Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
I have it so much better than a lot of my countrymen, but holy shit does this suck and it is not getting better anytime soon. The hopelessness gets you.
Software engineering is one of my last remaining pillars of life remaining more or less intact. At least I get to write some code and make computers do things.
Life is a strange thing.
I hope more than anything that Ukraine (and Russia, and Israel, and Palestine, and all the war-torn regions of the world) can one day be free of this ghoulish mindset, that world leaders will choose life instead of worshipping death
But is the only way out further death and destruction?
Blessed be the peacemakers, as they say
and for crimes that are not enough to execute for, bog-standard prisons are enough. they are imperfect, but those willing to change prove themselves there, and a good one should give enough opportunities for a criminal to re-educate, reconsider some of their life choices, and rehabilitate.
punishment by death is never the right fit.
Russia and Israel are the countries causing the regions to be war torn. They are mass murdering invaders, no better than Nazi Germany.
As such, all of us doing nothing more than “voicing support” on the internet and some far-away rally, should offer our empathy, and not presume to tell them how much we’re “helping”.
What is your definition of "supporting", if "providing support" doesn't count?
The US is the despicable laggard, even when accounting for our distance from the action.
(And especially when accounting for the fact we promised them our protection of their sovereignty)
Denmark: 3%
Estonia: 3%
Lithuania: 2.5%
Norway: 2.5%
Latvia: 2%
Sweden: 2%
Finland: 1.5%
...
UK [†]: 0.75%
...
United States [†]: 0.5%
[†]: These countries signed an agreement that they would protect Ukraine's sovereignty.
For context, the US's entire national defense budget is about 3% of our GDP. Or alternatively, Medicare is 3% of our GDP.
This statement is false: "None of the European countries are doing much relative to their economies."
As a US citizen I think that our country should also do more to assist Ukraine. But fundamentally this is a European problem. They need to find a solution instead of expecting the US to bail them out again.
As an American, I'd like to say I'm as horrified by our faithless leadership as you are frightened by the circumstances you're facing, but that just sounds pointlessly shallow. All of Western civilization has a stake in keeping Putin at bay, but only your country is being forced to confront that fact right now. We should feel grateful to Ukraine, and in fact many of us do.
Suffice it to say we aren't all aligned with Musk and Trump, and many of us fervently wish we could do more to help in a meaningful capacity. Trouble is, about a third of our eligible voters have decided to put a single party decisively in charge of all of our branches of government, and the way our system is structured, that leaves the rest of us more or less powerless. That will hopefully change soon, but we'll see. Try to stay strong, and we will try as well.
On the other hand senior embedded/mechanical/electronics/AI engineers are of the very high demand.
At my previous (well known tech) company, we had a number of older Romanians who grew up in the Communist era. I became close with one of them. And the stories he told me were just harrowing. They were not at war, but the government simply couldn't provide for the people (other than giving them a good education). The struggle for basic necessities in the 80's became real. He had a wife and a newborn, and the wife was sick, and they couldn't afford any furniture. There was real concern the baby would die because the mother couldn't get even basic rest (no mattress, no bed, sleeping on concrete floor, etc).
The stuff he had to do to ensure she got a bed was crazy.
And then later there were food shortages, etc. Dodging bullets, etc.
But they all somehow persevered and focused on surviving. And then got out of the country as soon as the borders opened up. Eventually, because of their skills, they got great jobs. Very senior and well respected in the company.
But of course, they know people who did lose hope and ultimately committed suicide.
Living in the US, I've encountered lots of former refugees from war zones. People like yourself with skills did well here. For sure they struggled, but eventually they all "made it".
If you have skills, I hope you can last long enough to get there too.
I guess a die is rolled somewhere in the universe and we are born—who knew where, who knew when.
And there are many who are even less fortunate than ourselves.
honestly, having a decently paying blue-collar job made me think whether tech is worth it at all, given that I'll lose all the extra benefits (from canteen to proper bomb shelter to gym to commute) and cut my already tight paycheck by 20-25%. for what? for "tech"? where I have to be able to wake up at 3AM when the client's LLM took down their prod, commute to a vulnerable office in Kyiv (and pay for expensive AND equally vulnerable housing there), live under a threat of getting fired because I was "not AI enough" or whatever management wants, or because I don't have gigabit Wi-Fi in the shelter? fuck it, I'll rather be a night-shift loader and idk, learn embedded at home.
the world devolving into proompting has ruined tech for me. prolly I'll get a Cat. C driver's license and spend little what I have remaining of life on the road. if I get lucky, I may eventually reach CE and Euro 95 certs, and that in turn gives me some sort of safety against mobilization.
if the war ends before I become 25, I'll likely end up a stereotypical himbo truck driver. I'm tired of having to perform the smartness.
Lost for words fella, lost for words.
Good luck!
Hang in there. This, too, shall pass.
I think a big part of the problem is that middle-aged men are at the apex of their expectations to be successful in the eyes of society, and we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.
There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1]. Émile Durkheim coined it in his book Suicide, written not too long after the Industrial Revolution.
In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.
In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.
I think for a lot of men, it feels like just at the time when we should be able to rest on our laurels a bit after having worked so hard to play the game society told us to, the rules have been ripped out from under us and any sense of security going forward is lost. We feel too old to learn the new rules of the game in time to play well, but not old enough to be able to abstain from playing.
It's a psychologically very difficult time.
Well said.
Today, unclear what that would look like as well as unclear if the career will even exist that long.
One sunny spot I have is that life is very long. I think I have 1.5 careers left in me, and a full pivot is alright. I've been talking with older folks, and loads of people have historically done giant pivots at midlife.
Why?
Some of Software folk i know move to repairing electronic devices for living. He still works in AC-room, but instead of holding mouse and keyboard most of the time, now he holds meter probe and soldering iron.
Not sure exactly where you are in it, but as a 53 year old I disagree. The younger I was the less likely I would have been to disagree but imo/ime the older you get the faster it feels like it is flying by.
> and a full pivot is alright
The AI-related existential dread is that it is very unclear what a pivot looks like when the ground under everything is shifting all at once.
The shifting is certainly a lot more obvious in our career than some others, but all of that shift (so far) happened more or less in a mere 10 months and is accelerating. And I don't think it is very likely that our career will stay anomalous for very long in terms of how much AI impact there is.
I do agree that a safe 'next' is unclear. But I also think if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.
And if it doesn't, then pivoting to some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.
Lots of people didn't have their field automated away though alongside most other knowledge work fields, or seen at the same time a drop in demand in manual work and an oversupply (drop in demand because of upcoming AI layoffs, and oversupply in manual fields, because of same)
In fact one of the worst "trade offs" of the trades is they can very much be a young mans game.
It gets real hard to sling water heaters up/down tight stairs or pull cable in a 100+ degree attic into your 50s.
Yes, but not for the reasons you say. It’s because if everyone is a plumber, you don’t need plumbers.
Edit: Fair point, you don’t want to be entering a trade which requires heavy lifting as an older guy with no experience.
I'm 41 and I could, in theory, pivot. But realistically: I'm good at exactly one thing in this world in terms of job ability. I can cook, I can bake, I can play music, but none nearly well enough to actually make a living on it. Thus the end of my tech career, if it should come to pass, basically means I will have to work menial jobs to get by. The future is very bleak for me, and the only real hope is that the tech industry will wake up to what a bad job LLMs do compared to humans. But while I think they will do that eventually, there's no telling how long it will take, and the thought that the market will eventually correct is cold comfort if I can't get a job in the meantime.
if you start to hurt every day, get diagnosed with age-related disease, your cognition starts to deteriorate, etc, you might just decide "hey, i lived enough. i don't want to go through years of feeling like this."
I retired in 2023, not because I could, but because I couldn't not. I'm almost 50. My parents died in their early 60s. I have some of their health problems, and some of my own. I also destroyed my back in a motorcycle accident many years ago and live with constant pain.
