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Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

I believe that my success can largely be attributed to deep anxiety. I have CPTSD from many terrible years of childhood trauma. As a teenager I struggled with intense depression and hopelessness. Then one day it was like something snapped. I suddenly had a fierce, insatiable drive the lift myself out of the shit situation I was in. I graduated high school a few months later and immediately left home.

Five years later I received my bachelors degree in Computer Science. Now two years after graduation I'm making $300k a year, I'm married, I own a home, and I live thousands of miles away from my abusers yet I still struggle with anxiety and I still feel that drive to be more successful.

I want nothing more than to be able to say that I broke a multi-generation chain of abuse. That I was strong enough to do the thing my abusers couldn't.

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I have a similar story, and I'm a bit further along in my career.

- CPTSD [X]

- Ongoing struggles with depression [X]

- Many manifestations of deep anxiety that permeate my daily life [X]

- Unstoppable drive to get myself out of my situation [X]

- Self taught developer and later product manager making SV salary [X]

- Still feeling that drive to be more successful? [ ]

I'm in my mid 30s now, and 3 months into a self-funded sabbatical due to severe burnout. I do think my upbringing helped fuel my professional success, but at least for me, it was not sustainable.

I'm now exploring philosophy and consciousness as a way to change myself, since external things stopped working eventually.

Obviously I'm just a single anecdote, but if there's one thing I'd tell my younger self it'd be to face my demons head-on sooner, and be careful about relying too much on work as a way to channel my anxiety.

The transition to nothingness in my sabbatical was rough at first, but has also been transformative.

I do wonder if someone giving me advice sooner would have helped me avoid the burnout, or if I just had to experience it to really understand.

I’m very similar situations as all of you. However I’m farther behind. The drive to get out of this situation. This drive growing more and more only began in my mid 30s. I’m still looking for my first career dev job while grinding out leetcode.

Your advice to your younger self is spot on. I still have to tell myself that sometimes as I’m not out of the woods yet.

Then posts like this give me a second of pure self pity like I’m too far behind (I know I’m not).

Thanks for your post.

I relate to lots here - especially the unsustainable part.

I’m a few years down the curve, pushing 40, abusive and itinerant childhood surrounded by high status peers, launched into adulthood with a boatload of responsibilities thrust upon me, and scrambled my way up everything that looked like a ladder.

I did my sabbatical six years ago. I didn’t go back. My business, ten years, but enough was enough, it was hollowing me out, and I’d inadvertently created a machine where I could infinitely relive my childhood traumas. It was when I pulverised a telephone at my desk that I realised I was probably done.

I was fortunate enough to cash out with enough to set myself up to put my feet up until the end of civilisation.

I am only now, after six years of… well, different stressors, but at least not ones which just pushed me deeper into a hole… beginning to find some kind of inner peace. Turns out I’ve not known it since infancy. Turns out I’m actually happy being a nobody in the forest. Actually happy.

Nobody ever had any advice for me - it was always up to me to advise others, even when I was drowning - until I finally bit the bullet and started therapy last year. It’s really helped.

I think a lot of success in life is actually turning trauma into a motivating force. That doesn't really help to resolve the trauma, but it does create an illusion of safety you can buy into, often helping to provide a space for processing.

I struggle with just how much traumatic processing is worthwhile. Like if you accept that everyone in life was always doing the best that they could in the moments in which they hurt you or themselves, or you replay the traumatic events and see them through your adult eyes, or if you try to recontextualize them some other way, at what point do you just put down the trauma and live?

Trauma comes in waves. It never really goes away as far as I can tell, you just develop a new relationship to it.

I am reminded continually of Dune.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I am continually reminded that there are deities in the South Eastern religions which have angry forms when they are unfed and benevolent forms when they are fed. The same deity can be a source of fear or a source of power depending on your relationship to it.

A concept I've thought a lot about recently is, instead of turning away from anger and fear, feeding my anger and fear until they are no longer angry gods but instead, benevolent beings who help me to contextualize my reality. I have found it is possible, at least for me, to do this without any outward expression of fear or anger, only inner acceptance that those feelings are real, valid, and not something that serves me at this time.

I'm not sure if these ramblings are helpful, but I hope you find peace on your journey, at least if that's what you're looking for <3.

> A concept I've thought a lot about recently is, instead of turning away from anger and fear, feeding my anger and fear

Some schools of psychological thought say that anger is rarely a primary emotion. It's often a cloak for fear.

