As someone who struggles with cycles of depression, but let's call it funk, I relate to the downward behavioral and thought spiral it can put you inside. Yet, inevitably, I DO get out of it. For me, it's been a combination of things, largely changes in the external environment that force internal action. I tried medication and eventually (after a painfully long time trying to find the right "fit") found some combination that got me through. But I didn't like what it did to my thoughts and, more importantly, to my perception of the world. Not to mention the physical side effects (including headaches, fogginess, and nausea), depression medication, as prescribed by psychiatrists, made me feel inevitably less ME. I did not like that. I do not like that.
So what did work?
When I was younger, I "solved" the issue by moving. I would move cities, move apartments, move jobs, and so on and so forth. And that worked! Such significant external changes forced a coming out of sorts, forced me into action that kicked me out of my spiral. It also lead to new experiences and a lot of learning! Great for young me. But as I get older and have more responsibility and weight outside of myself in my life (now including wife, children, dog, and house), I cannot in good conscience keep doing the same.
I know how this may come off, but I did try micro-dosing more recently and found it supremely helpful, not as a long-term solution, certainly not as a means to enhance my ability to achieve more in any particular task, but supremely helpful in terms of kicking me out of a vicious and unrelenting downward spiral. Enough to find my footing and make my way out, replacing it for a more upward trajectory. Once footing is found, I can stop and, on my own, work my way up. The last time I did this was several years back, and we'll see how the cycles go from here.
All that to say I have found no perfect solution. I still search, though not as desperately as before. And time, more than anything, has its sway.
Why write this? Perhaps I'm just feeling introspective in the new year.
It's hard to explain to people who only get sad what real depression can do. In my case exacerbated by childhood/early adulthood trauma and homelessness, as well as ADHD, bipolar type II, and tourettic OCD. Some insensitive people who think they are smarter than health researchers think that's just a string of labels, but anyone actually suffering from those afflictions understands that they are typically comorbid and can have aassive effect on the range of highs and lows experienced in just five minutes, much less a day or week.
My sister tried killing herself twice in the last two years. That situation financially drained me during a time when I'd just been forced out of a CTO position during a hostile takeover, and, among other circumstances, caused me to completely crash out. I stopped talking to everyone, dropped a lot of responsibilities and hobbies, and just retreated to my comforts for a year. Hardest wave of depression I've had since I was a child getting beaten regularly, or a young adult having immense existential crises around my future prospects.
I can already tell that it will take a dew years to become normal again. Just hoping this was my early midlife crisis and that things will cruise from here for a while.
I wish you the best, and my email inbox is always open if you want to chat.
Hah. I also remember, that i wanted to move cities, to get away, to have fresh starts. But you know, in the end, i am always me, i always take myself with me. The change was only a temporary fix.
I am more on the journey to not give in to my thoughts anymore. They are not helping me. They are a tool, but they turn against me. Why should i listen to them? I try to ignore. And less ego. Helped me a lot to overcome my anger.
Also thought I could get away from myself by getting away, and at times it helped a bit, but also often didn't. Sounds like you're on the path to feeling better. Less ego for the win.
Author here. So sorry to hear about your depression and medication trials (ugh, the side effects..), though I'm heartened by the sentiment that you "inevitably DO get out of it. Fortunately these things are usually temporary, however long that temporary might be.
I hadn't consider that my own moving around in my early twenties was a way to try and 'break out' of the cycle until you posted this.
Wishing you and your family the best in the new year!
Same. None of our alerts are going off, our EC2 instances seem happy. No user reports of problems which we would likely be getting if there were S3 issues for 40 minutes.
This really speaks to me and is one of the driving philosophies when we created our pricing model for Warmintro, which ironically has a mission very close to the author's example: "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
We make it easy for private groups to create their own online community portals, and it would be very hard to stay true to community-focused ideals, if our revenue didn't match the mission.
For this very reason, a sizeable chunk of our customers migrate to us from Facebook groups due to privacy concerns. Facebook makes money on your data and by serving you ads, that is the direction that everything they do leans. The groups that they host suffer from that fact.
We made Warmintro paid from the very beginning. It made things harder for us in many ways since we acquire initial customers more slowly, but it also guarantees the direction of our priorities. Because at the end of the day, how you make money determines the ultimate direction of any for-profit company.
I've struggled with this quite a bit in my own life. I find the "No Zero" mentality to work well for me. Treat every weekday as a "No Zero" day. What does that mean? It means if my goal is to go to the gym, even if I literally walk into the gym, do a pushup, and leave, that counts. It's more than Zero. Consistent non-zero days eventually help break me out of my depression. And when I miss a day... well forgive myself and keep going.
