Anxiety and burnout: why kids are consumed with worry

There are therapists who are well versed in imposter syndrome and help patients understand it and get better. There are also podcasts if you want to take a self help approach first. I mean it's free. I would look for licensed therapists who apply a CBT oriented approach.

For imposter syndrome you have to assess at the evidence you are not capable or otherwise a fraud. Is there anyone else at your work that you feel is an imposter? No probably not. Are you as capable as the average employee at your work? Yes! You have performance reviews as evidence that you are good! What would you advise a friend who came to you expressing that they felt the same way? Would you say they are most definitely an imposter? What is an imposter anyway? How would an imposter be hired in the first place? Recognize that these automatic thoughts are triggering your amygdala and activating the nervous systems fight or flight response.

Also, there's quotes from Richard Branson along the line that if you meet 70% of the job requirements you are qualified to take the job and you should just learn the rest of it on the job.

And remember that even in the worse case, if you are fired, fired! There are still companies and jobs/roles where you are or can be a superstar. You see this all the time in business.

It was put best to me: Don't tell the dog it's not a chicken, we need the eggs.

More concretely though I would not look to anyone directly in your management chain for a variety of reasons. The best ways I've seen to address it is with a senior engineer or someone that you respect who's willing to take you on in a mentorship role. This should be something where you set aside time to talk through these types of issues(plus all the other wonderful inter-team stuff that comes up in development) over a 3-6mo period.

If you can't find that I will say this: I've found that it comes from a place of caring and giving a shit about wanting to carry your weight or be a part of something. I don't think it's possible to have a desire to improve yourself and not experience it on a regular basis.

The best way I've found to approach it is to recognize when it's happening, call it out directly and tell yourself that your brain is being an asshole in this specific instance. Something I've also seen work well for other people is to do a short list of the things that you work on each day. Review it at the end of the day and take an objective look at what you've accomplished, you'll often find that it's more than you 'felt' like you did.

Hope that gives you some direction. If you're finding you local resources lacking drop me a line at val at vvanders.com and see what I can do to help.

This is a point that certainly needs to be raised more often. Thanks for making me aware of it.

Childhood trauma and PTSD are little better than a death sentence. Of course, not every child who gets knocked down has trauma. But there's a lot of evidence that people with "rough childhoods" just grow up to have "rough adulthoods".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_...

"Getting back up" after life knocks you down is a huge factor in their success. There are very few successful adults protected from life's blows given the competitive, cut throat world we live in. They all know something about getting thrown into deep holes and climbing back out.

However, I will say that a majority of successful adults, learn how to be resilient at the expense of the people around them.

Not because they are evil, but because no one has shown them better ways of how to handle situations they haven't faced before.

People don't realize how bad this used to be in the past. Nowadays we have much more access to info, better understanding of the right ways to "cope", better understanding of what to avoid, and the right people/environments that will pull one out of life's deep holes. It's nowhere near perfect but it's much better (if you have the resources as you pointed out).

In the past people were mostly just winging it. It's why you see a whole lot successful people who are also ruthless. And regret it towards the end of their lives as they tally the costs and see examples of better routes they could have traveled.

Exercising the situations that we think might be a threat to us in a controlled way might be the best solution.

It never goes away, you just get on top of it as something that you inextricably are, like having a scar or poor eyesight. its called emotional repression.

There's a few great lines in hooks' book about how we adopt our patriarchal ontologies unquestioningly, never stopping to think what about "being a man" we would have chosen for ourselves.

I will read "The Coddling" because I can't be in every American classroom, and it's possible I am simply unaware of some training as atrocious as "be on the lookout for microaggressions and report them," but I suspect it's a deliberate misinterpretation of the feminist understanding that the common American ideological worldview is an deference and adherence to rape, exploitation, domination, and violence. Standing against these things early on, when they're recapitulated as "mere" schoolyard bullying, is a heroic act, and not the result of "coddling," but of a stable, enriching family life--something you can read about in Deborah MacNamara's "Rest. Play. Grow."

Unfortunately, the American home life often recapitulates endemic American patriarchal violence. As hooks puts it, "the love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity." No surprise, then, that that children teach one another to relate in the terms of domination and submission.

