author here: Hey, that's my post on the frontpage, what is it doing here?!?
I've been working on my blog lately, and having only a few posts up and no readership, I'm now blown away by all the comments and mails and support I'm receiving. Thank you so much everybody!
It's a privilige to live in Germany, where I have public health insurance, and access to great doctors and staff. I'm tapering off the cortisone right now (I'll be taking it for six weeks in total, so I dodge a lot the strain it can have), and am now on another medication. I don't feel comfortable sharing my condition / medication due to me being on the job hunt, but maybe one day. Thanks for all the pointers, too.
You didn’t ask for any advice, but I’ll offer it anyway, maybe someone will find this useful. When tapering from steroids, it’s best to follow the schedule prescribed by your doctor. I was once on prednisone for some alergic reaction, and I was really looking forward to put the episode behind me. So I tapered much more agressively than what my doctor advised. Big mistake. I ended up in the ER in an excruciating pain. I then resumed the original tapering profile, and I got off the prednisone in 4 month. Slow and steady was the key. No more incidents.
Interesting to see Cortisone mentioned on HN. I was diagnosed with Thymus Carcinoma in 2020 (peak COVID), long story short, with God's grace - all healed in 6 months. In 2024 it reoccurred, then Chemo, then healing. 2026 has been tough for me, they found growth on one kidney, small and slowly growing, got it removed. Then doctors recommended immunotherapy, said it would be safe. But like the article, immunotherapy messed me up - extreme muscle weakness and caused inflammation in a lot of muscles even heart. Then I am on cortisone for last 2 months, getting the immunotherapy out. This has been quite hard, even harder than chemo.
Anyways, for you folks - life is a gift, I did not see many conventional "healthy" days since I turned 40, but with faith in Christ I have been healed many times, lived so many years and worked as a normal programmer. Things may have looked very difficult at some points, but faith and love of Jesus pulled me through.
If you have good health, take care of it and personally live a - "holy" life, the rest follows. I know I may sound strange but my biggest regrets have been when I messed up in life by hurting others or living selfishly with no self control.
> with faith in Christ I have been healed many times
I think you might be undercutting a few other factors here, though whatever helps your ability to persevere when in such a vulnerable state isn't a nil-factor :)
for religious people there is only the single factor, and it let's them do what op did by positioning actual expertise under their personal beliefs. i agree that this type of cope may actually be useful, though, it's just insulting at the same time.
> for religious people there is only the single factor, and it let's them do what op did by positioning actual expertise under their personal beliefs.
It's difficult to discern precisely the claim you're making, but it is suggestive, something to the effect that all religious people reduce all good events to miraculous acts. If that is the case, then you are misinformed and - it would seem - painting all "religious" people with the same broad brush. I would strongly recommend looking at something like JPII's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" [0].
As the OP would appear to be a Christian, I will say that according to a robust and mature Christian understanding of the world and its relation to God, there is a distinction between what are called primary causality and secondary causality. While all that exists is granted its existence and causal power by God (primary causality), within the created order and thus within the domain of secondary causes, things operate as genuine causes. This is not some kind of occasionalism where the world is more or less a kind of cosmic puppet theater. So there is no contradiction between gratitude for, say, a doctor's successful intervention and the divine cause that enables it, even when nothing miraculous has occurred (whether quoad substantiam, quoad subjectum, or quoad modum et ordinem).
> i agree that this type of cope may actually be useful, though, it's just insulting at the same time.
I suppose understanding this latter sentence presupposes understanding the first, but I would point back to the division of causal orders above, and perhaps be mindful of superbia vitae.
I'm not sure why there's an urgent need to attack people on HN for their religious beliefs ? Isn't freedom (in all aspects of life) one of the core tenants HNers pride themselves itself in?
My point is this: it's fine if you don't agree with their beliefs, you can simply ignore that part of the comment and reply to its essence. The parent wasn't trying to convince anyone to take a magic pill.
I disagree with many people here on various topics such as politics, philosophy or outlooks but never have the urge to attack them.
It’s the strange dichotomy of the religious engineer/programmer/scientist.
In one domain, they are skeptical and thorough, but in the other they’ll just take anything at face value without questioning it. How do they even know which god was responsible? There’s more than one religion claiming to be the one true religion.
It’s also strange to bring up magic in a discussion about medicine.
It's kind of strange that our existence has come down to working in an often unfulfilling job almost all of our waking time, and only finding fulfillment when you're out of a job.
ooh yeah I like this - I was only aware of their chiptune stuff. It's like they heard me wish for more bands that feel like Fang Island and made it happen.
But I keep being told that all jobs suck and I'm being silly seeking fulfilment at the place I spend 70% of my waking hours.
EDIT: in fact these days, people make fun of me because I sought fulfilment in my career as a whole, and it’s my fault now that I’m depressed that it’s gone. I’ve come across this snarky comment more than a couple times on this forum.
Every once in a while I feel this -- "yeah we're being exploited!"
