning in building a B2B startup. It might work for a couple of years, then you need to find something else.


Maybe, that gives you 10-15 years before you have to consider the question again :)


eh, life expectancy for US males is 77 by that point you're practically dead (sarcasm). More generally, worrying about a mid-life crisis feels silly and probably only compounds angst.


This answer is IMO a strong distractive strategy. I don't have children, but as a former gamer, I do know a thing or two about distraction! What I found: after the distraction has run its course, it will come back to you.

Distraction suppresses. It doesn't actually allow you to work through it.

That's my experience at least.


See your sibling comment:

> A child answers the existentialist "why I'm here? what's the point?" question on a primal, fundamental level. The child needs you, your purpose is to care for it.

A child is not a distraction from something else, they become your entire purpose.


Some things cannot be worked through. Sometimes a distraction lasts long enough for things to sort themselves out. That's my experience, at least.


Forcing myself out of the house, even if I'm still just scrolling HN and youtube, not doing it at home encouraged me to get back into networking, getting into networking helped me connect with people, connecting with people made me feel more hopeful. As cliche as it is, getting moving really helps, go for a super long walk, really really breath deeply right into your belly and just walk with purpose (the purpose of just walking), I also just do some weird silly dancing around my kitchen to music (I'd kinda forgotten that can be quite fun). However for me, the most helpful by a mile was psilocybin. That whole "this too shall pass" thing is a real thing. Sending you good luck!


> However for me, the most helpful by a mile was psilocybin. That whole "this too shall pass" thing is a real thing.

Also for me two big things. I have over a decade and a half of experience with LSD and psilocybin and it has in my view the role of what ecstatic religious experiences had in the past. I can't really bring myself to believe in any doctrine deeply enough to experience that anymore but psychedelics are very similar in terms of insight, epiphanies and catharsis.

> I also just do some weird silly dancing around my kitchen to music

I've come to see this in my life as a sign I'm happy more than a cause. When I'm depressed I don't much listen to music or dance, and the opposite is also true.


Beware of toxic definitions of squandering your life.

Even successful people let failures define them and get depressed. Set acheivable goals and celebrate those, trying to do hard things is a constant struggle and is mostly failures for me, you need to see progress. Even if you do not think small things are worth being thankful for it actually helps to train yourself to see positive things.


You must have something going on to feel better - be it work or studying, well, at least it'll make it easier. You can combine that with psychotherapy, physical activity or SSRIs if needed, and most importantly, keep a good balance with fun activities. You must get rid of your "learned helplessness", by achieving something from your effort, if you feel like you have it.


I figured out which industry I wanted to work in (data analytics at first) and just took action. Studied what I needed to for the jobs I wanted, and took classes to advance my skills. The confidence I gained from this was great. I also prioritize outside time and going in long walks when it’s nice out. That’s huge for me.


A good psychotherapist could of course provide the environment, support, guidance and relationship to help you find your way through this stuff

This is how I found my way.

Back in 1992 I, ran my own business, my first child was 2 years old, had a wonderful partner and was financially secure.

Just after my child was born I suddenly has access to my childhood years which had been out of my awareness (dissociation). Vivid dreams and memories terrorised me through every waking and sleeping hour of the trauma I experienced as a child.

My friends had always talked about their childhoods, holidays, school friends, memories but for me it was like I did not remember anything of my childhood.

The pressures of life took their toll and overcame me. I became clinically depressed and abandoned my life, partner and child and moved into a squat. I spent the next year just wasting away.

I then found my way into psychotherapy for the first time and over the next 3 years changed my life.

After 3 years of Transactional Analysis I told my therapist that I wanted to do what she was doing. I began my training a therapist and have never looked back.

There is nothing that is written that says life is easy, its just that we need a new set of tools at different times and different developmental stages throughout life.


Never looked back? What about your wife and child?


They also never looked back


Regarding unemployment, in my brief experience of that, that does sap confidence, more than one might expect. And conversely, starting back at work seems to fix it instantly. At least it did for me.. 20 yrs ago I returned from some time out of Tech and some time spent travelling, it took me about 3 months to get a job at that time, it was new year, market was still not recovered from dot-com bust, and I was starting to get a bit despondent. But literally 30 mins after starting the new job, boom, life's back on track again. Like a switch flicked. I think the moral of the story is sometimes, take the first decent job you can even if its not a perfect fit.


