Hacker News Reader

Yes. Nothing stresses me out more than talking to other people. Going on an hour long walk by myself (hopefully in a nature setting) is what I need. But when I work in an office there is a stigma against just getting up and walking away for awhile. Butts in seats. This is one of the reasons I love working from home. My mental health has improved infinity fold since starting to work from home.

> Nothing stresses me out more than talking to other people

I'm in the same boat. That, and also the bright artificial lights in our huge open space. There's almost no natural light in the whole building which I find extremely disturbing. Luckily we can work from home almost full time now. Hope we won't go back to normal.

> Let work be work and let people recharge with family and friends if they prefer.

Instead of that, you’ll get HR peddling their Modern Health subscription that they’re paying unknown amounts for.

Oh God, we had to go through a "personality test" seminar at work, with absolutely no basis in science that was this exact thing. Break up into your ECBR groups (I forget the exact abbreviated systems), and discuss how you're similar. It felt like seeing a psychic, starting with vague generalities and narrowing it down to specifics in a group. This was our "entertainment budget" for the group for the quarter, to give you an idea of the cost, when most of us were not only on a deadline to ship, but would rather have spent those two hours with our families or at the pub.

I once had a coworker I didn't know very well say something like "I noticed you seemed a little off during the last meeting, is everything alright?". I'm sure they meant well, but the comment was jarring and invasive. It felt like on top of everything else going on at the time, I needed to exhaust more effort worrying about how I appear on camera.

The guy was just trying to help out. Friendly people do that...

I understand where you are coming from though. I was depressed in my 20s and my inner dialogue was all about how bad I must appear to other people. It prevented me from relaxing in the company of others completely, and made me interpret their comments in a negative way.

You get out of that by gaining self confidence. You have to have the mindset to not let other people's opinions bother you too much. So for example, what if that guy you mentioned think you look not happy on camera? Maybe you don't but you have no obligation to look like anything. You can put a picture of a rabbit instead of yourself. You can say your camera is broken.

It all comes back to having the confidence to do these things because that is freedom. If you don't have the confidence to go your own way because you want to, you are a complete slave to the behavior of others. They decide how you feel. Just stop it. Walk your own path in life. Start practicing tomorrow by turning off your camera.

Good luck.

That’s how some people connect, my friend.

A good-faith way to look at it would be to see it is this way - sometimes, things bother us and we don’t feel like telling other people about them because we don’t want to bother them. When this person asked you if everything was alright, I believe they meant to say “hey if there’s anything bothering you, I’m open to talk about it okay? No judgement”

Our analytical minds play tricks on us very often. It can take any situation and make a bad faith interpretation of it.

> Any additional expectations about team building or water cooler talk only extend the amount of time I'm ignoring my family and shackled to the screen

No, these are not supposed to be additional work hours on top of the normal work.

> My employer or coworkers are not who I look to for improvements with mental health as I feel it is a very personal topic

...and yet we spend 40+ hours a week in contact with this people. Not to mention the emotional attachment to the meaning and outputs of the work itself.

Mental health is not something that we can offload to our spare time. Just like workplace safety.

> I wish there was more respecting boundaries

Respecting boundaries is not incompatible with talking about mental health - actually it's the opposite.

Totally agreed. Team building benefits the company. Why should employees spend from their personal time. Same for mental health.

>Respecting boundaries is not incompatible with talking about mental health - actually it's the opposite.

What if my boundary is not wanting to talk about it?

>Mental health is not something that we can offload to our spare time.

Why not just give the employee more time to fix their own things if they so desire, rather than pushing employers to fix it. Clearly some prefer the former, some prefer the latter.

Considering the article talks about "autonomy" multiple times, it is a little baffling that "keep 40+ hours but spend some hours on your employee's health" is the sole solution pushed.

We are spending a lot of our lives at work, we might as well make it enjoyable process. "Shackled to the screen" shows you really loathe it and I'd suggest figuring out how to make it actually enjoyable vs. approaching it with a self-toxic attitude that probably makes you not enjoyable to work with too.

Employers can choose to make you an amazon warehouse worker who is given zero slack inside a windowless room with no AC and no ability to socialize with your fellow workers, or to give you slack so you can have water cooler discussions and hang out time to get to know people better vs. faceless voices in a zoom call. Doing these things are not an either-or proposition.