I agree with this 100%. I find though, that the crippling part of the worst bouts of depression can be the inability to get up and make something. The impetus to create - usually strong - disappears.
My strategy in those situations is to get out my phone, set a timer and say: "I'm going to work on x for five minutes, if I still feel crappy after five minutes I'll stop." That mental bargaining is bizarre in that I know its irrational but it always works, five minutes is enough for me to get enough 'creative inertia'.
Making things isn't a panacea for me, when I'm done working I'll still sometimes feel less than great, but it always helps.
I've had a similar experience in that getting started is a large barrier. I'd like to see an article that bridges the gap between saying, "just do it," and the understanding that someone who is depressed does not want to do anything.
I respond best to very specific instructions that don't require choices on my behalf. For example, "do something active," won't move me. Instead I need, "put on running shoes, go outside, run around the house three times." It's a silly example, but the point is that I won't "do something active" but I will "put on running shoes, ...".
I can fully understand that - I occasionally wind up asking other people to tell me to do specific small things and it can help a lot with just getting through the day.
The first half of the article has a lot of wisdom.
The second half reminds me of well meaning people who make things worse by trying to help. "Just (go jogging, do something creative drink vegetable shakes)"
Quite. The whole thing with (bad) depression is that it makes you unable to get up and do the very things that help fight it: exercise, create, see friends.
Yeah, might be different for different people but when I'm depressed I can become devoid of passion, and caring about things enough to carry them out becomes a daily struggle
Exactly... the mythos of the "depressed artist" is a joke; if you're truly depressed, it's almost impossible to create. The light within you is extinguished. I suspect a lot of "depressed artists" are actually manic-depressive, which would explain their bursts of creativity.
I would also add that it by necessity has to happen dynamically.
In the OP, the author recieves a nudge from his friend, but ignites his spark himself, and connects all the dots.
It's like Inception, you can read however many self-help books, blogs, studies, ideas as you'd like to try to make yourself get out of something, but it won't happen until it's "your" idea.
I have very much experienced this myself, and I can draw parallells between myself and the author, but I know that me telling anyone else won't help them (also from experience), because every transformation happens from within. All you can do is be supportive and present. Nudges and ideas can provide a seed, but they have to grow it. But there's also the risk of appearing pushy and having the opposite effect.
There is a very large difference between clinical depression and situational depression. The ideas and suggestions of those who have suffered from situational depression are often not very helpful for those who suffer from clinical depression. I think this article is clearly about situational depression, but I don't think people often know there is a difference.
I really wish these advice givers would understand the difference between being down because things are not going well and having depression, which is a disease.
Things are good for me from an objective perspective (money, career, family, health), but I'm miserable and not in a good place. My brain is broken and only certain treatments help. A DJ class isn't fixing me.
I really think these people are confusing burn-out with depression. These are actually two very different things that require different solutions. I wish we were more open talking about burn-out and dissatisfaction instead of just ramping everything up to "I suffer from depression! Halp!" You don't. Once shit gets good for you again, you'll be Mr. Happy. I won't be.
I feel like there's a stigma against discussing burn-out because it really can be seen as a personal failure. You worked too hard for stupid reasons, you believe your dishonest boss or work culture or coworkers, you had unrealistic expectations, you tried too hard for something that was impossible, or you simply failed and its entirely your fault, etc. It seems more ego-pleasing to just jump to talking about depression and kinda sorta equating your situation with people who suffer from major depression, which ultimately is ego-pleasing but the wrong way to go about things. If a DJ class 'fixed' your depression, you didn't have depression, you had burn-out/situational depression, which has nothing in common with clinical depression.
That said, I don't want to trivialize situation depression/burn-out. Why do we only see post-burn-out articles but rarely see burn-out prevention articles? I spend about 20% of my work day considering whether that path I'm taking on this project or interaction violates my own anti-burnout strategies (do the least work possible from a reasonable perspective, do not create drama, let foolish things slide unless they personally affect me, very carefully pick battles, mentally clock out at 5, realize its just a job and that I work to live not the other way around, etc).
Also the above is written from someone with a depressed perspective, so take that as you will.
Great insight. I never thought of it this way. Perhaps this is the best justification for art education. It is not about producing beautiful objects. Perhaps it is about our mental health. More like meditation. It is the process that gives us value, regardless of whether other people are willing to pay for the art that we make.
As someone who started out messing around with trackers in like '98 with FastTracker 2, and who hasn't made anything I would call a "real song" to this day, but spend hundreds and thousands of hours on it, I can absolutely confirm. I wrote lyrics that were decidedly not about making beatiful objects.. more like a process to clean myself, which produced dirty rags. The really mean and ugly ones I deleted after I had outgrown them, the rest I still love dearly even as they make me cringe from tip to toe haha. Art is a bit like dancing, it's awesome when people share it, but it would be tragic if they never did it just for themselves.
As someone who was in OP's shoes literally, ( my 1st job was a 4 month contract with an option to extend, which never happened) you tend to shut out people. It just happens. I can't explain it why but it does. I consider myself as a social person who can't live without friends, but i ended up just sitting in my room. When i graduated and while i was working i could never imagine me not going to gym but guess what, i hated going to gym. Heck i stopped going to gym even though i was sitting at home all day. I can't explain why it happens but it does.
One of the core symptoms/phenomena of major depression is anhedonia - the inability to experience pleasure.
It’s very difficult to imagine what that would be like - until you experience it. Hope you’ll seek out some effective help. It’s hard to dig out all by oneself.
"Sane Thinking about Mental Health Issues" - it discusses the phenomenon where in some cultures 'getting professional help' before reaching out to friends or family is absolutely necessary, and that 'abnormal' mental health related feelings should not be shared or discussed.
Your comment reminded me of that attitude. Maybe it would be enlightening for you to read about other perspectives
Start with a daily journal. Write down the stuff you did and the thoughts you had. Write down the things you want to get done tomorrow in the same journal and cross them off if you accomplish them.
This way every day of your life will have significance. Even if the day was dreary, mundane, sad, or even horrible, recording the memory records the significance because you lived it.
Journaling didn't cure me of depression, but it helped me build a ladder out of my pit of despair.
> The whole world deserves to experience what it feels like to be in your present moment.
I'm glad the author found something that helped him through depression. Unfortunately this is not a silver bullet. It won't work for everyone, or even every time depression hits.
There are many different activities you can try to help battle depression, and they are definitely helpful, and creating things is one of them. But they'll all fail without a key ingredient: realizing that you have to just do whatever you have to do, simply because it's the right thing to do, regardless of your emotions, or how intense they are, or lack of them.
If you live by that philosophy, you'll find yourself doing all the right things, and for all the right reasons, and you may not ever get out of depression, but it won't be crippling anymore.
A major difficulty with carrying this out as a person in tech though is that we're inherently a little more existential and philosophical than others because of the nature of programming being very intertwined with philosophy, and we get paid more generally which means we usually have more time to think too. Combine these with modern philosophy, and you usually have programmers who see no real value in life other than to enjoy it and have a good time (which explains why we love alcohol and sugary drinks like Red Bull so much), and when that good feeling runs out, life feels pointless and empty for us, because we can't find any motivation.
That also explains why there's a steady stream of philosophical and motivational posts on HN's front page. Because usually that good feeling that programming gives you doesn't last forever, so we try to look for explanations, or we try to look for other motivators. It also explains why we keep coming back to exciting topics on here, like bitcoin and the newest programming languages or tutorials on Haskell monads (which nobody can ever understand even though we know we should, so the closer we think we get, the more excited we are).
I don't have numbers on how many programmers are turning to religion, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was growing too, because we're looking for some motivation to keep us moving forward after the excitement runs out (and it always does, and never lasts very long).
I totally relate to the above, the purpose, the drive, it's there until you finish the project or your stuck doing the last 20% which ends up being half the work. You stop and you think why am I doing this, am I just building tools to build them. Start to feel like your grasping for nothing. Then you burn out, go do something crazy for 1-2 weeks come back and like yeah lets start a new project! haha
> realizing that you have to just do whatever you have to do, simply because it's the right thing to do, regardless of your emotions, or how intense they are, or lack of them.
Right, but how do you figure out what the "right thing to do" is? Especially if you ignore emotional response as a guide?
Well that's the point of philosophy, isn't it? To figure out what we're supposed to do. For some people, just living life going through the motions is enough, and they never stop and ask this question. Other people keep bouncing from philosophy to philosophy, or religion to religion, looking for something that fits. Some of those people find something that works, and stick with it. And of course others just kill themselves because they never can figure out an answer that satisfies them, so life seems infinitely meaningless and they see no reason to keep going.
The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you. I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved but in a way that is far better than I could have ever conceived. Another problem is when you run out of ideas or if the creative endeavor doesn't produce sufficient results. Creativity and execution is really hard, that I'll grant.
Creativity includes discovery and invention. I would assume that if you put all your eggs in the basket of discovery, then you are kind of just throwing the dice. (on Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns")
That's why Elon Musk says he didn't pursue his idea of using capacitors as batteries. It relied too much on whether or not there was something to be discovered. So he went with things that definitively could be built, where he was sure that "success was at least a possible outcome." ("Known unknowns")
So I would think that you should choose your project wisely, where, again, you can be sure that success is at least possible.