> I'm certain there are many on here who had high potential and feel they've squandered it.

I had the same feeling, I still do to some extent. But genuinely, I also have noticed that society isn't equipped to deal with my high potential. My issue is: I want to stay authentic, I find it (morally/ethically) hard to put on a mask or role. Therefore, I bring my whole self to a job interview.

The problem with that is that: suppose you'd order a coffee at your local coffee chain and you see the barista, and they would bring their whole self while making you that coffee. How would you feel about that? You'd think "I only wanted a coffee, but now I also have to deal with all this extra stuff." That extra stuff may be good or bad, but it's still overhead. Well, that's the problem I'm running into when applying for jobs. No one in my family could've told me that this would happen. It wasn't part of my upbringing. No one at uni told me this. I had to painfully piece this together myself.

A large part of society doesn't fully get integrated into work culture. Some people fix this by being okay with lying or bending the truth. I wasn't. However, the workplace is not the welcoming environment that university is. At university all one has to do is to show that they're ambitious and work their asses off. That's not the case in the workplace. The mechanics are much more tribal, and also culturally different.

I wasn't prepared for it and I wasn't willing to sacrifice my integrity over it. So yea, my high potential simply could not have been utilized.

Also, it shows that markets are inefficient. The market incentives for me to find a job aren't strong enough and the market incentives for companies to find me and use my talents aren't strong enough either. I'm convinced there are companies out there that I'd be able to transform due to a personality/culture/skill fit. However, both me and those companies are having an incredibly hard time finding each other. To be fair, it's not an easy task. And market dynamics sure aren't fully solving it with the "invisible hand" that it offers.

It is what it is. I choose to stay as optimistic as possible.


>> And market dynamics sure aren't fully solving it with the "invisible hand" that it offers.

If I take my ideological glasses off for a second its kinda obvious why - invisible hand is just and "observation" dressed in lots of wishful thinking from economists. In reality it is just useful model that almost always fails if you look close enough

>> The market incentives for me to find a job aren't strong enough and the market incentives for companies to find me and use my talents aren't strong enough either.

But on the other hand - you seems somehow not to notice that todays world is all about team work and the only way most people can test you on this is by using their intuition -so if you feel off to them they will write you off as not a cultural fit and by all means they may be right - the harsh truth is that there is not many people that want to work with people that are true to themselfs (which usually means they have all barriers and filters discarded and are at best annoying and at worst offensive)


> the harsh truth is that there is not many people that want to work with people that are true to themselfs (which usually means they have all barriers and filters discarded and are at best annoying and at worst offensive)

That's what I was trying to depict with coffee/barista example. The example highlights the problem: the customer simply wants coffee brought to him, not to meet a new person - perhaps for a small quick back 'n forth chat but that's it. In the work force, people see other people mostly for the services they provide first and foremost and they want it to be a pleasant interaction. They don't care about you, they care about (1) the service and (2) it being pleasant/positive. I get it, I also find it dehumanizing, but I get it.

And it is a harsh truth. I've tested to put my morals/ethics away and just mask my behavior. Suddenly I jive much better in the work force. The only thing I don't jive well with when I do that is my own conscience.

> so if you feel off to them they will write you off as not a cultural fit and by all means they may be right

What I was trying to depict in my previous comment: the harsh truth is that not everyone is enculturated to fit in. Some people never got a real chance to get the memo. That's how talent is wasted. It's an unequal playing field. This is especially true for people in economical disadvantaged positions.

For example, a friend of mine is a teacher and he teaches some economical disadvantaged boys. Those boys believe that being able to beat someone up is actual strength and what it means to be a man. They care about all the stereotype things that a person cares about when living the "thug life". Some will grow up like that in their adulthood, in my experience. For them, it's tough to integrate into any working lifestyle simply because they've had a traumatic past where no one had the culture of trying to solve conflicts with words rather than with violence (speaking from enough experience). Schools try to correct for this and are failing, and I'm speaking from experience in the Netherlands. I can't even imagine what the US is like.

It's an unequal playing field. I've made my peace with that a long time ago since being born in NL is also unequal. But given that, it bares to be repeated. How you grow up determines a lot of how you're encultured into the work force.


