Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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A psychiatrist will almost certainly try to remediate your feelings of burnout, rather than help you identify what you'd rather be doing instead - but if you're depressed, you should still go see one. I'm pretty surprised to hear how useless the career counselor was; that must have sucked. If you can afford to consult one of the best in the industry, does that also mean you can afford to (metaphorically) lie on a beach for several months until you develop alternative interests?

What do you do in your spare time - read, watch movies, follow sports...? If so, what are your preferences? Also, while I don't suggest wallowing in your feelings of depression, it is worth learning to listen to your depressed mental monologue for clues about whatever-it-is that you are not doing because you're stuck on an IT treadmill, 'eg 'to think that I used to dream of being an Olymic figureskater but I ended up writing middleware....grar...'. Most likely you still have dreams, but being mired in depression means everything is covered in a sludge of negativity and you 'know' that none of them are achievable now so that you have trained yourself not to let your imagination run free.

I don't really have a lot of motivation, so what I do with my spare time is to waste it. I am naturally talented musically, but have little formal training, and I can't feed my family with that. I don't have enough money to lie on a beach for an extended time without fucking my savings.

Good advice about trying to let go of the things that are holding me back. I've thought more about going back to school, but not sure what I'd want to study.

Well, music is indeed a super-risky career since the bimodal distribution skews towards Poverty....Megabux, although as someone who makes electronic music I am only familiar with the left end of that graph ':->

But it would give you something nice to do outside of work, and you can leverage technology as much or as little as you prefer. This would at least 'stop the rot' by compensating yourself for The Job You Hate in the short term, and might help you open up mentally to other possibilities int he longer term. If you're naturally talented you certainly have an edge over me.

I wouldn't discard your IT career just now. You're likely to be hating some particular aspects of your current job (long hours/little vacation? monotonny? stupid management? dull coworkers? feeling of isolation?). If I were you, I'd try to pinpoint them and try to work myself into a position (most likely by changing jobs, maybe going into a different specialisation) where they aren't such an issue. Even if that transition isn't easy to accomplish, it'll give you some goal to strive for, which in itself works wonders for mental well-being.

Please, don't make any long range decisions like school right now. Try a week of walking out in the sunshine and fresh air whenever you have time, instead of just wasting the spare time. This will help you sleep, and sleep will help everything.

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