I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
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Don’t ever quit.
Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.
“Don’t be a quitter” is like saying “Fuck your boundaries. Stay in toxic situations no matter how bad they get.”
They told me to not quit. So I’m still a crack addict.
Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!
as everything this has contexts in which is valuable and contests in which it’s not
don’t quit because you’re demoralised. don’t quit because you’re tired. don’t quit because it’s hard.
if your first natural response to adversities is flying instead of fighting, it’s telling you to fight, because you are likely the only person losing when flying.
it’s not about never change your mind. never critically think what’s the situation and if it’s still worth it.
or check up with yourself and see if that’s still what you want.
after all leaving a situation you don’t want anymore, it’s not quitting, it’s moving on
it seems just semantics, it’s about knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.
nothing is black or white
You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.
“There are people worse off than you”
Thanks, that totally solves my problem.
I always tell them “Following that logic, there’s only one person in the world that can complain. But that dude really got it bad.”
My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
- Every day is a day I’d rather have off.
- It ruined the thing I loved (programming) for me
“Nothing is fun 8 hours a day” isn’t an advice but at least it’s true
In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”
I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
Fastest way to kill your passion is to make it your paycheck, I say to those people.
Did the formal education before the job ruin it for you, or did the job itself ruin it?
My experience may be an outlier but…
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.
Ah, that’s fair.
I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).
It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven’t already started on something else, I’m sure it’ll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.
Someone told me that if I wanted to be a history teacher I should get a degree in special Ed to “make myself more marketable.” It took 14 years to get out of special education and land a job teaching history
14 years is a long time. Hope you’re having a better time now.
Teaching as a profession sucks ass in general right now… but at least a lot of the special educator-specific bullshit is not my problem anymore. But thank you.
Coincidentally, I know someone who recently applied for a regular teacher’s assistant role and when they got to the interview the hiring director didn’t even ask questions about that position; instead they interviewed for a special ed job and then only offered that. It was a total bait & switch to try and fill a role nobody was applying for.
My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.
At the party, my dad’s friend took me aside and said “My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that’s an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that.”
Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I’m still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.
Ah yes the brand new exciting world of electricity. Rumor on the street is they’ve got this fancy new device called a tellyfone that uses this electricity. You can talk to anyone in the world!
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Ah yes, the good ol’ “Just get over it” technique that is supposed to work for any mental health condition.
The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.
When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.
Similar to this: telling someone with ADHD “stop letting yourself get distracted”
Or to someone with anxiety:
“Just don’t be anxious!”
🫠…
“But it’s not actually scary!”
Yes, I know, that’s why it’s a disorder and not just being a reasonable person who’s afraid of frightening things!
Money doesn’t buy happiness
Like fuck it doesn’t. This is class war propaganda and shouldn’t be confused with the idea arseholes are better at making money.
I was a new dog owner, went to /r/Dogs to ask about a particular behavior my dog was exhibiting I’d never seen or read about before (turned out to be normal tho) and every reply I got basically told me I don’t know how to care for an animal and that I should give him to someone else.
It was then I realized that it wasn’t just /r/RelationshipAdvice that was full of bitter, jealous losers whose advice is always “dump them.” It applied to literally every single subreddit dedicated to advice. They may have started with good intentions and knowledgeable people, but over time filled up with people who had no business giving anyone advice.
Oh yeah even lifeprotips, if you go in the comments it’s just full of people grasping at straws to find the tip useless and upvoting each other’s cynicism
There was one: “If you want a fridge’s compressor to turn on and off less frequently (ie: if you sleep in the same room), fill it with water bottles to increase thermal mass” and the top comments were “Actual life pro tio: get an apartment with 2 rooms???”
I was like: are these people actually that slow?
The less there is to say about an advice, the less reasons you have to go write a comment. Therefore the people in the comments are often outliers
Just fyi: That person was trying to make a joke.
As a fellow dog owner, the internet always seems to be the most judgemental place to get dog advice. If you dont spend 6 hours a day training your dog, feed the top of the line kibble, and vax them for diseases only 3 dogs have got ever, then you dont deserve to have a dog.
“Do something that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Bullshit. I worked in the video game industry in a field I’m very passionate about with great people who were all talented. But the industry burned me out and almost killed my passion for games as a hobby with the endless unpaid overtime, constant crunch and deadlines, fairly low wage and all that investment was rewarded by eventually being let go along with all the less senior staff because our studio was bought out and the parent company told to cut expenses.
Don’t work for the video game industry, people. Make indie games by all means. But stay clear of the big names.
I have always hated that advice. While exceptions exist, there is no faster way to burn yourself out on something you love than making a career out of it. I generally do like my work (IT) now, but a lot if that is because I actively try to not even look in the direction of a computer when I am not in the office. I probably consume less tech/IT industry news now than I did before I worked in the field.
“Just be yourself”
That’s how I got myself into this mess in the first place idiot
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down
That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.
My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).
When I was a teen I worked as a waiter at a dirty smokehouse/bbq place.
One of the kitchen staff there would make sexual comments about me. Say things like “You’re lucky you look good because you’re so stupid.” And would ask what kind of underwear I was wearing.
I told my parents about it, and the advice they gave me was “Deal with it. You need a job.”
Within a month that kitchen staff member had started to grab me and sexually assaulted me.
I don’t talk to my parents anymore.
Your parents are awful. You deserve so much better.
“Deal with it. You need a job.”
WTAF? How can someone be so blase about their child being sexually harrassed?
Me: having a hard time mentally and emotionally Someone: “You need to pray to God to make your troubles go away.”
Am I supposed to upvote this because it’s awful advice or downvote it because it’s depressing advice?
It seems like this person either had success with their advice or had nothing to say, but felt the need to say something.
My favorite advice for clinical depression is “just snap out of it.”
Is it inappropriate or off topic? Then you downvote.
Anything else? Upvote or abstain
“Nothing happens in god’s world by mistake.” “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Etc etc.
When 1 in 6 women has been sexually assaulted in their lives (and many men and NB folks), that’s a really fucked up thing to say. You never know what someone’s been through, and I’ve personally been through a lot of awful things. I guess it helps some people to tell themselves this kind of shit, but it is impossible to me to think of any kind of meaning that would make being a victim of violent crime “positive” or “worth it” or “a learning experience” blah blah blah. I think the term for that is “toxic positivity.”
So either “everything happens for a reason” is utter bullshit, or god is a sadistic fucking asshole.
When I wanted to cut back on my drinking: “Just don’t buy it.”
Look, it’s great that you’ve never been addicted to anything, but it also means that you’re in no position to be offering addiction advice.
Maybe not great advice for alcohol, but absolutely great advice for junk food.
I disagree, I think offering healthier alternatives is better than simply giving up junk food by itself
Obligatory unsolicited link to Dr Greger How not to die
> Science discovers eating real food, predominantly plants, assists health and maintenance of healthy weight without kj restriction
“sleep when the baby sleeps”
Yeah because there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they’re down too.
“Sleeping like a baby” had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!
Here’s some more unhelpful advice: Hang in there, it gets easier! (for real though)
Also, like, adult humans don’t do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don’t have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.
Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.