It's the assholes who say "I am being me, deal with it" as an excuse to get away with bad/rude behaviour without actually knowing what their true self is


You're currently labeling a group of people as assholes that seem to say something similar to what I wrote. Please assume that I'm commenting in good faith [1]. I can mask my behavior as well and I have done at places, it sucks. HN is not a place where I want to do this.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I am not labelling you an asshole, I am saying there are people who use that as an excuse and this group make the other group look bad


Fair enough, I can see that.


I've recently been in a rut and while I still have a lot further to go I've been feeling better over the last couple of days and here's what helped:

- going to therapy

- taking PTO

- going outside

- hanging out with friends

- cooking a meal

- going on a date

- going to LA and getting sun

- reconnecting with old friends

I'm not out yet but I feel like with some time and effort I can be. How did I do it? I think there are really two parts of this - helping others and asking for help. I've always enjoyed the first but never done the second and that was really holding me back.


When I travel, I'll take all my luggage out and put it back in, do laundry, shave, etc. Basically, a reset. Then I'll treat myself to something familiar, maybe watch a movie I love. It's a good way to ground myself again and start afresh.

Longer ruts seem to come from routine and aimlessness. I find that giving myself time without devices or entertainment helps. A bicycle ride is a good way to clear one's mind.


Treat yourself as a marginal factor, not the totality. You bear some brunt for what's happening in your life- but not the majority of it. So focus on what's inside of your control.

I have a weird life. I've had years where all the wind was in my sail and life was bussin, bad bitches and making money. I've had years where literally nothing I did worked, everything was useless.

You'd be surprised how many variables are actually outside of your control. Does everyone love you? Does everyone hate you? People can and will blow hot and cold.

It's better to have a value set and just stick to it. Whether you want to be a CEO or live under a bridge. Anchor yourself in something worth believing in, even if attitudes around your values shift around.

This is how you maintain self-respect no matter how well or how poorly your life is going.


Getting back with friends helped me a lot. I have been living in another country for a while without close friends. Once I have moved to my _real_ friends for a few months, my symptoms have improved a lot.


Doing sport 2 times a week helps me a lot. I also enjoy spending time with my friends on weekends and with my family during work days. All this helps a bit but still sometimes I feel exactly like you do.


I decided to downsize my life by selling a relatively expensive car and my condo and see how long I can go without working.

I have no desire to go back to frontend development even though I can make way more doing that than anything else.

I'm hoping in a year or so I'll be ready to get back into tech, but right now I have no desire to. So much of the industry just seems toxic to my mental health.


Same problem here. It doesn’t get better in my experience, the more you stay away the less you want to go back in. Over the last 15 years I estime I’ve worked 50% overall. This time I haven’t been working for over 2 years.


Forgive yourself.


I'm a believer in inertia. When you're at rest, getting going is hard. When you're in motion, staying in motion is easy.

So what I do when I'm in a rut is literally anything. Take on a hobby project, learn something new, do volunteer work, anything. I just force myself to do something. The important thing is to get into a state of motion. Exactly what that motion looks like isn't important. Once moving, you can change directions.


Similarly, I think of it as "if things aren't working, something has to change". It doesn't matter what changes as long as something does. It both proves that change is possible and the world doesn't end with change.


for me i feel totally detached from my work, it's just a means to an end, a salary

as such i find it very difficult to care beyond doing the minimum not to get fired

yet the work gets ever more complex and layered with technical bureaucracy and ever changing landscape of idiots to deal with

i am planning to quit by eoy. thats my solution. life is too short to waste it.


In-person yoga classes have turned out to be dramatically therapeutic for me, which surprised me because I was already seeing a therapist, and I thought I didn't enjoy exercise at all.

(If ClassPass is in your area, they have a free trial that makes it easy to try out many different studios.)


Yep. Being at the back of a yoga class always works for me


You're just a person like anyone else. Let go of the idea that you're special. Also forgive yourself like you'd forgive someone else telling you the same story. Don't hold yourself to a standard you wouldn't hold someone else to.


Drugs (methylphenidate, better known as "ritalin" in the US)


Concerta for me, but the same result. I feel a lot more stable and optimistic about the future. AND I get things done instead of sitting on the couch in a daze.


This could help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies


Maybe you need to reframe or challenge your beliefs.