> I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved
It seems to me that you're letting yourself be paralyzed by something that really has no bearing here. You will note that the article does not say "solve a hard math problem first and best". It says "do something with your hands and your feet". The two are not comparable.
It seems like a good example of the described problem, however. I could also attempt to make a table, and I will conclude that I have seen many better tables made, which could make me feel bad.
The hard part is letting go of being the best, or even succeeding, in my opinion. It's cliche, but the attempt is what matters. If you run a marathon to win it, you will almost certainly be disappointed; but if you run it to be a better runner, to be healthier, or simply to say you did, you will be happier having done it than having not done it because you know you won't win.
Pick a subject without much difficult craftsmanship or creativity. One where you can just execute. Grow carrots. You won't worry about there being larger or nicer looking carrots grown by others.
I restore old bikes. It's easy mechanically, cheap, and projects are short enough to never be overwhelming (unlike e.g a car project). It's a nice analog change from computers.
“We have to reinvent the wheel every once every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors.”
- Bruce Joyce
Keeping your head up while (inelegantly) solving tons of problems yourself is an crucial step to solving them well.
I generate tileable patterns on my phone using Defqt, Decim8, and iColorama. Doesn't require hardly any mental energy and it's pretty certain that you're going to generate something unique. Plus it's a quick cycle (~10-60s) which means you're not getting stuck on any single one.
Do you define it as how your answer or creation measures up to everyone else, or do you define it as you made significant progress in a field you had very little prior experience with. In my math escapades, it's linear algebra, for you it may be differential calculus, etc.
Basically if you always measure success in comparisons to others, you are always going to be disappointed. There are very few times where this isn't true -- such as you entered in a competition for worlds best overall mathematician, which almost doesn't exist, because you have to pick one thing and specialize in it.
Just realize if you take the time and effort to practice, you will achieve success. We all have the same brain, and barring any learning disability, every human has the same potential for amazing learning, the only difference between those seemingly geniuses with perfect answers that solve problems in a way you could never conceive, is they practiced more, and thought about it more.
I think comparing is inevitable.. going through a lot of this now personally and sometimes i wonder how much a factor is the size of the pond you swim in.
I agree comparing with others is inevitable. I also think you can derive joy and satisfaction in comparing against your self (i.e. your previous work). Admire your improvements, however small, and pat yourself on the back for having persistence. It might seem hollow/shallow, but I really believe it's a powerful way to frame skill-building.
Good point. Also, much of the value in creativity is due to the fact that you do it your way. If you write a poem or a song, it says what you want to say, the way you want to say it. No one else can do that.
> every human has the same potential for amazing learning, the only difference between those seemingly geniuses with perfect answers that solve problems in a way you could never conceive, is they practiced more, and thought about it more.
I completely disagree, and I think this attitude, which I find more prevalent in North America, is at the root of a lot of depression and feelings of lack of self worth. It's the same as saying that "person X is more successful than person Y because they wanted it more / worked harder at it"
In the end we do not have all the same brain, and we do not have all the same capabilities, thinking that we do in my opinion makes it a lot more likely to develop feelings of lack of self worth (I still suck at this, it must be my fault)
Some people find the innate ability mindset oppressive and saddening, and are greatly comforted by "you can do whatever you set yourself to!"
Other people find growth mindset oppressive, and greatly prefer "you can't be the next Gauss, so stop feeling bad about his achievements!"
None of which is a strictly relevant to what's true, of course. The answer there seems to be "lots of skill is inherited, skill plus effort is required to truly excel, but skill and effort are often interchangeable except at the highest levels".
But for whatever reason, I'm in the second camp with you on which narrative is depressing. A lot of growth mindset writing is almost physically uncomfortable for me. I appreciate the value of hard work, but believing that everyone is equally capable completely contradicts my life experience, and implies that 99.9% never fulfill our potential in even a single domain.
I like this idea of a gift-effort balance. Everyone requires a different mix to shine. But effort seems more important, as I see hard-working "average" people excel more often than lazy geniuses.
But,
I think the key realization is that whenever the incentives are strong enough, a lot of hard-working geniuses will be fighting for the prize. Hard-working geniuses are really hard to compete against, and if you don't realize that natural variation is a real thing, you can get discouraged pretty quickly.
Agreed. At this age, I'm content to let the hard-working geniuses move the world forward and inspire me, while I do the best I can in my limited corner of it.
Usually, those people are making disproportionate contributions to the world for comparably small rewards. Usually. We're lucky to have Einsteins and Bachs and Taos and an infinitude of less well-known but probably equally capable hard-working geniuses. I'm very grateful for hard-working geniuses who devote themselves to important problems! Some of them do apply themselves toward more secular ends, such as Gates. That's OK too, although the world takes care of gratefulness for me ;-)
It's just important to realize they exist if you ever get into a situation where you're regularly competing with them.
I just meant "some people are smarter/more productive than others for reasons beyond either person's control at the time of measurement".
So it could be environmental factors (access to better support or higher quality educational experiences in early childhood). Or just genetic. I'm not positing any specific causes, just making a general observation that I find to be true of the world I see around me: especially at the highest levels, some people really are just smarter than others, and no amount of hard work could close the gap.
I learned this one looking at mathematics graduate students. There's plenty for non-geniuses to do, but someone who wants to be exceptional at their work should almost certainly pick a different field. There's a ridiculous amount of brainpower in the field, and if you're not near the top you're never going to be one of the superstars.
I used to prefer the growth mindset and now I agree with you.
I think what changed for me is that I got good enough to regularly interact with people at the "highest levels" of what I do. Teaching probably had some impact on me as well.
I still work hard and enjoy improving, but if I'm completely honest with myself, I'll never be as good as some of the people I regularly interact with. Their minds are gifts that no amount of hard work can compete against (especially because they're also incredibly productive... which in some sense is, I think, also a genetic gift. I need my 8 hours of sleep and can't consistently work more than 10 hour work weeks.).
Since having that realization, I've noticed that most people in my life who prefer the growth mindset happen to work in occupations where there isn't a lot of room for variation -- or where variation in productivity is almost completely explained by factors under your own control. E.g., factory work, truck driving, and the sort of healthcare occupations you can do straight out of high school. Or in one case, a software dev who puts in his 40 doing very standard C# LoB CRUD apps.
Figuring out that there's an essential difference between my environment and theirs was a huge relief -- it's not that I wasn't working hard enough (I definitely was), it's that the type of work I'm doing is much more sensitive to variation in natural ability.
Maybe ignorance is bliss when it comes to the growth mindset.
to me it's more that everybody is born with a certain set of multipliers, say the "average" human has 1.0 everywhere, to reach competency level X you need Y * 1,000 hours.
You can be born super lucky to get, say, a 100 multiplier in playing the oboe, you will be considered "gifted" and you will rush past your peers, however all you have is a multiplier, if you put in 100 hours and somebody with a 1 multiplier puts in 20,000 they will become better than you despite your "gifts". But if somebody that has a 100 multiplier puts in 20,000 hours then they will reach levels that you could never ever reach due not having enough time in your life to do so.
On the other hand, unfortunately there are plenty of cases where you might get a 0.1, 0.01 or even 0.001 multiplier, and in those cases you can work hard as much as you want, but you will never ever become more than competent at whatever this is even after a lifelong pursuit. I am pretty sure for example I have a 0.01 multiplier at painting unfortunately.
In the end one always needs hard work, but there should be the understanding that due to how you are born, your hard work might not ever give you the level of performance you would like to have, and that's nobody's fault. This is also why the people that excel at something and go "it was all about hard work, you can do this too if you try really hard" do a great disservice to everybody else.
If you "try really hard" you cannot become an astronaut unless you are genetically lucky and have all the required physical attributes, same deal about becoming a world class anything.
It does feel like the only way not to get depressed is to tape/record yourself regularly at anything you do, always save some of your learning efforts (paintings, musical performances, woodworking things, ...)
I personally am lifelong learning playing the pipe organ, and midi record every single practice I do: when I feel bad about a perceived lack of progress, I play some midi files of six months ago or whenever and I am instantly reminded that yes, I am progressing slowly but I am progressing quite a bit. The only thing I personally have issues with is that no matter how well I learn a piece I will always make at least a couple of mistakes when playing it, I wish I could get a piece perfect but it seems that whatever my multiplier is for "perfection" it is a lot lower than the multiplier for "good enough"
This is a great model - honestly it's much closer to my intuitive sense than what I wrote up.
I think most people can be decent at most things, certainly. Humans are (almost always) normally distributed, and odds are you're between 0.5 and 2 on most scales. If you want to run a 5k, or play guitar for fun, or make a website, your multiplier probably won't stop you.
But if you want to be the best, or you're choosing a goal where demand is short (astronauts, professional tubists, etc), you'd better think about your multiplier. There's a reason music schools are so viciously selective, and it's that hard work isn't going to get you a career unless you're somewhere up in that 100+ territory.
