Ask HN: How to Stop Caring (Professionally)?

You’ll quickly build a sense of confidence and be excited about your results. Work will become a 9-5 means to an end and all the weird stresses will wash over you because you feel good. You’ll look forward to waking up at 6am and going for a 10 mile run and will go to sleep early in anticipation.

After awhile, you’ll look at the people above you in the soulless corporation and realize they’ve wasted their 20s/30s climbing an arbitrary layer. I remember going into my first job at Amazon and calling my girlfriend, telling her “These are the richest, most miserable looking people I’ve ever seen”. I looked at the folks that were $SDE+2 and they were doing the same work, they just artificially cared more and would spend their evenings and weekends working.

If you don’t have kids then you’re lucky, you have more time to spend building yourself up.

I guarantee this will work but there is a really rough 1-3 month period before it kicks in.

Start today: do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and go run-walk for 20 minutes. Do that everyday, continuing to set goals. Rain or shine. Even when you feel sick, hungry, tired.

With that said, the “patch” I've used back when I was in a similar situation was actually to care about the “smaller” things in my work. That is, things that aren't unimportant but are often overlooked. I don't know what job you have, but as a developer, I was able to start experimenting with how we do testing and deploys, improve documentation, think about how I would refactor the codebase if I had the chance. That gave me “internal autonomy”, so to say. Making sure that my skills that can't really be developed would at least not degrade. That helped a lot when I finally quit and found a job with much more autonomy. Finally being able to “do it right” while also having the way to “do it right” right there with me.

Apparently the way to handle intrusive or nagging thoughts are mainly two ways.

The first way is to realize that thoughts come and go. They are backround noise. Not every weird thought, or worry, that pops in your head is "you". One can observe the thoughts, from a mental distance, without judgement, without owning them.

The second way is to actively distract yourself. Either by doing something that occupies your full attention. Or, not following a line of thought, conciously, actively thinking about something else. You can try to make it a habit of not actively thinking too much about the things you cannot change. Instead, actively think about the things you CAN change.

Ok so, moving beyond the staggering premise, let's look at the source of the problem - answer the question: why do you care?

- you care because you're invested - physically, man hours, mentally, emotionally, describe these and be honest with the situation.

- you care because it defines you - it's your baby, it's your everything

- I can't think of a third one

Either case, you have to let go of it. Find a way of letting go. Work is work, therefor nothing should be personal. It's a transaction of work, effort, time against money. I know there is more to it, but imagine swapping job with someone random in the world for a day, that's that.

Secondly, nothing is ever yours at work, it is property of some company, or an IP of an entity. You're far more than your work. The knowledge, the experience, the resilience, the care you have for it is irreplaceable and no one can take that away from you.

As for actionable, try pretend you don't work there anymore. You're just on some retainer, some maintenance contract. Mentally check out of the nonsense of your colleagues, because, it's just that.

Set up timers on your phone for breaks at brunch, lunch, afternoon tea and clock out time, follow by them as much as possible. Make work work for you and not the other way around.

At the end of the day, you're replaceable, the work is just money and those dickwads aren't family. I'm being blunt but it sounds like you need a bit of that.

With that in mind, write down what you want out of your life and job and set some simple easy to achieve short term objectives. They might be health or learning related. Then go out and do them. This will build motivation to actually deal with the issue which is the job sucks and you need to change it. Write down criteria for your new job and spend your time finding it. Don't just jump on the first thing.

It's really important to get yourself together mentally before you jump ship though because it's very easy to end up in exactly the same situation or worse if you make a rash uncalculated decision.

Beyond that, if you want to care less about work, my advice is to fill your life with things that matters to you outside of work.

The technique worked so well, that I've continued doing it even after the situation resolved itself. To date, I still keep a strict boundary time for when to stop work and switch to the side project every day. I spend about 4hrs of my day on the side project and about 8-10 hours on professional work. I find myself being really productive and yet not getting exhausted by what would otherwise be grinding 14-hour days.

And once a year I take an entire month off, and leave my work phone/computer at home while I go on vacation.

This doesn’t get talked about enough on HN but therapy is literally life changing.

The good ones are like a mechanic who can fully take an engine apart, lay out all the pieces, clean and replace broken parts, assemble the whole thing back together, and make adjustments to it until it runs like new.

You’ll be able to better understand why you did they things you did, why you currently emotionally respond how you do, and craft the tools necessary to in the future respond intentionally to your own environment.

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress with your first therapist. Try a new one. This is a highly intimate service and you deserve someone who is a good fit for you.

Identify the things you can help with, and the things you can't. Reserve your energy for the best opportunities to make a difference.

Also, you could do your own personal project for a while. I did some of those and realised that I'm almost 100% happy with the personal project, and I think I'm happy not because it's perfect, because I control everything to my satisfaction. Now at work I think "I've already proven that I can do something that I feel is perfect, so it doesn't matter that this is (very) imperfect, it's just outside my control."