Research emotional biases. A combination of believing in your own specialness, loss aversion and retrospectiveness can be a toxic combination.


It's difficult. If you can't find someone who truly cares about you, might as well getting a job, any job, ASAP.


one small success at a time. Its a very deep mantra once you start applying in life.


TL'DR: friends..if you can find any.

I'm in the same place. After TED talks and much self guiding/discovery materials. I realize it really comes down to friends or at least someone you can confide in without judgement. Although therapist can help, but that just a guide. You still need to find friendships. I can't lose faith in humanity but omg...it's so *ukin hard. Worse for me as fulltime dad of a toddler where my times are mostly preoccupied so ideally for me. Need someone else who's going through the same.

Ex prgm mgr, coder from FAANGM now triaging my zillion side prj ideas for gold, but same..everyday is a struggle. Can't focus, lack motivation and direction.


At one point I had a bookshelf full of books on depression, fear, lack of confidence, etc., so it's impossible to answer such a broad question in a comment, but let me comment on the "high potential" sub-question.

Personally I no longer think that "high potential" is a real thing--I think of it more as of a mental trap that can play part in depression (it definitely played a big part in mine..).

What I mean by that (and it's not my own concept, I'm sure I read about it in one of the aforementioned books), is that the only reality that exists is the one we're living in right now. There are no other realities--unless you're dr Strange of course, I'm assuming you're not :)--where you're better off.

As a consequence, your place in this reality is exactly where you're supposed to be at this very moment.

Note that if you're in a bad situation, I'm not saying you should be happy about it, not at all!! I'm saying that given there's only this one reality that we have, if you are in a given situation then you are in the given situation and no amount of "what ifs" will change the present moment. It will only make you more depressed.

So this is basically acceptance. But the term "acceptance" can mean two different things to different people--I don't mean acceptance as in resignation or passivity ("it is like it is so it's all hopeless"), I mean something like "as of this moment the state of the world is XYZ and there are no other worlds in which I'm in a better place, so there's no point in beating myself that I could have done ABC. If I could have done it back then, I would have done it. If I didn't do it then that was the only possibility back then because as of now we're at the point XYZ, which is a result of me not doing ABC before (and of bazillion other events, so me doing ABC might still not end up the way I would think).").

Tongue in a cheek--I'm sure I could have written it more clearly :))

EDIT: I think I lost the "high potential" thread along the way. So: IMO "high potential" is a mental construct that can easily depress us. "I have/had such a high potential and I haven't used it. I'm a failure". No, stop!! This is a fantasy land!

You might have the highest IQ in the world (or the most flexible muscles, or whatever other advantage there can be). And you've definitely been using your IQ in your decision making, almost by definition. And you made the decisions you made yourself, correct? (I'm ignoring all the external interferences, as we're talking about "high potential".) Which means that you used your potential.

The fact that you can easily generate 100-digit prime numbers out of the top of your head doesn't mean that you can be top scientist just like that, because the scientist also need a reliable schedule, curiosity and tons of other things. And so the "high potential" fantasy is basically focusing on the prime numbers and skipping the other factors.

Now you can beat yourself that you lost you high potential because you didn't get up at 6 day by day to do some research. But that's exactly my point--you didn't because you didn't think it was advantageous to you, or maybe you did think that but you've had undiagnosed ADHD and that made it an order of magnitude harder. So what I'm saying is that your actual potential has been exactly what you observed!

And if you're not convinced, or if you disagree with me, then I have one final question: let's say you really had a high potential and you really failed at it, and you're really a failure (all BS, but let's assume otherwise). Given that the past is gone and you cannot do anything about it, how does beating yourself help you?


Reflect on what you did wrong, but do not keep beating yourself up over it?


Yes! "Extract" your lessons from the past but with the future in mind.

One big caveat--it's "wrong" only by your today's standards. Back then it was most likely "right" (willful crimes aside), that's why you chose to do it! So I would strike it and leave simply: "reflect on what you did, (...)".


> So what I'm saying is that your actual potential has been exactly what you observed!

+1; How close is my paraphrasing to what you were thinking?

achievement(person) = potential(person) - adversity(person)

People implicitly assume the 'adversity' term is negligible. But in reality, the 'adversity' term can very large, and vary widely from person to person.