All easier said than done of course, and sometimes a no-zero goal is just to get out of bed... but it has helped me.
The article on FiveThirtyEight "If You Stop Thinking Of Exercise As A Way To Lose Weight, You May Actually Enjoy It" [0] really helped me realize something similar.
I think virtually any doctor would agree that my half-ass, crappy exercise at the gym is still almost certainly better than me sitting at home and watching TV, even if it's not the most optimal way of doing it.
I meant it as factual rather than inspirational. It is daunting for sure, but every person in this journey will find out about it as soon as they take that first step. And most people around will not understand, and will not be able to help and support appropriately without that understanding.
I would have responded with exactly this -- the post that you linked. The four points that the author makes really make a difference if you can internalize them.
How do you feel about monthly 1:1's? This was my approach though the topic was less about keeping up to date with what the team/person has been doing, and more about how they are feeling, if there any roadblocks I could help them with, if they are interested in the work they are doing, etc etc...
I think of my job as a manager as supporting and empowering my team to be productive and making sure they are happy with their work, this was just one way for me to do so.
Given your preference for less 1:1's, I would be interested to hear your take.
I was not expecting that downvote. That must be a manager ;)
Anyway, I think monthly would be fine as long as it focused on career growth, goals, etc. I am a tad bit of biased since I have had bosses who use 1:1's to stay up to date with projects and work while ignoring the entire team and was on the golf course the rest of the week.
Of course I am not talking about deliberately keeping your boss in the dark, that is a problem for another thread. I am not for 1:1s being used for "phoning it in" from a lazy manager.
Software ones can be good or bad, but software adjacent ones can be downright ridiculous.
A running joke at my last role was that I would keep trying to get the company to pay for my Scrum Master Training, which conveniently had a Hawaii option.
But in all seriousness, what a silly "Certification".
That's a good way to put it. As my economics professors liked to point out, Black-Scholes was a self-fulfilling prophecy in that the success of the model was determined by the fact that everyone was using it (or some variation of it) to price derivatives.
If it had never been published would it still have been as accurate? Who knows.
When you dive deep it's easy to think of economics in terms of math and forget the fact that, unlike physics, it is a social field and there is no right and wrong aside from what people agree on.
Been getting blocked by recaptcha more and more, do any of these tools handle dealing with that or workarounds by default? Tried routing through proxies and swapping IP addresses, slowing down, etc... Any specific ways people get around that?
I feel this problem is especially significant in San Francisco. Having lived in several other cities, I can say that, at least for me, this was never a major issue before living in SF. Meeting other programmers and people in tech out in the real world used to be a pleasant surprise. Now it's just a given.
Coffee shops, climbing gyms, museum nights, hiking meet ups, hanging out in the park, etc etc... I, like apparently every other person in tech, enjoy these things. I do miss the diversity of thoughts and lifestyles to be found in other cities. Not that SF doesn't have such diversity, it's just that I never before had to make an effort to find it outside my normal activities.
Well SF is clearly saturated with people working in the tech industry. As we're seeing more and more on HN, there's a huge amount of people in the tech industry who are in it for reasons that do not include a passion for technology, writing code or developing things.
So you've a huge amount of people fairly dissatisfied with what they're doing 40+ hours a week, in an area full of similar people, and who have the disposable income and time to look for more in life outside of those 40+ hours.
So it's not surprising more cultural/outdoor/etc. things are flooded with people from the tech industry in SF, I suppose, where elsewhere they would be both less people in the industry and those that are would be slightly better geographically dispersed.
So what did work?
When I was younger, I "solved" the issue by moving. I would move cities, move apartments, move jobs, and so on and so forth. And that worked! Such significant external changes forced a coming out of sorts, forced me into action that kicked me out of my spiral. It also lead to new experiences and a lot of learning! Great for young me. But as I get older and have more responsibility and weight outside of myself in my life (now including wife, children, dog, and house), I cannot in good conscience keep doing the same.
I know how this may come off, but I did try micro-dosing more recently and found it supremely helpful, not as a long-term solution, certainly not as a means to enhance my ability to achieve more in any particular task, but supremely helpful in terms of kicking me out of a vicious and unrelenting downward spiral. Enough to find my footing and make my way out, replacing it for a more upward trajectory. Once footing is found, I can stop and, on my own, work my way up. The last time I did this was several years back, and we'll see how the cycles go from here.
All that to say I have found no perfect solution. I still search, though not as desperately as before. And time, more than anything, has its sway.
Why write this? Perhaps I'm just feeling introspective in the new year.