How old are you? I am 34 and was recently reading my journals from college when I was ~21. I was continually lamenting my laziness and lack of direction, filled with worry too. I had high aspirations but no clue how to get there. Proceed to 10 years of absolute failure but learning the value of a determination to persist. Now happy with a mid-level job that I worked so hard to get, nowhere near the PhD or MBA friends I have, but that’s okay. Living in the middle of nowhere and that’s okay. Realize I can always get a job at a restaurant and at least pay rent. Idk, just hang around and keep trying and lower your standards. Maybe get away from your parents so you are forced to be independent.
I am working on the determination aspect but it is so slow and frustrating, plus any time I am learning, I get flashbacks of my own failures and also thoughts of how everyone else is so much ahead.
first, you don't need to reward or payback your parent. You don't need to feel guilty for the love and support of your parent.
second, it is never too late. you already had a time machine. your future 70 year old self transported you back so that you had awareness and wrote this post but you can't remember that you're from the future. But you do know that you can make a difference starting now. Don't aim for big changes. You will mostly disappoint and give up. Aim for small daily improvements. Procratinate a little bit less (just a little will do) . Learn a bit more (just a bit more is enough) every day.Time will be your friend and you will be a different person a year from now.
I do owe my parents, firstly because I am adopted and secondly, they went above and beyond for me in every way they could. Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate them.
I am trying small daily improvements now, for the millionth time. But the fear and the guilt is overwhelming, and I am never gonna catch up to other normal people, much less high earners. And then there is AI.
Look, I'm sad to say I absolutely know the headspace you're wandering right now, and I don't have a panacea. I can tell you though, fuck the AI hype wave. Fact is, if it gets to the point where the 1% decide to fuck the other 95%, it ain't gonna end well for somebody, and we all know who not for the most. If you're gonna throw your lot in with anyone, save your soul, and give the finger to most of the types that consider themselves above everyone else. Solidarity is something bore by the humbled and humble, and is likely part of what drove your own parents to take the longshot on you. They still love you, and the best thing you can do for yourself is follow their example and learn to love you too.
You need to work on loving you, for you. Even though that may be extremely difficult right now, it is possible, but you have to look for the ways how. The first step in that, is to admit those ways might exist. If you spend enough time truly feeling self-loathing and internalizing it, what'll happen is your consciousness will shove it deep down into the unconscious, where it'll take on a life of it's own, and get stronger and stronger over time. C. G. Jung, a psychologist of the 20th century coined a term for this process, enantidromia, and it's kind of a consequence of being a human. Normally things even themselves out, but in certain cases, the repression of those parts of yourself can be so severe that it turns straight up pathological, and never gets a chance to even out in a less disruptive way. Given the conscious mind kinda floats on top of the unconscious faculties, orchestrating what you've mentally automated over the years, and what you can begin to experience is a very alarming tendency for these pathologically amplified loops to break into your conscious processing loop to great deleterious effect on your overall quality of life.
I've experimented with a couple therapeutic techniques that might help alleviate a few things/maybe help you find some direction.
Try looking up Dr. Tori Olds series on Coherence Therapy, AEDP, and Internal Family Systems.
Even if you can't afford a therapist to work with you, it should give you enough of a grounding in the technique that you should be able to equip at least a few parts of your psyche with the tools to start to knit itself back together. The essence of these techniques are severalfold:
A) You are many-parted, and each of those parts is a fragment of you that has played a part in getting you where you are today, and keeping you alive.
B) There are no bad parts. Just bad times to use parts that are insufficiently integrated.
C) You can integrate and heal these parts. It takes time, dedication, and an openness to experiencing/reliving the insecurities of your past, and bringing new, wiser insight to these parts of you. They're already there, but isolated from one another. The healing process though will open up entirely new avenues of life you never thought of once you break the fundamental pathological loops that have dominated your unconscious faculties.
I can't say it'll fully fix you. Still working through some dodginess myself. But I'd be remiss to let someone whose tread those parts of the human experience go without giving them a glimpse on what has at least helped me pull out of some of the worst days it.
Keep trying. The only way out is through, and by wrestling with the unconscious, you'll be amazed the changes that'll pop up. It may not be the ones you want, but at least it won't be the same self-destructive loops you dealt with the day before.
Comments that assert that genetic inheritance determines life outcomes are not what we want on HN. It has very ugly implications that I don't need to spell out. And it's personal for me because I, and others I know and love, have put a lot of work over many years into overcoming inner obstacles that were said by "experts" to be "hard-wired" traits.