I'm pretty sure I'm down around .1 for music. I'm fairly tone deaf, my sense of rhythm is crappy, and I've never found any part of music intuitive. I've played some instruments, I don't regret it, but I'm certainly not going to go stake much of my time on being even middling-competent.
You touch on one thing that I think is a huge deal - people with big multipliers don't necessarily feel it. That top-notch musician knows they worked their ass off, but can't experience how they would have done with a worse multiplier. It's like listening to successful founders say that you should just focus on your idea and "it'll all work out in the end" - that's sample bias like no other.
I didn't get really skeptical about pure effort and growth mindset until I started working out how specific people learn. The gulfs in effort for different people on the same achievement are shocking, and this model is far better for understanding that.
> If you want to [...] play guitar for fun [...], your multiplier probably won't stop you.
Well, mine did :-D
After 3 years of practice, I could still not accurately do what a kid can do after 1 week, or someone who plays another instrument after 20 minutes.
It was time to throw in the towel and admit that there are hopeless cases and that I was one of them :-)
The worse thing is that I did not have great expectations when I started, since I don't have any interest and even dislike complex music. But I couldn't even reach my very very low expectations... By far... since 3 chords were 2 too many and the other one would never come at the right time :-D
Exactly. With math, you must focus on the journey at least as much as the destination. While the proof motivates the effort, the mastery of math comes not in deriving elegant proofs, but in devising 'A' proof, then remembering how you did it so you can later: 1) use the method again in other proofs and 2) improve on the proof, often by learning from others. Nobody jumps straight from zero to hero.
Like chessmasters, only the best mathematicians invent techniques. Most just employ what they've learned in inventive combination play.
This hits me almost every time I think of something. Recently someone suggested to me a game of "snake" (like the old QB game) that used the tilt sensor in the phone to direct the snake. Should be pretty simple.
A few searches later and I'm looking at super-realisticly rendered WebGL demos of mobile 3D pinball examples and thinking "there's no way I could ever implement something like this".
Anything I can think of already exists, and already exists better than I could do it.
Think at this as an exercise in programming. You don't write a game of Snake to make THE game of Snake. You write it to learn something and hone your skills (same way as someone taking a Math course solves simple and typical exercises).
Getting over this hump in thinking is hard though - I was crippled for years by "CREATION MUST BE PERFECT". It's only recently I've managed to adjust to thinking "all of this is good practice" and dumping almost everything I make out to the public.
I've had this thing where I'll think about all the things I'll never do.. At 17, I'd go "I'll never be as good as Gauss". At 19, "Jesus, Lagrange taught at college at age 19". At 20, "Galois died at 20..Damn.."
The only thing that I have going for me is that I have dissociated my emotional/psychological state and my intellectual pursuit to become smarter than I was the day before. I can work on stuff when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when tears are wetting the paper, when it's cold, when it's hot, when I'm anxious, when I'm relaxed. The first thing I did after college is trying to come up with a studying schedule to undo the harm of not making the most out of it.
This is great, right? The downside is that, judging myself even more harshly than when I judge myself compared to others: If I can work in all conditions and everyday, how come I still suck at everything and can't do anything well. I haven't found an answer to that, yet.
I'm missing your point. Do you mean he was unlucky not to have lived enough, or to have died of strep? (the 'or' is a boolean 'or', not a colloquial one. i.e: not mutually exclusive).
Hmm, the only death example was Galois. Not sure we can make a theme out of that. Also, I'm not sure: are you 35 and are talking about yourself or something made you think I am?
My replies to your comments were questions to elicit further details because I didn't understand what you meant (maybe an inside joke, maybe a gem hidden in there) and I didn't want to go with assumptions and possibly miss meaning. You called me a pedant for that.
Well, as you might already imagine, that is an unrealistic attitude to have. One of the points of these creative endeavors is to have fun and improve yourself, little by little.
The expectation that you must "dunk over Michael Jordan" to do so is a bit absurd.
Plus the web rubs in our faces the output of all of 8 billion people on the planet, of which tons are bound to be far better at what we want to do, while simultaneously depreciating the value of both local talent (since now you compete internationally for attention), and global talent (since the channels are saturated and people have 2000000 outlets to care much for any particular one).
I think the implication is that you should try to create something away from the internet, note how the poster goes to a class and creates a beat and is getting positive reinforcement from people at the class
If he had created a beat on his own, posted it on soundcloud/youtube and posted, say, on reddit, he would've likely gotten trolled or put down or compared to any number of amazing beatmakers and it would have added to his depression instead of helping him get over it.
I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be, and those somebodies are also instantly accessible from anywhere at any time for comparison purposes.
In the old days, say, you could tell yourself "ok, the teacher/master craftsman/... that is teaching me is so much better than me because they have a lifetime of experience, when I will be their age I will have learned and will be just as good", but now you can find endless amounts of people younger than you already amazing at what you are trying to do, and you think to yourself what's the point when they are already there and you have just started.
Nowadays with most of the world connected you can find hundreds of "one in a million" people you can compare yourself to: and if you are depressed it is really really hard to want to get started at anything, because getting started at something means months or years of being objectively pretty bad at it, months where you can tell yourself "what's the point, youtubeuser999 is a kid and they're already better at this than I ever will be"
It is also hard because one of the ways to get better, is to compare yourself to people better than you and try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't, and incorporate that in your practice. If you are in a beginner art class with a teacher walking around and you are all around the same level, you can get a lot of benefit from looking at others and listening in.
But if, thanks to the internet, you have Michelangelo on your left, Leonardo on the right, Vermeer in front of you and Tintoretto behind, and you are just trying to learn to draw a face that doesn't look like Frankenstein, it is going to be extremely discouraging.
Well said and as someone commented earlier about "building a table" I think there is some sense of accomplishment and utility you can get from that vs something in tech.
I think the internet's "Michelangelo on your left" effect is more subtle, but equally dangerous.
Say you do truly believe that you can stand out in whatever crowd it is. Certainly that's true of a learners' meetup in person, but that could be an online community, in which you find a niche or a community with a greater demand for creative work than supply. (Soundcloud is not such a place, but consider fandoms as an example.) You believe that you could get positive reinforcement of the value of your work from making something, be it a table or a beat. You find and engage with that community. Awesome, that's the first step!
The problem that then arises is that doing things at the level of quality that folks come to expect from this new world of democratized creation (and you're a perfectionist at some fundamental level, of course, who browses the Internet and will see exemplars of whatever craft you want to pursue)... is that even if you believe you can get to their level, you need to put the time in to practice your craft. Like "the free time of a teenager" levels of time (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori ). And if you're already in a place where you feel guilty for misallocating the hours of every day of every week of every month for a very long time... then the clarion call of huddling in bed, or reading a website, or playing a video game with instant gratification, can quickly drown out the impulse to create. A comfortably unsatisfying safety blanket from which it is very hard to escape.
There's a much lower barrier to entry to writing HN comments, that's for sure...
Perhaps a bit out of the left field, but one suggestion would be to make sketchnotes [1] of some useful idea that you would like to share. For example, a summary of a book or article you read. Do it on paper, snap a picture and post it online. That way you create something which is meaningful to you, but you can also share it and it might help others too. Also, this is the kind of creation where you usually do not have to compare with others.
The obvious con of course is that it can be really time consuming.
If you steer towards areas that don't have a "right" answer it might be easier. I used making a set of shelves out of planks of wood last weekend to manage my mood. They're not going to be the best shelves in the world; there's no "right way" to build shelves. They're not even going to be the best shelves I can make. In fact, as a physical artefact, they're kinda shoddy.
It really doesn't matter: making them got me into a flow state, I got a ton of carpentry practice out of them, and as a handy side-effect I NOW HAVE A NEW SET OF SHELVES. Woo.
(Also I need to buy a finishing saw. Oh no, more tools, whatever shall I do.)
This is why I've enjoyed my time taking improv classes. I'm with a group of other complete beginners and failure is encouraged. It has a beginning and end, and whatever happens will only happen once ever. I go home with a sense of completion and accomplishment, but I don't have the feeling of having to show anyone else for validation.
Jim Butcher tells the story, in various interviews, how he started the wildly successful Dresden Files series with trying to write terrible formulaic genre fiction to prove to his teacher that it would be terrible, and ended up with something marketable.
Most of the world's great ideas came from doing something that seemed derivative or insignificant at first. Very few came from waiting for a huge, original idea to strike like a lightning bolt.
This fact surprises many people, because popular reporting of science and invention usually attributes ideas to some instant flash of insight, skipping over the hard work that led to it.
Don't do the Google search until you're ready to check your answer, and even then don't copy anything you find. It's better for your growth and learning to work the answer out yourself. Not only that, sounds like it's better for your mindset to come to a complete conclusion and then compare instead of getting stuck on how other people have done things. You'll learn how to refine your work eventually, but for now "the problem is completely solved" means essentially nothing. Sounds like your current work is homework for when you start pushing boundaries. This is getting rambly, but maybe you'd benefit from a Coursera class or two in math and then maybe a graduate university night course?
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
I really wish "just make something" was that simple, but for people who are already full of self-doubt, it might not make things any better, especially for people with high standards. There are ways to get around this (see the rest of the Ira Glass quote), but it's not the panacea the article makes it out to be.
