[graderjs]

Seeing some of the comments here how people valued him, it seems like maybe sometimes these sentiments of gratitude are not expressed until after someone passes. It works if folks cherish the time they have, and remind people of how they appreciate them while they're still on Earth in their body.

[schneems]

I had lunch with him on Wednesday and wish I said more.

I also worry about the hidden pressures of praise. A overly critical inner life can interpret it as “I like you as long as you are useful” which is of course not the truth.

I have appreciation for the creators in my life, even when they no longer create.

[xtracto]

>I like you as long as you are useful” which is of course not the truth.

I think that's the problem with depression disease: no matter what most people tell you, your brain will find a way to use it to dig the hole deeper.

My wife has battled with minor depression and anxiety her whole life. I learned that more than trying to say things to cheer her up in the moment, i was more useful by looking for treatment.

It's a terrible disease.

[whats_a_quasar]

This is a point that is often missed in the conversation about depression. In the middle of a major depression, literally nothing you can say to the person will cheer them up. The best you can do is be near them, express love, and try to help them maintain sleep/eating/exercise and therapy.

[JohnBooty]

    no matter what most people tell you, your 
    brain will find a way to use it to dig the 
    hole deeper.

"I've got them fooled. I'm a fraud, they just don't know it."

"They're just being nice."

"This good person's kind words and actions are wasted on a piece of crap like me. If I wasn't around, they could 'spend' that kindness on somebody who actually deserves it. I'm hurting the world just by being here."

"They're lying, and now I feel worse because they're lying"

"I hurt so bad inside, and it hurts so bad to wear this mask and graciously accept the praise"

"I hurt so bad inside that I wasn't able to accept the praise graciously, and now I actually feel even worse because I've been so rude to this nice person who praised me"

Yeah. It's a struggle.

Even when you logically know those things are false and it's "just the depression talking" it's very hard to break out of those thought patterns.

(Which is why practicing positivity and gratitude -- keeping a gratitude journal, etc -- is actually an effective part of treatment for me. I'm not sure if it's because of specific neuronal pathways being reinforced by specific repeated thought patterns or what but, from a practical perspective, I try to treat positivity like a muscle that I need to exercise)

[toyg]

> A overly critical inner life can interpret it as “I like you as long as you are useful”

That's me after most praise: "you say you like me because the stuff I can do will help you, or because you have some unstated aim to take advantage of me, or because you don't know that it could have been so much better". I don't know when, but at some point any expectation of honesty in praise just went out of the window. Because of that, obviously, I also don't praise people as much as I should, because I expect they would react like I do - with obvious repercussions on social interactions.

The mind can be a right bitch.

[schneems]

I find some of the best advice for adults is found in advice for handling small children (I've got two kids).

The new research/trend is to try to praise behavior rather than outcomes (or in addition). The other bit is to focus on their actions instead of it's impact on you. For example "I'm proud that you won that baseball game" places the focus on me and on the outcome of winning. Versus "I saw you really focused out there in the outfield, I know getting distracted between bats is easy and you've come along way."

It's a very new way of speaking for me, but the more I practice it the more natural it comes. My family aims to "catch someone in praise" a few times a day. We also celebrate celebration. I.e. if I say something nice about someone, then they turn around and say "you get a point for giving a point."

> The mind can be a right bitch.

Too true :(

[JohnBooty]

This is really insightful and I'm going to try and do more of this!

    Versus "I saw you really focused out there 
    in the outfield, I know getting distracted 
    between bats is easy and you've come a
    long way."

A wise mentor told me a variation on this a long time ago. He mentioned that one of the most powerful things you can do is simply let somebody know that you recognize what they're doing or how they're struggling.

example: "I see you working on those reports! There are a million of them coming in every day, and you're cranking them all out yourself."

You don't even necessarily need to praise them, per se. (Although honest praise is of course very cool) Just the act of letting them know, and noticing is super powerful.

[rented_mule]

Agreed. For many, myself included, receiving praise for an outcome gets internalized as setting that outcome as the minimum bar. It applies more pressure. For some, they hear that the outcome is valuable and punish themselves psychologically for not achieving it sooner. For some, it's even more complicated than that.

A few years ago, I was managing the most impactful engineer I've ever been around (and I've seen a lot great engineers in my 30+ year career that included stints at several startups including my own, going through a a pretty big IPO, working at a FAANG as it came to dominate it's area, etc.). It was her first job and the team was stacked with high performers. We were directly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. Three weeks into her career, everybody on the team was going to her when they couldn't figure things out. Just a phenomenal mind with a capacity for dealing with technical complexity and finding business value that I would have previously thought impossible. Of course that led to a lot of praise from me and everyone else. Every time I praised her for an outcome, she withdrew further, eventually getting to the point that she wouldn't say anything in one-on-ones other than short answers to direct questions. A few months in, the CEO (without telling any of us beforehand) used a slide from one of her design review presentations to inspire the company with the kinds of technical->business wins we were now achieving as a company - it devastated her, making her want to change careers. A month later, she tried to reject a significant salary increase.

Nine months in, she made (and corrected) a minor technical mistake. I mentioned it to her in our next one-on-one. As I did, she leaned forward and her eyes got big. She peppered me with questions until she understood my perspective on it from every angle. The more I spoke about it, the more she perked up. After seeing this response, I decided to try to find deeper "criticisms" to bring up with her. She was so good that it was HARD to find anything at all. Eventually I thought of what level she'd be at in ten years and framed things as "here are skills you have that you're not fully exploiting to be as impactful as you could be." It instantly turned our interactions inside out. She went from zero trust in me as her manager to complete trust in me as a life mentor in ~30 minutes.

