Olympic medal-winning cyclist Rebecca Twigg is homeless in Seattle

It's terrible, but it happens: I've learned anyone can suffer from mental health problems. I have a decades-old friend who was gifted and brilliant. He succumbed to schizophrenia in his 30s, lost his job as a patent lawyer and broke off his engagement to his lovely fiance, and started murmuring about evil. He stopped answering my calls and moved around so much I have no idea where he is now, or if he's even still alive.

“Twigg was still a child when she became homeless.

A prodigy in academics and athletics, she started at UW at the age of 14... At this time, she was living in Seattle in a basement with her mother and sister.

Twigg’s sister says their mom kicked Twigg out; Twigg remembers being offered the option to leave and taking it. She was a few months from turning 16.”

I’m sorry, I don’t need to “weave a tale” about anything other than the fact that this person has been subject to abuse since childhood. And yeah, of course her family doesn’t want to talk. Nobody wants to talk about abuse in the family.

If anything is missing, it’s our collective blind spot where we can read a story like this and make it about “mental health”. Until we get better as a society about recognizing clear signs of abuse, we won’t make a dent in these kinds of problems.

Most homeless people have either medical or mental health issues. The older I get, the more convinced I am that those two things are not so neatly separated.

I think you might have the causal relationship backwards, at least for a lot of athletes. Elite sport is a really good way of not dealing with your emotional problems. It's a socially legitimate form of obsession, a path in life that makes eating disorders and self-harm look like the determination to win. You can lead a lifestyle that would be obviously pathological for anyone but an elite athlete and people will applaud you for it. It's an all-consuming kind of avoidance coping that nobody scrutinises too deeply.

When athletes retire, they lose their structure, they lose their support network, but they also lose their excuses. All the problems you used sport to escape from are now front-and-center, and you've got nowhere left to run. It's like sobering up after a 20-year bender.

[0] https://www.menshealth.com/health/a24268441/michael-phelps-d...

If you need someone to talk with please call: 1-800-273-8255.

Alternatively, I'd love to talk with you (the reader of this sentence) as well, Hacker to Hacker.

I think this is true in the abstract, but in this particular story, there's a lot more going on. She was a homeless teenager when she was discovered as a rider, and the article strongly implies that the only stable life she's ever known is racing.

This isn't a Ryan Leaf-type story, where a talented athlete was pushed too hard by their parents, coaches, and teammates and ended up breaking under the pressure. I think Rebecca's circumstances are way more poignantly tragic.

My heart goes out to her and I hope she gets the stability and peace she seems to be searching for.

But Twigg's case seems more complicated for me than that. Her lifestyle suspiciously in harmony with her mother kicked her out of home when she was just 16.

There have been a number of studies that show that poverty has a very real impact on your mental abilities. It wouldn't surprise me at all if homelessness itself causes mental health problems.

But there are absolutely also athletes who have a hard time functioning outside their sports bubble.

The positive feelings from winning do not come close to offsetting the negative feelings from not winning, even if it's second place.

According to the article, Twigg has only been homeless for five years, and she is currently 56 years old. Twigg wasn't really a "free spirit"- She held down jobs, had kids, and made a normal life for herself up until her 50's.

So I feel that this story is instead about an older tech worker who has aged out of the workforce. As a 40-something developer who has already experienced age discrimination as well as the realization that many of my skills are becoming outdated, I feel for her. Without a nest-egg, many of us may very well be in her situation in our 50's.

I wonder if truly free living is possible - looks like someone is always paying some price/ doing unfree things to make it happen.

Someone that constantly (or most of the time) depends on other people's work to sustain themselves and to have a place to stay, aren't free spirits, they are just piggybacking on the effort of people that live according to society's norms.

  - Started at UW at age 14 while competing. 
  - Had a programming job, quit to go back to cycling.  
  - She had a job, disappeared for 4 days, only to return, freak out and quit in fear of being fired. 
  - Had a support job, got fired, returned to Seattle and didn't even bother applying for another job.
  - Won't accept help from people who found out about her state.

She needs some sort of counselling and help with life skills. Her line of thinking isn't even, "If I sort myself out, then maybe I can help some of the people I know".

I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.

1. It should be made financially speaking prohibitively expensive to be a residential landlord. I.e. buy a house and charge others rent to live in it. Tax it at 100%. Done!

2. Change zoning/building codes to allow modern and more efficient construction, allow people to get easy financing to build more HIGH QUALITY and affordable housing.

3. Change mortgage laws to make it possible for more financially responsible families to build and own homes.

Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place.

I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry.

Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.

It doesn't matter! it should not matter. People should not be homeless, and the different safety nets should be agnostic of the reasons (otherwise you are catering only for the mental health issues, and you still have homeless drug addicts, or homeless bad-luck people).

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

It is jungle and can be confusing/sad/demotivating to realize that your best is no longer at their best interest.

Yet, I find myself as developer still fortunate to have somewhat rational managers and the market condition still in our side mostly.

It is still more solitary than many other jobs.

On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.

Some people may have the capacity for pair programming but I doubt that it is sustainable. The conclusion of the famous Steele/Stallman session is this:

"My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."

Even so, there's a significant difference between programming or a job in sales or PR or management or etc., anything where your core job is dealing with people.

But I would still say it is far from really social jobs - after school, I worked at a home for elderly people, and everyday left me exhausted. After work as a programmer, my social batteries feel much more charged.

One could make programming an extremely social endeavour though, i.e. by constant pair programming (two of Googles best Software Engineers are doing this).

I am a developer now, was a PM, and was a developer before that. Even with actively reaching out to people to talk to, my day to day always felt objectively solitary, and certainly solitary compared to what I experienced as a PM. That was what originally drove me away from engineering, and when I went back I got reminded of that fact.

I suspect you can keep growing a few years past 18. I suspect you can stop growing a few year before 18 as well. I don't think 18 is set in stone but an average age when people reach their adult height. But I think gaining an inch at 26 is rare. But she is an olympic medalist and a rare person.

Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.

The implication that flipping burgers will make you a billionaire is patently absurd. You should never feel ashamed about your work, but menial work in $current_year actually leads to poverty and hunger because it doesn't pay a living wage. An "entire generation" doesn't have illusions about how the world works. The 2008 recession was more than sufficient to dispel that. They just want food and shelter.

She's 56, so... which generation is that?

Would you mind explaining why? I'd imagine how difficult it is to move to the coaching/administration level was more a function of the particular sport? Are you thinking just about differences in the level of funding?