We want HN to be a place for talking about expanding people's possibilities, not limiting them.
Although, my bio parents and grandparents were white-collar or white collar adjacent at least. And one of my bio grandpa was very conscientious and active well into old age
There’s more to life than money, this is why your parents are willing to “waste” it on you.
When I was in a similar rut/loop the best thing that happened to me was when I finally stopped trying to keep up appearances, got honest and asked for help.
It was embarrassing to finally humble myself to ask for help, luckily embarrassment isn’t life threatening, just really uncomfortable for a minute.
The people in my life wanted to help me more than they wanted repayment. They helped in finding a gp the gp helped find a psychologist and then they all helped find a psychiatrist.
Seriously, just buy a bag of seed, go find some pigeons, and feed them.
Now, watch them, carefully… see how hard they work, every day, even when they’re hobbling around on grotesque stumps where their feet used to be before they got wrapped up in our discarded waste.
Notice how something can put so much effort into just surviving, against all the odds, and against the abuse and mistreatment and just casual negligent brutality inflicted upon them by your species. See how they aren’t focused on money or jobs or learning or prestige, just on being now and being for a bit longer.
See how they’ll eventually trust you enough to approach or land on your hand to feed. How, if you do this day after day, they’ll recognize you and wait for you.
The only living thing that won’t, eventually, react to a modicum of gentleness and kindness with trust is a human.
You’re not on this planet to earn money. You’re not here to work. You’re certainly not here to build edifices of ephemeral noise. You’re here to be, while you can.
Pay your parents back on their real investment, by dedicating your time to them. Be there to care for them as they age. Give them a bit of gentleness and kindness… they need that much more than they need the fiction that is money.
When they’re done, then check out if you want to. I’ve been suicidal for as long as I can remember, I’m faking it until there’s no one else to care for. That’s enough.
No one is beyond redemption, if only because there’s no such thing as redemption in the first place.
You are able to, that’s a defining trait of being human… what you may not be capable of without a serious mind shift is applying yourself to that learning. The first step of that will be seriously lowering what you think of as decent money (if you live somewhere that actually requires millions, which is effectively nowhere on Earth you’d ever want to be, then move elsewhere) and then getting control of that shame impulse. Doing that is going to be best helped by seeking out mild antidepressants, individual therapy (CBT works), and time in nature (in no particular order). You don’t need, or want, tech bro money or tech bro work, find something you can concentrate on, and do it.
Fake it till you make it works, you just have to lower your bar on what you only think due to bad marketing represents making it.
You’re only surprised because you haven’t spent enough time watching pigeons. They’re beautiful birds, many past societies literally worshipped them, and they saved a lot of butts in both World Wars. They’ve fallen from grace because 20th century plus humans don’t like what survives and thrives wild in their cities, especially when they associate them with dirt and garbage the humans leave everywhere.
I've spent plenty of time around pigeons. They've nested a few times within 20 of feet of my apartment.
If I don't use adequate protective equipment while cleaning the pigeon shit from my patio, I can be infected with an organism in the shit, namely, Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Aspergillus fumigatus, Chlamydophila psittaci, Salmonella bacteria, Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium avium complex, Listeria monocytogenes, West Nile virus, St. Louis Encephalitis virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus.
Most of those you have any realistic chance of catching from a wild bird you can also get — and are vastly more likely to get during your lifetime — via the fecal-oral route from another human. Indeed many of those are only a risk at all with pigeons because they live near humans who expose them to filth they’d never encounter in the wild.
Oh, and several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.
>several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.
"A mosquito is needed to transfer the virus from the pigeon to me," is not a great defense of pigeons because of how common mosquitoes are and how hard it is to get rid of them.
Sure, mosquitoes have, historically, earned your ire, but now you’re blaming the pigeon, again, for a disease you’re just as or more likely to get from another, very likely human, source.
Which is especially true when you realize that most mosquito species that have adapted to blood feed off avians don’t also tend to blood feed off mammals.
And, not for nothing, but what I was refuting was the idea you needed safety gear around pigeon poop to defend you from blood-borne viruses that aren’t known to transfer via that poop.
Bro, forget about guilt and lamenting, you are not obligated to be useful, you can just be.
You obviously have ADHD, go and get on stims, it will likely help you. Or there may be some other issue. Or you may indeed be this way forever. Just go and try to change something in the brain for once.