Later I asked her why that worked and she said it was one of the few times in her life that she thought someone understood her faults and still valued her. It's just what you're saying about letting people know you see them and what they're doing, not just the outcomes they are a part of and how it affects you. I'm lucky to have learned so much about engineering, management, and life from my interactions with her.

One of my heroes, Fred Rogers, was very good at this 50+ years ago, saying things like "I like you just the way you are."

[pertymcpert]

My god she sounds like a force of nature. I'd feel so small next to her.

[rented_mule]

She absolutely is a force of nature. But she has a giant heart and is passionate about the entire team sharing in each others' successes and everyone being respected. The result is that the people around her feel like they are doing the best work of their career because they are a true team. People came away with a better understanding of what they are capable of, and not feeling small at all.

I'm retired now. I delayed my plans around retirement until she moved on. One of the few things that would pull me out of retirement would be the chance to be led by her on a team doing work I feel passionate about.

[tfigment]

You are not alone. I think it goes all the way back to high school or middle school for me. Its when you realize the gold star stickers were behavior manipulation or something and then see it everywhere.

[layer8]

If he indeed committed suicide out of depression, I would imagine that maybe he realized after years of relative successes that nothing, no achievement, no appreciation/gratitude by others, will cure his depression. At least that wouldn’t be an uncommon pattern for high-intellect people with severe depression.

[theGnuMe]

This is very common actually. Phil Stutz (a famous psychiatrist) calls it the Snapshot. Basically the Snapshot is the misbelief that if we achieve certain things we will be happy. It's a form of wishful thinking. Instead you have to focus on and enjoy the journey because basic reality is pain, uncertainty and constant work.

There's a Netflix documentary on Stutz (called "Stutz") with Jonah Hill that is quite good although abbreviated on its coverage of "the tools".

[entropicdrifter]

As someone who suffers dysthymia and occasional major depression on top of it, I'll never stop being grateful that I figured this out early on in life.

When I was 11, I got my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. A couple years after that point I grew disillusioned with continuing to practice martial arts altogether because I realized that the achievement didn't make me happy. In some ways, it made my depression worse at the time and it just took me a few years to figure that out.

Music has consistently sustained me since then. It's both an endless journey of self improvement and an activity that's possible to purely enjoy in the moment. It takes so much of your brain at once to perform music that you literally cannot be stuck in your head with your own thoughts, instead you reach a state of mind where there is no ego whatsoever, just total flow-state focus and the experience of the present.

[mattgreenrocks]

Music is pretty much my primary hobby at this point for the exact reason: it has a near-infinite skill ceiling, highly creative, improvisational, and it can be both a private and public pursuit. It is the ultimate grounding to the present moment, and it provides very good feedback when you start drifting out of it. It demands a very high degree of awareness and rewards you accordingly. Truly magical.

[theGnuMe]

That's awesome and you've motivated me to restart piano!

[mattgreenrocks]

> maybe he realized after years of relative successes that nothing, no achievement, no appreciation/gratitude by others, will cure his depression.

The real kicker is that the cure for this is not free either.

I'd say the cure is to starve the broken part of yourself that needs achievement to justify itself. To do that, you must consciously break the cycle of over-achievement and focus on well-being as a higher value over achievement. This is a lot of work, as you're patching up the hole that achievement was trying to fill, and it is slow going.

Eventually you can have a better relationship with achievement, but there's a cost: you no longer see it the same way, and other people can sometimes detect that about you. You'd choose your own well-being over achievement most times. Because it broke you once, it is harder to have the same hunger for it you once did. And that's good: it means you learned and you changed. (Sometimes I think the fact we can make these big changes at all is a profound miracle.) But, people can see that as aloofness, detachment, or disengaged. It is none of those things. It is kept at arms length the same way a former alcoholic might deal with a drink: extremely cautiously and deliberately.

It will forever be complicated.

[graderjs]

Seeing some of the comments in reply here from folks who find it hard to give or take gratitude, it seems a lot of people see what is being talked about as praise. But appreciation is distinct. Praise is: you are good or your skills is good. Appreciation/gratitude is: you really made a difference to me.

You can never go wrong just honestly and vulnerably saying, "I appreciate you because...", and telling someone how what they did really help you out, or let them know you appreciate them because they made a difference to you, you're just sharing how you feel sincerely. Whatever happens, you said what you could at the time.

As for accepting expressions of gratitude, people may have ulterior motives that you may correctly suspect, in which case...be happy, a frenemy has revealed themselves to you, and the fact that they see you as important enough to their interests to try to manipulate is its own form of compliment...or they may simply be imperfectly trying to express how much of a difference you made to them, like everybody else... Either way you can choose the meaning you take from it and find something to feel happy about or use.

It reflects poorly on your if you always suspect other people saying nice things to you, for one you have such a low opinion of others, and of your own impact, but also you miss many chances to find something good. For examples: someone may have been trying to connect with you, because they appreciate you, but by suspecting them, you pushed them away, and hurt them. May as well at least try to see the good and give a chance to it: you may be helping someone more than you know by doing so.