4 ms·

Thank you for sharing your experience. combined with the 'exact' same experience as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item

Thank you for sharing your experience. combined with the 'exact' same experience as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774, I have been in this phase for couple of years. I am trying to fight it (have to due to peer pressure to make money). It has come to my losing interest in anything. I used to love programming for the sole reason of enjoyment. I haven't made any changes to my lifestyle (I probably cannot). Last 3 weeks, I have been in the 'isolation phase' My work place, it's a farce of work with people pretending to get work done with unnecessary complex sub systems. My family raised concerns (they understand my phase, my wife often tells me to pursue academics, as I seen not raised for the corporate world). It's only when three members in my family asked the same question, I started to wonder. I have a thousand things in my mind and a struggling pain of not accomplishing anything. I encounter this every single minute of the day. I am so stressed by the whole lagging behind the world that I feel I cannot learn anything new. I have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months. Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. The thought that someone started learning math about 6 years ago when I too picked interest and the comparison istantly drives me for a whole day of depression. During those days, I don't absorb a thing of what I read. I shake my legs when I think and I think all day. I am supposed to working on getting xml schema related work done and I am here shaking my legs and thinking. I have frequented HN enough to know to that I should visit a doctor. But I know that it will not work for me. I don't have the comfort in talking to a 'stranger'.I have heard few here: try a physically involved job. I want to try out (but feel I cannot due to the money factor). I have to earn the bread. I fight with myself saying 'there is do or do not, there is no try', the difference between doing it and thinking about it. I have all the motivation inside, but I just cannot bring myself to do anything. I can never finish any task that I start. This has been going for years. My sanity is still in positive numbers, thanks to my wife. could you share how did you come out of this phase (perhaps there is much more than just moving to a different job). Do you have any personal stories? I ask this because, as I understand this is not the nature of the job but an intrinsic battle that you won.

SMrF 16y ago
I am off to my daily commute. I'm happy to say what worked for me, so I'll type something up once I get home. Just wanted to let you know I will be responding.
SMrF 16y ago
I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you. The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these. The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back. I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again. And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life. And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then. And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.

SMrF 16y ago

I am off to my daily commute. I'm happy to say what worked for me, so I'll type something up once I get home. Just wanted to let you know I will be responding.

SMrF 16y ago

I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you. The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these. The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back. I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again. And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life. And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then. And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.