My favorite things to do, which bring my peace and joy, involve me sitting in a chair, which hurts my back. In my youth I rode my bicycle avidly, which now hurts my back. I love gardening, and if I do it too much, it hurts my back.
It became increasingly clear to me that my "purpose" in this country is to work until I die. I know that there are other countries, and other kinds of lives, but they are not where my wife and friends and life are.
I am happy, relatively healthy, and love life. I would like to live forever if I could. I know I could fill every minute of it with things I find interesting, even if it was just reading every single book.
But I've seen what American life looks like in your 60s and older, and it's not fucking pretty for most people.
Mostly just posting to say, hey, there's others out here like you. Hang in there, Almost-Me. If not, see you on the other side.
Sure its a little off putting but if you've the time and money it could be worth trying.
Some of that is political advocacy. Some of that is open source code that should exist. Some of that is helping a neighbor. I don't need to hit a certain bar, I just need to know that in a given interaction or situation, I am trying to make things... at least a little better.
That also scales well to differing life decisions. The video game I'm playing, can I get people to play a little nicer with each other and have more fun? Workplaces are full of dumb stuff, success is making it at least a little better. Turns out I have kids now. Wasn't the plan, but now my obligation is to make sure my involvement in their lives is positive. Not a specific bar I have to achieve, but you know, someday I hope someone appreciates how I chose to live my life.
You hit a point in your life, reflect back on where you'd thought you'd be when you were in your early 20s, and think.. shit.. what I do all of this for?
This isn't even a flippant comment (especially given the subject matter); being at this age and thinking "I imagined it would all be easy by now" does hit home.
The midlife crisis is probably better described as a change or unease in the self and not knowing why you get out of bed in the morning anymore and that entire adventure, whereas this anomie is the social environment you're moored to breaking down.
I think there's a step change from say the silent gen/baby boomer generations where a midlife crisis was realizing you lived the classic "American Dream" but weren't going to be a rockstar or super wealthy, compared to now where a midlife crisis could easily be wondering if you will continue to have any economic value at all years before social security kicks in.
Admittedly this is America-centric, but that's my lived perspective, and also I recognize that things weren't always very stable even here, thus why I am comparing a couple of specific generations to the ones that followed.
There was, for a time when I was younger (as a Gen-Xer), just an assumed sense that each generation would have it better than the last. Naive, perhaps, but alas. And obviously far less people assume that anymore.
Anomie plus helplessness plus a feeling of a rug pull of the laws/equality/character of our country. I am not suicidal but wow I get it.
Not anymore than WWII deaths are the epitome of "classic early life suicide".
If it was "the classic mid life crisis" the rates wouldn't be "highest ever" (as per the post).
Do people who say this have kids? I ask genuinely. Everything before my little dude was fake. Everything since him is real deal Holyfield. Probably knock off in the next 20 minutes and take him to Home Depot to look at some bullshit because we have a good time with that kind of thing.
More: Every time we point to this situation, we get insulted as incels. Sorry, I'm a multi millionaire, so I can provide, muscular, so I don't look too bad and have my health in order, CEO so I have some social status, and my love life has been terrible, I'm thinking of going to prostitutes to close the loop on being treated like shit.
Clearly there's something wrong in the dating market, women don't want to make families anymore, they literally don't want kids, and those who do, it's with wifeveaters. I know, "it must be you", "all men find women so you're probably a cunt" — I get it, I get it. We're truely the lost souls of today's world.
The only thing keeping me alive is the idea of revenge against the people who insult us like this.
If you have money, but they don't, then they think there must be your fault, because if they had money, they wouldn't be in this situation.
If you're muscular, but they're not, then they think if they were muscular, they wouldn't be in this situation.
The biggest insult in the incel community is not someone who gets laid, but that someone is a volcel larping as an incel (purely as an attempt to demoralize them)
I do agree that the dating market is broken, but only men can find a way out of this. And those women want to be saved too, just not the way you think.
If there isn’t a compelling story behind it, it probably doesn’t convey social status. Poor people with interesting lives often have far more success in the dating market than “successful” people that are indistinguishable from every other successful person. It is less about collecting credentials and more about writing a story that people want to read.
Fortunately, the bar for this is low. Most people have done few interesting things in their entire lives despite abundant opportunity. Many people that have lived interesting lives fail to tell the story. Having time and money expands the kind of story you can write but you still need the courage to live it.
I wish I would have figured this out earlier in my life than I did.
Women are the culprit. But it’s not their fault.
One thing you will note is that most men killing themselves likely don’t have a woman or don’t have kids.
So what’s going on within the last century is that women have been changing. Feminism and female empowerment is on the rise worldwide and across every culture. Any country or civilization with high technology any first world country women are becoming more powerful and having more freedoms and breaking out of old gender roles. This is what’s causing the problem and it’s hard to talk about.
I want to say that what’s happening to women is not ethically a bad thing. Morally it’s good. But thousands of years of evolution has not prepared mankind for this shifted dynamic. Women are hypergamous in the sense that they want a man to go is more capable than them and has more resources and can take care of them. They are biologically programmed to find a husband who at worst is a partner in crime and at best a care taker that completely makes them feel safe… while men are seeking a partner to take care of a person to nurture. A woman will not take care of a man, at worst if she does take care of a man she expects actual care in return. A man trades care for mating privilege and that’s all. He provides the resources for survival, she opens her legs. While this is a gross simplification the overall sentiment is true-ish
Hypergamy is so strong that women would rather be single than be with a man of lower status. And typically she’s ok with that. That is the problem you see today. Historically not only was almost every man usually a higher status but a woman virtually had no choice but to marry a man if she valued survival. Men worked and women stayed home. That’s how it was setup. If a woman left a man she wouldn’t be able to hunt, farm or get a job in the old days. Now a woman can be ceo and a ceo isn’t going to want to be with a lowly engineer. You will note that women are actually acting rational with their choices here. It is men that are a bit more dumb in terms of mate selection. They’re willing to be with someone that will drag them down. Someone they have to take care of. It’s irrational and a bad deal from a rational perspective but biology designed us that way.
So as a result you get a lot of single men who want to kill themselves and a lot of single women who are fine with being single.
The thing that’s curious is why this phenomenon is happening worldwide? Is it because of feminism? Is it cultural transmission of the ideas of feminism? No it is not. Feminism is the result it is not the causal factor. In prehistoric times men hunt and do the hard labor. Women don’t want to do that shit. Mainly because they aren’t as strong as men. So it is actually historically in the women’s best interest to stick to her gender role of not hunting and plowing the goddamn field. The difference between then and now is technology. Now nobody plows the field. Now everything a man can do a woman can too. So feminism is really the result of all women around the world figuring this out. That’s why feminism suddenly happened worldwide this century across virtually every first world country no matter the culture. It’s the last 1% of human history and it coincides with the intense rise of human technology. Human technology equalizes men and women. That is what we are seeing today. If you are dating… this is what is going on. Women have changed and it is because of technology changing society to allow women to change.
Think of overfitting. We’ve evolved biologically to overfit specific gender roles and as a result as soon as that changed the mechanism begins to unravel. It’s no ones fault.
You will note it’s not just a problem with men killing themselves. What’s happening is a population crisis. Women don’t get with men, men are frustrated but also there’s no children. We are hitting population decline world wide as well. Children actually would’ve forced a lot of men and women together.
Human biology actually designed a fail safe for this potential problem. Sex was the fail safe. Women and men are a bit addicted to sex and that kept the population going. But this fail safe was eliminated with birth control.
So actually I think the real solution to these problems is actually banning birth control. Believe it or not.
I'm still gainfully employed, and business is ripping, but a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year. So part of me is extremely glad I don't have kids right now, and part of me is really angry that everything feeling so unstable is leading to our decision to not have them. I know that even in the best time it's a scary decision, but the general vibe is flipping people (like my wife and i) who are at the margin.