Let's say someone comes up to you and says "Where are you really from?"

The motivations for asking this question can be ambiguous.

One way to interpret it is as a subtle racist insult that implies you are an "other". At this point you can be mad at how society is so racist.

An important part of CBT is that you can't read minds. The other way to interpret it is that the speaker is genuinely interested in me and wants to learn more. At this point I can have positive emotions and go about my day.

From a mental health point of view you are less likely to have anxiety if you choose option 2.

(Of course, she actually wasn't crazy because her fantastical visions were real, this is a TV show, etc.)

Admittedly, we don't know what the son's role was like before Will went missing...

I'm someone who lives in perpetual worry and it was something that I inherited from my parents. While I'm naturally lazy, a procrastinator, and completely unambitious; the sheer worry during my younger years forced me to try harder.

As a head of household one thing I've come to accept is that it's a role that comes with perpetual worry. It can't be helped.

The only way to mitigate it somewhat is to live well-beneath one's means.

And the only ones who don't worry about disaster looming around a corner are like Aesop's grasshopper.

If you are doubtful take a look at this video the UK government put out in the seventies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXx5Y2Fr2bk

The primary difference is that school shootings actually happen.

So on the one hand those barriers are getting torn down slowly, which is progress in one dimension, but the economic reality is worsening for everyone. For example, people of color mighty be competing with other individuals on more level ground when it comes to getting jobs, but the supply of those jobs, the quality of life they support, and the security they afford seem to be decreasing, and the all important question isn't what it's like now, but what it'll be like on 20 or 30 years.

As a side note, worsening economic conditions can result in a flare up in racial tensions which might undo the progress that has been made.

> increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too

Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_. And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress--and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".

> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.

This Malcolm X quote does a great job highlighting how the cessation of a particular oppression is hardly progress. Since slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and Red-Lining, there has been little in the way of reparations to make African American communities whole--not to mention the millions of Mesoamericans(1) similarly exploited in the history of American Imperialism(2), and still to this day(3)!

So, thanks again for that completely brilliantly painted analogy. I hope you find these texts offer some compelling augmentations to your understanding.

1) Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America"

2) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"

3) CrimethInc's "No Wall They Can Build"

Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.

Wait, what? What is the crisis and what is the cause?

The Economist article to which I linked gave multiple metrics that contradict this claim.

> And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live.

True, and I mentioned that there are exceptions to the overall positive tend and specifically noted housing costs. But the solution to this problem is well known: increased the supply of housing.

> And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of.

But that's the thing: the data indicates that the poor aren't becoming worse off. Yet we have the perceptions that it is.

I think understanding why this contradictory perceptions exists lies at the heart of a lot of social chsllenges today. Like why people in the US become so strongly against immigration and free trade despite the strong evidence that these things have a positive effect on the country.

2,3. The improving economy should help. We are at historically low levels of unemployment for many subgroups, including hispanics and blacks. Factory employment has recovered to levels not seen in decades.

4. Labor participation should continue to drop as the baby boomers retire. It will rise again as they die. The normal unemployment numbers, which don't include the retired, are showing a situation that is wonderful for American workers. The numbers would look even better if not for the fact that large numbers of "discouraged workers" are reentering the workforce; these people had not been counted because they had given up looking for work.

5. Wages are starting to rise. Of course, businesses are demanding immigration to "fix" the "problem" of rising wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History

The link I provided gave several objective metrics that indicate positive trends. More people have access to goods and services that used to be more exclusive. People without access to basic infrastructure (e.g. plumbing, electricity)s are drastically fewer.

Upper, middle, and lower class are artificial labels. They don't correspond to quality of life. A decline or increase in one does not indicate a change in hardship. The question I seek to answer is, "has life gotten better or worse for the average person?" or "how has life changed for the Americans in the X to Y income percentile?". Overall the trends are positive.

Even life expectancy has a overall upwards trend. It has gone from about 70 to close to 80 over the past 40 years, which was the time frame that the previous commenter referred to.

But the eye opener is this, and something that is often left out. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014 as a percent of the total population:

- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%

- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%

- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%

- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%

- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%

Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview.

