About seven years ago, I was working full-time at an amazing but consuming job, raising a family, and surviving the pandemic. I was also writing every single day on a large textbook. Then within the span of about six months, my dog got sick and died, my mom got cancer, and a few friends and family members died unexpectedly. I kept writing every day while dealing with all of that. I literally wrote in the waiting room while my mom was getting CT scanned. I kept working on the book as the pandemic reared its head and politics went insane.

I got through it all and finished the book, but I haven't felt the same since. It's like some nerve in my soul got burned to a cinder and is no longer able to fire.

I've spent a lot of time in therapy which has been amazing, but I'm still not what I'd call all better.

My hypothesis is that I spent so much time compartmentalizing emotions like anxiety, grief, sorrow, and hurt in order to keep moving forward that I got too good at stuffing them in a box. The only way to avoid being overwhelmed by them was to sever my connection to all of my feelings, which meant I lost access to joy, humor, whimsy, and passion too.

I'm working to rebuild that connection, but it doesn't come back easily.

Something that helped was re-connecting with the past version of myself by going through some truly ancient computer backups. To some extent it put me back into my prior mindset, and so now at least I’m doing things explicitly because I want to and find doing them enjoyable.

I can only theorize on what might finish returning me back to how I used to be, but I think probably the most beneficial thing would be a hard break from most of my responsibilities for an extended period of time which I can then dedicate to myself, probably somewhere between 6 months and 2+ years. That’s not exactly practical though because I have a mortgage and bills to pay.

I've been rehabbing from a severely broken ankle the past nine months and in physical therapy the other day, my therapist said, "You'll be in a better headspace if we come up with a concrete goal to work towards. What's something you'd like to be able to do with your body that we can work towards that would be fun?"

And I just, like, stared ahead blankly for a while without having an answer.

> Something that helped was re-connecting with the past version of myself by going through some truly ancient computer backups.

That's a good idea. I do feel like part of my internal disconnection also has to do with being disconnected from my past self as well. It's like I sort of forgot who I am.

And this is my anonymous online diary.

Oof, yeah, I know that feeling.

> I have talked to a therapist about it, but didn't get anyway.

My understanding is that variance in therapists is very high. Given that it's one of the most intimate relationships you can have, it really requires finding the right one that fits your specific needs. It may be worth trying to find another.

Heh, this is so poignant for me, but for me, it's going back and reading old journals/writings - I write a lot, so much that most people don't want to read it all, so a lot of it when I was younger went into journals. One entry in particular was after I had just lost my father, in front of my eyes, in kind of a violent/traumatic way - I was in my early early 20's and had no idea what I had been experiencing was some kind of PTSD, but knew enough to know something weird was happening to me, so I wrote everything down in a little journal by hand.

Recently, in a fit of frustration, I picked it up (this is now 15 or so years ago) and I found an entry I had forgotten about - a wildly delusional (at that time, if you had known me, you would have considered it delusional) passage where I aspired to lift myself out of my situation and said I wanted to study CS, or as I put it that time, "something with computers," and even named my dream university I ended up transferring to in the end. This was many years before any of it ended up becoming reality, and I became proud of my past self, and I felt that connection a little bit of what you are describing. Until I read that I had no idea that where I ended up was exactly where I intended, I had lost sight of that.

You know, actually, I think this is what it is too. I had a terrible therapist for ~7 years that always tried to get me to avoid/mitigate uncomfortable emotions but I always felt it was making the issue worse. When I broke away from therapy in favor of things like meditation/philosophy, in some sessions, I felt ancient grief/pain bubbling up in ways that were overwhelming, but always felt way better afterwards. This isn't easy to do though and is taxing in itself. Some people need substances to do it, or hypnosis. I do think it's something to do with this though.

> in some sessions, I felt ancient grief/pain bubbling up in ways that were overwhelming, but always felt way better afterwards.

For me, the major reason I might have excessively compartmentalized things[0] was that whenever I let myself feel the grief/pain/uncertainty - and early on, I was trying to process them instead of avoiding them - it would be overwhelming, excruciating, and never made anything better. After a year or two of what felt like inexhaustible supply of the same painful emotions, of nothing really changing or looking like it was about to, I finally took the opposite course, and ended up more-less where you and 'munificent are.

Took almost a decade to get to that point, and it's what you and others describe in this subthread. Some kind of emotional detachment. The emotions are there, but mostly weak, and most of the time I feel like I'm just observing them, and occasionally fighting them when they get too strong, too close to me. "Severed connection" seems like a very good analogy. I'm still afraid of revisiting the past, because I can't afford becoming non-functional for a year or two, like it happened the first time around. There's this part of me, that source of motivation, somewhere - but it feels like it's on life support, in a coma, waking up every other year for a few moments.

Meanwhile, when someone asks me what I like, or what I'd like to do, I draw a blank. It's not anhedonia, but something else - something that shuts down my brain whenever this question gets asked (or I ask it myself).

--

[0] - And developed what I feel is like instinctive fight-or-flight response around negative emotions: solve the problem or run away, but get rid of the emotion and do it NOW NOW NOW!

