Well done!
RedJen wrote:Strangeblades wrote:Goddamn frustrated right now. Trying to get a job (again) and got lots of prospects but no calls back. These days I'm applying to large corporate transportation companies. This means the person I'm talking to does not have the authority to greenlight my hire. It's gotta go to a pile of requests sitting in another department.
I hear you, I'm in the same situation.
Sigh. Yup.
By the way this gif and comment means I'm with you. I hear ya. I understand. (Im bad at communicating in short comments)
Congratulations!!! So excited to hear some good news today.
Well done!
Thanks
Congratulations!!! So excited to hear some good news today.
Thanks thanks
This is perhaps a ludicrously open-ended question (and more of a rant than a real question), but how do you know which side of the line you're on with work - i.e. is the depression caused by my workplace unhappiness, or is my workplace unhappiness caused by my depression? With three different companies in the past three years, I'm beginning to think I'll just never be satisfied, which makes me wonder whether it's me or them?
There's probably a larger statement to be made regarding capitalism and the family unit, but I'm relatively powerless to impact that, try as I might.
I wish I knew the answer to that question. I'm in a similar boat, and lean towards my depression being the culprit rather than my job. However, I feel like I'm never getting my depression under control (hello, Mr. Depression, I see you there), which makes me want to assume my job will never get better either. Logically, I understand that my depression will get better at some point and then I can properly evaluate my job. Emotionally, I'm just tired and exhausted of feeling tired and exhausted all the time for the past 3 years.
I relate to your post a lot, but that last sentence of yours sums it up for me. I appreciate knowing I'm not the only one in this boat, even if it's sinking .
Mine was more of a malaise than an active dislike but I can confirm that overall happiness had increased more from treating my depression (which turned out to be more of an attention issue) than by changes in my work situation.
Overall it's more likely and has far more upsides/fewer downsides to treating it as a depression issue until proven otherwise. Put another way: if you fix the depression issue and it's really a work problem, you'll still benefit from all the progress you've made. If you fix the work issue and it's really a depression problem you'll have less benefit to carry forward.
Mine was more of a malaise than an active dislike but I can confirm that overall happiness had increased more from treating my depression (which turned out to be more of an attention issue) than by changes in my work situation.
Overall it's more likely and has far more upsides/fewer downsides to treating it as a depression issue until proven otherwise. Put another way: if you fix the depression issue and it's really a work problem, you'll still benefit from all the progress you've made. If you fix the work issue and it's really a depression problem you'll have less benefit to carry forward.
++
This is perhaps a ludicrously open-ended question (and more of a rant than a real question), but how do you know which side of the line you're on with work - i.e. is the depression caused by my workplace unhappiness, or is my workplace unhappiness caused by my depression? With three different companies in the past three years, I'm beginning to think I'll just never be satisfied, which makes me wonder whether it's me or them?
So I quit my job of 15 years out of the blue middle of last year, when I realized that I'd been waking up in semi-panic-attack states at the thought of having to go to work that morning. Which is to say, I feel you, man.
I'm now 6+ months into a new job, and what I've realized is that the old job was definitely a large part of the problem (stagnation, boredom, lack of engagement while putting on a brave face so no-one at that job knew how checked out I'd been for years), and with hindsight, I shoulda been outta there years earlier.
While the new job solved some of those problems - it got me back into a style of work I more enjoy (closer to the coal-face of solving technical problems and making engineering decisions, rather than cranking the handle to churn out the same set of paperwork for each iterative release), and has put me back on the steep part of the learning curve, the real lesson is the one you've succinctly captured here:
There's probably a larger statement to be made regarding capitalism and the family unit, but I'm relatively powerless to impact that, try as I might.
The bottom line is I that was (and still am, to a lesser extent) burned out and what I REALLY want is not have to work. As you say, I'm powerless to get that, because capitalism and family obligations.
So I've been thinking intently (*) about how to manage that burnout, what kind of work I should be chasing over the next decade, and what I can do elsewhere in my life to mitigate and manage the burnout. Cos that seeps in everywhere, and it's easy to find maladaptive coping mechanisms which just dig the hole you're in deeper (e.g. booze, drugs, vidjagames, whatever you find yourself doing to distract from your misery) while doing precisely nothing to actually address any of it's sources.