And then I remember that basic living has always had a cost to be paid. I doubt the first hunter gatherers sat around wondering if they were fulfilled. They just had a more immediate sight-line from their labor to their actual living costs.
Most of us here work well-paid jobs that allow us to pay our requirements and still have disposable income to enjoy our lives. But work we must; homes aren't free and neither is food and much of the entertainment we enjoy.
I don't feel particularly exploited. I fear if you do whatever menacing thing you're insinuating you want to do to the "exploiter class" then my job will go away and much of my lifestyle with it. Not sure that's a good outcome for anyone, really.
Homes aren't free, but many people here have parents for which one of them worked a single job out of high school and were able to provide food and shelter, buy a home, take vacations, etc for an entire family and they weren't in the top 5% of income. They weren't expected to be always online and available out of work hours either.
A little bit of historical knowledge, a little bit of reading statistics of wealth inequality currently being about the same level as France before the French revolution. A little bit of looking around and doing the math for what a schoolteacher, or someone earning the median income has to do to survive right now, and maybe you can develop a bit of empathy.
We are at a historical apex of economic exploitation in the US, where we have a trillionaire preaching about the dangers of empathy while giving billions to politicians to ensure he is never taxed or his companies regulated. We are the sons and daughters with far less security, working harder for longer and for less than our parents. We have more gadgets but far less peace or leisure or time to take care of our neighbors.
I think I have plenty of empathy. I just don't yearn for the guillotine for anyone, even our most wealthy, though I do support reforms to make them pay more, and allow the average working person to better afford life's necessities.
My point was that this all feels a bit rich on a forum with mostly well todo software engineers. You are not an exploited victim if you are making a high income working a white collar job in a comfortable glass tower, and the worst thing that ever happens to you is the occasional off-hour page.
Do you realize how much money some people are making out of this racket while spending billions to convince you that socialized healthcare is the devil's work?
Or is it a sign that life has an inherent cost that must be paid, and without the extractive institutions we’d spend our time scrabbling in the dirt attempting to grow our own food and sewing clothes together with dried grass and hides
there is a level of extractiveness that optimizes for overall wealth and prosperity.
and overly extractive systems are unstable over the long term.
are you confident that the current level of extraction is optimal, or sustainable?
if a large part of society decides that it's not optimal or sustainable, where would you stand? prevent change? or seek equitable and stable redistribution?
there are so many examples of the inherent unwillingness for the beneficiaries of extractive systems to resist change: see the laws imposed against serfs following the black death, or the shooting and violent suppression of striking union workers.
that cycle is beginning again: MAGA, widespread rioting in France, Italy and other places.
There is economic and political injustice. Systemic extraction is passing a stable equilibrium.
relax the grip on power and resources, or spend the blood and treasure it will cost to maintain it.
but don't bullshit anyone with this 'life has an inherent cost': that's trivially obvious to everyone.
we are well past the point of collectively paying that cost. it's just not fairly or reasonably distributed.
> are you confident that the current level of extraction is optimal, or sustainable?
No, I just don’t think a class war is the answer. Equitable and stable resource distribution doesn’t necessitate retribution towards the current ruling class. An imperfect system beats no system at all.
the reason we have weekends and no child labor is because workers died for it.
the state, the capitalists desire control, obedience and extraction. worker well-being is a low priority. workers advocating for better pay, safe working conditions, etc were routinely killed.
why is it laughable to say that there is a need to resist the injustice and push for better working conditions and rights for all?
Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
Ignoring art with patrons which is a tiny percent of all art made, people just did things at home quietly. They painted, drew, told stories, knit, crocheted, etc. Even patron-led artists just made what their patrons wanted, namely all the famous religious art, which I imagine felt like unfulfilling work anyway.
What we like, that is to say gets things like our dopamine flowing, tends to tie in well with the idea of not being compelled to do it. Someone writing copy at work to further enrich the capital owning class and to pay their bills is very different than someone writing short stories in the evening after work.
I would say that past “jobs” had more of a sense of accomplishment and agency. Personally I have never felt the same level of accomplishment from building things that directly improved the quality of my house, hunting with my father when it was required to help maintain ecological balance (too many deer or elk can actually be bad for an ecosystem), or directly contribute to my family/community in some way.
Now my days largely consist of navigating a “game of thrones” political landscape where work means less than it ever has. The sense of agency I once coveted now feels like a distant memory in some ways.
But to be fair this is probably something that people experienced in many different ages of humanity.
> I have never felt the same level of accomplishment from building things that directly improved the quality of my house, hunting with my father when it was required to help maintain ecological balance (too many deer or elk can actually be bad for an ecosystem), or directly contribute to my family/community in some way.
This is because you were already meeting the base of your pyramid of needs. If you were building shelter because you had none, or hunting for subsistence, it’s considerably less enjoyable. Success means you live another day, failure means suffering. Self actualization is not a concern in those scenarios.
You don't think spending the days with your family, hunting/growing food to feed that family would be fulfilling?
Obviously I don't know the answers, and there were obviously tons of day-to-day stressors that sucked, but I'm not so sure it's a given that people of the past did not find life fulfilling/meaningful.