Now the most interesting thing here is that the paper I'm referencing and this Pew article are using the same methodology, and thus Pew is also basing their report off the same data. It's just interesting to see the contrast between how things are presented, and how people would respond to the raw data itself. Just to point out one more little oddity. Pew seems to focus specifically on 1999 to 2014, yet their own chart [3] indicates everybody saw declines in income from 1999 to 2014. Nonetheless their discussion seems to imply this is a uniquely middle class phenomena. E.g. the heading of the first section being: "The American middle class loses ground nationally". Yet it would be much more accurate to state that "Americans of all classes lose ground nationally."

[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...

[3] - http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...

If "socioeconomic status" is defined as income or asset percentile, then that is inherently a zero sum goal. For someone to go from the middle third of Americans by income into the top third means that someone in the top third has to go into the middle third (or bottom third).

Down about 100 hours per year from 1970. I like the idea of quantifying stress but that is probably too subjective to quantitatively measure. I don't necessarily dispute the notion that stress has increased over the past few decades - just that whatever pressure people are feeling is due to declining quality of life or economic opportunity.

44 at least got SOME kind of healthcare, but not enough, shoved through before things gridlocked.

45 ... I understand and sympathize with why many followed this siren's call, but it's all emotional rhetoric and very little of real substance. I hope they are replaced soon and move on to making "The East Wing", a reality inspired drama made for TV.

Syrian drought -> refugees -> anti-immigrant sentiment -> populist leaders -> ++boomLikelihood

For climate change we just have to keep on doing what we already do - and in fact we are still accelerating.

Droughts and famine are no joke, it feels every more likely we might be the last generation to experience prosperity.

I think the only sensible conclusion at this point is hedonism. Enjoy it while it lasts.

If you're relatively young and in a metro area, you probably don't see it. Step out into the suburbs or more rural areas, and growth means that there's a new Dollar Tree and it's hiring.

Racism or animosity toward whatever group is not constant. And also, we should not use worst periods as benchmark for "it is ok if it is not as bad".

Money is a zero sum game and the super rich are hoarding it, which widens the social gap.

I think the general weakness in retail (not entirely attributable to e-commerce, as e-tailing is still around 10-15% of overall retail) is likely explainable by low velocity of money in the low to middle classes. The wage stagnation over the past few decades while overall corporate revenue and profits continue to grow certainly suggest some kind of low velocity or siphoning effect. There's a certain survivorship bias in that comparison since corporations that stagnate to much eventually are put out of business, while developed nation citizens can stagnate until they pass away, so it isn't a perfect comparison to hypothesize about. But again, we simply aren't measuring for any of this nuance at this time.

If we did start measuring for it somehow, then someone would have to figure out how to measure the unit of money moving between income bands and from household to/from "big corporations" (say, any of the publicly-traded companies in the CRSP US Total Market Index and privately-held companies with the same amount of revenue as the lowest revenue element in the CRSP). Damned if I know how that would be captured, though.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

One reason housing is getting more expensive is that more of the population is moving towards cities and out of rural areas. That migration has a positive correlation with housing costs. In addition the typical things used to reduce pricing, automation and offshoring, have had little impact in the construction industry due to the complexity and local nature of the work. I had seen a study previously which showed this for the US but can't find it, in it's place here is a similar study done in China (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...)

Finally, education in the broad sense is now cheaper than ever if you include public libraries and online courses, but I suspect you meant University degrees. University costs have soared, more people than ever need a degree to do even entry level work, and student loan debt is not dischargeable through bankruptcy. New York Federal Reserve did a study that showed an increase in credit was followed by an increase in university prices (https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...)

I can assure you that the cost of goods has gone up along with inflation.

Young people can't afford a house even with historically low interest rates.

Household debt is way up there.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/500385/median-household-...

But in 2005 things went crazy. Now that private student loans could no longer be dismissed it meant private lenders could throw out loans like beads at Mardi Gras. It was basically 0 risk from their perspective since you're not only getting a much higher than average earning demographic, but you get them where you have a claim on them for the rest of their life if they don't pay you off. And if they do pay you off, well you win there too!