For me, I'm now employed by an agency who provides senior-level high-skilled engineers to clients. My goal with that is to avoid getting pigeon-holed in the same role for years at a time: it's a model that almost ensures I'll be switching roles and/or jobs every 1-4 years, keeping me on that steep part of the learning curve, and ensuring that the problems put in front of me are interesting ones. It's a much better fit for me, I just wish I'd figured out way sooner than I'm not suited to being a lifer at the same place.
(*) This is a loud advertisement for talk therapy, y'all. It's not something I'd really considered until my wife lovingly bullied me into it because I was so goddamn depressed. It's not much of an over-estimation to say it changed my life. Certainly changed my patterns of thinking for the better (not to mention patterns of behavior), and gave me a mental toolkit to interrogate my depression and work at it, rather than pretending it didn't exist while it gets worse and worse (which was my prior approach).
All of which is to say in response to your OP, yeah, there's a good chance you're never going to be satisfied with your job. The real trick is to accept that, and to take a dating metaphor, stop looking for Mr Right (Job) and start looking for Mr Right Now (job). Which with 3 jobs under your belt recently, sounds like you are. And you're missing the point about the link between workplace dissatisfaction and depression - it's not a one-way causality - they're an Ouroboros of unhappiness. One leads to the other, which leads back to the first, and so it goes.
Really appreciate all the advice, I definitely relate to basically all of it.
Unfortunately, my current work has made my decision for me. Turns out this week was the end of my 6 month probationary period and they've decided they don't want to continue with me. Not sure how I feel about this. I guess I appreciate the possibility of taking a break?
Sadly, its not much of a break. The stress of not having a job can easily match the most toxic one.
That being said, you still need self care and to take breaks while job searching. Many people forget that and the burn out continues to pile up.
Dust up your resume. Work on a few stories where you were critical to the success and don't be negative.
Also, as per auditioning for roles, learn to move on to the next interview after you complete one. It is hard but lingering on the one you just did will drive you nuts. Even if you were lukewarm on the opportunity.
I'm gonna spoiler my rant. Trigger warning for people sensitive to fatphobia (not that I think this is particularly fatphobic, but it is about being fat, and I don't know how your fatphobia manifests, so consider your trigger warned)
My wife is fat. That's her word to describe the shape of herself. She's been various degrees of fat her entire adult life and has gotten increasingly large over the last 10 years.
She's also lazy and/or actively resists efforts to be physically active. Accordingly she's got the strength of a woman a third of her size.
She's also got a constellation of maladies, mental and physical, including a degenerative joint disorder and monocular vision (no depth perception).
It doesn't take a genius to put those facts together and see problems waiting to happen. She's too weak to manage the size of herself, and too clumsy to not make mistakes that require that strength she doesn't have to respond to. She's fallen down the stairs three times in the last few months, and yesterday that resulted in a badly broken ankle.
She's in her 40s, but performs physically like someone in their 70s.
The shit of it? I've been begging her to get off this train for several years, warning her that I'm terrified I'm gonna find her at the bottom of the stairs, broken or bleeding, before long. Lo and behold, here we are.
Now muggins here has to play Humpty Dumpty and pick up the pieces. Again. For the umpteenth time.
I'm so f*cking tired, you guys.
Sorry Jonman.
FWIW my wife is in a similar but less severe situation. She drinks though and has fallen because of it
Sorry Jonman.
FWIW my wife is in a similar but less severe situation. She drinks though and has fallen because of it :(
: sad fist bump :
4-ish years ago, my wife came home to find me epically, catatonically, unrousably drunk. She thought I was literally dying of alcohol poisoning and it terrified her. To this day she regrets not calling an ambulance.
I quit drinking there and then. She insisted on it, she was right to, and I'm glad she did. That shit was out of control and destroying me.
I'm so pissed that she won't do the work to return the favor, with sugar being her booze.
I'm so pissed that she won't do the work to return the favor, with sugar being her booze.
I hear ya. I don't even know how to talk to her about her weight. And it really isn't her weight, its the mobility issues that scare me.