>> It's kind of strange that our existence has come down to working in an often unfulfilling job almost all of our waking time, and only finding fulfillment when you're out of a job.
> Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
No. I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable. As technology has progressed, many jobs have gotten farther and farther from what we were meant to do.
And AI isn't going to help. The best case scenario is it replaces work with purposeless entertainments and ennui. The more likely case it that it removes fulfilling work from human hands, leaving more space for unfulfilling work and poverty (because capitalist logic CANNOT be questioned, or you're a heretic who should be burned at the stake).
Maybe the jobs themselves were not enjoyable physically but the satisfaction of a day’s work was.
Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.
Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.
I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.
Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.
Rose colored glasses. “We won’t starve today” is not spiritually fulfilling. It’s survival.
People romanticize the past. Modern life is more comfortable specifically because everyone isn’t struggling to survive. (Obviously some still are.)
> Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured.
That’s a real big “if”. You can go get a construction job right now. It will get you more fit. But it will probably also get you injured, especially over the long term.
> Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?
If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.
And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).
This life is still available in the least civilized parts of the world. And unfortunately it comes with all the other problems of that time: your children will die, other tribes will occasionally kill you, and you need to stay on the move to escape enemies as well as seek food.
For my part, there is a huge price I’m willing to pay to be able to drink water out of my tap. I didn’t have this always and I really value it.
I actually think that piped potable water at home is incompatible with a hunter-gatherer society. The infrastructure required to maintain this requires civilization with a stable non-mobile population centre.
People look at Athens and Rome as some ideal. Labor there was mostly slaves. I don't think we fully appreciate how burdensome labor is and how that's the main motivation for people to offload it to the working class and make themselves the capital owning class. The American dream is being the boss or independently wealthy investor, not the best math teacher in your town.
Owning capital means off-loading my labor to capital investments i.e. machines. I don’t see how that is any less noble than seeking to be a math teacher. In fact, once I’ve accrued enough capital (save enough in my 401k and retire), I have some plans to go into teaching, just as my 7th grade science teacher did after he retired as a chemical engineer.
I think one could make the case that the human life lived during pre-agriculture was one which matched the evolution of our biological organism.
So this is kind of a pedantic point, but 95% of our history is us doing things exactly as we evolved to do. I don't doubt either that hunting must have been a very engaging activity, especially when done as a clan or tribe.
> I mean is this not most of human existence through history though?
That's not a good thing. It means we're failing to progress as a species. If we keep repeating history (with now, unfettered access to it), we're devolving, not evolving.
I would frame it like this: collectively, we have the resources to provide education, health care, housing and dignified work to all people. But on many if not all of those points we are regressing.
I've been through exactly that.. I've just completed 30, and I was lay'doff on my 29's.
This such weird-dread-inducing modern world is so weird man.. In the past the anxiety of having bread next-day was completely attached to your hard-work.. nowadays it doesn't feel like that.
It fascinates me a topic that I was reading a couple days ago in a magazine (a old-professor of mine from college wrote it) about young people fantasizing about living in the past rather than the future.. and that could only mean that people is really anxious about the future.
It’s not just the job situation. The world in general sucks now and the broad reasons are smartphones and social media, but if you drill down the real problem is everyone feels surveilled all the time. Anything slightly out of the ordinary is brutally made fun of, any slight misstep during any part of the day can be recorded and immortalized on social media. There is so much cultural meme sharing that everyone has a brutal, acerbic take on every imaginable situation ready to go. The stuff we used to do in college in the 00s that made college such a fun experience would be kind of career ending today. Imagine getting blackout drunk and then naked and dancing on a table during a house party nowadays. You’d be done, a laughing stock forever.
There’s just a general feeling of dread and malaise in society. You see it in public too. Everyone is stonefaced and going about their day. There is no hum/hustle and bustle like I used to see in public places in the past. Money is very tight and everything is way too expensive. I mean lunches cost between 15 and $20 even in places that are not big cities. Basic grocery shopping runs cost $500 at this point. I think one of the biggest things is, you can essentially live a whole life without really having to interact with a whole lot of people now. Corporations provide all your services. The Internet provides community knowledge.
That being said I feel like I existed at the perfect time. I was able to get a social media and smart phone free youth and a great career in my middle age which means I can retire early and provide for my wife and kids with the money I’ve made so far. The next generation is screwed. I worry for my kids.
I've had the exact same thoughts. Nothing is anonymous anymore. In the back of the mind, one has to wonder if someone is going to record you doing or saying anything silly. Can't even do karaoke without wondering if someone is going to post you without your consent. And to millions of people, the idea of getting consent to post your behavior to the internet is silly! I also feel like graduating in the 00s was a great moment.
This moment in technology and society is really weird.
I agree, it sucks, but not because of social media and smartphones. It sucks because:
- almost nobody is talking about climate change. It is coming, and instead of being a big gigantic project for humanity where we have a collective and cool purpose (save lives! Species!), you are called a doomer. The collective purpose of humanity is to bow to billionaires.