One of the many wise things my therapist said to me once: "The thing you're supposed to do with feelings is feel them."

It sounds so dumb, but for people like me who have spent their lives training themselves to compartmentalize and analyze their feelings, it was an essential reminder that I was denying myself the critical experience of actually sitting there and feeling them.

But you aren't supposed to put those feelings in the box forever, just until there's a better time to take them out and process them.

as for your second, that’s often, if not always, an unconscious action

I'm saying that mature people are able to compartmentalize at least some of them in their day to day life. Losing a child or some other insurmountable horror is excluded.

What I'm talking about is if you have a bad day at work, you don't yell at the poor cashier working the fast food drive through window when you're picking up dinner on the way home.

Thankfully I had the resources to self-fund an extended sabbatical, and I left my job. In many ways this has been incredible and has helped immensely. But in many ways, it made the grief even more central in my life because I was no longer spending my days solving other people's problems.

Therapy has been immensely helpful, but I've struggled with integration. To this end, I'm about to experiment with psychedelic-assisted therapy. I've tried a lot of things up to this point, but I'm actually pretty optimistic about this. We'll see.

I'm now in this weird middle place where I recognize a growing need to do something useful and to work on big problems. But I'm also depressed and struggling to imagine returning back to what I was doing. I think the 2nd half of my career may be simpler and more focused.

You might find it interesting. Anyway best of luck healing! You’ve been through a lot.

If you mean writing the book, then I'm glad I worked on it while going through all that stuff. And, in many ways, adding the book on top of that stress actually helped because it was a thing I could control and feel mastery over while surrounded by other things I had no control over me.

If you mean all of the other bad stuff that happened, well, no I would prefer it if none of that had happened but the universe doesn't seem to care.

If you mean how I psychologically compartmentalized things and the long-term consequences of that... I think I probably did about the best I could have in the situation. There are definitely psychological tools I wish I had had before that stuff happened to me that would have helped (like giving myself actual time to process feelings when I could). But given what I had going in, I think I did OK.

~10 years ago that was there in a big way for tech. It was peak YC prestige. HBO's Silicon Valley brought the start-up struggles/drama into the mainstream. Most people who worked hard were rewarded. Large in-person tech meetups provided a venue to share your success story.

The tech industry now feels bloated, mundane, low-value/rent-seeking, or as a net-negative for society. It isn't fun to share your success since it comes off as boasting instead of inspiring.

How I miss 2014. I was productive, optimistic, and energetic in a way I can barely comprehend now.

Not only for whether it's ever worthwhile in your role and how you benefit, but also for pacing.

For example, if you're a startup cofounder, in a good team, and you win big if the startup wins big, then you might put in that 110% frequently -- but you save your superhuman 200% bursts for emergencies, so that you can reliably put in close to 100% every day, not start making fatigued huge mess-ups.

For another example, if you're a series B startup hire, being paid below-market, with 0.01% stock options that will never be worth exercising, and the founding team turns out to be bad at everything except raising ZIRP money and beer-pong-- then you should still do right by your good teammates, and also be professional in general, but don't spend years burning yourself out at 110% while watching the dysfunctional company just urinate away everyone's contributions. Spend that extra 10% energy of yours in searching for a better situation.

Concretely, it assumes a lot of agency.

The words “major life calamities and personal loss”, were key words that really change the amount of agency it’s reasonable to assume.

I could add more examples that touch on these extreme situations, but I was trying to give examples familiar to most of HN.

Even if taking it negatively impacted loved ones (in the short term at least)?

Personally, I just don’t know how to make that kind of decision well beyond a certain point.

And maybe it seems like there's no good option or way out -- but they're too overextended to reason about whether that's actually true.

In those times, if you're in the position of advice-giver, one of the best things you can do is to also help relieve some of that overwhelming/unsolvable pressure that's the most immediate barrier. Maybe the most common examples is to offer crash space.

With the immediate barrier relieved, then you can pair that with now-viable advice, like they need to quit that toxic environment minimum-wage job, or do couples-counseling or break up with that troubled relationship, or move out of that bad locale, or try out for this better job opportunity you can refer them to, or whatever the bigger problem is.

I went through a similar period near the end of my studies and can relate to your current disposition.

I was pretty directionless in my younger years, but reasonably smart and driven. I was in the Army and in my late 20s and decided to get into software and went back to school full-time while still serving in the Army. Possibly somewhat predictably, I also went through a divorce at the same time. But I was awake at 3 AM or so every single day, studying for several hours, going to work, studying at lunch, coming home, studying some more, on and on for a few years, and that was all I did. It was work of some sort, nonstop, with no other concerns.

It "worked." I got through the program, re-skilled, left the Army, at this point have quadrupled any salary I ever earned before getting into software.

But beyond that basic brutality of the experience of being mentally on at all waking hours on all days, and those waking hours often being well beyond 16, I ended up going through severe spinal degeneration in my mid 30s, obviously exacerbated if not outright caused by sitting too much, that ended in three surgeries in the span of 16 months, several years of intermittent disability and forced bed rest, cerebrospinal fluid leakage, an inability to walk without assistance for a while.

