Finding my rhythm again

Good God! My wife got cancer last year and I managed to stay on a very stressful contract gig until the end of the year, but after that I realized how burnt out I was and how much I needed to just focus on her recovery, which was going to take way longer than the FMLA-allotted 12 weeks and so I had to swallow a lot my pride and just quit and focus no caregiving. It's now almost a year since the stem cell transplant and there have been a lot of ups and downs, including 2-3 hospitalizations, but right now she's doing fairly decent. It's just that my career is wrecked. Part of me doesn't even care because I've been doing tech stuff for about 30 years, it's just hard to give it all up suddenly.

My advice to this gentleman is to just stop doing all that stuff, enjoy the family, keep jogging, and let the world turn. It's what I have have had to learn to do. I even went to a few therapy sessions recently, but it didn't help me that much even though I'm trying to give it a chance. It's because I was always all about the mission--the next project, the next all night troubleshooting session, whatever the challenge was, and sitting still doesn't suit me, but I'm learning.

Definitely also guilty of overworking and pushing myself as hard as possible until I suddenly hit a health wall and had to rethink my strategy. I count myself among the blessed to mostly be on the other side of it a couple of years later, but not everyone is so lucky. When you’re a little younger and you haven’t hit any walls yet, it feels like nothing can stop you, but in hindsight those are the years to be investing in fitness for the long haul, when so many of us are burning midnight oil that we don’t realize we’re running out of. Self-discipline has to include a holistic development and ongoing maintenance of health, not just squeezing every last drop of work from yourself. Health is wealth.

This sounds almost exactly like what happened to me. I was a runner and a happy overworker. I developed AFib at 38 years old after the pandemic. Studies show a 6–10x higher risk of developing AFib or other arrhythmias within a month of infection compared to baseline. It sucks. I feel for you dude.

Jesus Christ. I felt my own heart skip a beat every time the sequence “I nearly died from a malfunctioning heart, and 48 hours later, went for a run” repeated itself.

Take care of yourself, dude. Still kinda feels like you’re pushing yourself too hard.

“This is not the 1% I was hoping to eventually join”

Temporarily embarrassed billionaires, all of us. Much easier to believe that than try to find some class consciousness and solidarity, isn’t it?