- fascism rising everywhere. Laws don’t matter
- the US president is a gigantic liar, racist, narcissist, incredible corrupt, and has lots of people around him that are fine with that too. Other governments are following his ways too. Being verbally and physically violent pays.
- billionaires openly control
governments and influence the world
- said billionaires openly say that AI will destroy millions of jobs or humanity itself, and offer no alternative. BUT if you, a normal person, wants to put some kind of control to all of this madness, you are again a doomer and anti progress
Sorry to hear about your illness and job loss--though we don't know each other. As a fellow human, in addition to the words, I can share some of my own perspective:
The things that were meant to be, will be. That's for acceptance.
But we have free will (sort of). And that's for action.
Also, highly recommend these books so that you can also take a more active role for your health (but you need to exercise extreme caution and critical thinking as some of the stuff in there may not be valid or valid anymore):
1. Back to Eden (J. Kloss)
[says in one section on pregnancy that expectant mothers must avoid all meat--which is bad advice. But there are some good ones there, nevertheless]
It was my last day at a company that was wrongfully firing me. I fought ruthlessly. In the morning I was fit and fine. By night I had a 104 F fever. It is astonishing how psychological issues significantly affect physical health.
I get it, but honestly, why? I have seen a few times someone being let go or about to and successfully negotiated out of it - but that person was always gone within a year anyway. The relationship is permanently damaged by that point, the employer cannot trust you're just buying time to get a new role and jump ship, and the employee will always have their guard up.
A workplace can have good work and great coworkers, but have truly awful people in positions of power over you. Which you may not realize until you're suddenly at risk.
Glad you seem to have found a way to deal with it. Have been dealing with a handful of severe health issues myself the last few years and it does get nightmarish at times, especially as one scratches out candidate causes.
IMO accessibility is an under-discussed benefit of the recent AI improvements. I've recovered from my RSI (typing injury) enough to use a keyboard a moderate amount but doubt I could ever go back to shredding through a codebase like I used to. In an earlier era I might have left the field entirely.
But still, even if all one has to do is read diffs and mumble to Claude, there's no getting around fatigue and brain fog when it's severe enough.
Hi. I'm here on HN to post occasional very dry remarks, and to tell people about their autoimmune conditions. (You'll see my other post from yesterday on the ADHD story.)
You should visit this website, from a nonprofit funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, and maybe show your clinician the linked clinician guide (sift through it yourself, to see how many independent subsystems you have symptoms in).
Sorry to hear about the job loss. As for autoimmune problems: these can often be related to vitamin A and carotene. Try staying well below the vitamin A RDA for both combined for a while and get enough protein, Zinc, Molybdenum, fiber, to support the pathways that metabolize it. Not medical advice obviously, but good nutrition is important (helped my allergies, as well as diverse other conditions).
Hadn't been out of a job for 10 years, but was still in his 6 month probationary period. Does that mean he left a job at one company for this one, only to be laid off almost immediately after??
I was on Prednisone for a year I got what was described as moon face.
I didn't get any mania, but the bottle of pills had Delusions of Grandeur listed as one of the side effects, which my partner would always point out whenever I had an idea she didn't like.
Prednisone is nuts. I had to take that as a kid during Leukemia treatments and my mom would find me rifling through the kitchen cabinets at 7am eating my brother's single-serving pasta buckets on the floor like an animal.
Additional advice: check your blood iron levels including saturation etc. Haemochromatosis can cause same symptoms and stays undiagnosed in men for 10 years in average.
I'm curious how cortisol relates to cortisone. Are they opposites? I know I could look it up with AI, but anecdotal evidence might be nice.
I've been through similar burnout phases with strange rebounds. There's a term called new leaf fallacy where we think that life will magically get better when we do the thing, so that any new thing provides a (false) sense of having a breakthrough. Then reality sets in and we slip back down to normal or even a new low.
I highly recommend thinking about finding optimal health as reality shifting. Which means that a holistic approach of making lifestyle changes can see real results that cause and effect might miss. So self-help is a good starting point, but there's also gut health and epigenetics.
Eating a can of mushrooms a day as part of a 2 to 4 egg omelet helped me tremendously. Mushrooms are high in fiber and have trace nutrients largely missing from our modern diet, so that they balance hormones and probably neurotransmitters. Cholesterol and saturated fat are also good for nerves and the brain. Note that they've been given a bad name due to red meat, which has a clogging effect on arteries for different reasons (especially beef fat). Humans also have a different sugar on our cells than other animals like chimpanzees (each protecting us from diseases that the other does not), so that when we eat meat or dairy, we try to use it and can't, which causes inflammation. Which also has a genetic component, since I'm able to eat large quantities of dairy but not meat, while other people find the opposite to be agreeable.
