Younger people catastrophize; she's not crying about her software job, she's crying about what she perceives as the "obvious failure of her entire career starti

Younger people catastrophize; she's not crying about her software job, she's crying about what she perceives as the "obvious failure of her entire career starting now". When I had a dubious run of bad job interviews and crappy life choices just post-PhD, my wife delivered what we still refer to as the "living in a van by the river" speech. :-) No-one cried, but it is very easy for inexperienced people to wildly extrapolate from a small set of data points to a trajectory of disastrous life failure.