Comment by autisticburnout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autisticburnout | Hacker News Reader

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autisticburnout

I definitely identify with that, so very hard.

I suffered pretty horribly as a kid. On top of the autism, my father was abusive, one of the few friends I had died at 9 years old, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer shortly after. I began to act out, and the school I was sent to helped me learn to "pass" was so horrible I ended up writing about it anonymously for Boing Boing.[1]

Later in grad school, a counselor would point out that on top of the autistic spectrum issue, I may have CPTSD from the treatment I received from the teachers in the alternative school that my acting out caused me to be sent to. It's not in the DSM, so I can't really get anything for it.

I went to college hoping for some stability - anything beyond help desk in my hometown required a degree. College made me "overqualified" for those roles but didn't quite get me to the point I could get a systems admin or software engineering role. In fact between self care and classes, my technical skills declined a bit from when I was 18 to 22.

A professor who I took a job with due to the flexible schedule saw promise in me and encourage me to go to grad school. I don't need a ton of money to be happy, so I figured maybe acquiring some prestige would eventually lead to a decent job - I never wanted to be a professor but I didn't see any other path forward.

I burned out partway through grad school... I managed to pass my quals so I could prove leaving was my choice and left with a master's. Tried working for a smaller company who I told I wanted work life balance, but ended up being laid off despite putting in as much (and sometimes more) hours there than I did in grad school.

So now, like many of the guys I went to school with all those years ago, I live with my parents. The difference being that most of those guys spent the past decade as NEETS. I'm not going to claim living on disability is a picnic, but I sometimes wonder who's smarter: the "genius" who spent a decade trying to push boulders up hills until he got crushed, or the American Hikikomori sitting in their parent's putting in their 10,000th hour of Call of Duty.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...

> so horrible I ended up writing about it anonymously for Boing Boing.[1]

That sounds more like a communist prison than a school, I'm not surprised it would result in PTSD.

10,000 hours of CoD sounds soul crushingly boring and pointless, so I'm going with the former.

I suspect you were meant to understand from the line of this person's story that the alternatives are almost equal. Answering is therefore not really what the author was going for (especially if it's a conclusion based on a different perspective than the author's without a very strong underpinning).

The person can rationalize playing 10,000 hours of CoD in their parent’s basement all they want. But I guess we can disagree, too, and suggest they don’t give up on life yet.

Maybe our perspective is that of someone who was in a similar place, and is now looking back on our lives with the benefit of hindsight.

I apologise for not being clearer: I was explaining first why just a single flippant response is not adequate, and also saying that if you want to post a response like that to a post like this maybe you should substantiate your argument a bit more. I can come up with a million reasons for why someone would respond that way and your rationale makes sense, but that doesn't mean that that was the rationale in play here.

It's not obvious to me that people will take a low-effort dismissal of their personal issues and turn that into a valuable learning opportunity.

Apex Legends and other games are all continuations of COD, so interpret that sentence as 10,000 hours of addictive online multiplayer gaming.

If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it. Also about your comment saying something is pointless... Everything is pointless. The least pointless activity is to work but eventually it fuels someone else's pointless activity if the work day is shorter than 16 hours. Gardening is pointless. Playing musical instruments is pointless. Reading fiction is pointless. Building a DIY rubber pad former with a hydraulic press to form sheet metal for your experimental (=non-commecial) aircraft is pointless. All of these are pointless and that's why I'm not doing them.

I wake up at 10 AM to work then go to college from 4PM to 9PM and then spend an hour learning a new language and then watch some movies or play some video games. Sometimes I don't know which of them is the most pointless...

At the end of the day we will all eventually die & at some point the heat death of the universe itself will arrive - surely rendering anything anyone ever did "pointless"...

But that doesn't matter - meaning is subjective & you make your own. If something is meaningful to you it's not pointless.

> If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it.

Yeah, but 10,000 hours of COD? That's about 5 years of playing from 9-5 every weekday. That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.

I can't even imagine the ennui of playing 10k hours of the same FPS or even the same series. "Soul crushingly boring" wouldn't even begin to describe it.

It engages a lot of primal drives: hunting, team-work, hand-eye coordination, tribal warfare, etc. I mean, we basically evolved to play team sports.

> That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.

These are not mutually exclusive.

Gardening creates food, improves your well being, improves your physical fitness, and has been shown to help with dementia. Your definition of "pointless" has no meaning and just sounds like ennui. Language learning opens up new opportunities. CoD at 10K hours is boring. You're skill level is likely to make you better than most people playing, to the point that you might be able to be good enough for esports, which would make the activity not pointless.

"Boring" and "exciting" is inherently subjective. And you've literally just been told that someone doesn't find that boring.

It's something where your progress and improvement can actually be tracked and measured, you can actually feel yourself improving by suddenly "outplaying" competition that you couldn't before.

As such it's a way to feel accomplishment and growth for people who don't have many other opportunities for feeling those things.

It's particularly appealing for people who struggle with participating in the usual venues for this, like sports clubs and other socializing that usually requires meat world interaction, which isn't a very easy thing to participate in for people with social anxiety issues.

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