>I think a lot of success in life is actually turning trauma into a motivating force. That doesn't really help to resolve the trauma, but it does create an illusion of safety you can buy into

Calling out the illusion ruins it asshole.

For you.

> feeding my anger and fear until they are no longer angry gods but instead, benevolent beings who help me to contextualize my reality

I’ve been reading “Body keeps the score”, and one of the concepts that came up is pretty much this.

Instead of rejecting the self that is “bad” (“I’m always critical and I hate it”), objectively acknowledge that part of self(“There is a part of me that is a critic”). Then, accept/thank that part has been doing that for a reason (“My critical self is trying to stop me from getting hurt”).

Just like you, I’ve found it helpful to looking inward and “thanking” them for protecting me. But gently telling them that it’s not needed anymore.

That feels like a really useful strategy. Thanks for describing it so well.

My inner critic tends to get pretty brutal often.

My father told me that you should never tear yourself down, there are plenty of other people to do that for you.

My advice is to listen to the parts of the critic that serve to improve your ability to heal the world (including yourself) and discard much of the rest.

Spoilers for the game Celeste below:

This has a strong parallel with an important part of the plot.

Over the course of trying to climb the mountain the game is named after, you constantly run into your “dark self” and struggle against it. It insults you and tries to get you to stop give up and go home. At first you run from it, but then you start fighting it until you actually chase it.

Near the end, you have a moment where you learn the “dark self” cares about you deeply and is trying to protect you, albeit in a toxic way. Once you reconcile and work together, letting go of the fear, you finally reach the summit.

Same here, pretty horrible childhood by all accounts.

Aged 20 I decided I was no longer going to let my life path be dictated by anybody else. For better or worse if it all went sideways I would need full control.

Starting a business, being self employed and carving my destiny was the solution to that problem - and I forced it to happen when the odds were not great.

No University degree, no network of wealthy or experienced business minded friends, no business acumen, nothing...just a shed in a garden to work from, a friend who could code much better than I could and the desire to be something other than what I was.

There was a madness within me that I channeled in to working my fucking brains out. I networked my arse off, told everybody I met we could solve their software problems - and the rest is history.

Learning through making mistakes is inefficient and foolhardy but as far as my monkey brain was concerned there was no alternative. Going back to the kid that I was before I was 20 was a fate worse than death.

Have you heard of post traumatic growth theory? Curious to know if this idea resonates with you.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/growth-trauma

I hadn’t heard of it. Interesting stuff. I certainly feel like I experienced dramatic personal growth after leaving home with much of it in the categories that link mentions.

I am glad that your story worked out as it did.

For others who might be coming across it, let me provide my story, which pans out very differently.

I was recently diagnosed with CPTSD (but it took a long time for doctors to reach that conclusion), although the anxiety was known for a long time.

Here's how it began: I was close to the end of a prestigious university program (3 years done out of 4) when I "snapped". I suddenly ran out of energy. I could no longer bring myself to care to go to class, and I found great comfort in running away from things. This was the beginning of what would eventually become deeply ingrained avoidant behaviour.

My ambition no longer matched up with the energy I had in my body. It no longer matched up with my ability to tolerate things. I could no longer live up to my ambitions, my dreams, my desires, my goals.

I broke, and I was suicidal for a long time (on and off for 10 years).

I am slowly working my way out of my issues now. I am learning how to deal with deep seated anxiety as a way to give me more energy so that I can achieve my goals. One of my doctors mentioned something crucial: anxiety saps energy. Having an overactive amygdala is harmful, because when you are having a panic attack, your body floods with energy (in order to execute "fight or flight"), but very briefly. The cost of this flood of energy is a massive drop in energy that lasts longer than the flood did. This is a possible explantion (amongst others) behind my perpetual low energy.

For me, part of the process of dealing with anxiety (amongst others, like mindfulness and self-kindness) is learning how to achieve my ambitions by making realistic goals, and learning how to feel pleasure in "small", consistent achievements (the depressed brain is excellent at making every achievement seem worthless). Feeling pleasure in these small achievements is important in order to fuel the necessary consistency of said achievements.

tl;dr: in my experience, anxiety is unlikely to be a driver of achievement, and therefore unlikely to be a cause of productive ambition.

Thanks for sharing your story as well. I mentioned my version of this in a sibling comment, and seem to have experienced some aspects of both experiences, but it took longer for me to snap.