Stop coping unless you want to cope until the end.
Well, how will I live if I don't make money or am useful. I appreciate your words, but this world is no utopia, humans have always had to have some utility to exist since the days we evolved into our current form. We are just slightly better animals, and wildlife is brutal. And, so is this world we inhabit.
I already got tested for it by multiple different professionals, they seem to think I don't have it. And people with adhd are everywhere in the tech industry, it did not stop them from learning or becoming great engineers.
I have tried strattera, vyvanse, and some other meds i can't even remember, none worked and only made me more suicidal
I don't see any hope for me.I have no capacity to work hard, learn technical shit, love people, sense of responsibility, anything. I just wanna go, but I need money before I end it
If you aren't suitable for white collar track, you very well know you can get into blue collar trades or become a taxi driver.
The tests for ADHD and some variations of depression are leaky, erroneous shit. Just get the drugs (Adderall xr, Wellbutrin) and see if these help.
You say you tried some NDRI spectrum drugs, this probably means you have some rare type of depression or schizo spectrum disorder, or something else entirely.
If your parents truly care about you they will find you a decent doctor that will diagnose it.
>it did not stop them from learning or becoming great engineers.
You seem not to be wired to get intrinsic motivation from coding, idk.
Don't hang around HN, you need to hang around more mediocre folks where you will not seem like such a loser. I'm in the same boat. Let me know if you find such a place.
How old are you? I am 34 and was recently reading my journals from college when I was ~21. I was continually lamenting my laziness and lack of direction, filled with worry too. I had high aspirations but no clue how to get there. Proceed to 10 years of absolute failure but learning the value of a determination to persist. Now happy with a mid-level job that I worked so hard to get, nowhere near the PhD or MBA friends I have, but that’s okay. Living in the middle of nowhere and that’s okay. Realize I can always get a job at a restaurant and at least pay rent. Idk, just hang around and keep trying and lower your standards. Maybe get away from your parents so you are forced to be independent.
I am working on the determination aspect but it is so slow and frustrating, plus any time I am learning, I get flashbacks of my own failures and also thoughts of how everyone else is so much ahead.
first, you don't need to reward or payback your parent. You don't need to feel guilty for the love and support of your parent. second, it is never too late. you already had a time machine. your future 70 year old self transported you back so that you had awareness and wrote this post but you can't remember that you're from the future. But you do know that you can make a difference starting now. Don't aim for big changes. You will mostly disappoint and give up. Aim for small daily improvements. Procratinate a little bit less (just a little will do) . Learn a bit more (just a bit more is enough) every day.Time will be your friend and you will be a different person a year from now.
I do owe my parents, firstly because I am adopted and secondly, they went above and beyond for me in every way they could. Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate them.
I am trying small daily improvements now, for the millionth time. But the fear and the guilt is overwhelming, and I am never gonna catch up to other normal people, much less high earners. And then there is AI.
>And then there is AI.
Look, I'm sad to say I absolutely know the headspace you're wandering right now, and I don't have a panacea. I can tell you though, fuck the AI hype wave. Fact is, if it gets to the point where the 1% decide to fuck the other 95%, it ain't gonna end well for somebody, and we all know who not for the most. If you're gonna throw your lot in with anyone, save your soul, and give the finger to most of the types that consider themselves above everyone else. Solidarity is something bore by the humbled and humble, and is likely part of what drove your own parents to take the longshot on you. They still love you, and the best thing you can do for yourself is follow their example and learn to love you too.
You need to work on loving you, for you. Even though that may be extremely difficult right now, it is possible, but you have to look for the ways how. The first step in that, is to admit those ways might exist. If you spend enough time truly feeling self-loathing and internalizing it, what'll happen is your consciousness will shove it deep down into the unconscious, where it'll take on a life of it's own, and get stronger and stronger over time. C. G. Jung, a psychologist of the 20th century coined a term for this process, enantidromia, and it's kind of a consequence of being a human. Normally things even themselves out, but in certain cases, the repression of those parts of yourself can be so severe that it turns straight up pathological, and never gets a chance to even out in a less disruptive way. Given the conscious mind kinda floats on top of the unconscious faculties, orchestrating what you've mentally automated over the years, and what you can begin to experience is a very alarming tendency for these pathologically amplified loops to break into your conscious processing loop to great deleterious effect on your overall quality of life.