I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either.
Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food.
Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it.
I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to be cancer researchers in the same vein that people 200 years ago assumed that only the best would be able to read.
I think developing taste is actually the hardest part. For example, most aspiring musicians start out enamored with a particular style because it impressed them in their early life. It takes years to make sense of things and find your unique personal concept of "good music". Many don't even reach the realization that it's a worthwhile goal. Similar with visual art, etc.
Developing the skill to evaluate something is different from developing the skill to produce it.
If they were the same, then all the front-end developers and UX experts would both work the same job. Some people can, and it's usually those who have developed skills for both.
Self-awareness of your skill level is the first step to developing it.
As someone who tries to practice CBT for depression / anxiety, this reminds me of a cognitive distortion, all or nothing thinking. Either it's the best in the world, or it's garbage.
One thing that helped me is realizing that there is ALWAYS going to be someone who does something better than me. You are still learning when doing things, you're still getting better.
It's a corny saying but it's true: winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners.
>The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you.
But the only way to get very good and end up being one of those "others" who make the best things is to push past this point and keep making things anyway. Of course you're not the best in the world at something when you first start doing it. Nobody was. How could you be?
The problem is, everyone who devoted their entire life at something, worked with insane intensity, and devoted themselves wholly to it, is not the best in the world either, except one.
Being "the best in the world" is not necessary. By definition, there can only be one "best in the world" at any given endeavor, so most people will probably never reach that level at anything. There's much enjoyment and satisfaction to be had in doing things for their own sake rather than comparing yourself to others.
Trying to create something doesn't have to mean being original.
Writing a song is hard. Learn how to make beer. Or fix up an old bike. There are tons of things you can do that involve creating something, that involves physical activity, a sense of achievement and produces a tangible result, but doesn't have the element of creative block or impostor syndrome.
Why do a startup, if someone else or a group may eventually do it better?
You can outsource all the work and spending money to others lol. This is also true of "effective altruism".
Why be so egocentric as to want to try to change the world? It is going to change anyway.
Take these questions seriously, I would like to hear some answers. I think it is to leave some mark because of our desire to exercise power and control over our environment. For men, it is an instinct to leave a trace that is independent of our biological lifespan. (Most women have an instinct to have children.) The desire to get really rich from helping many people. And finally, the desire to do something you like and have it be meaningful.
Taking your math example, if the people who are currently at the forefront were constantly worried about where they ranked along with everyone else, they never would be where they are now. There are a few exceptions of course but they're the exceptions.
I could give a damn if I'm #5 in the world or number #5,000,000,000 in the world for x. I just want to be as good at x as I can be. I get a little bit of joy every time I get a little better at it.
I've found three things to help motivate myself in endeavors such as this:
1) recognize that if you really want to be good at it, it will take time and consistent, proper work at it (see deliberate practice).
2) maybe you don't have to be the best; you might be able to muster something that is good enough and that would still be of value to others (by definition, if it's good enough).
Maybe you spend too much time on the Internet checking out what others are doing. Spend enough time and you will find someone who's doing it 10x or 100x better than you.
I can guarantee though that if you keep doing it with focus & dedication, ultimately it's going to work out.
As someone who has periodic depressive episodes, if you're capable of leaving the house to go to a DJ class, you're probably already over the worst of it.
"Just go do x" sort of has a "Get off the couch" pre-requisite that needs to be satisfied.
Try meditating. My favorite way to meditate is outside sitting up, but on the days were I struggle to even get of bed I'll start meditating right there and try and work my way to the floor and then sitting up. It's not about doing it right, well, in certain positions or any. Start trying to bring your attention to your breath until you feel like you can work your way out of bed to the floor and then upright.
I've also found bike riding can be modified in a similar way. Throw on a hoodie even if its hot out. This allows you to put your head down and your hood up and generally ignore the world. Even when its hot out, its normal enough to wear a hoodie to work up a sweat". Bike riding also works at low enough speeds you can do it in a very apathetic manner(I find it easier than walking.) You don't have to work hard, just getting a little motion starts blood-flow and can provide a small lift. For me its about finding the easiest, simplest, way to provide some sort of lift to start the day and then hopefully you can snowball it.
Try meditating. My favorite way to meditate is outside sitting up, but on the days were I struggle to even get of bed I'll start meditating right there and try and work my way to the floor and then sitting up. It's not about doing it right, well, in certain positions or any. Start trying to bring your attention to your breath until you feel like you can work your way out of bed to the floor and then upright.
I've also found bike riding can be modified in a similar way. Throw on a hoodie even if its hot out. This allows you to put your head down and your hood up and generally ignore the world. Even when its hot out, its normal enough to wear a hoodie to work up a sweat". Bike riding also works at low enough speeds you can do it in a very apathetic manner(I find it easier than walking.) You don't have to work hard, just getting a little motion starts blood-flow and can provide a small lift. For me its about finding the easiest, simplest, way to provide some sort of lift to start the day and then hopefully you can snowball it.
When I'm feeling depressed, the last thing I want to do is jump up, and start working on something. This sounds like advice written by someone who has never been depressed. Like a skinny dude, telling a fat guy to stop eating.
Very good front half. The second half ruffled my feathers with conflating lifting other people's work via sampling and tossing flourishes in and suddenly feeling like an authority on creativity. I say this as both a 100% from scratch producer and frequent unsanctioned remixer of other people's work. Glad it's therapeutic for him, genuinely so.
He's wrong though, not every human is "innately creative" in the sense that there's an artist, singer, dancer, drummer, painter, sculptor, or didgeridoo maestro hiding somewhere inside each of us if we only look. That's not fair. Some people will go looking and find disappointment, much in the way I think for some reason I'll never enjoy Calculus II or have much of an aptitude for it. I just think false hope can lead to, eh, other depressive tailspins.
> not every human is "innately creative" in the sense that there's an artist, singer, dancer, drummer, painter, sculptor, or didgeridoo maestro hiding somewhere inside each of us
If the bar is at "maestro" then no, of course not. But I think most people can be creative to some extent even if it's -at best- journeyman level. The trick is to remove the societal / cultural stance that says things must be maestro level or they're not worthy of our attention.
I really think people do themselves a disservice by feeling that everything they do has to meet some imaginary bar.
I'm a terrible flute player. I go so long between practices that I sometimes forget where my fingers go, but the simple joy in making notes with a wind instrument makes me smile me every time. The "bar" is set at "just create tunes" not "be a classical virtuoso."
I agree. I think they are mainly saying to go looking for something to care about. Creation worked for them but it wasn't the actual answer. It is a search for purpose. When you find a purpose, you can focus your energies there for the positive emotional feedback we all so crave.
"I just think false hope can lead to, eh, other depressive tailspins."
This right here. These sorts of feelings are very similar to piloting an airplane in a stall. You can pull the nose up as hard as you can, but unless you fix the problem (e.g. by increasing the throttle) the plane is going to "fix" the problem for you (usually by nosediving and/or spinning out of control). If the engine is broken, then the only recourse is often to point the nose down yourself, and hopefully in the process you'll give yourself enough speed to make it to a nice clearing instead of crashing into the face of a mountain.
You basically just described why the Air France flight out of Brazil went into a stall and dropped 30,000 feet to smack into the ocean. All I can hope in such a scenario, as a passenger, is that the DMT kicks in and I go out in a dream state. What happened was the pilots weren't experienced enough in the emergency scenario to go against their instincts and with their training - granted, there was a mechanical issue of the pitot tube freezing up, but in depression, emotional physiology is also a mechanical issue of sorts. That crash, to me, is an exceptionally clear example of how our own gut feelings can be ones that have to be overcome if we want to survive.
Friends have worked for me[1]. I've tried travelling, running, working, drinking, innumerable distractions. But having friends who can spot when I'm falling and reach out, because I'll never ask for their help, has been invaluable.
Everyone is different, so I'm not going to knock the author for his views.
What I found over the years is that having a routine helps ward off depression, and by definition almost making something isn't a routine it's a one time event.
I would suggest something much simpler. Walking. Take as many steps as you can every day. Log the results, but really you just want to do something to get you moving so the results don't matter, I just like to compete against myself and walking is something I can do just about any day.
Eventually you will feel like doing something other than walking, but there may be weeks or months or you don't -- and that's OK too.
The point is just not to lie around letting the self-destructive thoughts spiral and lock you in that place you don't want to be. But even when you're there, you can still put one foot in front of the other...
1. talk to people who care about you - face to face at every meal if possible but at least at every lunch if not. Be around other people and interact with them. Join communities where performance is not needed but people are thankful if you just show up.
2. do small tiny things. Eg: buy and cook eggs and eat them, clean your apartment. As you do slightly bigger things, do things for other people. Send $10 to a charity online or to a watsi patient.
Its a constant struggle and its hard as hell. But small tiny steps and support from others help a lot.
Two things I've noticed that are surprisingly small but significant:
- leaving your home
- talk to people
They switch your mind off some inner loop. As an ex loner that loop was my favorite mode, but abused you end up grumpy, acid, somehow depressed.