I also believe that I got a copper deficiency from taking zinc every day for the gym, without knowing that it blocks copper absorption in the intestines for 3 days. That resulted in unexpected illness and a couple of really bad injuries starting in 2024 and lasting for 2 years until I finally isolated the root cause(s). I heard an expert on NPR I think (can't remember her name), but she said that taking vitamins and minerals to end deficiencies is hugely beneficial, but that taking doses beyond that has basically no effect or can do harm. That's why the supplement industry might be perceived as snake oil, because it works for some but not others.
Epigenetics is really about faking it till you make it. If your intuition tells you that something that used to work in your body no longer does, you can retrace your steps to find triggers. Then do the opposite of them long enough to flip the switches back. For a lot of people, I think stress takes such a toll that we keep going until our body makes the decision for us and pulls the plug. So the obvious answer is to de-stress, which is hard to do in the workaday world that demands full productivity just to tread water when nobody shares. What the universe is really asking of us there is to de-stress anyway and let the cards fall where they may. In my experience, the things I was holding on to had little to no value anyway (they were attachments separating me from myself).
I only mention it because those outlier insights have a lot to offer. It's not so much about doing more of something, but looking at the things we're not doing and devoting energy to them.
> I was put on cortisone treatment, which relieved my symptoms immediately. Cortisone essentially lowers your body’s immune response — which is great when your body tries to defend itself against itself, like mine did.
Due to some nasty, persistent chest congestion a couple of years ago, I took a course of prednisone.
Holy shit did my fingers ever move on the guitar fingerboard without any warmup.
I have an autoimmune disorder and i want to warn you that stopping the steroids may cause your condition to regress quite a bit. I have used corticosteroids periodically for my condition and it helps cover the condition during disasters but theyve never caused the condition to go away, it always comes back after i stop them. Albeit in a better state i can manage more easily, but it's 100% possible to regress all the way back.
So please be careful after you're off the corticosteroids to not restart the things that might've contributed. Good luck, autoimmune disorders are hell.
Yes OP should be careful of PEM (Google it). Do the bloods other commenters but I'd pace until you know what it is even if feeling OK. Pace E.g. Go shopping come back and be still for X time (depends on you) and have recovery days
Sorry that you've been going for through all of this.
For what it's worth the auto-immune issues can happen in periods of high stress. The low-energy, joint pain, etc, that could all have been a result of the stress from losing your job. The body is crazy and we underestimate the extent to which our minds and the stresses of life can influence our bodily health.
> In some phases of my life, I can take a giant step back, and look at it like from a bird’s eye view.
This is exactly what I'd be doing. Think about where the world is heading and how you might best position yourself for that world and where you want to be in it. Look at least 10 years out. Overly optimising to solve immediate problems is rarely the best move longer-term. For this reason sometimes these forced-reflection periods can be beneficial in the long-term if they shake you onto a better path.
Best of luck man. It's good to hear your optimistic. I hope everything works out exactly as you hope in the end =)
yes, stress can kick a mild autoimmune issue into overload, and once there it can be almost self-sustaining.
what is physically happening is that the body's mast cells release neurotransmitters like histamine and serotonin, causing inflammation (so the immune system can fight some things off) leading to pain, and also fatigue (to encourage you to stay safe at home in the cave conserving energy, or some such story like that -- don't trust any specific just-so story though, especially this one).
the interesting question is what all the other things are that stress you out. i've found dietary triggers are what got me and a lot of my friends; there are some allergy cases out there, and a few friends with long COVID, which is one particularly nasty self-sustaining form. a family member had a terrible decade long episode triggered by contact dermatitis with poison oak. and generally speaking, heat and humidity are stressors too, as are pressure changes (you've heard tell of the little old lady who can tell a storm is coming because of an arthritis flare).
The future is so hazy now. Maybe it sounds somewhat contradictory given what I said, but I think to take a long-term view at this moment you have to assume a high level of uncertainty, and that means you have to hedge and be more short-term oriented in your decisions.
For example, if you need to train for 2 years to reskill, then you require another few years of entry level work in that field before earning a decent salary, it's worth considering how confident you are that you're training for a career that will even exist in say 10 or 15 years. If you're investing years of your life into a future career it's important to do that with quite a high level of certainty about the return of that.
A lot of my decision making these days is trying to model out a safe route through uncertainty. A few years ago I felt like I could plan and was able to move towards the life I wanted. Now I feel like I'm just trying avoid getting my legs blown off as I walk through the minefield.
I've been working on my blog lately, and having only a few posts up and no readership, I'm now blown away by all the comments and mails and support I'm receiving. Thank you so much everybody!
It's a privilige to live in Germany, where I have public health insurance, and access to great doctors and staff. I'm tapering off the cortisone right now (I'll be taking it for six weeks in total, so I dodge a lot the strain it can have), and am now on another medication. I don't feel comfortable sharing my condition / medication due to me being on the job hunt, but maybe one day. Thanks for all the pointers, too.
Anyways, for you folks - life is a gift, I did not see many conventional "healthy" days since I turned 40, but with faith in Christ I have been healed many times, lived so many years and worked as a normal programmer. Things may have looked very difficult at some points, but faith and love of Jesus pulled me through.