Recovery has been gradual, and I have much work to do, but one thing that I’ve found really helpful is directly examining what it means to be conscious. “Waking up” by Sam Harris was the start of a rabbit hole for me.

This exploration gave me tools to reframe certain experiences as “the contents of consciousness” and helped me start to step outside outside of myself for the first time in my life.

It’s no silver bullet, and YMMV, but I’ve found it incredibly helpful.

> tl;dr: in my experience, anxiety is unlikely to be a driver of achievement, and therefore unlikely to be a cause of productive ambition.

Agreed - the article reminds me a lot of the internet discourse around autism. That community is often dominated by successful, high functioning people with Asperger's/ASD who portray the condition as a fun, often beneficial personality quirk.

This crowds out the voices of people who are less functional, and their caregivers. Classic instance of survivorship bias.

> For me, part of the process of dealing with anxiety (amongst others, like mindfulness and self-kindness) is learning how to achieve my ambitions by making realistic goals, and learning how to feel pleasure in "small", consistent achievements (the depressed brain is excellent at making every achievement seem worthless). Feeling pleasure in these small achievements is important in order to fuel the necessary consistency of said achievements.

I try to stick to this strategy. Often times though, like when I watch an interview of a young(ish) founder of a company or read about a Fields medal winner on Quanta magazine, a cycle of self-pity mixed with self-hate and a strong feeling of worthlessness begins. I begin to day-dream of life trajectories when I wasn't drowned in trauma and was actually able to achieve my potential.

Then it becomes harder to get back to focusing on my smaller objectives as they start to feel mundane. I realize on an intellectual level that these smaller objectives are what will help me in the long run but on an emotional level I feel worthless and leading an inconsequential life.

However, I do thank you for writing up your experience. I feel it will help me re-enforce my strategy and not get caught up in the webs of emotional abuse my inner critic.

This is not directed at you specifically, but I am close to someone with CPTSD and they have found Internal Family Systems therapy to be very helpful. Just sharing a keyword in case folks are looking.

Thank you, you're the second person to mention that and it's spurring me on to take a closer look.

Of course. No problem.

If I'm completely honest - some of the ideas came across a touch 'woo woo' at first (which, is probably a "part" as they say), but I believe the core concepts are very useful. I don't have CPTSD, am I still happier for recognizing some particular patterns in my thinking/acting/motivations.

Good luck!

If you'll allow me to be the third, I can strongly recommend the specific IFS book "You Are the One You've Been Waiting For."

It's a short read, and it's heavy on case studies and examples -- which, at least in my experience, are more useful than any sort of prescriptive self-help.

A good IFS resource: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternalFamilySystems/

Really good thread. I saw a lot of different discussions about how folks cope. Was surprised not to see Internal Family Systems discussed. Visualizing a younger version of myself being inside of me reacting and controlling has been very helpful in terms of helping me empathize with the poorly adapted (or adapted to my bad early environment not the real world) parts of myself.

Obviously finding a good therapist has been part of that (I had a fine one for 6 years and switched to a different one {body based} a year or so ago and it's been transformative). The other thing that has helped is couples therapy has been very good as individual therapy. Given how many of our issues are relational, couples therapy is a surprisingly good context for forcing individual growth.

The common narrative i see on comments here is poverty or escaping abuse. I'll throw in my own story -- same narrative -- escaping poverty. We grew up poor, to the extent that we went to bed hungry at times. Thankfully it wasn't so extreme that we were homeless.

There is something worse than poverty though, it is the abusers. People who want to exercise power over you because they see you are vulnerable or because they realize you have few choices. This is worse than the poverty in many ways.

You might typically think this is a pay-day lender, but in my experience it was more subtle -- it was usually a bureaucrat. Sometimes it would be a school administrator refusing to enroll you in a class for no logical reason. A school administrator who didnt want to print your transcript for this reason or that.

Sometimes it would be a doctor's office giving you an urgently needed appointment in 3months, when you know well they have earlier dates. A doctor's office refusing to give you your medical records or trying to charge you money if you want to print your test result. Sometimes it is a hospital refusing to give you a prescription for a generic drug even though that is all your rx plan supports, but you're not allowed to speak to the doctor to change the rx.

It was the system, and it happened all the time.

Being where I am now, I can talk with my wallet. My expensive PPO plan can go to a different doctor. My expensive school district answers parents' emails almost as we're "clients." Heck, if something really bad happened i throw down a hundred dollars and go out-of-pocket on some required medicine. If something really bad happened, i'd find a lawyer and force the bureaucrat to act in a fair manner.