We have no "mandatory" stairs. But a year ago we were in the grocery store and someone runs by me to tell the check that a woman has fallen at the end of the aisle and I knew. So I ran to the end of the aisle to find her sitting on the floor unable to get up. The emergency room said she had a hairline fracture in her ankle and she epically struggled with crutches until I was able to get her a medical scooter where you can put your weight on the effected leg's knee.
So much fun
I hear ya. I don't even know how to talk to her about her weight. And it really isn't her weight, its the mobility issues that scare me.
Right? I don't f*cking care what the scale says, I care that you can't navigate a set of stairs without significant existential risk.
And guess who bought a 3 story house 18 months ago?
Right? I don't f*cking care what the scale says,
So much this.
Except for me its "I care that I don't want to see you hobble for the rest of the week on a sore ankle you got from working a Monday trade show."
The scale is just a number. I am not going to add to the 3 lbs, 7 lbs, up and down pressure already on your shoulders, levied by society and television.
Who knew that love is paralyzing?
And on that note...
My wife fell at work and probably broke her rib(s). Her boss told her to Uber to urgent care but they then called her an ambulance to go to the ER.
Yay!
So sorry to hear that. That boss needs to be reported to HR immediately.
Sorry, there's missing context. My wife thought she could drive herself to Urgent Care and her boss advised her not to. And to take an Uber instead.
But, nothing broken thankfully. She was able to sleep okay. The docs said the pain would be worse today but that hasn't materialized yet. *crosses fingers it stays that way*
Well that's better than you feared. Phew
Sorry, there's missing context. My wife thought she could drive herself to Urgent Care and her boss advised her not to. And to take an Uber instead.
But, nothing broken thankfully. She was able to sleep okay. The docs said the pain would be worse today but that hasn't materialized yet. *crosses fingers it stays that way*
Phew. Hope she does ok over the weekend!!!
Thanks for the support. She is as good as can be expected.
She told me that my mom gave her great advice a long time ago. To "stay ahead of the pain". So long as my wife does that, she is able to mostly look after herself.
I am really just counting my lucky stars that she is able to rest and sleep comfortably. Understandably she grimaces a lot still and it makes my heart sink. Again thankfully her sleep is free of that
The emotional toil of having our loved ones unexpectedly come to harm from falls is a real one that comes with increasing frequency at this era of our lives. I'm 2km away now, and hearing a thud somewhere in the house still has me jumping, fighting off fear and despair to assess the situation.
Sending you all my love. It's frustrating and unfair.
I've been thinking about relationships to food a lot lately and the impact that has had on my mental and physical health. Sooner or later we're all likely to get type 2 diabetes, however some hurtle toward it. I found that my sugar dependencies were either habit based or brain-chemical-induced (yey serotonin), so there were other needs not met for which I used sweets or treats to fill the void. It's manageable now, but in 10-15-20 years? I'm in my 40's and getting further and further from the ability to walk anything off.
It's more than just replacing treats, it's requiring a complete mental shift in perspective and that takes work. I don't know enough to presume anything about anyone else's situation, but I'm considering specifically seeking out a therapist that handles eating disorders to navigate my relationship with food, and I can only do that because I actively want to change. There's... a lot of deprogramming around food that needs to happen for women in order to have a healthy relationship with body and food in a world that is incredibly fat-phobic.
A lot of us were fed questionable diet food and substitute ingredients and body dysmorphia in the 80's and 90's while our metabolisms were still developing, and I'm still mad about it. The damage of that is still not really known but there is a look to our bodies, and I can't stop seeing it and wondering.
The scary part about insulin spikes and crashes is it's like dealing with a toddler or drunk person with how loopy or out if it they are. These are people who may be conscious enough to make decisions but not present enough to avoid being a danger to themselves or others because they're not able to adequately assess their own current capabilities.
Think about the carbs you eat, Amoebic. Reduce sugar and processed carbs. Instead of bread, make a bowl of brown rice or quinoa and mix it with the sandwich fillings. Try to fit in a salad each day (with very little dressing, so one with proteins is quite helpful). Avoid sodas and sugared drinks (avoid, not totally eliminate as long as you're not pre-diabetic, is my non-doctor advice; gotta have something to keep you from being crazy). Sweets likewise.
Diet drinks and such may help but be aware that most of them use indigestible sugars and sugar alcohols, which will give you massive diarrhea after a while. Don't ask how I know.