If you have good health, take care of it and personally live a - "holy" life, the rest follows. I know I may sound strange but my biggest regrets have been when I messed up in life by hurting others or living selfishly with no self control.
I think you might be undercutting a few other factors here, though whatever helps your ability to persevere when in such a vulnerable state isn't a nil-factor :)
It's difficult to discern precisely the claim you're making, but it is suggestive, something to the effect that all religious people reduce all good events to miraculous acts. If that is the case, then you are misinformed and - it would seem - painting all "religious" people with the same broad brush. I would strongly recommend looking at something like JPII's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" [0].
As the OP would appear to be a Christian, I will say that according to a robust and mature Christian understanding of the world and its relation to God, there is a distinction between what are called primary causality and secondary causality. While all that exists is granted its existence and causal power by God (primary causality), within the created order and thus within the domain of secondary causes, things operate as genuine causes. This is not some kind of occasionalism where the world is more or less a kind of cosmic puppet theater. So there is no contradiction between gratitude for, say, a doctor's successful intervention and the divine cause that enables it, even when nothing miraculous has occurred (whether quoad substantiam, quoad subjectum, or quoad modum et ordinem).
> i agree that this type of cope may actually be useful, though, it's just insulting at the same time.
I suppose understanding this latter sentence presupposes understanding the first, but I would point back to the division of causal orders above, and perhaps be mindful of superbia vitae.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
My point is this: it's fine if you don't agree with their beliefs, you can simply ignore that part of the comment and reply to its essence. The parent wasn't trying to convince anyone to take a magic pill.
I disagree with many people here on various topics such as politics, philosophy or outlooks but never have the urge to attack them.
In one domain, they are skeptical and thorough, but in the other they’ll just take anything at face value without questioning it. How do they even know which god was responsible? There’s more than one religion claiming to be the one true religion.
It’s also strange to bring up magic in a discussion about medicine.
That is subsumed in the "faith in Christ" bit. For the religious, the latter doesn't exist independent of the former.
Anamanaguchi - "Buckwild"
EDIT: in fact these days, people make fun of me because I sought fulfilment in my career as a whole, and it’s my fault now that I’m depressed that it’s gone. I’ve come across this snarky comment more than a couple times on this forum.
next time when its uprising, there shall be no mercy whatsoever to the exploiter class
And then I remember that basic living has always had a cost to be paid. I doubt the first hunter gatherers sat around wondering if they were fulfilled. They just had a more immediate sight-line from their labor to their actual living costs.
Most of us here work well-paid jobs that allow us to pay our requirements and still have disposable income to enjoy our lives. But work we must; homes aren't free and neither is food and much of the entertainment we enjoy.
I don't feel particularly exploited. I fear if you do whatever menacing thing you're insinuating you want to do to the "exploiter class" then my job will go away and much of my lifestyle with it. Not sure that's a good outcome for anyone, really.
A little bit of historical knowledge, a little bit of reading statistics of wealth inequality currently being about the same level as France before the French revolution. A little bit of looking around and doing the math for what a schoolteacher, or someone earning the median income has to do to survive right now, and maybe you can develop a bit of empathy.
We are at a historical apex of economic exploitation in the US, where we have a trillionaire preaching about the dangers of empathy while giving billions to politicians to ensure he is never taxed or his companies regulated. We are the sons and daughters with far less security, working harder for longer and for less than our parents. We have more gadgets but far less peace or leisure or time to take care of our neighbors.
My point was that this all feels a bit rich on a forum with mostly well todo software engineers. You are not an exploited victim if you are making a high income working a white collar job in a comfortable glass tower, and the worst thing that ever happens to you is the occasional off-hour page.
Wait a second-- I didn't do that at all.
and overly extractive systems are unstable over the long term.
are you confident that the current level of extraction is optimal, or sustainable?
if a large part of society decides that it's not optimal or sustainable, where would you stand? prevent change? or seek equitable and stable redistribution?
there are so many examples of the inherent unwillingness for the beneficiaries of extractive systems to resist change: see the laws imposed against serfs following the black death, or the shooting and violent suppression of striking union workers.
that cycle is beginning again: MAGA, widespread rioting in France, Italy and other places.
There is economic and political injustice. Systemic extraction is passing a stable equilibrium.
relax the grip on power and resources, or spend the blood and treasure it will cost to maintain it.
but don't bullshit anyone with this 'life has an inherent cost': that's trivially obvious to everyone.
we are well past the point of collectively paying that cost. it's just not fairly or reasonably distributed.
No, I just don’t think a class war is the answer. Equitable and stable resource distribution doesn’t necessitate retribution towards the current ruling class. An imperfect system beats no system at all.
lol
lmao
the reason we have weekends and no child labor is because workers died for it.
the state, the capitalists desire control, obedience and extraction. worker well-being is a low priority. workers advocating for better pay, safe working conditions, etc were routinely killed.
why is it laughable to say that there is a need to resist the injustice and push for better working conditions and rights for all?