[yep the "equation" isn't dimensionally consistent. It's meant to be a "completion prompt" to your internal LLM to translate those tokens to a longer paragraph.]


At first I thought your equation sums it up perfectly, then caveats started to appear and then caveats to caveats. And in an hour I realized a PhD could be built around it :)). So I won't give you a simple answer, but I'll write some loose thoughts, likely incoherent, etc., OK?

- I think the only real/tangible/measurable/graspable part is the `achievement` side. Although personally I wouldn't call it `achievement` but sth like `present state`. It's because `achievement` invites comparison, and if someone already compares themselves to some idealize figure, then I think it would be more helpful to use neutral terms. Also, it cannot be measured--you can measure net worth, but not empathy or compassion.

- On the right side of the equation I would treat both the potential and the adversity as unknown and fixed. By fixed I mean that in each moment of the past they had some fixed value, and by unknown I mean that it's practically impossible to measure their values. We only know the result (i.e. the left side), but not as a measurement, only as a state, so to speak.

- I can see that thinking about the potential and adversity as separate terms might be useful if someone beats themselves about wasted potential, but then can look at the equation to remind themselves that the potential is always tied with adversity, they go hand in hand together and looking only at the potential is like looking at your assets but not on your mortgage.

- Another useful angle of the equation might be that if someone is beating themselves about not working to decrease the adversity, then they might notice that working on it would "consume" the potential points! (E.g. time is required to use your potential, but if you spend it on dealing with adversity..). (But then it might be dangerous as it also conveys they idea there is a measurable, standalone thing called "one's true potential", which I don't believe exists.)

> People implicitly assume the 'adversity' term is negligible.

I thought about it for a short while and my take would be that people share (discuss) their adversities with others all the time, but when it comes to formulating the equation they often tend to end up with sth like:

    expectedAndMandatoryAchievement(person) = perceivedHighPotential(person) /* - adversity(person) */
I guess I'm saying that people don't think the adversity is negligible, but they tend to completely cover it with a newspaper when thinking about the potential vs reality.

And this is a straight path to depression...

OK, let me end here! I hope my LLM didn't hallucinate too much, but it's closer to stream of consciousness than to well though out arguments, so buyers beware!

Last but not least, thank you for a great prompt--it made me think about the topic from a different angle!


Let me know if you find anything that works for you.


My perspective continues to change, and my feelings about death increasingly line up with what I've liked to say for years: "I accept that I will die and I'm okay with that." I'm in no hurry to die, mind; life is wonderful, even when it's shit (well, like a cold shower, it's a lot better once I'm through the shit). Increasingly I'm okay with who I am, where I am, and what I've done, freeing me up to do what I really want to do.

Mentally converting a lot of my physical stuff into shit to give away (so much gratitude to George Carlin), and actually giving it away (no regrets for any of it, either), has been a huge part of this process.


Sure, I've bottomed out pretty badly twice.

First time was late teen years and early 20s. I experienced some sort of mental illness issue that hasn't recurred since and I never even attempted to get treated or diagnosed. I saw something similar watching the Temple Grandin biopic years later, but it involved shaking fits and banging my head against furniture in my dorm room. I dropped out of college in my first semester and did not immediately try to go back, only registering for classes at community college to keep my dad's health insurance coverage, then dropping them, until the school suspended me and I moved onto another one, being lucky I suppose to live in LA County with a car and having access to endless community college systems.

Within two years, I was working at Disneyland as a show performer when the enterainment division at parks had layoffs. At the very same time, I'd gone so off the rails in personal life that I'd married a woman I met in a writing class on our first date, and she proved to be unpredictable and unstable and destroyed our apartment, so I got evicted at the same time. I was too ashamed to even talk to my parents and lived on the street for a few weeks.

Getting out of that one was just a long, slow climb. I divorced and met a woman on the Internet and moved across the country to be with her. We only stayed together a year, but it was a very positive experience. I lived with her mother, a gracious, lovely person who otherwise lived alone, an Italian immigrant who is still the best cook I've ever lived with and instilled in me in a love of food and cooking that endures to this day. Her father was great to me as well, taking me through rotations of meeting different friends of his in various career fields to get an idea of what they all did, to think of what I might want to do with my own life. I eventually moved back home and just got serious. Went to yet another community college, but this time actually took the classes, spending nearly every minute not in class studying in the library, then worked a graveyard shift job detailing restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm, another amusement park. It wasn't a great life and I still slept in my car pretty frequently, but I was young enough to endure this and I did until I could transfer and eventually graduate and have a real adult life.