Just being on the move changes that. And talking to people even short polite chit chat will feed your brain with .. I don't know .. negative entropy ? external energy that refull your mind in more efficient ways that most your lonely activities, even those you love (music, painting, reading, programming).
2016 - I feel sad. It must be that I'm depressed, let me read more about depression so I'll know even how I fail in life, because everyone around me on social media is so much successful and happy.
1986 - I feel sad. Well that's life. Kills self six weeks later
In other words, it's not that people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past just knew how to live with; people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past died from. People drank themselves to death, or ODed on drugs, or put a rope around their neck, all because they couldn't calm the storm raging inside their head.
What bullshit (the "I feel sad. Well that's life. Kills.. " triggered me :))
Feeling sad is part of life. Dealing with it requires practice. I think people did it a lot better before our age of needing to be happy all the time or worry something was wrong with us.
Precisely, developing coping mechanisms to deal with sadness is crucial from childhood on without suppressing it with pills and/or stimulants (and yes modern day Internet + Social media is just that). No wonder there's more people "depressed" then ever.
I don't really grasp how people who have only ever felt sad and have not experienced clinical depression are so quick to assume that only the former exists. Like, if you'd only ever had normal headaches and met someone with cluster headaches, would you just insist to them that their head just hurts and they need to deal with it?
But, as someone who was actually depressed and that due to things that in retrospect don't really matter, I do think that if I had been more resilient I would have had an easier time.
2016 - I feel sad. There's a constant litany in the back of my head saying, "Maybe I should just die. If I was dead I wouldn't have to go to work. Can I just go back to sleep? Sleeping is nice. Man, what if got hit by a car? Then I'd be dead but it wouldn't be my fault. Then no one would be disappointed in me that I failed at life and killed myself. Oh I'm driving over a bridge, what would happen if I just yanked the wheel to the right really hard? I'm depressed, my meds aren't working as well as they worked earlier in the year. I need to see my doctor. That means making an appointment. I can't even get out of the bed though. Maybe I'll manage to call tomorrow. Maybe I'll die in my sleep."
When you are depressed, please try seeing a professional if you have the time/money/insurance coverage.
We've made a condition that is largely out of your control a taboo and I don't know why. It's ok to want to be functional, and people can help without pretending like your depression/any other condition isn't real.
"We've made a condition that is largely out of your control a taboo and I don't know why."
The reason "why" is (I suspect) because the people who don't understand depression think that it's not out of one's control. Thus, since they don't experience the effects of depression, they insist that people with depression will be magically cured if they just tried to be happy.
This approach to curing depression - much like trying to fix a severed limb by pretending it's still there - is almost always destined to fail. When it does inevitably fail, the non-depressed people - still failing to understand depression - resort to blaming the depressed people for being depressed.
It's very unsurprising, after all, much like how it's unsurprising for a physically-healthy person to take for granted the ability to use stairs, or how it's very unsurprising for right-handed UX designers to assume that users are right-handed (I'm looking at all y'all Android designers...), or how it's very unsurprising for developers to brush aside bugs with their software because it "works fine on my machine, so you're obviously just doing it wrong; RTFM".
No, I already Read The Fucking Manual™; you just suck at comprehending that your exact situation is not everyone else's.
> how it's unsurprising for a physically-healthy person to take for granted the ability to use stairs
I broke my arm a year ago and I was surprised to see how much rote behavior I relied on using my left hand for! It was pretty enlightening and I try to think about what I take for granted from time to time.
I had a similar experience when I tore my ACL; I still don't really feel comfortable going down stairs (up is fine for some reason) even after a very successful surgery.
Making things feels good to me all the time! I am a musician, I was a fine arts major, am now a software developer. Whether it is a a print, a song, a web page, something for my children, it doesn't seem to matter - the creative process always feels good to me. Please see
Bring nature to your own place, Thats what helps me. I do gardening to help myself.
Just seeing them growing everyday, Give me some kinda of hope and makes me feel i'm not alone.
Its so easy to start with and so rewarding, Just get some pots and soil and start planting your own vegetable or flowers! I promise you'll be happiest person on earth when your chilli fruits!
You can try to make your own coffee/tobacco or medicinal herb if you have enough space!
Heh. That's fine until the plants die :P Living things can be tricky sometimes.
It's good advice in general though. Having plants that depend on you to do something - even if that something is so simple as watering them - can mean the different between doing nothing on a day and doing one useful thing. And perhaps that one useful thing is enough to not have to write that day off as useless.
The number of times I have that I felt I could do better - and then I start working on it, get 80% done, but then I struggle with the next 20% - and then almost burnout and give up and feel depressed because I'll never be able to do anything in life, is just insane.
Then I start wondering - what is all of this for? and what's the entire point of even living?
Talking to people does not help either (as it is, I'm not very social and then to add to that, most friends would have a general response along the lines of "oh wow...look at you and your problems", talking to parents is worse - they'll tell me to pray and that's how life is - which I refuse to accept).
Distractions are the only thing that has helped me yet - I distract myself with almost anything I can find - games, cars, tv shows, movies - just so I don't think of anything else.
I write this because, as the author mentions "Make something" - the will to make something disappears. Which is why distractions help.
I generally agree with your sentiment. Anything I do seems to fall so far short of my expectations that it makes me depressed.
My mom used to say "when you reach for the moon, at least you'll climb a tree" but to me the image of man on a tree, reaching out to the moon fills me with hopelessness instead of inspiration.
You're right it'd be sad. But if you climb a tree, you're not gonna reach out to the moon; you're going to be a little out of breath from climbing, and notice your lungs. You'll have put your arms and legs to use. You'll notice something around the tree you didn't. And maybe then you'll do something else.
It's not actually about reaching the moon, but (I think) just doing something. Because purpose and meaning can also come after doing something which previously had no apparent meaning.
I believe that if you find yourself needing distraction to keep going you should refactor your life. You should really talk to someone about your situation, distraction is temporary, you'll always end alone with your own thoughts at some point and it doesn't have to be painful.
If you believe that there's more to life then you should keep looking for more. Dream and make your dreams happen, even if it takes time you'll have a goal and purpose.
There is no point in living but there's no point in staying in the box society puts you in and be miserable neither. You can do whatever you want.
One of the things that helped me was teaching myself a new skill. Finishing a Udemy course and knowing that I have a new (and marketable) skill is a great feeling that encourages me to find projects to apply it towards.
(Especially!) if your government doesn't give you access to a therapist or if you don't want to suffer side-effects due to anti-depressants, then do :
1. Mindful meditation [free] -> Daily practice (30+ minutes)
John Kabat-Zinn [0] masters the link between science and meditation and has published very valuable books (including guided/audio meditation exercises) [1]. There are a couple of scientific studies which prove effectiveness [2] [3].
LSD however requires one to literally read/understand/know everything about the substance before applying it (minimum literature: "The psychedelic explorer's guide" by Fadiman). Also, order a test kit and test before you ingest. Certain "edge cases"/people should not try it and educating yourself about everything will allow you to decide if it's a good idea in your case or not. In addition, you may be able to access your spiritual dimension, which increases quality of life even further (it is less immediate with meditation).
You may combine micro-dosing LSD with meditation for accessing the meditative state easier (it's quite a challenge for depressed people).
There is good reason to be cautious with meditation while depressed. Meditation helps people get some distance from their emotional reactions - but depressed people are often already _unhealthily_ dissociated from their emotional state, and mediation may exacerbate that rather than repair it.
Meditation becomes rather unrealistic once your depression is past the "moderate" level and has become "clinic" (strong), in which case either anti-depressants (mostly with side-effects) or a well researched and full-blown LSD experience can "jumpstart" your brain again (and therewith enable you to start practicing meditation which then helps you avoid falling back into strong depression).
369 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadMaking things isn't a panacea for me, when I'm done working I'll still sometimes feel less than great, but it always helps.
I respond best to very specific instructions that don't require choices on my behalf. For example, "do something active," won't move me. Instead I need, "put on running shoes, go outside, run around the house three times." It's a silly example, but the point is that I won't "do something active" but I will "put on running shoes, ...".
The second half reminds me of well meaning people who make things worse by trying to help. "Just (go jogging, do something creative drink vegetable shakes)"
I would if I could damn it! lol
In the OP, the author recieves a nudge from his friend, but ignites his spark himself, and connects all the dots.
It's like Inception, you can read however many self-help books, blogs, studies, ideas as you'd like to try to make yourself get out of something, but it won't happen until it's "your" idea.
I have very much experienced this myself, and I can draw parallells between myself and the author, but I know that me telling anyone else won't help them (also from experience), because every transformation happens from within. All you can do is be supportive and present. Nudges and ideas can provide a seed, but they have to grow it. But there's also the risk of appearing pushy and having the opposite effect.
Things are good for me from an objective perspective (money, career, family, health), but I'm miserable and not in a good place. My brain is broken and only certain treatments help. A DJ class isn't fixing me.
I really think these people are confusing burn-out with depression. These are actually two very different things that require different solutions. I wish we were more open talking about burn-out and dissatisfaction instead of just ramping everything up to "I suffer from depression! Halp!" You don't. Once shit gets good for you again, you'll be Mr. Happy. I won't be.