Ignoring art with patrons which is a tiny percent of all art made, people just did things at home quietly. They painted, drew, told stories, knit, crocheted, etc. Even patron-led artists just made what their patrons wanted, namely all the famous religious art, which I imagine felt like unfulfilling work anyway.
What we like, that is to say gets things like our dopamine flowing, tends to tie in well with the idea of not being compelled to do it. Someone writing copy at work to further enrich the capital owning class and to pay their bills is very different than someone writing short stories in the evening after work.
Now my days largely consist of navigating a “game of thrones” political landscape where work means less than it ever has. The sense of agency I once coveted now feels like a distant memory in some ways.
But to be fair this is probably something that people experienced in many different ages of humanity.
This is because you were already meeting the base of your pyramid of needs. If you were building shelter because you had none, or hunting for subsistence, it’s considerably less enjoyable. Success means you live another day, failure means suffering. Self actualization is not a concern in those scenarios.
Obviously I don't know the answers, and there were obviously tons of day-to-day stressors that sucked, but I'm not so sure it's a given that people of the past did not find life fulfilling/meaningful.
You think it'd be fulfilling when your children had around a 25% chance to die before the age of five?
> Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
No. I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable. As technology has progressed, many jobs have gotten farther and farther from what we were meant to do.
And AI isn't going to help. The best case scenario is it replaces work with purposeless entertainments and ennui. The more likely case it that it removes fulfilling work from human hands, leaving more space for unfulfilling work and poverty (because capitalist logic CANNOT be questioned, or you're a heretic who should be burned at the stake).
Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?
Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.
Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.
I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.
Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.
Rose colored glasses. “We won’t starve today” is not spiritually fulfilling. It’s survival.
People romanticize the past. Modern life is more comfortable specifically because everyone isn’t struggling to survive. (Obviously some still are.)
> Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured.
That’s a real big “if”. You can go get a construction job right now. It will get you more fit. But it will probably also get you injured, especially over the long term.
If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.
And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).
For my part, there is a huge price I’m willing to pay to be able to drink water out of my tap. I didn’t have this always and I really value it.
Nah, couldn't be. You can't have running water without also having Elon Musk ruin Twitter, that's just a crazy fantasy.
Yeah. Things people do as hobbies tend to be things they enjoy.
There are a lot of people out there right now spending their free time prompting LLMs to write more code, because they find it fun.
So this is kind of a pedantic point, but 95% of our history is us doing things exactly as we evolved to do. I don't doubt either that hunting must have been a very engaging activity, especially when done as a clan or tribe.
That's not a good thing. It means we're failing to progress as a species. If we keep repeating history (with now, unfettered access to it), we're devolving, not evolving.
It fascinates me a topic that I was reading a couple days ago in a magazine (a old-professor of mine from college wrote it) about young people fantasizing about living in the past rather than the future.. and that could only mean that people is really anxious about the future.
Weird times.
There’s just a general feeling of dread and malaise in society. You see it in public too. Everyone is stonefaced and going about their day. There is no hum/hustle and bustle like I used to see in public places in the past. Money is very tight and everything is way too expensive. I mean lunches cost between 15 and $20 even in places that are not big cities. Basic grocery shopping runs cost $500 at this point. I think one of the biggest things is, you can essentially live a whole life without really having to interact with a whole lot of people now. Corporations provide all your services. The Internet provides community knowledge.
That being said I feel like I existed at the perfect time. I was able to get a social media and smart phone free youth and a great career in my middle age which means I can retire early and provide for my wife and kids with the money I’ve made so far. The next generation is screwed. I worry for my kids.
This moment in technology and society is really weird.
The things that were meant to be, will be. That's for acceptance. But we have free will (sort of). And that's for action.
Also, highly recommend these books so that you can also take a more active role for your health (but you need to exercise extreme caution and critical thinking as some of the stuff in there may not be valid or valid anymore):
1. Back to Eden (J. Kloss) [says in one section on pregnancy that expectant mothers must avoid all meat--which is bad advice. But there are some good ones there, nevertheless]
2. Let's get well (A. Davis)
3. You can get well (A. Davis)
I get it, but honestly, why? I have seen a few times someone being let go or about to and successfully negotiated out of it - but that person was always gone within a year anyway. The relationship is permanently damaged by that point, the employer cannot trust you're just buying time to get a new role and jump ship, and the employee will always have their guard up.
A workplace can have good work and great coworkers, but have truly awful people in positions of power over you. Which you may not realize until you're suddenly at risk.
IMO accessibility is an under-discussed benefit of the recent AI improvements. I've recovered from my RSI (typing injury) enough to use a keyboard a moderate amount but doubt I could ever go back to shredding through a codebase like I used to. In an earlier era I might have left the field entirely.
But still, even if all one has to do is read diffs and mumble to Claude, there's no getting around fatigue and brain fog when it's severe enough.
This guy should get his thyroid checked.
You should visit this website, from a nonprofit funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, and maybe show your clinician the linked clinician guide (sift through it yourself, to see how many independent subsystems you have symptoms in).
https://allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources/
I didn't get any mania, but the bottle of pills had Delusions of Grandeur listed as one of the side effects, which my partner would always point out whenever I had an idea she didn't like.