The second time was in my late 30s. I experienced severe spinal degeneration and years of treatment made it no better. I herniated discs all the time doing mundane everyday tasks, things like standing up to get out of a car, putting dishes in a dishwasher, attempting to put pants on. Eventually, one day I was getting dressed after showering in the morning and started spasming. This was not like any other spasm I've ever had and I've had them since I was 16. I fell onto the floor, and then every 30 seconds or so, felt like someone had attached jumper cables to my lumbar spine. My entire body seized up each time like every muscle cramped simultaneously. This went on for nearly three days. I've never wanted to shoot myself so badly and even owned a handgun, but I couldn't move to get to it. I didn't go to the ER because I would not have been able to get into a car and didn't want to spend on an ambulance.

Finally, when it subsided, I got a steroid shot that let me move somewhat normally. I'd been working remotely for a boutique hedge fund building machine learning models, but as a contractor, so had no disability or PTO or anything and simply couldn't work. Once I was able to move again, I got a referral from one of my wife's contacts at her job and found a reasonable job pretty quickly, and serendipitously, it required a security clearance but they were willing to sponsor it. This was lucky because that takes a while and I was going to need spine surgery and would be missing some time right off the bat, but they didn't care and started me anyway, granting the leave even though FMLA doesn't require it until you've been with the same employer for 12 months.

The surgery did not go well. I sprung a cerebrospinal fluid leak afterward and experienced severe nausea and disorientation. I couldn't eat anything but saltine crackers and lost 20 pounds within two months, and was not even close to overweight so this was not a happy loss. It seemed to go away on its own, but instead of going away, it was instead leaking into a cyst, which eventually swelled to first size, hurting so badly I could not let anything touch that part of my back. When I got in for an MRI, they were so panicked by what they saw that the spine surgeon cleared his prior appointments and I got surgery 8 hours later.

I recovered okay from that one, but by this time, years of this stuff happening had taken its toll. My discs were almost non-existent at L4/L5 and L5/S1, so narrow that my vertebrae were sometimes bone on bone and the osteoarthritis and sciatica from that was sometimes unbearable. Both my legs went numb at times and I constantly felt like I was walking on pinpricks or being electrocuted in my feet. I had to have my 3rd spine surgery in the span of 16 months at that point, this one they called the "mother of all spine surgeries." A multilevel anterior lumbar interbody fusion, in which they cut open the front first and cut out your spinal discs through you guts, replacing them with metal spacers, then sew that back up and go in through the back to attach screws and rods and saw off a piece of your hip to seed a bone graft that eventually turns your lumbar spine into one long solid bone that grows in and around permanent titanium hardware.

The span of time over which this all happened, nearly two years, was far and away the worst time of my life. I couldn't always walk, and when I did, required a cane at best, a walker at worst. I needed assitance rails installed into my bathroom, replaced my regular bed with a hospital bed. I stopped wearing regular clothes because they were too hard to put on. Sweats and slippers were about the best I could do. I needed an assistive device to put socks on because I couldn't easily touch my own feet. My wife was often emptying bedpans and bottles for me when I couldn't leave the bed.

But I did recover. Once I could walk, I did, often a lot, hours a day. I knew I was going to need to be stronger to better support my shit joints as I aged, and started with resistance bands at first because that was all I could do. Progress has been slow and frequently interrupted by nagging annoying injuries and joint swelling, but progress has been had. Today, I lift six days a week for close to an hour per session, some combination of barbells, dumbbells, and a cable machine. I run nearly every day, though it took me five years before I was brave enough to even try because, at first, one attempt to just run across the street felt like someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer at every footfall. If you don't catch me limping up the stairs or needing to grab the bedside table to get out of bed, an average person on the street would think I'm perfectly fine. I'm in my mid-40s now but look like an underwear model. I've never been fat, but the need to be so diligent and disciplined just to get through a normal day, plus my continued love of cooking my own food, has translated well into very careful food logging and diet tracking, which has enabled me to become extremely lean while also building noticeable muscle now that I've been lifting for years without a break.