I've experimented with a couple therapeutic techniques that might help alleviate a few things/maybe help you find some direction.
Try looking up Dr. Tori Olds series on Coherence Therapy, AEDP, and Internal Family Systems.
https://m.youtube.com/@DrToriOlds
Even if you can't afford a therapist to work with you, it should give you enough of a grounding in the technique that you should be able to equip at least a few parts of your psyche with the tools to start to knit itself back together. The essence of these techniques are severalfold:
A) You are many-parted, and each of those parts is a fragment of you that has played a part in getting you where you are today, and keeping you alive.
B) There are no bad parts. Just bad times to use parts that are insufficiently integrated.
C) You can integrate and heal these parts. It takes time, dedication, and an openness to experiencing/reliving the insecurities of your past, and bringing new, wiser insight to these parts of you. They're already there, but isolated from one another. The healing process though will open up entirely new avenues of life you never thought of once you break the fundamental pathological loops that have dominated your unconscious faculties.
I can't say it'll fully fix you. Still working through some dodginess myself. But I'd be remiss to let someone whose tread those parts of the human experience go without giving them a glimpse on what has at least helped me pull out of some of the worst days it.
Keep trying. The only way out is through, and by wrestling with the unconscious, you'll be amazed the changes that'll pop up. It may not be the ones you want, but at least it won't be the same self-destructive loops you dealt with the day before.
I believe in you. You can do this.
[flagged]
Comments that assert that genetic inheritance determines life outcomes are not what we want on HN. It has very ugly implications that I don't need to spell out. And it's personal for me because I, and others I know and love, have put a lot of work over many years into overcoming inner obstacles that were said by "experts" to be "hard-wired" traits.
We want HN to be a place for talking about expanding people's possibilities, not limiting them.
That's fucked up for me, I would rather die
Although, my bio parents and grandparents were white-collar or white collar adjacent at least. And one of my bio grandpa was very conscientious and active well into old age
Then you should be OK.
There’s more to life than money, this is why your parents are willing to “waste” it on you.
When I was in a similar rut/loop the best thing that happened to me was when I finally stopped trying to keep up appearances, got honest and asked for help.
It was embarrassing to finally humble myself to ask for help, luckily embarrassment isn’t life threatening, just really uncomfortable for a minute.
The people in my life wanted to help me more than they wanted repayment. They helped in finding a gp the gp helped find a psychologist and then they all helped find a psychiatrist.
There is no meaning to life, the only meaning I can have is family and money. I failed one and the other I can't get
Seriously, get a prescription for ADHD medication.
Go feed some pigeons.
Seriously, just buy a bag of seed, go find some pigeons, and feed them.
Now, watch them, carefully… see how hard they work, every day, even when they’re hobbling around on grotesque stumps where their feet used to be before they got wrapped up in our discarded waste.
Notice how something can put so much effort into just surviving, against all the odds, and against the abuse and mistreatment and just casual negligent brutality inflicted upon them by your species. See how they aren’t focused on money or jobs or learning or prestige, just on being now and being for a bit longer.
See how they’ll eventually trust you enough to approach or land on your hand to feed. How, if you do this day after day, they’ll recognize you and wait for you.
The only living thing that won’t, eventually, react to a modicum of gentleness and kindness with trust is a human.
You’re not on this planet to earn money. You’re not here to work. You’re certainly not here to build edifices of ephemeral noise. You’re here to be, while you can.
Pay your parents back on their real investment, by dedicating your time to them. Be there to care for them as they age. Give them a bit of gentleness and kindness… they need that much more than they need the fiction that is money.
When they’re done, then check out if you want to. I’ve been suicidal for as long as I can remember, I’m faking it until there’s no one else to care for. That’s enough.
No one is beyond redemption, if only because there’s no such thing as redemption in the first place.
I need money to be here. and to have decent money, i need to have skills, which i have to learn, which i am not able to do
You are able to, that’s a defining trait of being human… what you may not be capable of without a serious mind shift is applying yourself to that learning. The first step of that will be seriously lowering what you think of as decent money (if you live somewhere that actually requires millions, which is effectively nowhere on Earth you’d ever want to be, then move elsewhere) and then getting control of that shame impulse. Doing that is going to be best helped by seeking out mild antidepressants, individual therapy (CBT works), and time in nature (in no particular order). You don’t need, or want, tech bro money or tech bro work, find something you can concentrate on, and do it.