Finally, another thing I've been thinking recently, is "find the fun in everything". Work is part of my life and I want to enjoy my life, so for any task I think about what parts of the task are enjoyable as I'm doing the task. Just thinking about and identifying what is fun about any task makes it better.

I try to remind myself that even if things are wrong, poor design, bad technology direction dictated from on high, even apathetic or stubborn colleagues, etc., I continue to try to find as much wiggle room as I can to make it as not terrible as possible, and never stop advocating for a better approach. I have found that repeating yourself enough, with evidence and data, eventually leads to others repeating it back to you as some new idea. It is a long game approach, but it does not fill that immediate change/feedback desire.

Ultimately you choose to change your company, or change your company. It is up to you to choose which one is worth your time investment.

That could lead to more responsibility or autonomy for you within the company.

Alternatively the company might start to view you as a troublemaker which would possibly result in a worse workplace environment, however since you already feel miserable I think it is worth the risk. Just don't mention to anyone you work how much you don't care for working there.

Do your bit within your allotted work hours, and leave it at that. It's just work.

Imagine that tomorrow your job changes. All your old projects are cancelled, and your new project requires you to remotely supervise an automated sawmill. You have a dozen camera views, five ways to unjam the machine, and something that needs a little bit of attention from you once every five minutes or so. Your pay and benefits remain the same. The hours are fixed: if you do the job competently, you get a five minute break once an hour, an hour for lunch, and a 15 minute break in mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

After a day or two, there is nothing of intellectual interest here. Nothing will change. Your work is necessary, but it does not march towards any goal other than the total wood sawn at the end of the day.

How does this change you?

You are definitely without useful autonomy. You are a cog in a machine. You don't work with anyone, really. It is not going to be fulfilling.

But this is so different, because you don't have the expectation that somehow, this remote wood-cutting work is supposed to fulfill you. You will need to define yourself in other terms: as a person who is part of their community, who has interests and hobbies outside of work.

The hard part is the deep understanding that work is not life, and that your feeling that work is supposed to address your non-material needs is orthogonal to the reality of work.

There are jobs that connect you more deeply to your community, or try to fix the world as a whole. But on a daily basis, they still involve tasks that are not intrinsically fulfilling.

The meaning is what you put into it.

But at some point I was thrown into a situation where I lost a 10 year old relationship, and had to rebuild my life from scratch, and realized that for me, caring for my work environment was mostly because I had a stable and nice environment at home, and needed to take on challenges and risks somewhere, so naturally the workplace provided such an outlet.

Once I was “alone” I suddenly could take much more risks and excitement from my personal life, so work became not that important - got a sailing license, a motorbike license, traveled the world, started latin dances, stuff like that - things that I always wanted to do, but dismissed as “too risky to even attempt”.

I guess I will always have a “risk appetite” where I express it though is up to me. So far I like where my life is going :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHxwY3Fz2gU

Seriously, though. I don't know how to stop caring because I've never cared. I only care about things outside of work. My friends, family, myself, our health, our society, the world, my hobbies and interests. Work is a thing I only do because I must in order to survive in this capitalist system that I would prefer to be overthrown. I am so brazen that I have openly expressed this attitude to my employers.

If I had cared and tried harder I probably could have had much more money, but I have plenty. More than most. If the company I work for fails, who cares? Not my responsibility or problem. I work according to what is written in my job description, and that's it. Work is a purely transactional relationship.

The big bang rewrite of your brain isn't a possibility just like it isn't one for codebases. Viewing the riddle this way will let you put the fun part of your profession in the driver's seat. What will you change to make the 'impossible' possible?

> How can I just stop caring?

Don't. Your ability to care is the only thing that separates you from a dumb machine. In the future that skill will be a most valuable asset if you want work in a world of "AI".

Don't confuse stress with caring. Use your care to fight the machine and the idiots, and if you can't win then kill the shitty job, not your precious capacity to care. Take your care somewhere more deserving.

You say you stopped caring, but you are still stressing. You should look at that a bit.

Other advice here seems solid, other activities will make work seem like what it is, exchanging your time for money.

Part of it is it takes time to adjust. I went from a place where we tried to make software really perfect, to a start up I reported a bug and the CEO told me not to fix it. (In our meeting he assigned it low priority. He said he could see it was bothering me but reiterated to leave it be. He was right, but it hard for me not to care.

I'm a big believer in reducing productivity if you've been at a place for a while, especially if they ain't giving you a pay raise. Missed deadlines and missed meetings start to create a pattern that they can't take you for granted.

It sounds kind of stupid, but the thing that really let me know that my anxiety was gone was when I realised I could smoke a lot of weed without any anxiety, which before would have been ridiculous, since I always panicked at the bodily sensations. Of course, meditation helps you learn to accept with equanimity a wider range of sensations that come up. Again, it did not help with my depression as much though.