I get stressed out a lot by my work. The people, and the lack of autonomy.
It invades my evenings, my nights, I spend sometimes hours unable to sleep dreading the next day.
I don't have any autonomy. I'm treated as a resource to be "used". And I work with people I don't respect personally or professionally.
I have been looking for a way out for a while, but let's just say that quitting or finding another job is NOT an option for now, for the sake of argument - to hopefully get some actionable advice.
I already stopped caring about my work. But my personality finds it difficult to ignore things that are wrong. Sometimes I look at other colleagues communication with others and it affects me also, I see so much wrong but I can't do anything about it.
How can I just stop caring?
You’ll quickly build a sense of confidence and be excited about your results. Work will become a 9-5 means to an end and all the weird stresses will wash over you because you feel good. You’ll look forward to waking up at 6am and going for a 10 mile run and will go to sleep early in anticipation.
After awhile, you’ll look at the people above you in the soulless corporation and realize they’ve wasted their 20s/30s climbing an arbitrary layer. I remember going into my first job at Amazon and calling my girlfriend, telling her “These are the richest, most miserable looking people I’ve ever seen”. I looked at the folks that were $SDE+2 and they were doing the same work, they just artificially cared more and would spend their evenings and weekends working.
If you don’t have kids then you’re lucky, you have more time to spend building yourself up.
I guarantee this will work but there is a really rough 1-3 month period before it kicks in.
Start today: do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and go run-walk for 20 minutes. Do that everyday, continuing to set goals. Rain or shine. Even when you feel sick, hungry, tired.
>> Start today: do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and go run-walk for 20 minutes. Do that everyday, continuing to set goals. Rain or shine. Even when you feel sick, hungry, tired.
Good lord man, I hope OP is a 20-something in fair shape. I started running later in life, and then working out. Dropping from a desk job to the ground to do 100 push ups or a 100 proper sit-ups if you have never done it is going to 100% motivate you to never do that again.
If OP wants to go exercise, and has never done so, go look up couch to 5k or start off with 10 proper push ups and 10 proper sit ups and then wait 10 mins and see if you can do 10 more. Do that three times. Give yourself some time to build that up.
This reply I am replying to has no idea what kind of shape OP is in. Don't go nuts on day one, you will spend a week (or two) recovering and this will demotivate you. (and I am no expert, perhaps call a trainer).
https://www.hybridcalisthenics.com/routine
Not only that, it will give you an injury that will take you weeks to recover from.
Even if it’s not exercise specifically. Find something else you can care about!
I’ve had this problem my entire career. I’m over invested in my work even when I don’t want to be and I can’t stop thinking about work (sometimes big things and some times minutiae) and it invaded my sleep. I’ve recently started a few activities that I believe are helping me separate from my work (and sleep at night). Here’s what I’m doing…
1) Exercising to a level I’m comfortable. For me that’s running a few miles a day and incorporating kettlebells, weights or med balls into my morning workout.
2) Reading books and simple puzzles like word search. I wanted to find an alternative to phone and social media - I think too much of that stuff sucks for mental well-being. Currently I’m reading Plato’s The Republic.
3) I started volunteering at my church. Churches and local institutions are suffering right now from lack of participation and have legit challenges to apply yourself to. So far this hasn’t kept me up at night or interrupted my sleep.
So I think the combined effect of these changes is that I’m out of my own head and applying myself to doing things other than using my personal time to marinate in my professional life. Oh and I’m no longer waking up at 3am every night unable to fall back to sleep.
Can confirm - I did this but also with 100 squats and a 10k run daily.
All of my hair fell out from the exertion, but I feel invincible.
I’d be specially wary of your final suggestion. Not only is that goal too high for someone just starting, going for a run when it’s raining and you feel sick and tired borders on dangerous advice.
It is dangerous AND stupid. If you feel sick - rest. Otherwise you risk every potentially lethal ailment every sensible exercise counsel warns against.
But yeah don’t kill yourself, barring injury or fever, I don’t give myself any excuses.
(Not saying that this is right for everybody.)
Just be aware that you can lose all hair
As a lucky man with 3 kids in my 30s, I strongly disagree with your statement.