We are all descendants of like 1,000 individuals who kept having lil babies through an ice age. There are mobile home parks full of happy kids dotting my town, populated by people who paint houses and do landscaping and make ends meet. I have no idea what your profession is or what your housing situation is, so maybe that's already where you are. My wife and I talk gratitude a lot, and that includes being grateful that if we had to dig ditches to keep a double wide over our heads, we'd go ahead and do that and have some giggles with our little miracle in there.
I think these things are less consistent than is often stated, we just see them occur consistently among people with similar lives. The "mid life crisis" is also debunked and replaced by "existential crisis" since it can actually occur at any age, from teenager to elderly, and zero, one, or multiple times. Only in the classic life progression of a certain era, it typically occurred worst at around 40-45 so it got that label.
Midlife anxieties are real and nothing in particular prevents it.
Part of working through history from (only) 100 years ago is an impression of how quickly societies were changing then. This isn't the first time we've had the table cleared, and it hopefully won't be the last.
Which isn't to downplay the upheaval that people are in - it is definitely traumatic. But we've been through disruption before. Hopefully we'll make fewer costly mistakes this time...
I don't think we should wish such evil upon future generations. The industrial revolution was a terrible time to live through, and arguably was not beneficial in the end to humanity. I would be very happy if we never had such a change again.
We don't have many coal miners any more. How do we treat the people who used to be coal miners, when we get to 100% clean power? If we are running society well, we give them a hero's sendoff and a nice comfortable retirement life. If we are running society poorly, we take away their homes and healthcare to punish them for not having jobs any more.
I have however run out of fucks and am ignorantly coasting and making optimal survival decisions only. Fuck the business. Fuck the career. Highly recommended.
So I put all my fucks into working my ass off. Started dishwashing. Became a cook. Then owned a bakery. Built up a portfolio, became a sysadmin for a large company. After 6 or 7 years the writing was on the wall that I'd be replaced with a call center and some low wagies so I left.
Been working a do-nothing laid back remote job for a year now and never happier. My only source of stress is thinking that giving a shit when I was young would actually lead somewhere when I had the rug pulled under me from the get-go.
+1. Also maybe it's an age where responsibilities start to peak. More senior positions in the workplace, having children, marriage, etc.
I've had a few stressful periods lately where it felt or feels like I can't load any more on to my plate and I don't even have that many responsibilities - no kids either, just an accumulation of small and background things needing dealt with. I think I do understand people who do commit suicide to an extent - if you add the above normal stresses of life to some highly stressful life events like a breakup or divorce and throw kids etc into the mix - and hey why not a pile of work related stress too - I can absolutely see how people get pushed to the edge.
Modern society has not been arranged in a way that sets people up for success. Staring at device screens for more hours year on year likely doesn't help.
Do you think this has changed from say 10 or 20 years ago? To me, I don't get the sense that there has been shift in the social definition of success. Maybe I'm missing something?
Feels like all the effort I put into coming this far was invalidated overnight. The writing is on the wall, and now I have about five years to get rich at any cost until it's all over. Now I'm firing from the hip in all directions, trying to hit something, anything.
I used to enjoy programming as a hobby, writing articles. It's all so meaningless now. What's the point?
We all heard it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem and so many other quotes. I've lost a lot of people growing up to suicide and the impact it has on those who continue to live on that you love is traumatic.
The man who raised me like I was his son told my mother that he would never commit suicide. He had stage 4 cancer that eventually took his life on my 17th birthday. His reason for enduring through the pain was to teach me that suicide is never the answer because it hurts all those around you.
Although he passed away on my 17th birthday of his illness, he forever changed my life in so many ways. Each and every day I aim to be a better man because of how he loved me.
Please take a moment to utilize this time you have to change those around you. You don't need to create a massive company, be a CEO, have a career people admire, etc.. all you need to do is be someone that inspires others to improve like John did for me.
Don't rush it.
And this isn't even to mention money, and what my future is looking like, despite having every possible intrinsic and external advantage in The Greatest Country on Earth.
I've had one same-aged friend kill themselves, and I try to be attentive to the signals being put out by everybody in my circle.
Person A might find it in nature, camping, trailing, etc. Person B might pursue a more spiritual path, giving back to the community, being of service.
Whatever floats the boat man. Live and let live.
Millenial cynicism is so boring.
Could be:
> folks plugged into a community live better, happier, and healthier lives
Or even
> folks with a weekly routine in a third space live better, …
There’s nothing causational about the denomination.
You're right, I'm sure the people that are publishing these studies have never heard of "correlation is not causation."
While we’re being snarky, should we talk about the people who are arbitrarily and capriciously removed from these communities during times when they need them most? Like women seeking divorce in abusive relationships while in a denomination that preaches absolute subservience to the male head of household?
It is this mainly. Community is the reason most people find happiness. Some people find it at church, some on a Sunday at a football game, some at their dnd game that’s being going on for years and some find it in their family. I am not particularly religious but I am 100% onboard the idea that community brings happiness. I find happiness in just having good neighbors.
>Millenial cynicism is so boring
Yeah, it's always Millennials who are in the wrong. Fuck us, right? It's all good, we're used to being the scapegoats for society's problems.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508619.2020.17...
> Of eight R/S predictors that were distinguished, only participation in public religious activities and importance of religion were significantly related to mental health
It's weird, its like there is some part of our mind that requires something spiritual to fill it, and has been that way every since recorded history. People have always looked for something higher than themselves, whether is be a god or gods, or the idea of nature or the universe, or any matter of similar ideas. And filling that part of our minds with a belief in something, seems to put the mind at ease in some ways. A lot of medical literature I've read includes 3 parts of yourself that you need to take care of: mind, body and spirit. So I really do believe there is something behind it.
Believing in a higher power has seemed to provide great comfort to a number of friends and family over the years. I went to a friend's father's funeral a while back, and I had to admit, the service, the way the community came together was moving, and it really made me question whether I should return to the church as an adult, even with my questions of faith.
I wonder if the Old Testament gives you the same effect
Alcohol is incredibly dangerous after 40, particularly if you've got a history as a heavy drinker. I've had to cut back to virtually nothing as it's guaranteed to trigger anxiety and depressive episodes.
Almost all the premature deaths in my circle, including suicides, have been alcohol-linked.
Obviously, YMMV, everyone's different, but if anyone reading this thread is over 40, struggling, and still drinking regularly, taking a break can really help.
I am very glad I ripped that bandaid off over a decade ago. But success for people with a genuine problem is stopping, not taking a break
People who want to drink--should drink.
People who don't want to drink but find that they keep doing it anyway, might want to check out what AA has to offer. It worked for me when nothing else did.
But I do know some alcoholics that say they can’t even taste the stuff or it will trigger them. So to each their own
And it's bad for you, yes, and that's why I quit, it was fucking with my sleep horribly, but also it's such a drain on your finances today. And given the state of things today, I'm glad I quit when I did. Saving a grand a year isn't a lot but that money is much better off being spent in a different way.
Anyway I don't disagree, in retrospect it was all a way to drink more beer in different styles than I could readily get from a store. It's easy to justify in the moment but having many gallons of beer around all of the time is dangerous...
I don't believe in politics. For me left and right are all *the same*. Just a bunch of megalomaniacs wanting to hog power for themselves. This extremely hot take has made people call me more names and costed me more relationships than if I went out and started screaming slurs in a crowded street. Because I am a "fence sitter" or whatever.
And I just can't handle it anymore, I just went full recluse. I don't go into social media anymore, I don't talk to anyone at a personal level anymore. Outside of some github issues and some comments here, I don't touch socials anymore. I am just overwhelmed by the level of vitriol and hate the new internet is based on.
Even knowing this, people around me still called me all sorts of things for not having strong opinions on random political things or wars. How can I worry about that when I am going to die soon anyway? Got enough in my plate to think about global politics.
I also enjoy the new wave of AI stuff. It took a while but I finally got a little robot buddy like in scifi when I was little. Full offline. It's kind of a dum-dum, but mostly works!
Unfortunately it's such a negative thing outside of places like HN that I can't share that joy with most people. Also a lot of people can't seem to wrap their head around an artist that enjoys AI, as I mentioned in another post in the thread. I have to shut up about it pretty much everywhere.