Want sugar? Eat high-fiber fruit to slow down the absorption of the sugars - bananas, apples, peaches, pears. Eat legumes to fill up; ie, as ingredients. Whole grains in their whole form (not just as ingredients). Legumes can make you feel full in your current meal AND not as hungry for the next one. Nuts are a good snack (almonds, pistachios, walnuts are good, peanuts okay) but they are high calorie.
Avoid pastas, processed cereals, alcohols especially beer/ale/wine, bread products, foods with added sugar, you get the idea. But remember - lifestyle change, not diet. Where you take away a poor "crutch" food, try to figure out something healthy to replace it. Candy with fruit. Bread with whole grains in their natural forms. Protein is always good but less processed is better than more.
If you can, take a walk or exercise a bit after a meal, to help burn off some of the sugar. Add exercise into your day.
And though this is just random advice (but also lived experience) from a non-professional, one thing my endocrinologist tells me over and over is that good blood sugar levels over time allow your body to respond well when you over-do it. Bad blood sugar levels (high) cause you more trouble with less sugar input, as your body loses its ability to calibrate insulin release properly.
Anything along these lines will be an improvement. Don't try to boil the ocean, make gradual changes over time that you can live with. Go talk to a professional, you probably have other things to take into account, but you'll hear a lot of the above from them.
Good luck! You really will feel better for it...
I've been thinking about relationships to food a lot lately and the impact that has had on my mental and physical health. Sooner or later we're all likely to get type 2 diabetes, however some hurtle toward it. I found that my sugar dependencies were either habit based or brain-chemical-induced (yey serotonin), so there were other needs not met for which I used sweets or treats to fill the void. It's manageable now, but in 10-15-20 years? I'm in my 40's and getting further and further from the ability to walk anything off.
It's more than just replacing treats, it's requiring a complete mental shift in perspective and that takes work. I don't know enough to presume anything about anyone else's situation, but I'm considering specifically seeking out a therapist that handles eating disorders to navigate my relationship with food, and I can only do that because I actively want to change. There's... a lot of deprogramming around food that needs to happen for women in order to have a healthy relationship with body and food in a world that is incredibly fat-phobic.
Obvs this is on my mind too. My wife and I had a long Real Talk (tm) last night about the kinds of changes she's looking at, and from what you've written, it's almost as if you were listening in.
We talked about how her goal isn't going to be explicitly "lose weight", it's "be able to physically manage your body", and while the reality of that will include significant weight loss for her (degenerative joint disorder means that even if she was strong as an ox at this size, her joints would be made of sawdust in 10-20 years from carrying that load), it changes the emphasis of what she's trying to achieve, and broadens the scope of it from just the kitchen, to the entire world. It shifts to an analysis of what you want to be able to do (that you can't currently), then works backwards from that.
You're bang on with the bolded part - making a change like this is 95% mental and 5% physical. In my inexpert opinion, therapy is one of the biggest hammers there is for this nail. Doing it without therapy is setting the difficulty mode to Hard.
I kind of love that you're written it takes work, because that came up too. For a long time, we've used the phrase "do stuff, try hard" as a way to celebrate when one of us knocks something out of the park. I've officially retired that phrase and replaced it with "Do The Work", because as we've aged, trying isn't enough anymore - you keep trying until the Work Gets Done.
Do the work of therapy, do the work of eating intentionally in ways that support your goals, and do the work of finding ways to move your body that are intrinsically rewarding, then do the work of moving your body like that.
Not to make this about myself, but I wanna talk a little about my own personal journey at this kind of thing the last 5 years, what it's been like, and the hard lessons I've learned. Cos we realized talking about it that she is now where I was 5 years ago (i.e. having to make some radical changes and un-do the consequences of years of bad decisions), and now I'm 5 years further down that path, and the path goddamn rocks, you guys. Spoilering for length - skip to the end if you just want my conclusions without all the navel-gazing and self-congratulatory context.
