[suranyami]

> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids

As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that.

Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of the disposable income you have now.

For me, it's a battle between "if I do something, someone's just gonna fuck it up anyway" and "I used to love this. I can still get excited by this, right?" I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything.

I suspect it's a result of a decade or so of working in startups with borderline psychotic egomaniacs. For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount.

At times I feel it may be akin to PTSD. The psych I saw suspected it may well be, but unfortunately there are many more needy patients being treated for far worse PTSD (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).

Apparently, there's a term for this "inability to do stuff": executive dysfunction. That's about as much as I know.

One of the other unsettling things that has recently manifested itself has been stuttering. I've never stuttered and always prided myself on being a persuasive and confident speaker. But since the above horror-show I've often found myself unable to string sentences together, getting tongue-tied, long pauses. Maybe it's just age, but it seems correlated time-wise. Yes, I know, correlation is not causation.

[heleninboodler]

If INTPenis hears anything I hope it's that not having kids isn't the root of this problem. I have kids and it's wonderful, but I too feel all the same lethargy and lack of purpose interspersed with bouts of helping kids with their homework and relentlessly getting their grumpy asses to school at ungodly hours every day and generally trying hard not to fuck them up. If you're already in a shitty situation, having kids definitely does not fix it.

If you find it inexplicably hard to make it to your 9am standup, try making it your responsibility to get two other humans out of bed and ready for school at 6:35 every day and then make it to your 9am standup.

[wonderwonder]

This. Kids don't help with burnout. I drive my kids to school each morning at 7:20. This is preceded by 35 minutes of insanity asking them 100 times to get out of bed, eat their breakfast, get dressed, brush their teeth, etc. This morning on the drive in, I got in an argument with my kid over the stupidest thing that is probably my fault but the result was he got out of the car upset and I drove back home irritated, sat down to work and opened my emails and essentially raged at the requests the people were asking of me. Lately my wife has been on me for not practicing sports with my kids but I literally don't have breakfast or lunch most days because I cannot get up from my desk, the pings and requests just don't stop coming. By the time I get up its dark out. I am lucky to get to the gym once a week and if I do its on a Saturday at Noon. I work from home and I had to hire a nanny just to distract the kids and do homework with them otherwise they keep coming into my office and I have to context switch and I am useless for the next 45 minutes, then they would come in again.

On Friday I committed to delivering a feature set in an insane timeline. I open my email this morning and they are asking me for a bunch of other busy work that I just don't have time to deliver but its on me to figure it out.

Life should really not be like this.

I am seriously considering a test run of taking a couple hits of marijuana before work one day to see if there is any difference on my stress level and work delivery.

I sometimes watch the garbage truck and I am incredibly envious of the two guys on the truck.

[avgDev]

I feel this.

I am having a really hard time coping with parenting. I am logical person but my toddler is not. I like reading books and just silence which allows me to think. That is completely gone in our house now. It is mostly crying, screaming, followed by more crying. There are some beautiful moments that I will cherish, but I really have a hard time. Other times, we are asking to brush teeth, get ready for bed, get in the car, get inside, or do something else which is met with MASSIVE resistance.

I don't know how people have 3-4 kids. I would probably go insane.

[Cerpicio]

Don't get too worked up about it. The crying and screaming rate goes down as they get older. Bedtime routines get easier as they get more independent. Of course other issues might come up, but I think it gets easier as they get older.

Hang in there! In a few more years you'll remember all the good times and the hardly remember that bad times.

(Speaking from experience as a father of two biological children of 15 and 11, and an adopted son of 3. And I'm 51. I never thought I'd have a 3yo at this age. He'll start driving when I'm 64. I don't have as much patience as I used to, so I have to watch my emotions. But it's worth it!)

[heleninboodler]

I think the answer is that they're not all equally challenging. My first kid is easy as pie. Still a lot of work, but generally does what's asked of her, has rarely thrown fits, is quiet, etc. The second kid is a constant battle.

[wonderwonder]

That's the nice thing about having multiple kids. The second kid situation is only 4 times harder than the single kid situation.

[giantg2]

A second kid is nice in theory. In practice it sounds like a nightmare.

[theGnuMe]

It takes a village to raise a kid so find your village.

[spikder]

you wouldn't go insane. you would adjust. it gets easier.

[nickd2001]

To me the problem here, is an unreasonable attitude by the employer. Many employees are parents. We cannot work at quite the same breakneck pace. Its abusive to the whole family to expect that. Employers need to understand and make allowances, and they themselves will benefit if they treat people reasonably. You could always go work for public sector though, perhaps the government, and/or ask to work 4 days a week. The salary hit is more than worth it, even if that requires some real frugality or change in lifestyle. Time spent with kids is precious. More chilled out parents make for more chilled and better behaved (though far from perfect ;) kids. I think the garbage truck guys have to get up early so that might not be compatible ;). Might be in a union though, so salary hit might be less than expected ;)

[wonderwonder]

You are not wrong.

9 meetings so far today. All booked over my blocked work time.

[vlachen]

This is the truth. The advice I give to expectant friends is this: get your shit together, mental health wise, before that tiny human shows up in your life. My partner and I found that the stress of having a child brings all that shit up.

[ido]

All of the above is true...And yet I (39 years old, father of 2 boys- aged 4 & 6) used to have existential crises routinely and I really don't anymore. Despite often being huge pains in the ass my kids make me so...Content? Happy? I don't know.

Whatever it is I don't have existential crises anymore.

[bombcar]

Kids provide a VERY easy answer to “why am I doing this inane shit” - because they would literally die if you don’t.

And people will naturally go through lots of pain if there’s hope their kids will have a better life than they did, and there’s almost always that hope, even in total societal collapse.

And a second side effect is kids force you to get to know the parents of other kids, even if only accidentally. Many people are quite starved for general human conversation, even if it is just about the immense number of diapers encountered per annum.

[eternalban]

I thought this was common understanding but the comments here seems to indicate otherwise. It is surprising. People’s behavior changes after having kids, and in the main this generally means they become more ‘responsible’ modulo ‘bad parents’. There is powerful biological machinery to make this regenerating process work for both sexes and it operates at a more fundamental level than higher level (‘conceptual’) processes.

[vlachen]

For me it was trauma from long past. I didn't get existential so much beforehand, because I had learned that looking too hard wasn't awesome. The complete life-upending force that is a slug in a onesie forced me to look at a lot of things. Further, keeping my relationship / career / everything else afloat required me to then do something about what I saw.

[frereubu]

I think existential crises often come because people have too much time to think. That's certainly the case with me. Perhaps you just don't have enough time to overthink things now! Kids, if you let them, also keep you in the moment pretty well - there's not much time to chew over previous mistakes when you're in the middle of a play fight.

[vwcx]

Agreed. Every time my kid naps, I find myself with an hour of "free time", but right around the time the existential questioning would begin, he's screaming for a diaper change.

[frereubu]

I agree that kids absolutely do not help with existential angst, and in some ways make it worse. But, and this is a nuanced point that I hope comes across as something to ponder rather than advice, I've found having kids and therapy at the same time has really has helped me in a way that I'm pretty sure therapy alone wouldn't have done. There's something about learning how to be loving with your kids (which I didn't have much of growing up, so had nobody to model that behaviour from) that has fixed quite a bit of my own self-loathing. As I've learned how to be a good dad (and to be clear, I wasn't actively cruel or abusive beforehand, just confused) I've learned how to be kind to myself. That has gone a long way for me in many areas of life, including work.

[jayski]

I'm going to say something that sounds shitty, because I don't want it come off like I'm bragging, I promise I'm not. Just trying to bring context to how financial circumstances might affect your outlook in this situation.

I founded a startup 15 years ago and have done well. It's nothing youve heard of and Im NOWHERE close to owning a yacht or a private plane.

With this mild success I was feeling depressed, didn't know why I was building this company for. Sure I could buy nice things, but it seemed pointless.

Then I had kids and it changed everything, I love every minute of it. Its very clear to me I'm working for their future benefit.

I think the difference is that my mild success allows me some game changing luxuries:

- We have a maid that handles all cleaning duties.

- I'm super involved in my kids lives daily, but we do have a nanny that can care for them if we want to take a break. This allows me to lock myself in my office and play guitar, piano or read whenever I want to. After 60-90 minutes I start to crave hugging my kids and go play with them. Its also not a big deal for me to work out daily.

- I only have to take on work projects that interest me, all the boring stuff I've done 50 times I can delegate to other engineers. Forget building another API endpoint, integration or CRUD.

There's an interview with Steph Curry where they ask him what the greatest luxury money allows him: A Nanny.

So I guess my point is, money doesn't fix everything but it can make things a lot easier and enjoyable.

[hobo_mark]

> For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount.

Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once?

[suranyami]

That’s a very good question. Hubris? I guess?

What I mean by that, was I was REALLY invested in the project: not the business case, or the brand or anything else about the company, and particularly not the CEO. I REALLY wanted to complete the project as a badge of honour for myself.

I’d built 4 x tech teams of a total of 25 senior devs up from nothing, entirely re-wrote the broken legacy backend systems and switched over flawlessly, under-budget and on-time, as well as gave the other teams I managed the autonomy and trust to rebuild front-end and mobile systems using best practices. We had a great engineering culture that I was proud of.

I had known from the very beginning that the CEO was a loose cannon, but I stupidly thought I had the experience and willpower to keep them under control and largely out of the way of the tech team. I was so horribly wrong.

When the above rebuild of the backend was finished they placed an incompetent buffoon in charge over me, threw out the roadmap I’d created and started micro-managing the senior devs. When he was shouting at one of the senior devs for daring to be 5 minutes late to work, I took him aside and said “you just can’t do that, these people are hard to come by” he fired me on the spot.

So, yeah, hubris.

[runeks]

Forget everything else. If you accept being treated this way — holding on to some hope that “some day it’ll get better” — you are going to feel like shit (even after you quit or are fired).

[cma]

If the person is on a visa they can be deported if they walk away without another job. Lots of bad behavior ends up excused because of this risk. A similar situation where this can go on is student/advisor in phd studies, especially when there is no other advisor in the field they can switch to at a small university.

[suranyami]

Laws regarding this are different from country to country. I know that the US laws are very biased towards the employer, and the employee gets to be put in a terrible situation.

Australia had laws like this in the past (thanks Liberal Party, you pricks), but they were being seriously abused and eventually rolled back. Abuse still happens though, just less of it.

[fho]

Have you ever walked away from a job? It's really hard to do.

[avgDev]

I have.

When I was young I detailed cars for a small dealership with 3 owners. It was a hot summer day, no AC in the shop, boss wanted me to get a car detailed in 2 hours. Kept asking if it is ready, and at some point he started screaming at me.

I literally said, "Fuck off man, I'm done, you can do this shit yourself". It was the most liberating moment in my life. Other owners called me and asked if I would come back, that the other guy was sorry. I didn't.

Today my emergency fund will cover 2 years of living expenses, because I never want to be stuck working in a crappy environment.

[makapuf]

I know it can be hard. However, walking away abruptly from someone disrespectful ( but with a very short -but polite -explanation) I have already done. Generally people cool off and come back either with apologies or at least explaining themselves calmly. Don't accept this.

[bavila]

Twice. And each time was better off for it mentally, and ended up securing higher paying jobs afterwards. It's just a matter of courage -- or maybe just not giving a fuck. Might get me into trouble one day, but, frankly, I don't give a fuck.

[docmars]

Same, I did so once. By a sheer act of God I already had another job opportunity lined up from a recommendation by an old co-worker at a new gig they were at, and I landed the job immediately, with a nearly 50% increase in base salary, and a team culture I wouldn't trade the world for.

[itsoktocry]

>Have you ever walked away from a job? It's really hard to do

Of course, and of course. But (I presume) the OP works in the same industry most of us do, and that getting another job has been incredibly easy for more than a decade.

[ddingus]

I have. It is hard. It gets easier the second time. I have no data on a third.

No regrets.

[fm2606]

Holy Shit! This is me exactly except for the decades in start ups, I've never worked in start ups. Also, I'm not stuttering but I do stop in the middle of a sentence and can't finish it. That has been happening for quite a few years.

I never heard the term "executive dysfunction" and always used the term "paralysis by analysis". I'm currently learning Common Lisp and very excited about it, but when it comes to doing any sort of actual programming for my own personal reasons (whatever that is) I have a hard time working on it. That is regardless of what PL I use.

If I have two things that I want to do, say Thing-A and Thing-B, when I work on A my mind says I'd rather work on B and when I am working on B I'd rather be doing A. It is a vicious cycle.

And as a parent I agree that kids would not help the OP situation.

I recently switched jobs (Aug 22) to a huge health care org. The work has way more purpose than my old programming job but I still feel like I am missing something.

[shanebellone]

I know it as "analysis paralysis".

[prox]

What I know of this, is that stressors work like water pooring into a bucket. But anytime you do anything that feels fun, creative or relaxing, a hole magically appears and water poors out.

The more stressors you have, the less water will poor out and you gain stress until your bucket is full. Then the warning systems kick in, and your brain or body starts giving signals. If you ignore them (motoring through or I got this mentality) you reach orange or red levels. A full PTSD is definitely possible (it’s like a short circuit)

Thing is, you can’t spend what you don’t have. If your reach a limit, it’s a literal limit of your body/mind.

The only to reverse the situation is to have good, refreshing times and periods to make holes in the bucket. Anything fun, creative and/or relaxing will do, and emphasizing it needs to be both for body and mind.

[peepee1982]

It does sound like PTSD or CPTSD. You can treat this yourself with the right resources.

For starters, there are journaling practices for processing emotions. And then there are various kinds of meditations.

Then there is psychoeducation, which will - over time - help dealing with difficult emotions.

Notable authors and researchers in this field: Pete Walker, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Arielle Schwartz.

[spikder]

hmmmm .... PTSD? he's probably just in the same existential funk 90% of the rich world is in. action is the way out, whatever that means for you.

[peepee1982]

No, it's not the same.

Action is good, but if the emotional state is too bad, you can't just act your way out of it. You'll just overreach and break down again. You have to metabolize your emotions. For example through grief and acceptance.

I've tried action and many other things for decades. What finally freed me was crying it out for a few weeks, and now I'm fine. Now I can take action to get out of a funk.

[spikder]

i should be more careful with my comments then. such a wide spectrum of human experience. glad you're freed :)

[peepee1982]

I've only learned about this stuff in my late 30s, although I was deeply affected since childhood. I don't think your comment was particulary callous or ignorant. It just scares me when I see actual trauma being trivialized and thrown in with the "usual" stuff that stresses us out and feel a need to point out the difference.

[itsoktocry]

>For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk.

This would happen to me exactly one time, and never again. I know it happens, but how people put up with such abuse is beyond me.

[suranyami]

Yeah, I dunno why I let it happen either.

I’d never been like that with any other job. My only guess is the explanation I gave in my other post above/below.

It certainly hasn’t happened since or ever will again, you can be sure of that.

Noone ever goes to there grave saying “If only I’d spent more time at work!”

[scruple]

On the stuttering thing, I've recently developed a similar problem. I had a stutter as a child and went through years of speech therapy and for all intents and purposes it was gone for over 3 decades. Now it's back? Not nearly as bad, but it's there and it's frustrating and distracting.

Another recent speech related development, I'm losing words. I'll be mid-sentence and I'll have a specific word in mind that I want to use but it's like the dictionary entry for that word is blank in my mind. Only seems to happen with verbal speech, haven't really noticed it when typing.

I also think it's age related in combination with past experiences and the fact that I have 3 young kids and everything that entails but who knows.

[Vedor]

That sounds similarly to my condition, but I'm just in my early thirties.

I was stuttering since I was a small kid. In high school, went to therapy and I was stutter-free for around 8 years, then I started to stutter again. Since then, I have a better and worse periods, I can speak without much stuttering for as long a quarter of a year, then suddenly start to stutter even doing small talk with the family.

Regarding losing words, I really like your analogy with blank dictionary entry. It's like, "I can speak without stuttering as long as a... what is the word for a period of three months?", then I need to search my memory for this word, and quite often I can find the word I'm looking for, but it takes time. I had these symptoms as a child too, but they have gotten a bit worse in recent years.

I always half-jokingly thought there must be some consequences of being born almost 4 months ahead of schedule.

[D13Fd]

>> It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids > As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that.

As a parent, I'm not so sure. I think every person is different, and some people (myself) respond really well to having kids. They give you a purpose in life and make everything seem more meaningful.

Other people absolutely do not get as much out of having kids, and it feels like a grind to them.

People are just different, nothing wrong with that at all. IMO problems may arise when your reality is misaligned with the kind of person you are.

Or it could be something else entirely.

[suranyami]

Oh, absolutely agree. Some people really THRIVE when they become parents, and hooray for them. It’s different for everyone.

[INTPenis]

>For me, it's a battle between "if I do something, someone's just gonna fuck it up anyway" and "I used to love this. I can still get excited by this, right?" I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything.

This is a much better explanation of what I was trying to say, you nailed that. I'm not a native english-speaker so I struggle with the right wording.

The kids part probably stems from the classic midlife crisis feeling that I haven't accomplished anything, and I'm sure that contributed to my state. So I'm not too focused on that part really because I've lived my life so far, and chosen my partners so far, with the goal of not having kids.

No instead I'm trying to reason that I need to see more of the world and meet more amazing people. I met an amazing woman last summer who was a digital nomad, and following her around the world has given me the travel bug.

So I need to reason in my head and come to a logical conclusion of how best to facilitate unlimited travel, and for the moment that is to stay with my employer and at least put in enough effort that they continue to be happy with my work. And use my freedom to travel and meet people while I'm still young enough to enjoy myself.

I'm coming from a 20 year long career of over-achievement, overly loyal to my employers and staying up long nights nerding out on tasks. I need to make a big switch from that to more of the do the bare minimum necessary to keep them happy and focus on the life part of work/life balance a bit more.

[suranyami]

The travel thing is definitely something I wish I could do more of, so if your current employer enables that, that’s a big plus for your mental health.

Do you think your current employer would respond well to an honest discussion about how to make the work you do more, I dunno, exciting? Envigorating? Less stressful? More meaningful? Less contact hours? Some managers would respond well to that. Others, not so much.

Dare I say it, it may also be worth talking to your partner? That’s definitely something I wish I’d done way sooner when I was seriously depressed. My partner has been so understanding and helped greatly get me back to a state where I was getting more joy out of life. For me, it was always this fear of feeling like a failure, something that is definitely intensified by having 2 people depend on you as much as a mother and child do. If they love you, they will really want to help you and you’d be crazy not to ask for their advice at least.

Worth noting that the HR department are NOT the ones to be discussing this with: they work for the company, not for you. It sounds harsh, but NEVER trust HR, no matter how nice they seem most of the time.

> the classic midlife crisis feeling that I haven't accomplished anything

Totally frivolous aside, the Germans have a word for that: “Torschlußpanik".

> From Tor +‎ Schluss +‎ Panik, literally “gate-shut panic”. For safety reasons city gates used to be shut at nightfall (Torschluss, from Tor +‎ Schluss), leaving latecomers no other choice than to stay outside, thereby exposing them to various dangers.

A German once told me “yeah, but in Germany that usually hits people in their 20s”. LOL.

[INTPenis]

Thanks for all the advice, I think we're pretty much on the same page here. It's not hard for me to understand intellectually what can be done, but motivation is a strange beast that doesn't seem to follow logic.

And my employer has been amazing, truly amazing. They basically gave me free reign to find projects on my own that could benefit the company.

No I'm afraid I'm stuck at stagnation and if I don't find another remote-only job that allows me the freedom of work/life balance I've become accustomed to I will just have to suck it up and do some effin work. Which is exactly what I've been doing lately.

Using all the known techniques, pomodoro, timeblocking, dividing tasks up into smaller components, I have managed to do some work lately and it feels good.

[spikder]

so maybe for you living == achieving? maybe takes this as a golden opportunity to reassess things. do something for you! that has no meaning, or purpose. just to do it. see what happens.

[leftbit]

Sounds familiar, especially the stuttering. Not really sure what's going on with me, but I found that sitting down for about 10 minutes and drinking one or two glasses of water alleviates the symptoms. Might be I just need the break, might be I'm stuttering because I've been dehydrated.

[dunno7456]

> I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything.

I'm stuck in the same position you described, except that I want to, but pretty much everyone around me is actively preventing me to work on anything.

[suranyami]

Been in that situation before too. Damn that sucks.

[stuaxo]

Ha, and like 5% of the spare time.