Exercise is good, but it's my family that keeps me from caring too much about work related stuff.
This doesn’t get talked about enough on HN but therapy is literally life changing.
The good ones are like a mechanic who can fully take an engine apart, lay out all the pieces, clean and replace broken parts, assemble the whole thing back together, and make adjustments to it until it runs like new.
You’ll be able to better understand why you did they things you did, why you currently emotionally respond how you do, and craft the tools necessary to in the future respond intentionally to your own environment.
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress with your first therapist. Try a new one. This is a highly intimate service and you deserve someone who is a good fit for you.
Instead of " can fully take an engine apart, lay out all the pieces, clean and replace broken parts, assemble the whole thing back together" many will (if you are luckily) charge you for new Blinker fluid and piston return springs (i.e do nothing) or if you are unlucky will take your engine apart and then put it back together with the wrong parts.
I went to a therapist because I started having very obvious anxiety attacks (and my life sucked generally) but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason down. They were able to immediately pinpoint the source of the anxiety attacks (abandonment issue) and I stopped having them immediately cause that’s all I needed to hear to get over it.
But when it came to trying to get over my chronic stress and malaise and overall shitty life/lifestyle? They had nothing. They were basically like - “well you are with the wrong partner, you were born poor, and you’re trying to live in the most expensive place in the world and do it on single income. Yeah - you’re gonna fucking suffer. Sorry I have literally no solutions except move away and give up - which obviously does nothing for you because you’d never be here if you were the type of person to ever give up career wise or in relationships.”
It was like talking to a brick wall for those issues. Great for specific trauma problems - terrible for anything more ambiguous. Which - to be fair - I really don’t think any therapist could solve. It’s why I don’t think I’ll ever go back. It doesn’t seem solvable by wishful thinking.
This is really good advice.
Therapy has many different “modalities” and therapy with one person can be veeery different than with someone else.
In doing that, I changed my perspective, in a way that I think may also be possible while still working as an employee. The only company I worry about now is me, my own business, my own career, my own success.
That’s not to say that I don’t want my clients to be successful, or that I don’t work my ass off trying to help them be successful, but I don’t worry if they aren’t. Why not? Because I understand that I have no control over them, no way to prevent them from making bad decisions, no way to prevent them from being managed poorly (as most companies are).
The problem is that employers want you to have an emotional stake in their success — to take personal responsibility for their success — but you ultimately have no control. That’s kind of the point of stock options — making you care the success of the company as a whole so you’ll work hard and stick around — but really you don’t have real control over the company’s success. And that dynamic — giving responsibility without control — is a classic sign of bad management.
So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves. Focus on the success of your personal business — how you do your assignments, the next step in your career, your mental and physical health, your family — and let the rest go.
I think this is a necessary attitude to adopt, even as an employee. You need to draw boundaries about what you care about, and one of those ways is to evaluate if people you work with actually care about something or if they only say they care about it. If you're not responsible for it and others don't really care, you should also try to not care.
I'll give a concrete example. I worked on a project recently where I was dependent on somebody else to finish something. They are perceived as a somewhat competent but lazy person and they took a very long time to get it done. Certainly much longer than other people would have done. Despite claims from our management that this was urgent, no additional people were added to that task to speed it up. Actions speak louder than words - if it really was urgent they would have asked somebody else to do it. So when my part was delayed I simply said I was blocked and tried my best to let it go and not get frustrated.
I had a major burnout years ago and one of the big reasons was because I took responsibility for my management layer understaffing projects that were supposedly a top priority. The priorities were always talk, but no action to add people or manage expectations with the user/customer(s). It look me years to realize that instead of fully putting the blame on my management, I should have stood up for myself and said I can only do what I can do and that's it.
>So don’t play that game: only take responsibility for, only worry about, the things you have control over. And for most employees, that’s just themselves.
100% Agree. You can strive to do the best you can do so you don't feel like you, personally, are doing a half-baked job. But beyond that, it's not your problem anymore.
Changing your perspective and worrying about yourself as a business is the best thing to do.
you're right, thanks
> How can I just stop caring?
Don't. Your ability to care is the only thing that separates you from a dumb machine. In the future that skill will be a most valuable asset if you want work in a world of "AI".