I feel like there's a stigma against discussing burn-out because it really can be seen as a personal failure. You worked too hard for stupid reasons, you believe your dishonest boss or work culture or coworkers, you had unrealistic expectations, you tried too hard for something that was impossible, or you simply failed and its entirely your fault, etc. It seems more ego-pleasing to just jump to talking about depression and kinda sorta equating your situation with people who suffer from major depression, which ultimately is ego-pleasing but the wrong way to go about things. If a DJ class 'fixed' your depression, you didn't have depression, you had burn-out/situational depression, which has nothing in common with clinical depression.
That said, I don't want to trivialize situation depression/burn-out. Why do we only see post-burn-out articles but rarely see burn-out prevention articles? I spend about 20% of my work day considering whether that path I'm taking on this project or interaction violates my own anti-burnout strategies (do the least work possible from a reasonable perspective, do not create drama, let foolish things slide unless they personally affect me, very carefully pick battles, mentally clock out at 5, realize its just a job and that I work to live not the other way around, etc).
Also the above is written from someone with a depressed perspective, so take that as you will.
Then I one day planned to do it starting the following week and finally got it done.
And so I found that using a physical agenda is the way to keep myself out of depression, it makes me do things
Then we can talk.
It’s very difficult to imagine what that would be like - until you experience it. Hope you’ll seek out some effective help. It’s hard to dig out all by oneself.
"Sane Thinking about Mental Health Issues" - it discusses the phenomenon where in some cultures 'getting professional help' before reaching out to friends or family is absolutely necessary, and that 'abnormal' mental health related feelings should not be shared or discussed.
Your comment reminded me of that attitude. Maybe it would be enlightening for you to read about other perspectives
This way every day of your life will have significance. Even if the day was dreary, mundane, sad, or even horrible, recording the memory records the significance because you lived it.
Journaling didn't cure me of depression, but it helped me build a ladder out of my pit of despair.
I'm glad the author found something that helped him through depression. Unfortunately this is not a silver bullet. It won't work for everyone, or even every time depression hits.
There are many different activities you can try to help battle depression, and they are definitely helpful, and creating things is one of them. But they'll all fail without a key ingredient: realizing that you have to just do whatever you have to do, simply because it's the right thing to do, regardless of your emotions, or how intense they are, or lack of them.
If you live by that philosophy, you'll find yourself doing all the right things, and for all the right reasons, and you may not ever get out of depression, but it won't be crippling anymore.
A major difficulty with carrying this out as a person in tech though is that we're inherently a little more existential and philosophical than others because of the nature of programming being very intertwined with philosophy, and we get paid more generally which means we usually have more time to think too. Combine these with modern philosophy, and you usually have programmers who see no real value in life other than to enjoy it and have a good time (which explains why we love alcohol and sugary drinks like Red Bull so much), and when that good feeling runs out, life feels pointless and empty for us, because we can't find any motivation.
That also explains why there's a steady stream of philosophical and motivational posts on HN's front page. Because usually that good feeling that programming gives you doesn't last forever, so we try to look for explanations, or we try to look for other motivators. It also explains why we keep coming back to exciting topics on here, like bitcoin and the newest programming languages or tutorials on Haskell monads (which nobody can ever understand even though we know we should, so the closer we think we get, the more excited we are).
I don't have numbers on how many programmers are turning to religion, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was growing too, because we're looking for some motivation to keep us moving forward after the excitement runs out (and it always does, and never lasts very long).
Right, but how do you figure out what the "right thing to do" is? Especially if you ignore emotional response as a guide?
That's why Elon Musk says he didn't pursue his idea of using capacitors as batteries. It relied too much on whether or not there was something to be discovered. So he went with things that definitively could be built, where he was sure that "success was at least a possible outcome." ("Known unknowns")
So I would think that you should choose your project wisely, where, again, you can be sure that success is at least possible.
It seems to me that you're letting yourself be paralyzed by something that really has no bearing here. You will note that the article does not say "solve a hard math problem first and best". It says "do something with your hands and your feet". The two are not comparable.
The hard part is letting go of being the best, or even succeeding, in my opinion. It's cliche, but the attempt is what matters. If you run a marathon to win it, you will almost certainly be disappointed; but if you run it to be a better runner, to be healthier, or simply to say you did, you will be happier having done it than having not done it because you know you won't win.
I restore old bikes. It's easy mechanically, cheap, and projects are short enough to never be overwhelming (unlike e.g a car project). It's a nice analog change from computers.
But you've obviously never seen a gardening competition. People absolutely worry about growing bigger and nicer looking carrots.
Keeping your head up while (inelegantly) solving tons of problems yourself is an crucial step to solving them well.
Do you define it as how your answer or creation measures up to everyone else, or do you define it as you made significant progress in a field you had very little prior experience with. In my math escapades, it's linear algebra, for you it may be differential calculus, etc.
Basically if you always measure success in comparisons to others, you are always going to be disappointed. There are very few times where this isn't true -- such as you entered in a competition for worlds best overall mathematician, which almost doesn't exist, because you have to pick one thing and specialize in it.
Just realize if you take the time and effort to practice, you will achieve success. We all have the same brain, and barring any learning disability, every human has the same potential for amazing learning, the only difference between those seemingly geniuses with perfect answers that solve problems in a way you could never conceive, is they practiced more, and thought about it more.
I completely disagree, and I think this attitude, which I find more prevalent in North America, is at the root of a lot of depression and feelings of lack of self worth. It's the same as saying that "person X is more successful than person Y because they wanted it more / worked harder at it"
In the end we do not have all the same brain, and we do not have all the same capabilities, thinking that we do in my opinion makes it a lot more likely to develop feelings of lack of self worth (I still suck at this, it must be my fault)
Some people find the innate ability mindset oppressive and saddening, and are greatly comforted by "you can do whatever you set yourself to!"
Other people find growth mindset oppressive, and greatly prefer "you can't be the next Gauss, so stop feeling bad about his achievements!"
None of which is a strictly relevant to what's true, of course. The answer there seems to be "lots of skill is inherited, skill plus effort is required to truly excel, but skill and effort are often interchangeable except at the highest levels".
But for whatever reason, I'm in the second camp with you on which narrative is depressing. A lot of growth mindset writing is almost physically uncomfortable for me. I appreciate the value of hard work, but believing that everyone is equally capable completely contradicts my life experience, and implies that 99.9% never fulfill our potential in even a single domain.
But, I think the key realization is that whenever the incentives are strong enough, a lot of hard-working geniuses will be fighting for the prize. Hard-working geniuses are really hard to compete against, and if you don't realize that natural variation is a real thing, you can get discouraged pretty quickly.
Usually, those people are making disproportionate contributions to the world for comparably small rewards. Usually. We're lucky to have Einsteins and Bachs and Taos and an infinitude of less well-known but probably equally capable hard-working geniuses. I'm very grateful for hard-working geniuses who devote themselves to important problems! Some of them do apply themselves toward more secular ends, such as Gates. That's OK too, although the world takes care of gratefulness for me ;-)
It's just important to realize they exist if you ever get into a situation where you're regularly competing with them.
Google shows me nothing but out-of-context biology-textbook material, so I'll ask: what is the relevance here of "natural variation"?
I just meant "some people are smarter/more productive than others for reasons beyond either person's control at the time of measurement".
So it could be environmental factors (access to better support or higher quality educational experiences in early childhood). Or just genetic. I'm not positing any specific causes, just making a general observation that I find to be true of the world I see around me: especially at the highest levels, some people really are just smarter than others, and no amount of hard work could close the gap.
I think what changed for me is that I got good enough to regularly interact with people at the "highest levels" of what I do. Teaching probably had some impact on me as well.
I still work hard and enjoy improving, but if I'm completely honest with myself, I'll never be as good as some of the people I regularly interact with. Their minds are gifts that no amount of hard work can compete against (especially because they're also incredibly productive... which in some sense is, I think, also a genetic gift. I need my 8 hours of sleep and can't consistently work more than 10 hour work weeks.).
Since having that realization, I've noticed that most people in my life who prefer the growth mindset happen to work in occupations where there isn't a lot of room for variation -- or where variation in productivity is almost completely explained by factors under your own control. E.g., factory work, truck driving, and the sort of healthcare occupations you can do straight out of high school. Or in one case, a software dev who puts in his 40 doing very standard C# LoB CRUD apps.
Figuring out that there's an essential difference between my environment and theirs was a huge relief -- it's not that I wasn't working hard enough (I definitely was), it's that the type of work I'm doing is much more sensitive to variation in natural ability.
Maybe ignorance is bliss when it comes to the growth mindset.
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
The less you know, the less you know you don't know.
Being a knowledge junkie, ignorance would be bliss. But once you know you can't easily go back and un-know.
You can be born super lucky to get, say, a 100 multiplier in playing the oboe, you will be considered "gifted" and you will rush past your peers, however all you have is a multiplier, if you put in 100 hours and somebody with a 1 multiplier puts in 20,000 they will become better than you despite your "gifts". But if somebody that has a 100 multiplier puts in 20,000 hours then they will reach levels that you could never ever reach due not having enough time in your life to do so.