Anyway, I digress...thank you.
Social media is poison, sure, but detaching from it doesn't mean you can get an IRL social life to replace it.
FWIW it’s not that hard to be a fence sitter and not advertise it to everyone. It sounds like either you’re hanging with the wrong people, or you’re the problem. I guess go back to playing with your toys!
I know friends and family with many kinds of beliefs, we don’t rehash why they believe those things every time we see each other. Humans are complex /shrug
"This is a bait comment". Shame on you.
See my other post in this thread, for example, replying to a Ukrainian who's finding that people he thought could be counted on can't be. As I suggested obliquely in that post, this is because one-third of our electorate is either brainwashed or malicious, one-third is willing to do what we can, and one-third can't be bothered to care either way.
Social media is a veil of manipulation, engagement maximization, and bots. Do not misconstrue it as any kind of real or productive politics. There is a signal there amongst the noise, but it's hard to make sense of if you do not have a coherent world model or belief system. You have to learn to cut through it if you want to keep your sanity.
My country has a very serious housing crisis, both the left and the right are contributing to it because both parties have multiple people who are "serial landlords" with several properties, so they only make laws that benefit the landlord. This is a known fact and there are huge protests ongoing about it to the point emergency elections have been called.
Yet, saying this simple stance just as I did now, that both of them are guilty, will have people call you an "ultra" or call you a conspiracy theorist, that you are a fence sitter, that you don't know what you are talking about, and so and so on. Like you have some ulterior motive or are a paid shill from the other side or making the logic leap to thinking you support the far-right for not choosing one of the two existing "teams". Everything has gone crazy.
That being said, I think it's worth noticing if one party does more bad things than the other and I also think speaking up with your values is worth it and maybe even a duty we owe the people who built this country before us.
Either way, your first responsibility is your own mental health so you have full support from this internet stranger.
HN is social media, saner than most, but I still don't assume sincerity.
> Yet, saying this simple stance just as I did now, that both of them are guilty, will have people call you an "ultra" or call you a conspiracy theorist, that you are a fence sitter, that you don't know what you are talking about, and so and so on.
If you mean people online, then that's expected. It's what I meant by social media being unproductive. Hostility attracts engagement and makes it more visible.
National politics is heavily influenced by economic interests, including global capital. And as wealth concentrates so does political power. That doesn't mean ordinary citizens have no political agency though, don't underestimate the difference you can make in your local community.
My heart is with the people, not the corporations or the elites. I just feel none of the choices right now is for the people. I don't understand why that would make me "hate LGBT people or migrants". It just doesn't make sense to me. The team mentality of the whole thing has gone too far in my opinion. And I don't understand why people get so heated up for groups that don't care about them at the end of the day.
I don't even think I'll be alive to see another election after the emergency one next month though. So it's too late for me to make any meaningful change. So I'm just trying to use my remaining time to leave a bit of a legacy as an artist and programmer. Even if I enjoy AI. One thing doesn't cancel the other. I do mostly analog art and even have been pretty excited to try new tools now that my hand works again (surgeries obliterated my hands for a while and they are permanently blue-ish and cold now, but I regained some mobility this month). AI is for me "that thing I wanted since I was a kid when scifi had AIs doing stuff".
In fact, that whole thing is also another can of worms. People can't seem to understand I can be an artist AND enjoy AI. The moment I mention AI people start assuming I flood the world with slop and want to destroy artists, then they ask for proof that I'm an artist, I show them my work (impossible for an AI to replicate because it's mostly analog), they go "but if you can draw like this why do you use AI!?? You should hate it because it's against you" and they can't conceive that for me it's just fun to tinker with it and test what it can do for fun. Like I should immediately take an anti-AI stance BECAUSE I am an artist. The AI is not replacing me because for me art is a form of expression and doing it is its own reward. It's just fun. Both things are fun to me. I don't see why they are exclusive.
It's like there's no room for human nuance and contradictions anymore. You have to be in a neat little box or else you are a bad person so it's right to fight you and hurt you. It's "justified", you know. Even if they are completely wrong, they already passed judgement.
Nihilism is a popular, vague pejorative today but philosophically it's a serious answer to exactly the manipulation, engagement-bait and juvenile techno-optimism of our age. Whenever you're at the end of some moral or social period active, not resentful or passive nihilism, is a palate cleanser and necessary condition for revaluation of all values.
The kind of middle aged men that tend to fall into despair or suicide in these times are usually people who rely on some identity provided to them that then crumbles. Job, money, house, status, 'how to be a man' etc. There's something they're supposed to be like and they're not, stability they took for granted just stops.
And we're in a period like this across many dimensions, political, technological etc. And if you want to be sane a dose of nihilism is fairly important so that you can go on and construct some sovereign answers to all these issues.
To be more precise, it was passive nihilism I was criticizing. That's the sentiment I sensed in the original comment.
Don’t know if you’re soliciting advice, but there are a few things that keep me feeling the way I did before: physical exercise, and live music. Unfortunately I find less time as the week goes by to dedicate to those things, but I at least know they’re there.
Therapeutic writing that out loud, in a way.
I felt similarly and had a "crisis" point at the start of 2025. I realised that living a fulfilling life had to become my top priority, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it may seem. Otherwise, I might not survive another 30 years.
Now I can see a bit of the mechanism behind the dimming of the spark. I had gradually conceded the direction of my life to external forces, and let anxiety and self-doubt drive my decisions. It's a great way to end up with a life that you don't want. I shudder to think of what it's like to do that for 20 years instead of 5.
I can't afford health insurance, let alone health care. 0 sick days, 0 vacation time, $0 leisure spending. Credit card debt ticks up each month. Retirement savings is a pipe dream. How could I conscionably attempt a family under these conditions? I'd never have time to be a part of it and would be plagued by the guilt of not being able to provide.
But hey, I'm told to feel lucky I managed to lock in a 30-year mortgage at 5.99%: If I'm diligent paying on it until I've got a foot in the grave, selling the house might pay for end-of-life care!
I was made redundant in August and despite being a 20 year career vet who has done many different langs, I still can’t find a new job.
My skills as a developer are no longer required because the all knowing robot can (apparently) do what I need to do. I’ve heard multiple companies now using it to ship stuff all the way into production without any human intervention at all. This feels to me like driving the car without holding onto the wheel.
The side hustle I had of writing books to teach people development is over — they can just ask the robot instead. I was writing a new book about how developers can train up others, but have put that on hold (due to losing my job which was that thing, and because of AI)
I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do here to provide for my family.
Then I got hired to a company which have been pushing AI 100% for like a year, not at the expense of headcount, but responsibly as the N+1th productivity increasing tool, like what it is.
It's a really nice environment where keeping and cultivating great talent is not just one of the primary marketing slogans on the hiring page, but it actually feels like it while on the job.
My talent is nowhere near yours, so don't lose hope, keep applying.
My software skills are now irrelevant. I've accepted that the omniscience robot is a better engineer than me. No clue what I'm going to do next, but I have to figure it out fast once my job disappears.
I wanted a family, but I'm relieved that I don't have one now. I can't imagine the stress and pressure of that with how weird everything is now. I'm nearing the end of the timeline for that anyway, being in my late 30s. Probably a blessing in disguise.
I have a some good hobbies that keeps me on my toes (physically, mentally) and a full social and family life fortunately. That's what fills my cup. I'm not stoked about tech anymore anyway.
And this is why the whole thing will implode eventually. But there will be a period of pain until then.
>And this is why the whole thing will implode eventually. But there will be a period of pain until then.
Not if it is a self-driving car, which is increasingly becoming the case.
I've facilitated 200+ talking meetings at this organisation and another I was involved with previously. Anecdotally, the average attendee at the male-only meetings is ~45 years old, has some level of issues with personal and/or professional boundaries, has had suicidal ideation more than once, and has made plans for or attempted suicide more than once.
There is some form of survivorship bias in the above, but I get a lot of pride from our groups keeping men alive. We haven't lost anyone in 2 years.
