1,144 karma · joined August 19, 2011
Keep in mind that popular cars in the US can be luxury cars in Brazil. My Brazilian friends' first reaction when I tell them I have a Honda Civic here is "damn, freaking awesome, you're loaded!"... and then I tell them that's a pretty basic car in America :)
I very much agree with this. Back when I was in high school we had some overlapping topics in Math and Physics. But in the Physics class we'd actually see things applied to the real world (e.g. a quadratic equation representing the trajectory of a cannon ball), and that made the stuff learned in Math a lot more interesting to me.
> Unfortunately, learning how to take care of your own body,
This should be fixed in PE. I only got interested in being active after I was already an adult (and a very sedentary one). For years I hated the thought of doing physical activity because I associated it with PE class and all the bullshit I had to endure (bullying and having no option but to play sports I didn't really like).
Would be nice if we were taught at school about body composition, nutrition, different results you can get from exercise (strength, hypertrophy, endurance, that kind of thing). PE is often instead a bunch of random stuff with no explanation of what results can be expected.
To make it worse I tend to start stuttering when asked things on the spot, even though I know the answers or could easily look up whatever info was asked for. I'm painfully aware this makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. People generally don't have the patience to let me gather my thoughts and give a coherent explanation/answer.
WTF? What's their rationale?
I also have this funny thing where I can't build endurance. I've been doing push ups on every work out and I can't for the life of me do more than 20. But I have no trouble increasing difficulty (putting hands closer, elevating feet, etc.) or weight (for things with weights like squats).
Also, I though the idea of Lagom was that one should not pursue material wealth and success above what is "good enough".
At some point the corporation decided it wouldn't outsource software development work anymore. They hired some of the key people at my former employer (by then I had already moved somewhere else), and almost overnight they had to close shop because they didn't have a source of revenue anymore.
One thing that helped me deal better with it was getting married, and specifically getting married to a woman who had a child. This suddenly took a lot of my focus out of myself, since now I have to care for others. It also puts me in a "I can't fail" mental mode which has me worrying somewhat less than in years past. But it's still pretty bad, I just don't panic as much anymore.
Another thing that made a significant difference was starting an exercise routine. It makes me feel healthier and therefore less worried about coming down with a terrible disease.
While I don't have physical symptoms as severe as those you listed, that's pretty much how my health anxiety manifests. I don't just have obsessive thoughts over being sick. I actually feel things. And my anxiety is not thoughts -> symptoms, it's the other way around. I start having a bunch of symptoms, give it some time hoping they will go away, but they don't. So I can't help but think something is seriously wrong. There are instances where I've dealt with a set of symptoms for a whole year.
A few examples:
- When I'm anxious over a brain aneurysm or brain tumor, it's because I started having visual distortions, tingling, my mouth won't widen on one side when I smile, etc.
- I was once worried about carotid artery dissection, because I could hear my pulse in one ear and it would stop when I pressed against my carotid on the same side (a telltale sign of CAD). MRIs in the ER revealed nothing.
- My heart acts up with PVCs every now and then, and they are so unpleasant that it's nearly impossible not to think I have a serious heart condition. PVCs can be common when people are really anxious or stressed out, but in my case they just come about in my most serene moments it seems.
- I start worrying about colon cancer whenever I get alternate bouts of diarrhea and constipation, coupled with frequent abdominal cramps. This particular anxiety gets to the point where I see blood when inspecting my output in the toilet, only for it to disappear when I blink. Mind you, it's not "hm I think that tiny spec might be blood". I actually see streaks of blood when I first look at it.
- At some point last year I started having sudden weakness in my right arm. I couldn't hold parts of it flexed, and things just seemed heavier. I was sure I had a degenerative disorder of some sort. But then it just went away after several weeks.
I could go on and on and on. It's horrible. Friends and family don't understand me, no matter how much I try to explain to them that I'm not just thinking about being sick (I'm actually trying hard NOT to think about it), but I'm really feeling a whole bunch of stuff. They always revert to "stop thinking about it and it will go away". So frustrating.
But paying what we pay in rent is depressing. I record and chart our expenses in a spreadsheet and the piece of the pie for rent just dwarfs everything else.
I love writing software, but that does not mean I don't love other things. Years ago I lived and breathed software. That's not the case anymore. I'd much rather help my daughter with her homework than read about the latest uber nifty JavaScript transpiler that will change my life and make everything awesome with unicorns and whatnot.
Our field churns the same ideas over and over. After a few years things get old really fast.
But there's what I said in another comment in this thread: I love writing reliable, correct, secure, well-documented software. Focus on those and my passion comes out. But come 5-ish o'clock and you bet I'm leaving the office to pick up my daughter from school and spend some time talking with her about her day and what she learned and whatnot. And then my wife will come home, we'll have dinner and we'll spend some time talking about our days and watching TV. Without those things I might as well not have a life.
I don't like it when there's an expectation that I'll be available to work 24/7. I don't want people expecting me to be on social media promoting my work or things related to it. I'll disappoint anyone who expected me to think of work as my life's mission or anything like that (unless I'm using my skills to help find a cure to a serious disease, or realistically help solving the problem of poverty in the world - that would change the game).
I have a number of interests in my life that are completely unrelated to work. Those are the things that I live for. Working is a means to bring in some cash that enables me to enjoy other things in life.
A part of me dislikes that I turned what was a genuine interest of mine into my job. Software was a lot more fun to do before it became a professional thing for me.
That is true, I don't dispute it. What I dislike is the shunning of those who want to do it just as their job.
Also, passion comes in different forms. For example, I am "passionate" (as much as I hate the term) about delivering reliable, secure and well-documented products. Sometimes a project will be focused on that and my passion will show, other times projects focus on things I just can't get myself to care enough about and will only do as much as is strictly necessary to get the job done.
> they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work
My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall from my experience that illustrate this:
- I had a team lead who once said, "I don't want people in this team working like this is a 9-5 job"
- Something I heard from someone in a team that worked close to ours: "the candidate was solid in problem solving and coding ability, but we didn't hire them because they didn't show passion"
This sort of bullshit is pervasive in our field and IMO is what the quote above is referring to.
I like this bit:
"the knowledge worker is under severe external constraints. Much of their work is assisted or mediated through information technology, which contributes to a de-skilling of their cognitive labor. And on top of this they are expected to fully invest themselves in their jobs in a way that manufacturing laborers never did: they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work. The whole thing is exhausting."
I've worked on boring stuff that I wasn't excited about, but I didn't have a negative attitude at work. Every day I just came in, did what had to be done, went home. AFAIK my past co-workers and managers all appreciated my work.
I can empathize with what OP is saying. I've never been rejected myself for "lack of passion", but I know people who have interviewed perfectly fine candidates in terms of logic reasoning and technical aptitude and rejected them for this bullshit reason.
I don't understand this current expectation that you can't just do a good job at what you do, no, you have to be all starry eyed about it and thinking of it even in your dreams. There's more to life than work.