I was (am?) an alcoholic. Highly functional alcoholic, held down high-tech jobs and competed in triathlons through it, but nonetheless, fully paid-up and long-time member of Club Pisshead. I was a teenager in the 90s in the UK, and being a heavy drinker is just how that went. Booze was fun right up until some point in my 30s, when it morphed into a compulsion without me realizing. I let that slide for about a decade, increasingly hating myself for continuing to drink, which surprise, surprise spiraled down into depression and loss of the great shape I was in thanks to the triathlon training, which itself was just another enabling mechanism to keep drinking and eating like shit - it offset those bad decisions and let me continue making them without having to deal with the consequences.
I quit drinking 4 or 5 years ago at my wife's insistence and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. My life has been incrementally better ever since. I lost 5-10 pounds over the following year (and I've never been big-big, just dad-bod chubby, so that's was a not-insignificant weight loss) without changing anything else or really trying to.
3 years ago, my cardiologist (yeah, I have a heart condition - great work boozing it up for 20 years, genius) noted that my blood pressure was high, and advised me to switch to a low sodium diet. That put the fear of god into me, so I got right on that. That switched how I ate from habitual to intentional. It cut out entire aisles of the grocery store as things that were no longer for a Jon (almost the entirety of the freezer section contains f*cking absurd amounts of salt). Fast food went out the window entirely. It forced me to find alternatives for the high-sodium things I loved - e.g. now I make my own baked beans in the pressure cooker instead of having my beloved Heinz Baked Beans, because a tin of them on a piece of toast with salted butter is over half your daily sodium quota. And my goal was to come in way under that quota.
It was goddamn eye-opening now that I was inspecting nutrition labels on everything. Not just eye-opening, but EMPOWERING. Now I'm actively thinking about how and what I want to eat, THEN EATING THAT STUFF. I eat like a f*cking champ these days, not just nutritionally (but also very much that), but in terms of satisfaction. I finish every meal having eaten something stupendously delicious that supports my goals. It's also been a fun adventure, I've been exploring new foods that fit in my paradigm, and novelty is evolutionarily catnip to all of us. I lost another 5-10 pounds over the next year, without really intending to.
Nearly 2 years ago, I took up rowing on a whim, cos I'd moved house to somewhere where there was a boathouse nearby, and I'd been looking for more ways to spend time out on the lake anyway, and you know, it was the "end" of the pandemic, so I was looking to get out and "do stuff, try hard". That has been another of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. It's a sport that really suits the way I like to sport - it's highly technical, requires you to be at least as busy in your brain as you are in your body, and scales as intense as you want to make it (and I like to go hard). I lost another 5-10 pounds over the first year of rowing.
At the same time, I put together a garage gym in the new house, partly because the pandemic had meant that we now owned a rowing machine and a couple of kettlebells, and partly because I finally had the space to do that. A friend of mine had been running workouts for friends in her back yard over the summer, and I realized that now I had an indoor version of that available as a resource that I could share with my friends, so I stole her idea wholesale and posted about it in the group thread "who wants to come play with kettlebells and learn to row". A year and a half later, I have 3 friends who I've coached weekly from "never touched a kettlebell before" to people who can walk up to a kettlebell and work hard for an hour. Every one of them is visibly stronger and fitter. That 5-10 pounds I lost since starting to row is actually 15-25 pounds of fat I've lost and 10-20 pounds of lean muscle I've gained.
I realized fairly recently that my self-identity had shifted from "someone who rows" to "rower" or "athlete", and that has been further re-enforcing my dietary choices. Now I'm thinking about how I can shoehorn more protein in with each meal. I've discovered that I love tofu and I'm cooking a couple pounds of tofu every week in an increasingly large array of marinades.
Through all of the above, I was smoking pot more or less regularly, and heavily. Turns out the propensity for compulsion/addiction isn't just contained in a bottle. Who knew? Oh yeah, everyone. That has been the final thing to be jettisoned and now I find myself accidentally sober. Teenage-me would be appalled, but present-day me has finally realized it's not only the only functional path available to me, it's the one that leads to the happiest, most content version of myself. I quit that 2 months ago and have dropped another 5-10 pounds in that time alone, and the scale is still reliably ticking down, because by god are The Munchies real. Pot turned my appetite all the way up and broke the knob off. It was not unusual for me to have literally ten different desserts after dinner, despite my low-sodium, nutritious breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'm estimating I'm consuming 1000-2000 calories a day less as a non-stoner, just in bullshit munchies.