Fake it till you make it works, you just have to lower your bar on what you only think due to bad marketing represents making it.
I'm surprised to hear that anyone enjoys feeding pigeons or even being around pigeons.
You’re only surprised because you haven’t spent enough time watching pigeons. They’re beautiful birds, many past societies literally worshipped them, and they saved a lot of butts in both World Wars. They’ve fallen from grace because 20th century plus humans don’t like what survives and thrives wild in their cities, especially when they associate them with dirt and garbage the humans leave everywhere.
I've spent plenty of time around pigeons. They've nested a few times within 20 of feet of my apartment.
If I don't use adequate protective equipment while cleaning the pigeon shit from my patio, I can be infected with an organism in the shit, namely, Histoplasma capsulatum, Cryptococcus neoformans, Aspergillus fumigatus, Chlamydophila psittaci, Salmonella bacteria, Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium avium complex, Listeria monocytogenes, West Nile virus, St. Louis Encephalitis virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus.
Most of those you have any realistic chance of catching from a wild bird you can also get — and are vastly more likely to get during your lifetime — via the fecal-oral route from another human. Indeed many of those are only a risk at all with pigeons because they live near humans who expose them to filth they’d never encounter in the wild.
Oh, and several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.
>several of those you can’t get at all from a pigeon’s poop, they require an intervening, blood-feeding arthropod.
"A mosquito is needed to transfer the virus from the pigeon to me," is not a great defense of pigeons because of how common mosquitoes are and how hard it is to get rid of them.
Sure, mosquitoes have, historically, earned your ire, but now you’re blaming the pigeon, again, for a disease you’re just as or more likely to get from another, very likely human, source.
Which is especially true when you realize that most mosquito species that have adapted to blood feed off avians don’t also tend to blood feed off mammals.
And, not for nothing, but what I was refuting was the idea you needed safety gear around pigeon poop to defend you from blood-borne viruses that aren’t known to transfer via that poop.
[dead]
Bro, forget about guilt and lamenting, you are not obligated to be useful, you can just be.
You obviously have ADHD, go and get on stims, it will likely help you. Or there may be some other issue. Or you may indeed be this way forever. Just go and try to change something in the brain for once.
Stop coping unless you want to cope until the end.
Well, how will I live if I don't make money or am useful. I appreciate your words, but this world is no utopia, humans have always had to have some utility to exist since the days we evolved into our current form. We are just slightly better animals, and wildlife is brutal. And, so is this world we inhabit.
I already got tested for it by multiple different professionals, they seem to think I don't have it. And people with adhd are everywhere in the tech industry, it did not stop them from learning or becoming great engineers.
I have tried strattera, vyvanse, and some other meds i can't even remember, none worked and only made me more suicidal
I don't see any hope for me.I have no capacity to work hard, learn technical shit, love people, sense of responsibility, anything. I just wanna go, but I need money before I end it
If you aren't suitable for white collar track, you very well know you can get into blue collar trades or become a taxi driver.
The tests for ADHD and some variations of depression are leaky, erroneous shit. Just get the drugs (Adderall xr, Wellbutrin) and see if these help.
You say you tried some NDRI spectrum drugs, this probably means you have some rare type of depression or schizo spectrum disorder, or something else entirely.
If your parents truly care about you they will find you a decent doctor that will diagnose it.
>it did not stop them from learning or becoming great engineers.
You seem not to be wired to get intrinsic motivation from coding, idk.
I am not wired to get intrinsic motivation from anything. period.
Might be low T btw
Nope, pretty high on T but without any of the pros of having high T
Anhedonia or negative symptoms of schizophrenia, or something else, might be even me/cfs, or obscure allergy.
... You seem to have intrinsic motivation to write longish texts though, unironically.
Haha, I don't know why I love writing about how shit I am, probably because I am hoping for some miracle
All advice basically comes to this: “Look inside. The answer is within you.”
Everything else is noise. That said, finding that answer that lies within might take a day or a decade or never (my case - between decade and never!)
Be well. Be kind to yourself meanwhile.
Don't hang around HN, you need to hang around more mediocre folks where you will not seem like such a loser. I'm in the same boat. Let me know if you find such a place.
The only hanging I intend to do is from a noose.
I don't like or gel with mediocre people, why do you think I wanna terminate myself? I never wanted to be mediocre
Find your tribe, they won't be the best of the best hackers on the internet, they'll be folks happy to figure out fizbuzz on a good day.