Don't confuse stress with caring. Use your care to fight the machine and the idiots, and if you can't win then kill the shitty job, not your precious capacity to care. Take your care somewhere more deserving.
Imagine that tomorrow your job changes. All your old projects are cancelled, and your new project requires you to remotely supervise an automated sawmill. You have a dozen camera views, five ways to unjam the machine, and something that needs a little bit of attention from you once every five minutes or so. Your pay and benefits remain the same. The hours are fixed: if you do the job competently, you get a five minute break once an hour, an hour for lunch, and a 15 minute break in mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
After a day or two, there is nothing of intellectual interest here. Nothing will change. Your work is necessary, but it does not march towards any goal other than the total wood sawn at the end of the day.
How does this change you?
You are definitely without useful autonomy. You are a cog in a machine. You don't work with anyone, really. It is not going to be fulfilling.
But this is so different, because you don't have the expectation that somehow, this remote wood-cutting work is supposed to fulfill you. You will need to define yourself in other terms: as a person who is part of their community, who has interests and hobbies outside of work.
The hard part is the deep understanding that work is not life, and that your feeling that work is supposed to address your non-material needs is orthogonal to the reality of work.
There are jobs that connect you more deeply to your community, or try to fix the world as a whole. But on a daily basis, they still involve tasks that are not intrinsically fulfilling.
The meaning is what you put into it.
* Become less dependent on your employer (build a public profile. Blog, speak, etc).
* Put yourself in a financial position where you can weather whatever storms come up (layoffs, bad bosses, drama, etc)
* Interview more, at least get in the practice of it. Think of it more as having conversations to understand the possibilities, then hard commitments. You will screw up many of these, (I know I have!). Luckily there's always more fish in the sea.
* Remember _they need you_ - software developers aren't exactly growing on trees these days. They need you to be a viable business as much as you need them for your income.
* Set boundaries - people just need to be told no, what you won't deal with, etc. This helps ensure you're not internalizing what's really an external problem. An imperfect boundary is better than never setting boundaries.
* Try to find/remember that small nugget of 'positive' stuff you enjoy about your work. I remember how much I enjoy building software and try to edit out the rest. Focus on cultivating that, try to put your energy there and not the noise. You are where you put your time.
* Behavioral activation - if you have a hard time doing a task, literally just getting started helps you get more interested in it.
* Remember it's usually not about you - whatever frustration you experience at work, it's probably systemic and something other people deal with. Not about targeting you personally. This can help you roll your eyes at whatever politics and drama and move on.
* Find peers that feel the same. To the last point, if you have a peer group, you can compare notes and figure out what problems are systemic, or maybe about the personality of a boss, etc.
* Know its imperfect. We're human. Despite the best advice, therapy, mindfulness, and preparation we will still sometimes get caught up in it. We're all works in progress. Don't be too hard on yourself.
I really need to emphasize how wrong this is. Your employer definitely doesn’t need you unless you’re working for an exceptionally small company/org where you can hold them hostage/ransom.
You are dime a dozen in the real world. The only reason you’ll ever get a sense that they “need you” is because you are being chronically underpaid and you are so incredibly cheap that just talking to you for 30 minutes to do X is way more efficient than paying you the 3x you’re worth.
I’ve seen engineers being paid 7 figures thrown away over trivial bullshit. You’re not needed.
> But my personality finds it difficult to ignore things that are wrong
That's what you think. Maybe you are a man-child throwing a tantrum? The tech world is filled with such folks.
Even if everything you said is accurate, you will be happier if you dont play the victim card.
Running around thinking that everyone else is the problem is never a recipe for success. My favorite thought whenever I feel myself slipping into that mode is to think 'do I want to be right or effective'. It immediately puts me in an in control, empathetic, problem solving mindset.
With that in mind, write down what you want out of your life and job and set some simple easy to achieve short term objectives. They might be health or learning related. Then go out and do them. This will build motivation to actually deal with the issue which is the job sucks and you need to change it. Write down criteria for your new job and spend your time finding it. Don't just jump on the first thing.
It's really important to get yourself together mentally before you jump ship though because it's very easy to end up in exactly the same situation or worse if you make a rash uncalculated decision.