I did so well at the new job years back that I moved around frequently to troubled hotspots, given special assignments, promoted rapidly. Luckily, this happened during the famous zero-interest free-spending VC years, so recruiters were calling all the time, and even though I was never going to move to Silicon Valley or New York (I've lived in Texas now for nearly 15 years), I was able to find remote work that resulted in a tripling of my first post-surgery salary, at a company that has no office and was all-remote before Covid even hit, so there is no return to office crap going on. This leaves me able to work out and cook rather than spending my "free" time commuting or dazing onto social media when I get bored at work but can't leave the desk.

All in all, I think I can see a few common themes in how I recovered from bad times. Developing better habits and sticking with them for many years, being patient and persistent. It takes time to build anything. Another is the kindness and generosity of others. I may have been streetbound forever or dead if not for some girl from New Jersey and her family that saw something in me and took me in. I'd have for sure killed myself during the spine problems if not for the support of my wife, not to mention we needed her second engineer's salary to get by when I couldn't work. We've never lived such that we need two salaries, but it's awfully nice to have a fallback when one goes away for a while. My company didn't need to give me medical leave before I was FMLA eligible and they could have not hired me at all knowing I had already scheduled a major spine surgery. If you asked for advice on whether to even disclose that on Hacker News, I can guarantee almost everyone would tell you to lie, but I did not and it worked out.

Ultimately, we live in communities for a reason and I don't know if you can do this alone.

This, of course, all depends on what level of rut you mean here. Maybe if it's general malaise, then testosterone, meditation, or digital detox is all you need. Lucky if it's that easy.


GPT summary for those interested:

Throughout their experiences, the author emphasizes the importance of developing good habits, being patient and persistent, and relying on the kindness and support of others. They attribute much of their recovery to the generosity of friends, family, and colleagues, highlighting the significance of community and interpersonal connections.

The post concludes by suggesting that overcoming such challenges often requires a combination of personal effort and external support, and acknowledges that solutions vary depending on the severity of the situation.


Go back to the basics.

Being part of this community, I'd suspect that there's a high probability of you being "in your mind" a lot of the time. Don't forget that that world up there is mostly conceptual. The map is not the terrain. The map is a lot more stressful. If you want to stay conservative, just change things up a bit to involve your body a bit more. If you're more radical, reinvent yourself completely. Some suggestions:

> For those who have been there and managed to get out and are now living a life you're proud of, how did you do it?

I'll answer the above question first:

- If you have the savings, travel. Plenty of places where it's the plane ticket that'll be the costliest expense. If you have the freedom, go for many months. Get a few books on topics you want to learn and go work through them from a place where the cost of living is permissive.

- Start taking courses in an unrelated, more "grounded", field (cooking, plumbing, masonry, woodworking, etc).

- If you already have some other skills, try turning them into a small business. Don't aim to change the world. Aim for basic cost of living before anything. Don't optimize your business for anything further until you have reached that goal. Premature optimizations will kill your business before whatever inefficiencies your analytical mind will undoubtedly spot very early in the process. Keep things super simple and non-optimal until it's absolutely clear that some factorization has short-term benefits.

- Find a physical activity to practice regularly. Don't rush the progress, savor it. Swimming, a martial art, yoga, etc.

> Depression, unemployment, lack of confidence, fear. I'm certain there are many on here who had high potential and feel they've squandered it.

I'm leaving this here in the spirit that you might be interested in trying a different approach to experiencing life. If this doesn't resonate with you, that's ok too.

The "squandering" of life is an outlook to it that is the product of cultural beliefs that we're meant to do "something meaningful". There's no evidence that there's a way to fail or waste life. There's reason to believe that every experience of it is valid. I'd suggest to start with some topics in philosophy as an entry point. Our culture is predominantly materialist and our thinking patterns generally already align like this, so I suggest to counter-balance that bias with contents in eastern thought (Alan Watts is a good entry point), idealism (A. Schopenhauer, Bernardo Kastrup), and stoicism (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius). This might help you expose possible underlying cultural beliefs you're operating from and why they're possibly wrong. Philosophy alone can raise existential questions. I strongly advise to supplement that exploration with a nondual contemplative practice where you will learn to explore and perhaps solve your version of "the world's problems", from within. Some good authors/speakers that I can suggest to begin with would be Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, and Rupert Spira.

Good luck.




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