I couldn't imagine being brave enough for it, props to you for doing this!
https://livingworks.net/training/livingworks-asist/
I have no connection or affiliation with the organisation beyond being a delegate.
Most of my friends from high school and college are dead from random cancers, or drugs, or both.
I used to love skimming the new preprints on arXiv in the morning but now the signal is buried LLM drivel.
The one hobby I have that is kinda LLM-proof for now is speedrunning. Tool-assisted speedruns have always had their own categories for decades, and even if the LLMs or their descendants are used for routing or glitch hunting there’s still an element of human execution.
They simply said
> Why do you imagine yourself you be in competition with others while doing hobbies? Do you not find pleasure in the doing?
Which... I don't understand how that is oversimplifying. If your hobby is golf are you unable to enjoy golf because you're not as good as the pros? If your hobby is music can you not enjoy it because you aren't going to win a Grammy award?
If you enjoy programming or working on something an LLM can do... can't you just enjoy doing it without an LLM? Heck there are plenty of people that will probably seek it out because of how many people hate AI being used in programming.
It's realistic to want to be competitive. But as soon as your "hobby" becomes competitive, at least in this sense, it ceases to be a true hobby. It effectively just becomes work.
Nothin' wrong with the OP feeling disheartened by AI taking away his "hobby"/job, but AI will never be able to take away a "true" hobby because a "true" hobby is something where such external factors are irrelevant.
You'll notice that people who lift weights, run marathons, maintain a garden, tinker with models, etc., are effectively immune to AI. An AI won't lift your weights for you or tend to your garden for you. Maybe one day it could technically do that, but it doesn't matter, because you simply wouldn't have it do that for you. And it wouldn't matter if AI is doing that for others, because you're not competing with others. You're doing it for yourself.
Recently I started rebuilding a custom d3d9 hook for an old game and it was really fun and I planned to release it to the community. But before I could, many many others had an LLM do the same thing and my work was obsolete in a moment. There went that hobby... so now I'm hunting a new one...
I gain no joy from that, the joy I would have gained would be from other people using my work. Now they can produce my work without me entirely...
Then it's not really a hobby, no? Sounds more like a weird competition.
>But before I could, many many others had an LLM do the same thing and my work was obsolete in a moment. There went that hobby... so now I'm hunting a new one...
That sounds more like a job, at least with your perspective.
>I gain no joy from that, the joy I would have gained would be from other people using my work. Now they can produce my work without me entirely...
That's a job, man. Even if you're not getting paid money for it, you're not really doing it for yourself.
The point is a bit moot cause it's the same difference: you can get joy from a "job" and AI making that job obsolete sucks regardless. But if that's what you think a hobby is, then you don't have an actual hobby.
Go take up gardening.
If someone likes digging tunnels by hand, that's a hobby.
If someone is mad that tunneling companies make it hard for them to find "hand tunneling work", that's not a hobby. That's someone thinking their work is owed attention.
Go find a hobby that you like doing for yourself. Why do you think so many engineers turn to woodworking? It isn't because they think they're going to compete with Ikea.
This is hideous.
Sounds like you're saying tennis can't be a hobby. Nor videogames, nor making movies, writing stories, etc.
I mean, it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic: hobbies via a community is still a hobby. There is no requirement that to qualify as a hobby it has to be completely audience-free.
Didn't say that.
>Sounds like you're saying tennis can't be a hobby. Nor videogames, nor making movies, writing stories, etc.
Nope, those are not conclusions you can draw from what I said.
>hobbies via a community is still a hobby
Yup, don't disagree with that.
>There is no requirement that to qualify as a hobby it has to be completely audience-free.
Never said that.
What I did say as that producing a product which is meant to be consumed by others and which offers you no joy if it isn't consumed isn't a hobby- it's a job. Money doesn't need to be exchanged for it to be a profit-seeking activity. And to be clear: I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But what I am saying is that, fundamentally, AI can't make a proper hobby obsolete.
The OP is disheartened because his "hobby" is no longer relevant because AI can do his hobby better than him. Just take a step back and think about that: does it make any sense? Can you think of a reasonable example of a hobby where this dynamic can ever occur?
Like, AI has gotten pretty good at music. Does that mean everybody who was in a band for the fun of it all disbanded because AI can make music better than them? Of course not; they still enjoy making music. Now, a band who is trying to make money off of their efforts may be facing a different reality: if people are able to generate better music than what they can produce for way cheaper, then staying in a band for profit is a hard sell. But note that in both instances, these people (who are clearly operating within a community) are doing the same exact activity, but one set of people are doing it as a hobby while the other is doing it as a job.
And again, to be clear: I'm not saying the OP's feelings aren't valid. They wanted to produce something that others would find valuable, and AI made their efforts obsolete. That sucks, and they're clearly not alone. What I'm disagreeing with is the notion that that is a hobby. And that's an important distinction, because the OP is claiming they don't have a hobby anymore and I'm claiming they never did. They should have a hobby- a proper hobby- because it's important for humans to have hobbies for their own well being.
The thing with that poster is that the output is not wholly art but also utility, so the AI could fully subsume that thing, if the consumers only care for the utility part. And software in general, qua art, is not an art that anyone but the author consumes, except for video games. So you're kind of right but also I think OP was using software as an artistic outlet through a utility output, which was neither a job nor is his current despair unfounded.
OP if you want to keep writing software for others you have to abandon the utility function and make art, such as games. That will fix your issue. And no, AI cannot make games as good as a human can.
Imagine an apocalyptic zombie world, and what the last remaining man seek to do is... make video games for himself
I’m just happy that, for now, AI can hold a soldering iron or operate a multimeter.
As for gardening: the town where I grew up has these plots of land for vegetable gardens There’s a long waiting list to get one. You should see how the plot holders compete over who has the best vegetable beds.
People who were in the demoscene took joy in learning how to make a computer do things no one had done before and push the hardware to its limits. That's not as meaningful if someone can achieve the same thing by prompting an LLM.
A lot of hobbies are fun because of the human challenge in creating the output and knowing it was only achievable because someone had to take time to create it. Having an LLM accomplish the same thing absolutely devalues the fun in the hobby. Hobbies aren't 100% just about accomplishing something for yourself, even though if you sway to much into doing it for validation or to compete with others it can lead to burnout and lack of enjoyment.
Most hobbies are impractical... Machines can produce clothes much faster than a knitter, no chess player will beat the best computers, a boat can bring more fish to port in one trip than you can in a year, etc.
Mine is gardening. With relatively little effort, I can grow a decent amount of foods, much of it interesting varieties that are not grown commercially anywhere. I really doubt that we're going to see affordable humanoid robots out-competing me in this hobby any time soon.
That's OK, you don't have to be the best at any one thing. The important thing about any hobby, be it programming, skateboarding, or playing the piano, is that you feel personal satisfaction in doing it, not in the reactions of people to your work. Your enjoyment of a hobby should never be based on whether or not people like it, or even whether or not they want to use the thing you created. If you feel that a project that you are working on could be summed up in a single prompt that can be given to an LLM, then your job is not to work on the project directly, but rather to find what makes what you are doing unique. It doesn't even have to be technically interesting or bring any new ideas to the table, just the fact that somebody has put in effort into making something (regardless of completion or quality) gives it value.
>I've been learning the piano recently and striving to play more difficult songs is what makes it fun.
And are you going to give up learning piano because now AI can just generate piano music better than anything you can ever produce? No? Then what you're doing is a proper hobby, which contrasts with the OP who feels their efforts are no worthless because AI can just do it better. That's not really a hobby; it's a job.
(Apologies if I'm missing your point)
I do kind of understand it when it comes to programming, though. Hobby-like side projects often felt like they had some utility down the line, even if not directly applied. It's fun to show others what you've accomplished, to show off, maybe land a job from being noticed, etc.
