Ask HN: Why Is My Happiness Tied to My Productivity?

I'm feeling low same as you, my parents don't support my coding journey or anything I do and will do everything to stop me and push me to be a doctor.

My advice : Move on and don't care Abt anything

I've found that taking a real look at what energizes me is key. Find something, anything, even if it's not for the long-term. Just something that makes you feel alive. Run with it. It starts momentum and that helps a lot.

I don't know you personally and can't offer individual advice, but there are some general things about our culture and general psychology that might be helpful to people like you dealing with those sorts of feelings (and yes I have been/am one of them):

1. A lot of social status is attached to productivity. This makes it really easy to feel like you "should" be doing things that you don't actually care about because society convinces you that you should. If your self-worth or self-image gets wrapped up in these things (and that's very easy to happen to any of us as social creatures), it's can be an easy recipe for unhappiness and feeling like you're not driving your own life.

2. Doing complex projects is challenging, and it's easy to lose motivation quickly when your initial enthusiasm wears off and the slog kicks in. You may have high aspirations and not be comfortable / willing to pay the cost they actually require.

I highly recommend Dr. K's (Healthy Gamer) videos about motivation, especially internal vs. external motivation. Not a panacea or anything but I think they give you a good foundation to work through those feelings. Obviously you may also want to consider professional help if you suffer these sorts of feelings extremely or persistently.

I have had similar issues.

It has helped to remember to do things I know help me feel better: reading novels, going on walks etc. even though I know these help I can fall out the habit easily.

Another is to try to load balance my productivity by leaving low hanging fruit for the next day. Something easy to do or that I’m excited about. That helps me get started the next day on a good foot and avoid procrastination.

These have helped but have not solved the issue for me.

Happiness != good emotions.

If you’re seeking for good emotions to feel happiness you’re not any different from a junkie.

Modern culture promotes this false idea that happiness == good emotions. Because it sells.

The secret is not to buy into this myth. Whether by yourself or with help of psychiatrists depending on how deep is the problem.

I have been lurking on Hacker News for a little under eleven years now and have just now created an account, for whatever this is worth.

Within my own life, I've noticed a similar pattern to the one you've described: when I have felt low, such feelings have often coincided with me not feeling that productive at work. Perhaps I'm working on working on a project that isn't particularly motivating. Perhaps I've hit some technical snag that requires me to reconsider my approach and/or implement some inelegant solution that triggers my perfectionistic tendencies.

I'll now project some of my own thoughts / feelings about this stuff that may or may not resonate with you (perhaps they'll resonate with some other reader, though). As another commenter has already pointed out, I think a lot of this causal link between happiness and productivity (I think the causality is bidirectional, too), is conditioned in some way. Specifically, I think this sort of depression arises when we fail to live up to some internally-held, idealized image of ourselves. Having some standards to live up to is probably healthy, although, if the standards are too high or unrealistic, then neuroses will follow. For context, I'm drawing a lot on Karen Horney's ideas in _Neurosis and Human Growth_. If this diagnosis makes resonates, then the solution is to diminish the role one's idealized self plays in one's thoughts and actions, which diminishment probably involves a lot of mindfulness and also some sifting through of one's "shoulds". What are the top ten things that you're thinking of doing? For each of those things, consider: is this something that you think you should do, or it something you actually want to do? If the former, continue to introspect: why do you feel like you should be doing something you don't want to do.

Obviously, there's some things we all must do that we probably don't want to do. I think with work, though, it's very easy to become disconnected from what you actually want. If you don't like what you do on some fundamental level, or something feels off inherently (even if this feeling is unconscious), you'll probably begin to dissociate / compartmentalize in some way which might contribute to your underlying feelings of depression.

Again, I'm assuming a lot, here - maybe this applies, maybe this doesn't. Whatever the cause, I wish you the best in dealing with it. Life's too short to take too seriously :).

I’ve had similar issues. I don’t think it’s productivity, but rather purpose. People need to feel some kind of purpose in life. If your job is all you have in your life, a lack of purpose in it hits hard. If you have a family, friends, and hobbies, in addition to the job, there is more balance. A lack of purpose in one area doesn’t lead to an overall feeling of unhappiness, because there are other areas where you can draw purpose to prop yourself up with.

