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Comment by 0xEF | Hacker News Reader

I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

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Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.

At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")

I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.

We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?

You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.

For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.

The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)

We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.

I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.

The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?

Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.

Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.

But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.

It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).

But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.

What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.

> Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.

Do you now have more of a personality outside work?

I’m going through this now, just resigned due to burnout while being a “rockstar developer” with no life recently.

I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job.

At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.

It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.

> One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.

I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.

The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.

Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things. Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change their personas.

The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.

Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)

You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)

You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.

Like The Fountainhead?

The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)

Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).

Can add Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the list.

> "socialism", "communism",

Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.

Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx are what make all of what we see today happen. From killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from Marx' is just nonsense.

The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.

That is a completely false representation of what then other ideas really are about.

Thank you for this unprompted demonstration that the mere mention of "communism" sends some into a ferocious - and vacuous - crusade.

Meanwhile bosses boss people around.

> Meanwhile bosses boss people around

And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.

"play" "this type of thing" "starting to think that"

Dude, that's the naked reality. You are contorting yourself to avoid facing it.

Why should one care how Marx defined "socialism"? The term predates him by many decades, so he doesn't get to say what is "true socialism" and what isn't.

>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?

At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?

This is the premise of the movie Sunset Boulevard, and of the much newer The Subtance. Tl;dr, it's not healthy for celebrities either.

Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.

Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.

Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.

Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm feeling

Yes, but was it FDA approved?

I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.

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