I've been through similar burnout phases with strange rebounds. There's a term called new leaf fallacy where we think that life will magically get better when we do the thing, so that any new thing provides a (false) sense of having a breakthrough. Then reality sets in and we slip back down to normal or even a new low.
I highly recommend thinking about finding optimal health as reality shifting. Which means that a holistic approach of making lifestyle changes can see real results that cause and effect might miss. So self-help is a good starting point, but there's also gut health and epigenetics.
Eating a can of mushrooms a day as part of a 2 to 4 egg omelet helped me tremendously. Mushrooms are high in fiber and have trace nutrients largely missing from our modern diet, so that they balance hormones and probably neurotransmitters. Cholesterol and saturated fat are also good for nerves and the brain. Note that they've been given a bad name due to red meat, which has a clogging effect on arteries for different reasons (especially beef fat). Humans also have a different sugar on our cells than other animals like chimpanzees (each protecting us from diseases that the other does not), so that when we eat meat or dairy, we try to use it and can't, which causes inflammation. Which also has a genetic component, since I'm able to eat large quantities of dairy but not meat, while other people find the opposite to be agreeable.
I also believe that I got a copper deficiency from taking zinc every day for the gym, without knowing that it blocks copper absorption in the intestines for 3 days. That resulted in unexpected illness and a couple of really bad injuries starting in 2024 and lasting for 2 years until I finally isolated the root cause(s). I heard an expert on NPR I think (can't remember her name), but she said that taking vitamins and minerals to end deficiencies is hugely beneficial, but that taking doses beyond that has basically no effect or can do harm. That's why the supplement industry might be perceived as snake oil, because it works for some but not others.
Epigenetics is really about faking it till you make it. If your intuition tells you that something that used to work in your body no longer does, you can retrace your steps to find triggers. Then do the opposite of them long enough to flip the switches back. For a lot of people, I think stress takes such a toll that we keep going until our body makes the decision for us and pulls the plug. So the obvious answer is to de-stress, which is hard to do in the workaday world that demands full productivity just to tread water when nobody shares. What the universe is really asking of us there is to de-stress anyway and let the cards fall where they may. In my experience, the things I was holding on to had little to no value anyway (they were attachments separating me from myself).
I only mention it because those outlier insights have a lot to offer. It's not so much about doing more of something, but looking at the things we're not doing and devoting energy to them.
Hope this helps someone.
Due to some nasty, persistent chest congestion a couple of years ago, I took a course of prednisone.
Holy shit did my fingers ever move on the guitar fingerboard without any warmup.
So please be careful after you're off the corticosteroids to not restart the things that might've contributed. Good luck, autoimmune disorders are hell.
For what it's worth the auto-immune issues can happen in periods of high stress. The low-energy, joint pain, etc, that could all have been a result of the stress from losing your job. The body is crazy and we underestimate the extent to which our minds and the stresses of life can influence our bodily health.
> In some phases of my life, I can take a giant step back, and look at it like from a bird’s eye view.
This is exactly what I'd be doing. Think about where the world is heading and how you might best position yourself for that world and where you want to be in it. Look at least 10 years out. Overly optimising to solve immediate problems is rarely the best move longer-term. For this reason sometimes these forced-reflection periods can be beneficial in the long-term if they shake you onto a better path.
Best of luck man. It's good to hear your optimistic. I hope everything works out exactly as you hope in the end =)
what is physically happening is that the body's mast cells release neurotransmitters like histamine and serotonin, causing inflammation (so the immune system can fight some things off) leading to pain, and also fatigue (to encourage you to stay safe at home in the cave conserving energy, or some such story like that -- don't trust any specific just-so story though, especially this one).
the interesting question is what all the other things are that stress you out. i've found dietary triggers are what got me and a lot of my friends; there are some allergy cases out there, and a few friends with long COVID, which is one particularly nasty self-sustaining form. a family member had a terrible decade long episode triggered by contact dermatitis with poison oak. and generally speaking, heat and humidity are stressors too, as are pressure changes (you've heard tell of the little old lady who can tell a storm is coming because of an arthritis flare).
The future is so hazy now. Maybe it sounds somewhat contradictory given what I said, but I think to take a long-term view at this moment you have to assume a high level of uncertainty, and that means you have to hedge and be more short-term oriented in your decisions.
For example, if you need to train for 2 years to reskill, then you require another few years of entry level work in that field before earning a decent salary, it's worth considering how confident you are that you're training for a career that will even exist in say 10 or 15 years. If you're investing years of your life into a future career it's important to do that with quite a high level of certainty about the return of that.
A lot of my decision making these days is trying to model out a safe route through uncertainty. A few years ago I felt like I could plan and was able to move towards the life I wanted. Now I feel like I'm just trying avoid getting my legs blown off as I walk through the minefield.
Attitude is everything in tough situations and your positivity is inspiring; thanks for the post. Cheers