Today, at the ripe old age of 47, I'm the strongest I've ever been (which given my athletic history is not a particularly low bar), the lightest I've been as an adult and the same weight as when I was competing in half-iron triathlons 12 years ago, I'm setting PBs in the gym and out on the lake left, right and center. I have visible lats for the first time in my life, and have just pulled out all the smallest size clothes I own that have been in storage for a decade. The grunts of delight I make during mealtimes are almost obscene. Life is good, again. Finally.
The biggest lessons for me out of this 5 year journey from crushingly depressed drunk couch potato to happy content athlete are these.
1: Intentionality is rocket fuel for satisfaction and contentment, because it's asking yourself what you want, then doing the thing that you want. It's therapy on a minute-by-minute basis, without the therapist.
2: Do The Work, because doing the work will make you happier. This work will never be finished, and you'll be doing it for the rest of your life, so find ways to make it enjoyable work to be done. Also note that the work won't stay the same. The work in year 1 of this journey was entirely different to the work at year 5. Don't get into a rut, keep looking for the right work, then doing it.
3: We are evolutionarily tuned to be attracted to novelty, especially us lot as gamers. Use that to your advantage. Take up new sports, learn new skills, use your body in new and interesting ways. This not only keeps your interest up, it's functional cross-training. If something stops being interesting, jettison it and find something else that is.
4: To be clear, I'm saying all this having spent the last 5 years talking to a therapist on a weekly basis, and only just recently stopped seeing her because she rightly pointed out that we'd run out of things to work on. So yeah, if you have the privilege/resources to do so, get a therapist, and do the work.
5: Sometimes it's going to be hard and demoralizing and one of the skills you'll need to learn is telling yourself "suck it up, Buttercup", while you climb back aboard the wagon you've fallen off. The important part isn't how many times you fall off the wagon, it's how far the wagon has gone after all those times you climb back on. Once again, this is an argument for therapy. Processing and facing failure is hard. Get help with it.
6: If you're making radical changes, you will have to grieve for the life you're leaving behind. That's part of the work to be done. Don't be scared of that grief - it's real, and needs to be addressed. Again, therapy.
7: If you pull back the camera on my 5 year journey, it's been A Lot. Many, many, many incremental changes along the way, but all of them for the better. Don't get overwhelmed by the number of changes, focus on the incrementality of it. Changing small things is easy. You just need to change a lot of them, one after the other. Pick a small number to change at a time, and once those have bedded in, move onto the next. The magic is in the sum total of the small incremental changes - gamers level up one level at a time, and the higher your level - the more you have to grind for the next one.
8: There were my lessons. YMMV.
Here endeth the inspo-porn.
Fantastic post Jon, especially point 6 I find hard when trying to quit smoking.
I had a panic attack last week. Never had one before but I knew exactly what it was when it hit. I've been going through lots of stuff in my own therapy journey and was in a really down space after coming to grips with some family issues. This was coming off a majorly stressful week and my partner had just expressed her stress which I internalized as my failings. I never really thought about it before but I feel like for the first time in my life, I know what to call this feeling of sadness and tightness gripping my chest. The pain every morning that I have to push through to get out of bed. Sure, it comes and goes and is normally kicked into high gear due to my fear of abandonment and crazy intrusive thoughts( which are a fun new additive), but it is depression. I've read so much in their thread and associated with it over the years, but never thought "I have depression." Im now having a hard time being ok with not being ok and learning how to function through all this. Problem is, I'm a fixer. I have a problem and all my attention gets turned to the problem, which just ramps it all up and that rubber band inside my chest gets tighter and tighter. If me not doing thing A was causing stress to those around me, then I just need to fix problem A and I will
Be fixed. But then I sit and wait for that external validation which is not going to come. I'm meditating, exercising, trying to eat healthy, but the weight won't lift and the tightness won't relax. I know it is because I'm fighting it and making it worse but it is a huge negative feedback loop that keeps growing and I don't know how to break it. It is like I walked through a door and can't go back the other way, and all I want to do is revert to how it was. I know the only way out is through, but the pain in that path is crippling me. It is scary and lonely. I know I will pull through. And I just have to keep finding my way, but that knowledge doesn't make today any easier.
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