Now because students could get practically unlimited funds universities could start to charge arbitrary amounts, and so they did. The one and only reason university costs have started to decelerate is because in 2011 we reached 'peak university'. US college enrollment started dropping even when people could "afford" it, because the perceived value became worth less than the perceived cost. Here's some data [1] from the BLS on costs. Unfortunately it starts at 2006, but it at least shows the deceleration that's started to happen once we reached 'peak university'.

The moral of this is, as usual, good intentions often go astray particularly when messing with economic systems. The reason private loans became guaranteed was ostensibly to ensure that students of all backgrounds and economic situations could afford a college education in large part to help them find a great job and give a better life to their children. It sounds great on paper. In reality, it's created a system where college costs have become completely unreasonable and simultaneously, ironically, devalued college degrees to the point that there's a pretty decent chance the guy serving your coffee not only has one, but is buried in debt over it.

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-i...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/5-charts-which-show-w... http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl... http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-sh... https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/12/news/economy/middle-class/i...

Additionally, the "Asian method" is not actually Asian, as is the case of most practices we attribute to China. These practices (rote mass education, communism, state birth control) are all originated by Westerners, who were unable to sell their ideas to the western countries, and so went east. In other words, we outsourced all our bad ideas to perform massive social experiments with other civilizations. Pretty reprehensible, if you ask me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

This is not remotely true, but I grant that it's the currently popular narrative.

It seems like there are plenty of non STEM blue collar jobs that afford a nice life, but the problem is they are looked down on.

I think part of the problem is that everyone is optimizing for the same niche, which makes that niche very crowded and requires extreme amounts of optimization to succeed.

Not sure it's a great system, is what I'm saying.

This is all well and good when they're in school and still dependent on your financial support. Once they're on their own (say, at age 22), and start making mistakes, the stakes are a lot higher and the margin for error a low narrower.

Let's say you majored in something but did poorly overall. That's mistake #1. You won't have as wide of a berth for mistake #2, because you are likely still suffering the consequences of #1.

The sad thing is that nobody cares about your education once you finish it. I have never been asked for my high school transcript except for when I applied to university. And I have never been asked for my university transcript ever.

Which is stupid because the last 30 equations and last 10 math problems are probably just repeating the same things you learned from the other problems.

Getting your marks sent to you when you are in a different context is private; you can feel shame or stress and in fact not know how you rank vs your peers.

The social stress isn't that new, and as far as marks went both my parents grew up under systems where the marks were posted outside the classroom and class ranking was also public.

I was really struck about the "prepared" part -- a lot of this should be considered spam: I don't need to know my marks (or bank balance etc) in realtime; I want to be able to get that info when I am ready to ask for it. The continual barrage of requests for attention is itself stressful. Having access to uninterrupted quiet (and boredom, especially for younger kids) is important for mental health and creativity.

Social has its own positive place as well. HN is a form of that.

But I don't think I am idealizing anything. The benefits of having a job when you are young are abundantly clear, and remain abundantly clear for those who still do so today. There is no reason why children cannot work and also have pursuits that are useful in other areas. It is not an either-or situation. They do not need to be full-time jobs. There is plenty of time for other pursuits.

It's also unlikely (or at least unnecessary) that electronic grades are released immediately after the teacher marks a test.

I gather that this is now frowned upon, but real publicly observable competition is a huge incentive to do well. It also relieves a bit of anxiety for those who would otherwise unjustly think they are doing badly. If you want to impress fellow classmates, perhaps especially those you find attractive, getting to be the best on that list does wonders.

http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/all-meat-diets/

> To my mind, examples of real people eating mostly-meat diets for long periods of time gives us much more powerful information about meat and health than conventional scientific studies conducted over short periods of time in which one group of people eats a little more meat or a few extra servings of vegetables than another group of people.

> Meet the Meat Mongers

> The Inuit of the Canadian Arctic thrived on fish, seal, walrus and whale meat. The Chukotka of the Russian Arctic lived on caribou meat, marine animals and fish. The Masai, Samburu, and Rendille warriors of East Africa survived on diets consisting primarily of milk and meat. The steppe nomads of Mongolia ate mostly meat and dairy products. The Sioux of South Dakota enjoyed a diet of buffalo meat. The Brazilian Gauchos nourished themselves with beef.

https://swizec.com/blog/week-17-what-happens-when-you-only-e...

http://m.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf