[jjames]

Article is from 04/07. Is there any followup? It's not clear from all the commentary whether the author learned something from the anonymous solicitation of advice or if it served primarily as catharsis.

For anyone else living like this individual, I particularly agree with the commenters who mention taking up photography to get you out into the world creating art without abandoning a detail/tech-centric tendency.

[ealar]

I have found that any art does the trick for me. Over my life I've played Viola, crafted pottery, attempted to paint, and done photography. Of those two were wildly expensive (photography, oil painting), and the others were cheaper. I think the main draw of modern photography for programmers is that a great deal of our technical skill transfers into every part of photography except taking a good picture -- so we don't feel baffled when we first start.

That said, if you want to take up music or some other art, it's never too late. Music lessons are fairly cheap and honestly indispensable (I held my viola wrong for six months of practice before I started lessons). Painting is a much freer art and you can produce decent works on your own without instruction. If you do painting, I personally found oil painting an amazing medium because it allowed me to constantly improve my paintings no matter how bad they started =p.

[menloparkbum]

The photography comments are cribbed from the "Linden Method" which is a pretty successful anxiety treatment system based in the UK. The idea is that you need an engrossing hobby to keep you from obsessing about your anxiety.