throwawaythisis

I know you didn't ask me, but I'd like to share my experience with meditation because it's been so helpful to me and my particular challenges. I've been meditating semi-regularly for about a year now, usually every day for a long while and then generally short periods of no meditation at all.

To give some context: I'm currently dealing with the effects of what in hindsight was a slowly ramping up 'social burnout' that has left me with quite a bit of social anxiety, general anxiety, and somewhat unstructured lifestyle where I can easily spend days doing 'whatever I want' (freelancer with savings). I also at some point developed dependence on alcohol and weed, although that's been relatively easy to deal with when I keep my life simple and calm.

On top of that I've just been diagnosed with (mild) autism - the asperger's variety - although I suspect that I might not have been diagnosed as such without the anxious, stressful and unstructured life that I've been leading these past years. Too early to tell though.

I can have immense trouble concentrating on something, especially when there's some 'problem' in my life, and I have to all but give up on being productive if this problem is of the social kind. My mind just cannot keep from going back to it, analyze it, take it apart, and so on.

It can be ridiculously difficult for me to leave the house, eat food, get enough sleep, or do simple things like laundry or take a shower. Without external prompts, I just sort of sit around reading, play games, follow some obsession, worry, 'monologue' to myself, stop eating, and avoid social contact. This eventually turns my thoughts and behavior darker, if I let it continue.

On the other hand, it can also be ridiculously difficult for me to stop and take a rest when I'm in 'meet my one deadline' mode, or actively busy with things. I decide to do all the things at once and don't realize I'm in over my head until it's too late.

Balance is clearly not my talent, and, as is perhaps typical of those on the 'spectrum', I have trouble switching gears. It's like my mind controls like a big-ass tanker ship, while others are more like cars or trucks.

I still struggle with these things. And getting, if anything, has made it more difficult. Things are a bit quiet overall, but it takes me even more effort to snap out of things, to stop overanalyzing, to switch gears. I suppose that's what happens when you do a thing for so long.

Some things have helped a bit, like prioritizing 'simple' things like getting healthy food in me, going for walks/general exercise, taking in more sunlight, and setting small goals for myself. I've become more 'tactical' in the challenges I take on, as being only 'strategic' is not practical enough.

But the one thing that has, across the board, been most effective, is meditation. I meditate for about 20 minutes, and it's like rebooting my system. The effects are smaller when I keep getting distracted, which is frequently, but they're still huge in comparison to anything else I can do (nap, walk, read, etc.).

Sometimes I have a headache, and brief session makes it disappear. Sometimes I can't snap out of a social conflict I'm analyzing while I should really do some work that I've been putting off for days already, but after a brief session (which I'd also been putting off) I just sit down and start, which is more than half the battle.

Meditation has helped me eat better, because after a session I am suddenly aware of the hunger, and I have the peace to let myself make some food. It's helped me sleep better by quieting down a reeling mind that would usually keep me up for hours. It's helped me deal slightly better with conflicts, introspective 'insights', depressive days, and moods by reminding me to not take it all to seriously, and giving me some perspective (through absence of obsessive thought drowning everything else out).

Hell, if it's late afternoon and I have no energy to spare (quite common), a quick session gives me an energy boost and allows me to use the rest of my day (whether it's actual relaxation or work).

The form of meditation I do is mostly the zen variety, which is the form that is probably the most popular (mindfulness). It's really just sitting and the only 'effort' is to not go after every thought that tries to pull you with it, but rather observe that thought itself and try to let it go (but not try too hard!).

I use the Headspace app, which is awesome, but there are plenty of free resources too. I light a candle as a ritual, which means nothing to me in itself but helps me get in the mindset, so to speak. I have a little bench thingy that I can sit on, and simply seeing it in my room can 'trigger' me to use it.

As a 'thinking' type of guy, I also currently devour books on the topics of (zen) buddhism and meditation/mindfulness in general, because, well, my cognitive side needs some tickling too to keep at it. But the actual practice of sitting has been the most important part.

I can recommend the following stuff, in no particular order:

- books by Alan Watts, in particular 'The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are' as well as 'The Wisdom of Insecurity' - The Suzuki's: Shunryu Suzuki for practice and 'contemplation', and D.T. Suzuki one for the academic stuff) - Trying Not To Try, somewhat practical, mostly insightful, and just fun to read

And there's other stuff I can't think of right now.