On the other hand, unfortunately there are plenty of cases where you might get a 0.1, 0.01 or even 0.001 multiplier, and in those cases you can work hard as much as you want, but you will never ever become more than competent at whatever this is even after a lifelong pursuit. I am pretty sure for example I have a 0.01 multiplier at painting unfortunately.
In the end one always needs hard work, but there should be the understanding that due to how you are born, your hard work might not ever give you the level of performance you would like to have, and that's nobody's fault. This is also why the people that excel at something and go "it was all about hard work, you can do this too if you try really hard" do a great disservice to everybody else.
If you "try really hard" you cannot become an astronaut unless you are genetically lucky and have all the required physical attributes, same deal about becoming a world class anything.
It does feel like the only way not to get depressed is to tape/record yourself regularly at anything you do, always save some of your learning efforts (paintings, musical performances, woodworking things, ...)
I personally am lifelong learning playing the pipe organ, and midi record every single practice I do: when I feel bad about a perceived lack of progress, I play some midi files of six months ago or whenever and I am instantly reminded that yes, I am progressing slowly but I am progressing quite a bit. The only thing I personally have issues with is that no matter how well I learn a piece I will always make at least a couple of mistakes when playing it, I wish I could get a piece perfect but it seems that whatever my multiplier is for "perfection" it is a lot lower than the multiplier for "good enough"
I think most people can be decent at most things, certainly. Humans are (almost always) normally distributed, and odds are you're between 0.5 and 2 on most scales. If you want to run a 5k, or play guitar for fun, or make a website, your multiplier probably won't stop you.
But if you want to be the best, or you're choosing a goal where demand is short (astronauts, professional tubists, etc), you'd better think about your multiplier. There's a reason music schools are so viciously selective, and it's that hard work isn't going to get you a career unless you're somewhere up in that 100+ territory.
I'm pretty sure I'm down around .1 for music. I'm fairly tone deaf, my sense of rhythm is crappy, and I've never found any part of music intuitive. I've played some instruments, I don't regret it, but I'm certainly not going to go stake much of my time on being even middling-competent.
You touch on one thing that I think is a huge deal - people with big multipliers don't necessarily feel it. That top-notch musician knows they worked their ass off, but can't experience how they would have done with a worse multiplier. It's like listening to successful founders say that you should just focus on your idea and "it'll all work out in the end" - that's sample bias like no other.
I didn't get really skeptical about pure effort and growth mindset until I started working out how specific people learn. The gulfs in effort for different people on the same achievement are shocking, and this model is far better for understanding that.
Well, mine did :-D
After 3 years of practice, I could still not accurately do what a kid can do after 1 week, or someone who plays another instrument after 20 minutes.
It was time to throw in the towel and admit that there are hopeless cases and that I was one of them :-)
The worse thing is that I did not have great expectations when I started, since I don't have any interest and even dislike complex music. But I couldn't even reach my very very low expectations... By far... since 3 chords were 2 too many and the other one would never come at the right time :-D
Exactly. With math, you must focus on the journey at least as much as the destination. While the proof motivates the effort, the mastery of math comes not in deriving elegant proofs, but in devising 'A' proof, then remembering how you did it so you can later: 1) use the method again in other proofs and 2) improve on the proof, often by learning from others. Nobody jumps straight from zero to hero.
Like chessmasters, only the best mathematicians invent techniques. Most just employ what they've learned in inventive combination play.
A few searches later and I'm looking at super-realisticly rendered WebGL demos of mobile 3D pinball examples and thinking "there's no way I could ever implement something like this".
Anything I can think of already exists, and already exists better than I could do it.
The only thing that I have going for me is that I have dissociated my emotional/psychological state and my intellectual pursuit to become smarter than I was the day before. I can work on stuff when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when tears are wetting the paper, when it's cold, when it's hot, when I'm anxious, when I'm relaxed. The first thing I did after college is trying to come up with a studying schedule to undo the harm of not making the most out of it.
This is great, right? The downside is that, judging myself even more harshly than when I judge myself compared to others: If I can work in all conditions and everyday, how come I still suck at everything and can't do anything well. I haven't found an answer to that, yet.
<pedantry>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugurtha
</pedantry>
The expectation that you must "dunk over Michael Jordan" to do so is a bit absurd.
If he had created a beat on his own, posted it on soundcloud/youtube and posted, say, on reddit, he would've likely gotten trolled or put down or compared to any number of amazing beatmakers and it would have added to his depression instead of helping him get over it.
I don't think we are equipped to deal with the fact that there is somebody younger than us better at anything we can think of than we could ever be, and those somebodies are also instantly accessible from anywhere at any time for comparison purposes.
In the old days, say, you could tell yourself "ok, the teacher/master craftsman/... that is teaching me is so much better than me because they have a lifetime of experience, when I will be their age I will have learned and will be just as good", but now you can find endless amounts of people younger than you already amazing at what you are trying to do, and you think to yourself what's the point when they are already there and you have just started.
Nowadays with most of the world connected you can find hundreds of "one in a million" people you can compare yourself to: and if you are depressed it is really really hard to want to get started at anything, because getting started at something means months or years of being objectively pretty bad at it, months where you can tell yourself "what's the point, youtubeuser999 is a kid and they're already better at this than I ever will be"
It is also hard because one of the ways to get better, is to compare yourself to people better than you and try to figure out what they are doing that you aren't, and incorporate that in your practice. If you are in a beginner art class with a teacher walking around and you are all around the same level, you can get a lot of benefit from looking at others and listening in.
But if, thanks to the internet, you have Michelangelo on your left, Leonardo on the right, Vermeer in front of you and Tintoretto behind, and you are just trying to learn to draw a face that doesn't look like Frankenstein, it is going to be extremely discouraging.
This is the plot to Amadeus:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086879/
Say you do truly believe that you can stand out in whatever crowd it is. Certainly that's true of a learners' meetup in person, but that could be an online community, in which you find a niche or a community with a greater demand for creative work than supply. (Soundcloud is not such a place, but consider fandoms as an example.) You believe that you could get positive reinforcement of the value of your work from making something, be it a table or a beat. You find and engage with that community. Awesome, that's the first step!
The problem that then arises is that doing things at the level of quality that folks come to expect from this new world of democratized creation (and you're a perfectionist at some fundamental level, of course, who browses the Internet and will see exemplars of whatever craft you want to pursue)... is that even if you believe you can get to their level, you need to put the time in to practice your craft. Like "the free time of a teenager" levels of time (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori ). And if you're already in a place where you feel guilty for misallocating the hours of every day of every week of every month for a very long time... then the clarion call of huddling in bed, or reading a website, or playing a video game with instant gratification, can quickly drown out the impulse to create. A comfortably unsatisfying safety blanket from which it is very hard to escape.
There's a much lower barrier to entry to writing HN comments, that's for sure...
The obvious con of course is that it can be really time consuming.
[1] http://rohdesign.com/sketchnotes/
It really doesn't matter: making them got me into a flow state, I got a ton of carpentry practice out of them, and as a handy side-effect I NOW HAVE A NEW SET OF SHELVES. Woo.
(Also I need to buy a finishing saw. Oh no, more tools, whatever shall I do.)
Perfect is the enemy of good; good is the enemy of good enough.
Example interview: https://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/interview...
(search for "Writing the Genre Fiction Novel")
The problem, though, is that I often lack the motivation to do even little things. Sounds like that's the case for folks with depression, too.
This fact surprises many people, because popular reporting of science and invention usually attributes ideas to some instant flash of insight, skipping over the hard work that led to it.
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
(full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...)
I really wish "just make something" was that simple, but for people who are already full of self-doubt, it might not make things any better, especially for people with high standards. There are ways to get around this (see the rest of the Ira Glass quote), but it's not the panacea the article makes it out to be.
Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food.
Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it.
I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to be cancer researchers in the same vein that people 200 years ago assumed that only the best would be able to read.
If they were the same, then all the front-end developers and UX experts would both work the same job. Some people can, and it's usually those who have developed skills for both.
Self-awareness of your skill level is the first step to developing it.
One thing that helped me is realizing that there is ALWAYS going to be someone who does something better than me. You are still learning when doing things, you're still getting better.
It's a corny saying but it's true: winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners.
But the only way to get very good and end up being one of those "others" who make the best things is to push past this point and keep making things anyway. Of course you're not the best in the world at something when you first start doing it. Nobody was. How could you be?
Writing a song is hard. Learn how to make beer. Or fix up an old bike. There are tons of things you can do that involve creating something, that involves physical activity, a sense of achievement and produces a tangible result, but doesn't have the element of creative block or impostor syndrome.
You can outsource all the work and spending money to others lol. This is also true of "effective altruism".
Why be so egocentric as to want to try to change the world? It is going to change anyway.
Take these questions seriously, I would like to hear some answers. I think it is to leave some mark because of our desire to exercise power and control over our environment. For men, it is an instinct to leave a trace that is independent of our biological lifespan. (Most women have an instinct to have children.) The desire to get really rich from helping many people. And finally, the desire to do something you like and have it be meaningful.