I think music is a good example of sometimes you need to not have fun to have fun. Practice isn't really fun, but if you can put up with it you can have a lot of fun. So you can say that the not fun parts are part of the fun parts because it's what gives you the payoff. But when people then go and send you a Suno generated song, and say it's better than yours, it is them devaluing the "not fun" parts you had to put up with. I've had people do similar things to code projects I've done. It's a real buzz kill.
I also really value when musicians critique my songs, even when I feel defensive about it. Because then it's not about them devaluing my time, it's about them helping me grow, and they know how it feels to go through that process.
I exercise/lift weights, and you should too. My reps/effort/weight/PRs are a joke. I'm ~50% percentile on strengthlevel.com despite really fucking trying for ~6yrs now.
Many people are better than me at the EXACT SAME THING that I'm trying, at my bodyweight/age/sex. It doesn't discourage me. There is always room to improve. I track every workout, go to RPE 8-9, and try to do progressive overload. Seeing the numbers go up helps. I know it won't continue into infinity, especially as the decades go on... but yknow, I'm building a mentality here, not just a body. And when the weights go down, I'll be in the correct mental space for it.
I _loathe_ every. single. minute. of weightlifting. I'd rather be doing ANYTHING else. But I do it anyway. I think it teaches me things about life.
The only true goal is to grow and be better than yesterday. Effort is the reward.
I don't hate every squat. In fact, it's (I can't believe I'm saying this) somewhat satisfying in the moment whenever I do decide to go RIR=0. I'm wiped, but like, in a "hell yeah I did that" way.
But starting a session? I'm still as reticent as I was on day 1 lol. Maybe someday I'll pick up a sport or something as the others suggest, but I love programming too much to pick up other hobbies >_>
But if you're in the mentality of _not wanting_ to have anything, then all the advice in the world will bounce off you.
My suggestion, then, is to work on that mentality. Do something to get you anything, to get you out of that "Many of us have nothing" mindset. Build momentum. Physically doing something is often what it takes to break a mental barrier. The mind spirals and digs a hole, especially at night. But you get to participate in life/society/people during the day, which is why doing bodily things affects the mind and can break its loops.
You won't "win" on the first attempt. But you'll make progress. And the real win-condition is to keep playing.
The first step is always the hardest. I wish you the best.
That's not the population. It is the average among other weightlifters which is where you would expect to be. Most of the population can't do a pull up.
1. How utterly dogshit the vast majority of code is.
2. How utterly dogshit some of the most important or famous products and services are under the hood.
So what if LLMs can do something better? Our entire field and industry has been built on 'good enough'. God knows how many programming 'masterpieces' are on Github with 0 stars and 0 users.
I am more excited about programming by hand now more than ever. While I do not know what the future has in store for us in terms of careers, I still think I will always program by hand for fun just because I enjoy the feel of the flow-state/getting lost in something.
Most of us had/are having kids late. Now our parents are old/getting old and in need of our support. Along with that, parenting expectations have never been higher. So between shuttling kids from one thing to another all week, and taking parents to medical and other appointments, there isn’t much time or energy left to enjoy anything. It’s exhausting.
Combine that with someone already depressed, and any unfortunate trigger could push them over the edge. It’s partly anecdotal and some of what I’ve observed.
I had to step back from my career to focus on a mobility issue and at this point I don't know if the job path will continue to be there or even if I care. I'm focusing on small pleasures for now - cup of tea, exercise, peace and quiet. Music and film help provide a sense of meaning and catharsis.
I don’t know about everyone else. My approach is to cut costs to the absolute bone and live like a monk.
I have no idea what is happening to my employability. The only thing I can do is get as lean as possible. Thus - life in a van / car.
Why on earth should you be on the hook for alimony given your circumstances and situation? That makes zero sense.
If you don't know what to do, try to get involved with helping others in some way. It can be rewarding and give you a broader perspective on life.
I can confirm that this is how I am generally happy in life as a single. Underrated advice.
DON'T DO ONLINE DATING. Online dating has wrecked mating except for the most attractive 5%. Online dating is mostly a looks competition as first step. And you are saying you don't have the looks to win that game, so you need to play a different type of mating game.
Go to meetups instead via meetup.com and also look for local group activities happening on EventBrite - don't make finding a partner the focus or even the objective - go to a ton of meetups doing the things you love doing.
People form relationships doing common interests and having shared experiences. Have shared experiences with people and take finding a partner off the agenda - just enjoy the company of others. You never know what might happen but don't go looking for it.
I can tell you this for sure - many women are looking for a partner of character - someone kind who actually wishes to engage in relationship - a genuine person - and if time is taken to form relationship well in advance of the "will you be my girlfriend" pressure, then how you look is very often just not an issue. Have you noticed how when you get to know someone you see their character as much as their outward appearance? You might need to let people learn who you are gently and over time.
As for being charismatic or funny, as Oscar Wilde said: Be yourself - everyone else is taken.
The best thing you do is to just grow your network until you find someone you like.
Whenever I go out, I always collect phone numbers and contacts if I can.
Before you know it, you have 100s of people on your phone. Befriending women is also excellent, they can introduce you to other women if they feel like you are worthy!
Successful, long term, loving and happy relationships. Not top 5% most attractive people. Mostly nerds, some overweight, some not.
The most terrifying realization is that I've already spent pretty much half of my life yearning for love and not getting it. Even if I magically get married soon, it'll feel like a consolation prize.
I struggled with weight gain for many years due to crippling IBS but I found some relief while bulking from a certain probiotic. (Got lucky - dozens of things I tried including fodmap, etc. never worked. That said, the probiotic only helps - not solves... and doesn't solve my absorption issues)
Surgery, steroids, and a serious bulk are in order if you're serious.
I can make the pounds go up or down in a few weeks by eating more or less, but it goes mostly to the gut (Skinny fat = probably the worst look), and just enough to pad the arm muscles so it looks like I've never been to the gym in my life! Lately have just been embracing it and staying lean (Looks like 12% maybe?) while working out as much as I can stand.
I was about to do the steroids... (low dose test) I suspect that would genuinely fix it. But when I got the blood test back, test was smack in the middle of the normal range! So would have to shop around a bit, and trying not to lose my hair. But may still do it. A bulk counter-intuitively is not the move because it would just put me back in skinny-fat land.
I strongly encourage everyone to try keeping a gratitude journal - just write three positive things that happened to you today.it can really change the way you look at your life.
A lot of the suicidal ideation has to do with lack of agency and control over your situation in life. I am a firm believer that you need to take a step back and look at the possibilities in your life. You are not just a SWE/whatever your job is - you are a problem solver, someone with curiosity, someone dedicated someone who is playing other roles in life than just an employee - a friend, a parent, neighbour, child etc
If you feel like you have no control over the path you are in - change the path, don't stop the walk. You can move to a different career, different country, different partner. Sure some of our circumstances cannot be changed - but don't make the arbitrary standard of life you set for yourself determine whether your life is worth living.
Then, at the same time, other aspects of our lives -- family raising and career -- are trickier than ever. Family raising these days takes more time than ever [2] (which admittedly is good and bad). Career growth in the era of stagnant wages has been tough for many fields of work, and AI threatens many of the remaining ones.
It's hard to feel fulfilled these days: our social lives are poor, and we're constantly busy doing things that don't necessarily help us get ahead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50089921 [2] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/01/09/millenni...
They can’t escape because all those legal and moral responsibilities. They have to wait patiently until retirement —- if their hearts allow them to live that long.
It is over for a lot of us in IT. It isn't going to get better, it is going to get worse very quickly. Rather than tell myself a convenient lie, I'd rather try to figure out why to keep living in a world like this.
Anyone going through the same thing, I hope you find something worth living for.
You never know what awaits behind the corner.
But I only recently truly accepted that the life I am living (and have created for myself and family) is actually the dream. We so often miss the greatest times in our lives because we are too focused on the unknowns of the future.
What I do know is that I wish he could have known how many people would miss him.
It's like plenty of things are happening by inertia, but none of them bring any joy or make lots of sense. In such moments, I really envy people who have the courage to work on something they truly believe in. I have quite a few people to take care of, which requires financial resources, so I am not there yet.