Considering that I struggled with, uh, 'self-medication' for quite a while, you might very well be right. Something to think about. Perhaps my cessation strategies can help with this too.

It's so easy to get carried away by enthusiasm, ambition, pride, fear ... it happens to most of us all the time. Luckily I belong to the people who run out of energy fast. Therefore I need to stop and break and make a reality check for myself regularly.

I recognize myself in the behavior that the writer describes. Going all-in on too many things, and all the negative consequences that result from that.

The feeling I felt as I read the article wasn't just recognition; it was envy. Because I am actually one of those people who run out of energy fast, my 'all-in' has not even resulted in a partner, kids, 'prominence' in any community, etc.

Basically, I am in much of the same place as the author, for the same reasons (to the degree that I can tell from one article, of course), except that I have nothing to show for it.

The best I can say about that, perhaps, is that by having less to 'show for it' I also have less to mess up or lose.

Small comfort.

Discovering that I also belong to the people that run out of energy fast, and that even operating at 'normal speed' can be disastrous for me in very particular contexts is a good thing though. If I learn to make these 'reality checks' regularly, I will most certainly be happier and more grounded, and in fact I'm pretty confident I'll even be able to 'achieve things' in the long run.

And that's a ray of hope, however small and however far off its source seems. Slow and steady wins the race, I think, applies very much to me.

My primary challenge is that I find it really, really difficult to 'make reality checks'. I have recently been diagnosed with (mild) autism, and apparently this inability is pretty typical.

How do you keep yourself from either going too much all-in, or hiding from the world too much, when much of the time you're barely aware of whether you're doing one or the other? How do you remind yourself to do a reality check when you forget about the reminder, because your brain is stuck on some random obsession?

Sometimes I feel that I live in a world that is fundamentally not suited to me. I don't think of eating unless someone else starts eating, but because I live alone in a big city with some flatmates I barely know, I am often not triggered. I don't think of leaving the house to socialize because there is no clear pattern or cohesive structure to my social world. It's all opt-in and based on personal initiative, mostly. I sometimes struggle doing work as a freelance developer, because my brain gets stuck in a loop and I just pace my room talking to myself. Or, the other way around, I work and work at the expense of everything else and end up in a pretty bad place because of this. It made me understand why weekends and vacations are important. If only I could remember this. I've tried for years.

I sometimes miss the period in my life where external structures provided me with a socialization pattern (student org.), where deadlines and tests forced me in some kind of rhythm, or, longer ago, where living with my family provided me with the triggers I need to engage in normal, healthy behavior (eat well, sleep regularly, get outside, talk to people, sit with people not talking, emotional 'cleanup' by talking to parents/siblings, etc).

Sorry about this reply getting off track. It sort of got away from me...

I started drinking in a student-life context, around the age of 23 (bit late, I guess). Everyone drank. I joined in, and it was a lot of fun.

Post-college, many of the people I knew just sort of grew out of it. Stopped getting drunk every weekend, and only drank a beer or two with a meal, or only with special meals/moments. But because I became an expat/freelancer/traveler, I kind of maintained a bar-centered, beer-centered life, and naturally ended up with friends who were the same.

It never occurred to me that this might not be 'normal' for everyone. The dynamics behind this are fascinating, but not so relevant at this point. Suffice it to say that most drinkers overestimate how much 'most people' drink.

All this was not a problem until it suddenly was. At some point I'd started drinking to relieve stress, or deal with depressive episodes, and one day I 'woke up' and realized that I'd been drinking to the point of 'being drunk' almost every single day. This was particularly shocking to me because I studied psychology and always had a fascination with addiction. So I knew about the dynamics. I was high-functioning, and doing pretty well all in all, but I didn't feel comfortable knowing that I had a 'dependency'.

