[pdimitar]

I didn't say or even imply that and it's unfair to interpret it that way.

Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way to win is to do something else with your time.

It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is not cool.

[SwSwinger]

I think the point is that this negative pitfall happens to people and multiple people concur. It's easy to say "fight this with positivity", most people on HN started with this philosophy. In practice, it's hard to do that consistently after the first 10 years, especially when you don't notice the slide until you're in a pit.

[pdimitar]

Hm, didn't occur to me to look at it that way so you're likely correct.

I am personally 41 and I've fought tooth and nail to not just sit at the computer for the sake of it, neither in an office nor at home. Nowadays when I sit at my desk, I have goals in mind and if I catch myself not working towards any of them in an hour, I just get up and go do something else and someplace else.

But I maintain that nowhere did I imply something as dismissive and shallow as "just don't be sad" or, not shallow but still far from what I meant, "fight this with positivity". It's not that at all, it was much more along the lines of: "find your own purpose and don't wait for others to impose theirs on you".

In my current job I am one of 3 recent hires (just recently hit the 4 months mark) and since we come from very different backgrounds compared to the company's culture, we often have 5 PRs just waiting on reviews and we find ourselves completely blocked on any further progress (can't even open other PRs since we still haven't received feedback on the current ones and that would severely change what code we should put in the new ones).

I have raised the problem multiple times, from squad leaders all the way to the CEO, but it seems that the people are cool with it and don't mind if you just twiddle your thumbs every now and then. So I started picking up more and more sysadmin skills which I need for my home NAS management and potentially other home servers in the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But maybe my comment up-thread was way too short and open for negative interpretation?