For them, I keep going. I think because both the best and worst times in my life were roughly due to my own decisions, I always have the idea that I will get back to the good times.
Now I'm here staring at AI with the reality that if it makes my skills irrelevant I'll have no fallback, and I'll be at an age where reskilling is extremely hard and I'm still nowhere close to retiring.
But, what can you do. There's always been injustice in the world. You just never used to hear about it 24/7/365.
Now you wake up and read about it on the little screen, later you see it on the big screen, talk about it at work, then go to bed and read about it on the little screen again. I have friends who can't even talk to me for 30 minutes without just bringing the entire mood down with doomerism.
Idk, I just do sports, work and spend time with whoever I can in whatever little free time I have left over. I had to forcibly block every news site and social media via an app otherwise I'd get addicted again and become a cynic. Reddit is by far the worst for me, insta is 2nd.
Unlike 95% of people I speak to I actually love my life and enjoy my work, and just hope that AI doesn't steal that from me.
Growing up as a first generation immigrant in a country with some of the worst inequality in the world taught me to just ignore everything but what you need to do.
This is something I sometimes feel guilty about now that I have a comfortable life. But, I feel like trading that ignorance for constant awareness just leads to anxiety and guilt and is a poor trade I don't have to make.
Edit: also this is just 1 factor. There are other factors like actual poverty, loneliness etc. I don't meant to put forth the idea that it's purely the 24 hour news cycle and social media that's to blame, just 1 aspect I see most often in my life.
2 male friends from college died by their own hand within the last decade.
By most measures, they were successful professionals.
(Out of curiosity, if you don't mind the question).
It's crazy how much not being at home in their body disrupted every part of their life
Or if you want at will, it would be good to have some way to radically speed up changes. You're still looking at 3-8 years for some things.
And yet my children are grown now and mostly gone. I feel a profound sense of loss.
I feel like I'm entering the age where I'm a prime candidate for any myriad of diseases and I get so anxious every time I get a symptom. I go to the Dr. a lot. I went to the ER twice every year in the past 3 years. Ironically, its occurred to me that if I do have something terminal, I don't have to go on like this. And I like the thought of that. I'm both terrified of death and also really looking forward to it.
I used to enjoy my work, but AI has made it so that I just kind of show up and ask it for things. Anyone could do what I do. There's no sense of accomplishment in anything.
The worst thing about this is that I have every reason to be the happiest person here. So the fact that I feel the way that I do actually makes me a pretty bad person and that makes the whole thing feel a whole lot worse.
I’m curious, are you fully remote?
Have you tried anything to shake things up?
I can totally see why this is highest in my demographic.
An underlying cause is quiet desperation, there are elements of failure in ones' own life, perhaps pressure caused deliberately by others as they step on you to get to the top. Perhaps it's the fact you start to notice death, your parents, family, and friends. You also see the beginning of your own aged based health decline.
Until society can support genx and older with their goals at this age, instead of telling them to get talking in men's groups, or saying it's alright to show emotions to a generation that grew up without this culture, this will probably continue.
I don't have an answer to fix it, but what I do feel would help is if was treated as a high risk stage of life without stigma. So 45+ men or menopausal women, can take time off to adjust, spend more time with family and friends, and it be treated as normal process, like a sabbatical or maternity leave or just a wind down from society like partial retirement.
This will never happen obviously because it means as a society we have to have a better welfare state and drop the ingrained idea that if you're not working you're a problem (not working is NOT the same as not contributing or benefiting to society, but people conflate this).
Perhaps the AI age will force us to fix that due to mass unemployment, the way COVID kick started remote working.
However, since the article is about "men" and "suicide". There is substantial evidence that suggest women (especially young girls) attempt suicide more than men... while men are are more likely to die from a suicide [1]
Does gender have a role in suicide? Maybe. But I would hesitate to generalize too much.
[1] I asked chatgpt to back up my claims. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
I have been meditating on WHY I feel this way. On paper things are pretty good. I’m married. I have a job that is safe for now. I have kids. Two dogs. A house. Two cars.
But I feel really lonely and unseen and like I am a disappointment to everybody including myself. Like it makes sense I’m unseen because I’m unexceptional.
So I’ve done some things that have helped a little including scheduling lunches with friends and coworkers, more frequent date nights (especially double date nights), working out (setting and achieving even small pointless goals like mile time, distance, weight lifted, etc really helps).
All of that and it feels like I’m bailing water out of a sinking ship. It is barely enough to stay afloat and heaven help me if I skip a day or make a mistake…
It is hard to imagine doing this for another 30 years…
I used to think Soma was one of the more disturbing ideas in Brave New World. These days, I understand the temptation a little better.
I hope you can find something that helps you feel like you're not just treading water, though.
I'm not a Buddhist, but because of the stressors of my previous career I sometimes joke that I accidentally recreated the fundamental tenets of Buddhism in order to not wash out. One of the things I've come to realize is that the slog feeling you describe is something like the concept of 'samsara' or "cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence" per the smarter people that edited the Wikipedia article. But that it's still possible to find meaning and satisfaction within this paradigm.
Maybe another tool would be to try to mix it up more… so each day feels different.
Especially at work where we have always been busy but lately there is no break, no time for modernization or learning or technical debt, we just move from one epic to the next epic, no fanfare, no launch parties. Just each of us at home working alone.
The suffering will come out no matter what everyday for me personally no matter how comfortable the day is.
For years now I force it out with intention every day. I push to a discomfort for an hour or more a day usually doing some aerobic activity.
When my body starts failing as I get older I’ll need to explore other options but this is where I am now.
Surprisingly my brain has been rewired over the years to look forward to this controlled suffering and counterintuitively it’s made all of life much more enjoyable.
1. Recognizing just how many of my goals and beliefs were "unnatural," in the sense that they never really originated from within me. I never in my whole life cared about money or status, but I had internalized the message that I needed to stand out (which I actually hate to do), have some glorious career, etc etc. It was completely useless pressure because I was running as hard as I could in the completely wrong direction. When I actually pay attention to what I enjoy, it's a very short list: laughing with my wife, tackling small but meaningful challenges (I'm a physically awkward guy but I've felt proud learning some basic home repair skills), reading books, beer, and conversation. That's basically it. So now I make time for those things and tune out the noise of what I'm supposed to want.
2. I treat my job as a source of money and a place to potentially form relationships. I also consider it an opportunity to exercise craft and quality, but I recognize that's not the main reason I'm there—it's not why I was hired and it's not (solely) why I took the job. Giving work a smaller (but still meaningful!) place in my life solved a lot of emotional problems.
3. Recognizing that "permanent happiness" is not a very realistic goal for human beings, and it's easy to make yourself miserable trying to be happy. I referenced this in another HN comment, but I really like the book "The Happiness Trap." It essentially helps you stop trying to run so hard from feeling negative emotions, and being ok with having negative experiences and feelings reduces so much stress.
4. The last one was "productivity," which manifested in many insidious ways. The first was turning all of my free time into a resource for self-improvement. I actually enjoyed this earlier in life when I was building a skill that I found interesting, but it became my goal to just get "better," and that was more useless pressure. I also tried to fit in an impossible amount of tasks, and to come up with systems to manage it all. Accepting my own limitations and the fact that there will always be more than it is possible to do really helped take another big category of stress away. "Four Thousand Weeks" is a great book.
All of this is not to say it's easy, or that I'm 100% fine all the time now. I still get depressed, overwhelmed and so on at times. But overall my quality of life is way up, I enjoy my days a lot of the time, I can function, I feel my life moving in a good direction. Mostly it was a journey of subtraction rather than addition. For a long time I didn't realize how many things I could just put down.
The lack of friendship, care, love cannot be eased with money. I used to be crazy about startups. I used to want to live in New York (I am from Kolkata). I had a great run in my twenties but I crashed many years ago. Living in Germany helped a lot. I realized I was not loved or cared for. By myself mostly.