I could give a damn if I'm #5 in the world or number #5,000,000,000 in the world for x. I just want to be as good at x as I can be. I get a little bit of joy every time I get a little better at it.
1) recognize that if you really want to be good at it, it will take time and consistent, proper work at it (see deliberate practice).
2) maybe you don't have to be the best; you might be able to muster something that is good enough and that would still be of value to others (by definition, if it's good enough).
3) you're doing it for yourself.
I can guarantee though that if you keep doing it with focus & dedication, ultimately it's going to work out.
"Just go do x" sort of has a "Get off the couch" pre-requisite that needs to be satisfied.
I've also found bike riding can be modified in a similar way. Throw on a hoodie even if its hot out. This allows you to put your head down and your hood up and generally ignore the world. Even when its hot out, its normal enough to wear a hoodie to work up a sweat". Bike riding also works at low enough speeds you can do it in a very apathetic manner(I find it easier than walking.) You don't have to work hard, just getting a little motion starts blood-flow and can provide a small lift. For me its about finding the easiest, simplest, way to provide some sort of lift to start the day and then hopefully you can snowball it.
I've also found bike riding can be modified in a similar way. Throw on a hoodie even if its hot out. This allows you to put your head down and your hood up and generally ignore the world. Even when its hot out, its normal enough to wear a hoodie to work up a sweat". Bike riding also works at low enough speeds you can do it in a very apathetic manner(I find it easier than walking.) You don't have to work hard, just getting a little motion starts blood-flow and can provide a small lift. For me its about finding the easiest, simplest, way to provide some sort of lift to start the day and then hopefully you can snowball it.
He's wrong though, not every human is "innately creative" in the sense that there's an artist, singer, dancer, drummer, painter, sculptor, or didgeridoo maestro hiding somewhere inside each of us if we only look. That's not fair. Some people will go looking and find disappointment, much in the way I think for some reason I'll never enjoy Calculus II or have much of an aptitude for it. I just think false hope can lead to, eh, other depressive tailspins.
If the bar is at "maestro" then no, of course not. But I think most people can be creative to some extent even if it's -at best- journeyman level. The trick is to remove the societal / cultural stance that says things must be maestro level or they're not worthy of our attention.
I'm a terrible flute player. I go so long between practices that I sometimes forget where my fingers go, but the simple joy in making notes with a wind instrument makes me smile me every time. The "bar" is set at "just create tunes" not "be a classical virtuoso."
This right here. These sorts of feelings are very similar to piloting an airplane in a stall. You can pull the nose up as hard as you can, but unless you fix the problem (e.g. by increasing the throttle) the plane is going to "fix" the problem for you (usually by nosediving and/or spinning out of control). If the engine is broken, then the only recourse is often to point the nose down yourself, and hopefully in the process you'll give yourself enough speed to make it to a nice clearing instead of crashing into the face of a mountain.
[1] http://hybridlogic.co.uk/2015/11/the-well/
What I found over the years is that having a routine helps ward off depression, and by definition almost making something isn't a routine it's a one time event.
I would suggest something much simpler. Walking. Take as many steps as you can every day. Log the results, but really you just want to do something to get you moving so the results don't matter, I just like to compete against myself and walking is something I can do just about any day.
Eventually you will feel like doing something other than walking, but there may be weeks or months or you don't -- and that's OK too.
The point is just not to lie around letting the self-destructive thoughts spiral and lock you in that place you don't want to be. But even when you're there, you can still put one foot in front of the other...
1. talk to people who care about you - face to face at every meal if possible but at least at every lunch if not. Be around other people and interact with them. Join communities where performance is not needed but people are thankful if you just show up.
2. do small tiny things. Eg: buy and cook eggs and eat them, clean your apartment. As you do slightly bigger things, do things for other people. Send $10 to a charity online or to a watsi patient.
Its a constant struggle and its hard as hell. But small tiny steps and support from others help a lot.
- leaving your home - talk to people
They switch your mind off some inner loop. As an ex loner that loop was my favorite mode, but abused you end up grumpy, acid, somehow depressed.
Just being on the move changes that. And talking to people even short polite chit chat will feed your brain with .. I don't know .. negative entropy ? external energy that refull your mind in more efficient ways that most your lonely activities, even those you love (music, painting, reading, programming).
2016 - I feel sad. It must be that I'm depressed, let me read more about depression so I'll know even how I fail in life, because everyone around me on social media is so much successful and happy.
1986 - I feel sad. Well that's life. Kills self six weeks later
In other words, it's not that people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past just knew how to live with; people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past died from. People drank themselves to death, or ODed on drugs, or put a rope around their neck, all because they couldn't calm the storm raging inside their head.
Feeling sad is part of life. Dealing with it requires practice. I think people did it a lot better before our age of needing to be happy all the time or worry something was wrong with us.
But, as someone who was actually depressed and that due to things that in retrospect don't really matter, I do think that if I had been more resilient I would have had an easier time.
We've made a condition that is largely out of your control a taboo and I don't know why. It's ok to want to be functional, and people can help without pretending like your depression/any other condition isn't real.
It says a lot about how humane the society we live in really is.
The reason "why" is (I suspect) because the people who don't understand depression think that it's not out of one's control. Thus, since they don't experience the effects of depression, they insist that people with depression will be magically cured if they just tried to be happy.
This approach to curing depression - much like trying to fix a severed limb by pretending it's still there - is almost always destined to fail. When it does inevitably fail, the non-depressed people - still failing to understand depression - resort to blaming the depressed people for being depressed.
It's very unsurprising, after all, much like how it's unsurprising for a physically-healthy person to take for granted the ability to use stairs, or how it's very unsurprising for right-handed UX designers to assume that users are right-handed (I'm looking at all y'all Android designers...), or how it's very unsurprising for developers to brush aside bugs with their software because it "works fine on my machine, so you're obviously just doing it wrong; RTFM".
No, I already Read The Fucking Manual™; you just suck at comprehending that your exact situation is not everyone else's.
I broke my arm a year ago and I was surprised to see how much rote behavior I relied on using my left hand for! It was pretty enlightening and I try to think about what I take for granted from time to time.
http://HockeyBias.com
It has been keeping me feeling good for almost a decade! ;)
Just seeing them growing everyday, Give me some kinda of hope and makes me feel i'm not alone.
Its so easy to start with and so rewarding, Just get some pots and soil and start planting your own vegetable or flowers! I promise you'll be happiest person on earth when your chilli fruits!
You can try to make your own coffee/tobacco or medicinal herb if you have enough space!
It's good advice in general though. Having plants that depend on you to do something - even if that something is so simple as watering them - can mean the different between doing nothing on a day and doing one useful thing. And perhaps that one useful thing is enough to not have to write that day off as useless.
Then I start wondering - what is all of this for? and what's the entire point of even living?
Talking to people does not help either (as it is, I'm not very social and then to add to that, most friends would have a general response along the lines of "oh wow...look at you and your problems", talking to parents is worse - they'll tell me to pray and that's how life is - which I refuse to accept).
Distractions are the only thing that has helped me yet - I distract myself with almost anything I can find - games, cars, tv shows, movies - just so I don't think of anything else.
I write this because, as the author mentions "Make something" - the will to make something disappears. Which is why distractions help.
I generally agree with your sentiment. Anything I do seems to fall so far short of my expectations that it makes me depressed.
My mom used to say "when you reach for the moon, at least you'll climb a tree" but to me the image of man on a tree, reaching out to the moon fills me with hopelessness instead of inspiration.
It's not actually about reaching the moon, but (I think) just doing something. Because purpose and meaning can also come after doing something which previously had no apparent meaning.
If you believe that there's more to life then you should keep looking for more. Dream and make your dreams happen, even if it takes time you'll have a goal and purpose.
There is no point in living but there's no point in staying in the box society puts you in and be miserable neither. You can do whatever you want.
1. Mindful meditation [free] -> Daily practice (30+ minutes)
John Kabat-Zinn [0] masters the link between science and meditation and has published very valuable books (including guided/audio meditation exercises) [1]. There are a couple of scientific studies which prove effectiveness [2] [3].
2. LSD [$5-10/dose + $25/multi-use test kit] -> One-time experience (every 6 months max.)
LSD however requires one to literally read/understand/know everything about the substance before applying it (minimum literature: "The psychedelic explorer's guide" by Fadiman). Also, order a test kit and test before you ingest. Certain "edge cases"/people should not try it and educating yourself about everything will allow you to decide if it's a good idea in your case or not. In addition, you may be able to access your spiritual dimension, which increases quality of life even further (it is less immediate with meditation).
You may combine micro-dosing LSD with meditation for accessing the meditative state easier (it's quite a challenge for depressed people).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn
[1] https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4180277/Mindful_Way_Through...
[2] http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...
[3] http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214697/meditation-brain-neuros...
I'm with you on the LSD thing, though.
Meditation becomes rather unrealistic once your depression is past the "moderate" level and has become "clinic" (strong), in which case either anti-depressants (mostly with side-effects) or a well researched and full-blown LSD experience can "jumpstart" your brain again (and therewith enable you to start practicing meditation which then helps you avoid falling back into strong depression).