I think there is a lot of PTSD from a childhood spent in this state and those of us who went thru it want to ensure they never ever have to go thru it again, and want to ensure their children dont have to go thru it.

Thankfully, tech in the US gives decent opportunities to up-shift on the economic ladder and the anxiety acts as an accelerant to do so, because you can see the ghosts behind you.

The hard thing is realizing that its all gone and you've already escaped. You're not going to be back in that situation because you're so many rungs past it.

Very similar story here. Growing up poor and unstable drove me to seek more and more stability.

I don’t really get the sense that most ambitious people are similarly driven, I’ve met a lot of people with a lot of motivations. But I’ve definitely met a decent number of people like you and me who grew up poor and are on a life mission to never go back there or let their children experience that.

I have many of those but I don't know about drive. After years of working, studying and trying, I find that I still suck at interviewing and finding high paying jobs. I have been stuck at $50K-$70K/year fluctuations for my entire 15 year career. Reading about people making six figure salaries sometimes ... makes me severely depressed for weeks on end.

I have a similar story. I would think that it's tied with poverty in many cases (such as mine), and you know what they say, misery loves company.

My pet peeve is being told that I have survivorship bias whenever I try to encourage others to use it as a fuel for good. So now I just shut up and try to ensure that my little ones have their tools to succeed. I'm no longer interested in helping anyone else.

I'm actually to a stage where I'm telling to round out my ambition, trying to figure out how to relax, but I really struggle with not needing to do something.

But let's not confuse "in spite of" with "because of"

edit you claim $200k per year at a startup, exactly one year ago.. you got a 33 percent raise to $300k per year now in one year.. while working on old games in java too.. hard to believe, really...

Half of that, or more, is likely stock options. It's not unlikely or even particularly remarkable for a large startup to have doubled its valuation since a stock compensation plan started.

It’s $200k base and $100k stock. Indeed at a large startup.

I work as a Site Reliability Engineer. I changed jobs not long ago. The Java game is just a hobby.

Lots of HN posters lie about what they get paid for whatever reason.

Honest question, how do you know they are lying?

Maybe your success, and all the repliers', is simply a matter of getting life served on a silver plate e.g. everybody going to university comp science, good backgrounds, getting very good jobs. Of course you can't live with that privilege and have to build a story of being the victim of society.

What? I had very little growing up. When I left home I had one suitcase, a small box, and nothing else. My abusers never gave me anything. I didn’t go straight to university but was instead a transfer student from community college.

Sorry to burst your bubble but I was most certainly a victim of circumstance. I can assure you that as a child I did not put myself in that situation.

I have taught high school English for quite a while. I've taught in poor rural, mixed-income urban and wealthy suburban districts. CPTSD is not a casual thing that comes about due to typical childhood difficulties, and wealthy parents can plow a bunch of resources into raising their kids while simultaneously damaging them in lifelong ways.

I'm sure there's some of that in a society that has turned victimhood into a virtue and a competition.

The reality is that victimhood rarely makes people better, and usually makes them worse humans overall.

The best solution is to stop congratulating people based on how much they have suffered.

I am one of the replies. My parents were poor (they had me when they were both 18), and my father used drugs. He kidnapped me and my brother from my mom when I was 3 and we went on the run. He wasn’t able to keep a job because we kept having to move when the people looking for us got close. My brother and I suffered neglect, and my dad even took out loans using my brothers social security number. He died when I was 15 and I went into a foster home from there. I dropped out of high school and got my GED so I could start working. I was lucky to have found a job at a computer store fixing computers. I managed to parlay that into a career in computers without having to go to college, which I never would have been able to afford anyway.

So unless I’m missing something (please let me know) there was no life served on a silver plate here. We used to get food and second hand clothes donated from churches, but I have to imagine that doesn’t count.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to go through all that to get a career. There wasn’t any “victim dividend” I received (once I started working, nobody really knew my situation at all, much less gave special treatment), and I don’t think it’s a repeatable path to success. At the same time, there are people with similar stories who used that adversity to drive themselves to ensure they don’t go back there. I spend a lot of time now making sure I have stable financial plans A, B, C, and D, and I recognize they are probably overkill. Many people would have probably started coasting some time ago. But I’m too anxious about it to do that, so I keep working on more stability, which to the outside just looks like ambition.

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