My parents love me but my dad has mental health issues which took a really bad toll on my childhood and teen years. I swept away the need for a love and care and replaced it with money. Many of us are doing this. The system needs most of us to slave. Now, I have been living the village life for about 6 years. I moved my parents as well. We have farms. I still write software, well, mostly generate them with LLMs.
There is a sense of purpose here that I started to feel. Over these last years, I have become more calm than I ever was. Happier, in a way I notice, every day. With less money than I ever had. Life is not about lots of achievements. We need meaning, love, purpose, care, friendships. We need slows walks, flowing water, walk in the rain, healthy food with zero labels. We need to grow our crops, care for animals, raise kids as a village.
I know I am typing this on a computer. But I no longer work for any tech company. I have a small consultancy client. I live as per a typical countryside routine. Most of my (whatever little savings) money is now invested in our farms where I work a few hours everyday, on time. Animals, dirt, mud, poop, crops, cleaning. All of it. Connected to how life is supposed to be. I used to hate glass buildings, still do.
Concrete, glass and everything about artificial spaces makes me sick. I am just one person, I do not have some research paper. But I know how I feel today vs a decade ago. Hope it helps.
amen to that. I took up cheesemaking as a hobby, which has led me to making contacts with farmers. I desperately want to dump everything and go all in on it. Just using my hands every day doing things with objects not made from silicon.
Kinda funny how I used to make fun of the Amish. Now I realize their lifestyle is closer to what I want than ever (barring the religious stuff I mean)
I’m in the stereotypical category. I’m college educated, have a successful career doing what I enjoy, have a great house, wife and kids.
I deal with OCD, negative thoughts I can’t get control of, low self esteem, paranoia, and trust issues. It’s impossible for me to feel loved. However, I’m one of those silent sufferers and no one would be the wiser for the most part. Death feels like a sweet escape after having a few drinks. However, I’m too OCD to actually kill myself because I have too many final tasks and arrangements to finish up so that I can leave everything perfectly in order. The guilt aspect is serious too.
Middle-age is a serious thing to face. It’s a super scary time on all fronts, because if you don’t already have your shit together, then you’re completely fucked if something happens.
I am a single man with no dependents who is struggling to work due to burnout, and I perceive that we are really not far off a world where young people will take seriously the idea that older people like me have had our time. I do not expect to be able to work for much longer because why would they let us keep our jobs or get new ones when we are taking away theirs? What can we teach them when we have built the tools that will destroy their livelihoods and wrecked the environment in which they live? Why should they listen to us at all?
Leaving a bit early may be the morally responsible thing for me to do. Understanding that living until I am dependent on care from the young is not going to be a good time when we are a despicable, despised generation, it’s an oddly liberating thought.
You are the exact opposite of the people that need to leave early. Stick around and wait for when we come out the other side. I think these kids are going to figure it out, with our help.
(Granted, millennials have to reckon with the AI CEOs being theirs, technically.)
Between climate change, AI, economic instability, political catastrophes, various actual and impending wars, social media bot farms and trad media content farms, and entire industries that exist to lie about what's happening and pressure everyone to work and consume and live an ideal lifestyle with ideal productive values - there's quite a lot going on.
Personally I have given up on hoping for a nice planned and well executed life up through retirement. My own skill set just isn't valued enough by the markets to set myself up separated from the festering human pits. Im just going to go for as long as I can just to see how things go at this point. I always did enjoy thrillers and tragedies, it sucks to be in one but it is better than being in nothing at all. And if the world just keeps getting crazier, maybe ill just join them in being crazy and maybe hopefully go out with a bang near the end.
The last thing I will do is die alone, or worse, confined to a nursing home, abused by underpaid staff. Yes: I have tried over 15 medication's, therapy, you name it. I came to the conclusion a few years ago that accepting that my life has an end, and they I will make that decision to end it, has been comforting. I feel like it's the only, perhaps last control, I might ever have
Back when we were in high school we were aiming to do the least amount of work to get through the year and spend the rest of the time hanging out with our mates.
A big part of our fault is also that we accept to get dragged by women into a territory that is not ours which is made up of large amount of introspection, extremely fine margins between good times and awful times and walking on eggshells with regards to social cues , the avoidance of social faux passes, planning years and years into the future down to the smallest detail .
That's the perfect recipe for depression for guys
We should go back to the basics and hangout with our mates trying to do the least amount of work as possible, play sports, banter with each other, take everything much less seriously and when we feel the need to have sex shoot for ONS or visit escorts or prostitutes and then go back to our mates.
At the individual level the pinnacle of happiness is teenage years and early adulthood.
Why wouldn't a rational individual not seek to prolong the behaviors in which one engaged during the pinnacle of happiness
romantic? really?
I had an assumption that most of human history, marriage was more of an arranged marriage thing. With a lot of "women being treated as property", "heirs required for transfer of wealth", etc notation.
And there were also societies that were polyamorous in nature?
We are in a new world now, there is no need to force traditions (or worse yet, false traditions) that frankly doesn't seem to work anymore
She said: “The evidence is clear that successive governments have failed to deliver on their promise to reduce suicide rates and make suicide prevention a priority. Today must act as a wake up call. The current approach is not working; we need meaningful action and proper funding if lives are to be saved.”
In any other era I would have been a useless drain on society and yet I happened by an incredible stroke of luck to be born at a time when the few skills I do have perfectly aligned with a career niche. It's been a good few decades. Now I just go back to being a useless nobody but at least I have my memories and my investments.
Remember, class, because this will be on the test: capitalism is the superior economic system because it elevates people who allocate capital efficiently. Just don't ever look too closely at the input and output functions of any such definition of "efficiency" (hint: they conveniently tend to elevate people who are skilled at flattering capital owners).
Who can blame them?
After having failed romantically one too many times and having an average dev job AI will probably take from me, that won't allow me to FIRE for 6 more years even if I can keep it, life's not fun for me at 35 already, how will it be at 55, all wrinkled up, frail, probably cancer stricken and with no future potential left?
Yeah ....all frail and falling apart here.
Seriously,look at the age at which people run for president. We got a guy whose been living his best life by stealing from the US public in his late 70s. 50 is the new 30 after all
And if you're wrinkled and frail at 55 years old then that's your own fault. Put on some sunscreen and go for a bike ride.
I wrote this about overcoming the suicidal urge, what I learned beating an “incurable” diagnosis without meds, and how it’s informed my coaching of some of the most successful unicorn founders in history.
My friends who are older are pessimistic as fuck. Several have been unemployed for lengthy stretches due to ageism in American hiring practices, which has resulted in their life crumbling around them as they lack the resources for basic upkeep anymore. I see that and shudder for myself, wondering if we’ll finally get this sorted before I hit my 50s or if this is just going to be a shitty fucking thing for the foreseeable future.
Social activity is hard for middle-aged men. We spend several hours a day commuting to and from work, which eats into our social budgets. Hard to host dinners, attend game nights, or go on dates when 80% of your day is spoken for work alone in some capacity (preparing for, getting to, performing, commuting home), which leaves us isolated. Most of our peers have paired off, so they have a stronger support structure - yet they too disappear at alarming rates.
At every conceivable intersection for the past fifty years, we’ve chosen to make life more hostile and less comfortable. I’m tired of feigning surprise at what, at least to me and my circles, is so sickeningly obvious.
We shifted from a sole-provider/homemaker model of couples to a dual-income-required model, at the same time our choices on car dependency and suburban sprawl came back to bite us in the ass. The working from home era was great for socializing because we could agree on small group nights if we were all feeling well, knowing we didn’t have huge commutes ahead of us after work and with the extra money in our pockets from lowered work costs; RTO mandates killed that again, as did the sudden jump in real estate costs, inflation, and stagnating wages in the face of AI investment.
That’s just the average, too. For edge cases like me in unorthodox households or living arrangements, it’s even harder.
And nothing increases the desire for other people to be sociable with you than walking a dog.
This is my pack: https://i.imgur.com/hnoioNy.jpeg