It took me a full two years to actually properly get things under control again. There were four things that I believe were crucial:

1. I realized that simply thinking I might have a problematic relationship with alcohol was enough reason to treat it as one, and at the very least 'test' whether I had one. I now believe that if you're not entirely happy with your drinking habits, then that should be enough reason to try and remove that habit for a while, since there are no real downsides to sobriety, and there are definite downsides to drinking regularly. 2. I started frequenting /r/stopdrinking subreddit and #stopdrinking chat room. 3. I found for my 'down-time' drinking periods and drinking social circles: I started meditating and diving into zen buddhism, I started reading and actively doing things again that I knew made me happy in the past (without pulling significant energy and willpower, like programming does[1]), and I took time off from my drinking friends. Meditation was perhaps one of the most important things, all in all. 4. I actively looked into sources of unhappiness and stress, and did my utmost to cut them out or minimize the negative effects.

[1]: interestingly, while my 'craving' for getting drunk is almost entirely gone these days, one of the few times that I feel the pull is when get caught up in a programming project. After spending hours doing that, sometimes forgetting to eat or take a break, it's like my mind is exhausted beyond a healthy point. I'm starting to think my active coding life played a big role in my alcohol dependency issues.

That's a good point, and I agree that I expressed my criteria poorly.

When I'm saying 'the codebase is terrible', I'm talking about front-end code for a web app that is a convoluted mess of jQuery written by someone who is clearly not used to writing javascript, and quite possibly a bad developer even in the language they are comfortable with.

Even if they're decent at whatever their primary language and 'domain' is, the front-end side of things is such a mess that it noticeably impacts performance and the ability to work on the app well before even the MVP is done.

I've worked with front-end apps (and even websites) that were multi-megabyte monstrosities that loaded multiple versions of jQuery, hacks upon hacks to make things work, and not even the simplest of optimizations (lazy-loading images, 'browser-side' caching, etc).

I've worked with jQuery-only front-end apps that took more than a month to build, did only the most basic of things, and were almost impossible for me as a contractor to work with. I would rewrite the whole thing in either Backbone or some variation on the react/flux approach in, at most, two days, and be able to get the in-house developer up to speed in another one to two days if they were capable and, perhaps more importantly, willing and remotely curious.

In part this has been due to the current speed of development in browser technologies and frameworks/libraries, and in part it's just part of working with in-house developers who have no love for their job or have other things that they prioritize (35+ with kids, understandable!).

Usually this level of horror only presented itself in older, more established companies with 'legacy devs', but I've seen similar issues with (web) startups that hired without knowledge of the domain.

So, to be clear: getting the job done is the priority. I've worked on Backbone projects where I would've loved to use the latest and greatest, but happily worked with stuff that I would consider, in front-end-hacker-news-hipster terms, old-fashioned. And I've come to realize that if you have clever developers with curiosity, you can get a 'front-end app' done that isn't pretty, but works well. But too often, especially in the 'cheaper' startups with little founder-level technical know-how of the domain (front-end), I've seen things go very, very wrong.

Based on personal experience and observation of some startups around here this is the dynamic that I've seen and what could be happening:

- startup gets some funding, but not a lot, and needs (more) developers

- startup founders think they can find good developers at rates that are similar to those of 'regular' developers outside the Silicon Valley / HN bubble / web development scene. Possibly because these founders are non-technical and mostly have experience in bigger, more 'boring' companies where developers aren't 'essential' (or don't seem to be), or groomed inside the company and happy with lower salaries.

- startup finds out that nobody will take the jobs at the offered salaries

- startup decides to be more creative and - if they're very lucky - find:

    1. competent, usually remote developers who are willing to work for much less than the going rate in home country  
    2. oblivious developers or developers just out of college who have no clue how much they can make

And the founders of these companies, if they're not technical, might never quite realize that in the end they're probably wasting more money because the codebase is terrible.

While I would never argue that the only competent developers are those in the 'SV/HN/web bubble', I do think it makes sense that there's a correlation between developers who are oblivious to their value and the rest of their field, and developers who are still stuck in older, less efficient approaches to many startup's problems.

Pay your developers well!

1. Further nurture being my MDMA-self without actually being on MDMA.

2. gain a more fundamental understanding of CS/programming, beyond just the webdev stuff and disjointed snippets of knowledge.

3. Find a partner, to ground me somewhat and keep me from getting lost in my thoughts too much (and forget basic good habits like eating, sleeping, working out, and socializing).

4. Make more friends, and broaden my network. The past year's been (intentionally) quiet, but I feel I'm missing out on what Berlin has to offer.

5. Simplify my life even more, lose more of my ego, practice empathy.