I ultimately got through it and seem to be basically okay in my mid 40s. Was it worth it, though? I have no idea. I'll certainly never do anything like that ever again. Physical health has become and will remain for the rest of my life my number one priority. I might deprioritize eating properly, sleeping enough, and consistently working out for a few weeks or even months here and there, but for years at a time? Never again. It's not just the severity of the experience itself. I'm not even sure the experience itself is all that bad. You get so high on the feeling of productivity and accomplishment that the difficulty of what you're doing barely even registers, and time flies when you're occupied nonstop. But I have no way of ever knowing how much it contributed to effectively losing half a decade of my life to a level of physical disability that doesn't normally happen to a person before they turn 70, during what was supposed to be the prime of my life.

It's possibly the reason I don't have kids. My wife at the time left me and by the time I remarried, I was in such bad shape that I couldn't even pick up my cats, didn't feel capable of raising a child when I couldn't even consistently get out of bed, and decided a vasectomy was a better option at that point. Again, I have no way of ever knowing if this would have happened anyway, but assuming the answer is even maybe no, was it worth to give up the chance of having kids to burn a little bit more brightly when I was 28? Fuck no, that isn't worth it.

I am the first generation from my dad's side, who descended from slaves, to get a college degree (or really HS degree if we only include my paternal lineage). So it was a big deal. For me though, my career hasn't been the blazing success I'd expected it to have been, and I didn't end up doing remotely what I thought I would do. I 10x'd my income from college within 5 years, which felt like a big deal, til inflation blew the crap out of that, my meager savings were all but obliterated due to a series of bad financial moves/timing, and I am starting to hit a ceiling where 2xing my salary in a few years is no longer a reasonable expectation. So, I feel stagnant and unsatisfied, and I guess in my worst moments I'd prefer to have never gone through it. My life's materially better, I'm not at risk of starving anymore, and I got some health problems fixed. yet, some of the best people I met while in college I tossed aside because there simply was no time for them + what I was trying to do, very honestly - so I am very alone now, and tossed aside things like settling down in favor of getting ahead, which was another thing I had to kind of give up for a while.

But, I suspect, deep down, I would have done it anyway, or I wouldn't have ended up here. I didn't want to do it then either but I did, for whatever reason.

Recently I reconnected with someone who was a close friend early in college, before I switched to "I don't have time to hang out" mode. It turns out my friend also recently started slowing down after a hectic early career, and was open to reconnecting. It's not the same as back then—for one thing, we live in different states and can only occasionally visit each other in person. But still, it feels like something in me is patched up, even if not perfectly whole, which the busy years had torn apart. (Therapy has also helped a lot.)

I don't want to assume anything about your situation, but if there is anyone from college that you did have a meaningful connection with back then, and if you're willing to risk the disappointment of finding that they are now too busy / not interested, you could try getting in touch with them to catch up. It could be that they too are done with their hectic years and looking to connect with people more. Maybe you've already tried this, but I'm mentioning it in case you haven't.

Of course, it fell apart in the most obnoxious way possible. We assumed we'd be receiving a series B, that didnt appear, and then tried to monetize aggressively at the last second, got some buyout offers that would have been life-changing money for me at that time, that for whatever reason the founders/board would not accept, boom, no paycheck 6 months later followed by a few months of being shopped around for no pay, basically held hostage, then collapse.

I am kind of glad it happened, I laugh at equity offers or "bonuses" now from startups. The one piece of equity that has cashed on me in my career so far was in the very very low 5 figures. Lol. Less than a cost of living adjustment when averaged over the course of that employment.

Notwithstanding the other intense stress I went through in that career, I feel that I used something up making it through that. If you want more of the story feel free to look through my comments; I've talked about it in more depth a few times.

Ironically this describes it perfectly in a way that no single word can. It's somehow more than burnout, it's an actual alteration. I've tried to come up with a psychological explanation. It's something like the brain recognizing a very large pattern, or more specifically a dead end. The mind consists of feedback loops that must tie back to rewards. Modern work is so abstract from the rewards, computer programming even more so. I think we grow up developing our psyche like some list of rules we cobble together over time, but it's not a unified theory. Eventually the brain realizes it's working harder and harder with no tangible payout, the contradictions in the rules accumulate tension. Life somehow tricks you into spinning your wheels at full speed, nothings really happening, you're not sure how you got there, and you don't really have an exit plan. Then it all comes crashing down.

I quit the job, finished my degree, and still struggle with the chest pains and celiac disease.

So I feel this. I pushed through the stress for a time, and it took something from me--goodbye delicious gluten.

Burn out, depression, emptiness come out due to perceiving unfairness with respect to the outcomes. Even if someone ends up overcoming adversity or overachieving, the serotonin response just isn't there, because that is not how it worked in the first place.

If you look at a static point in there will always be grievances, if you look at an imaginary future there will always be grievances but if you have been mentored to look this as a movie, see where you started, and you see what you have ended up achieving it will be a lot brighter. Most of the people do good with their lives.