I say this mostly academically, as I have had almost singular focus on my career, which has had its ups and downs (it’s still be stable and I make money, but I don’t know what it’s all for… I lack purpose). I know rounding out my life would help this, but dealing with my career is easier than facing those other parts of life I’m less adept at navigating. I’ve had nearly 20 years at the same company. I’m really not sure what would happen if that went away tomorrow, when I don’t have another stable area of my life to lean on.

Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend? If not, get on that. Go have sex. This is not a suggestion, it’s a prescription.

Have sex, get an emotional attachment, fall in love. Obviously there are risks associated with all this.

I was insanely career obsessed. Found someone I adore. Helped me recalibrate my brain. They didn’t love me back the same, so I had other problems. But I grew a lot as a person.

Bad parenting. High expectations, or just ridiculous expectations, fuck up people to seek external validation at all phases of life. It's also a form of neglect because you get used to the concept of trading value for love.

A mantra that worked for me: Productive engineers are happy engineers. Happy engineers are productive engineers. It's a self-sustaining loop.

One option is a minimum of happiness - brightly lit office, decent food, music.

The other option is a minimum of productivity. I like to wash dishes after a bad day lol. Work from office. Use AI to handle the blank page problem (you can reject everything it says afterwards).

The trick with side projects is to complete and ship them. The first side project should be limited to 10 hours max. Sometimes shipping is the hard part. Once you can do this, add more time. Do 20 hours, 40 hours, 100 hours, and so on. But progressively. If you start by making the world's greatest something, it will drain all your motivation and energy, especially once the bloat kicks in.

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Manuality is a dicease.

Because in our modern world, productivity is virtue. And if you want to live a virtuous life(= better self image, self actualization), you need to live a productive life.

That's what the modern culture have told you.

It wasn't always this way, but at some point, increase in productivity stopped being the burden of the system and shifted to burden of the individual.

Henry Ford or early factories didn't tell "each worker to be more productive", it looked at how the production system could be made more productive. At some point, this was offloaded to the individual. (it did both in reality)

But if you determine your self worth by how much you get done, you will forever feel worthless.

Maybe this can make you think it from another angle: Productivity rips you apart https://youtu.be/VQK64SrYkzs?feature=shared

For me it helped when I consciously trained to shift my attention from "how much I've done = how much left I need to do and/or compared to others" to "how much I've done = how much I've done compared to previous me (checkpoint towards the past) and if the trendline is upward OR I'm actually enjoying the process". In practice this meant that every time anxiety creeps in, at the spot (this is important), I "pause", and try to consciously steer my anxious thought patterns to one that evaluate my done/productivity the other way.

Well, productivity is good. It's good to solve important problems and to move them out of other people's way, so that they can solve more important problems to move out of others people's way, and so on and so forth. It's probably a good and natural thing to feel happy when you've been or are being productive. I don't see a problem with that in a vacuum, that just seems normal.

What's less normal is tying yourself to being unhappy to being unproductive, which obviously sucks when you're in a productivity lull. I don't know what the solution is but I think that's the half of the equation I'd focus on.

Our minds thrive on the little dopamine hits we get from accomplishing something worthwhile. It can be something simple like cleaning your bedroom or losing 5 pounds. It can be coding a new feature or fixing a perplexing bug.

If your day is full of little victories, you can live a happy, fulfilling life; even if you don't do something grandiose like curing cancer or setting a world record.

Maybe your happiness isn't tied to productivity in itself but movement...you said "stuck" a lot.

I think productivity is about moving, doing, fighting, not giving up.

I have quite similar problems. Not at a depression level, but decent ups and downs attached to my work and satisfaction with it.

I don't feel much satisfaction in socializing, random conversations, hobbies, or relationships after the initial romance phase—they become boring. Work feels nice. My reflections and therapy have led me to realize this is more about proving self-worth and the desire to be proud of my work (for whatever broken childhood reason). It's a desire for external validation.

I haven't solved this yet. I can say that I feel happier when I go out and do activities like learning salsa dancing or participating in a debate club once a week. Though these activities work (I do feel happier), I never feel like I fit into those groups. Right after the activity ends and the free, unstructured socializing starts, people become boring... salsa people socializing (booze, dancing, shallow conversations) or debate club people (just shallow conversations). It just feels dull.

I recommend reading "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Dr. Robert Glover - https://www.amazon.com/No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy-ebook/dp/B004C438...

Either you'll find that it's about you and the book will highlight a lot of things, or it's not—then just toss it away. It helped me reconsider some parts of my life, as well as my behavior and attitude.