Good advice, however I find myself quite struggling with the third point.
I recentyl turned fifty, with a decent career up to now: software engineer, sold a company I co-owned some time ago. My daughter spent years figthing cancer, so that was also a big part of my life in the last ten years.
Now things are better and I cannot seem to find decent interest in anything. I still love to code from time to time, but I am more in CTO or managing roles. I exercise on a regular basis, I eat quite well (vegetables a lot, fish, a little bit of meat, everything home made), I try to pursue some hobby like playing music, which I enjoy, but it is quite hard to find the time to do more than half an hour per day. I am also trying to take care of friendships as much as I can.
Despite all this I have a very hard time to find anything that motivates me, and I really wonder how I will go on in my professional life for another 10 years. Clearly I need some peace-bringing meaning, but it is very hard to find, and I do not even know how to start looking for it. So yes I think a meaning is paramount in a good mental health, but it is quite difficult to find!
> Clearly I need some peace-bringing meaning, but it is very hard to find, and I do not even know how to start looking for it.
there is almost no way to say this without sounding preachy, at least to my american english ear. But. it’s true nonetheless.
that meaning? it’s in your neighbors, and you find it in direct, human service to them. There are many, many ways to serve, and one of them fits you. It doesn’t have to be some huge thing, and i’ve found that it helps not to talk about it, just do and be open to the moment.
I would like to argue that this painful state of seeking meaning is a good thing.
For most of human history we have been stuck in a Stockholm syndrome, a cozy state of delusion, that has been perpetuated by each generation.
The more people find that old mental systems (religions, woo, etc.) are fraudulent and are confronted with this issue the higher the chances someone discovers/creates a paradigm shifting philosophy.
Many people got excited in the past two decades for something like this, yet I feel the wave has dissipated without achieving much, and many have fallen prey to charismatic charlatans.
Maybe. That is how many of humanities advancements have been realized. People being unsatisfied and believing there can be a better way, believing there can be a better explanation, etc..
Even so, I do worry about the future.
I fear, for multiple reasons, that we risk entering a new kind of dark age.
The combination of the power of the internet to propagate disinformation and quackery at greater speed and scale than it is debunked.
The development of language model AI's which enable at scale the hallucination of meaningless content masquerading as legitimate content.
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For having spent a long time in hospital (France), I can tell that the beeps of the machines are completely useless. It is maybe very ok for someone spending 2 or 3 days in the hospital, but for people spending 3 to 6 or even more months in hospital (this was the case here), it is completely terrible and the sleep deprivation goes against any good care practice.
Situation is the following:
- First you have beeps every few seconds in a floor with 20 or 30 rooms. The beeps, after a few days working in the hospital, is just a common noise for nurses and doctors. The human brain is wired to ignore repetitive noise in your environment. Basically no one cares about the beeps after a few weeks in the hospital, and the beeps turn into routine noise. They should be exceptional to be an alarm. Constant alarm is not an alarm anymore.
- Then there is no way to tell if the beeps are serious (dysfunction or else) or irrelevant. For example infusion pumps beep 2/3 minutes before ending as pre-alarm, then beeps when ending the infusion, and keep beeping until a nurse stops it. If you are in a room with 5 infusion pumps delivering medicines and one heart rate monitor with high and low alarms, you are guaranteed to get beeps in the room almost constantly, which kills the whole point for the beeps in the first place. They become useless. It is even counter productive. Not mentioning beeps of low-battery for infusion pumps or other devices which are plug into A/C. Very often the beeps cannot be de-activated, so the medical device vendor is safe for a legal point of view.
- children spending 3 or 6 months in hospital are seriously impacted by the 6 to 9 wake-ups during the night. Every kid with a leukemia or other form of cancer spends 3 to 6 months in hospital at least. This is a lot of kids (about 15 000 per year in the US). Nothing is done to help those kids sleep better during those months in hospital. they have a double burden: cancer and sleep deprivation.
It is obvious patients should be monitored, but today we must admit sleep is the least of worry for all caregivers and medical devices vendors. It is possible today to design sleep-friendly monitoring devices. Machines states can be displayed on a central deck, nurses and doctors can have a smartphone or smartwatch with alarms connected to the machines, machines could only beeps when a care giver is in the room thanks to NFC, blinking lights in the corridor could be used as well.Stupid questions that are in the patient file should be answered in front of the computer, not at 2 a.m. during the night.
In any case too much noise is bad for the patients and kills the whole point of an alarm.
It's hard to get staff working within a bureacracy to acknowledge this sort of thing, however. Only bureacratic procedures are real. Attempts to reform merely add to the bureacracy.
I recentyl turned fifty, with a decent career up to now: software engineer, sold a company I co-owned some time ago. My daughter spent years figthing cancer, so that was also a big part of my life in the last ten years.
Now things are better and I cannot seem to find decent interest in anything. I still love to code from time to time, but I am more in CTO or managing roles. I exercise on a regular basis, I eat quite well (vegetables a lot, fish, a little bit of meat, everything home made), I try to pursue some hobby like playing music, which I enjoy, but it is quite hard to find the time to do more than half an hour per day. I am also trying to take care of friendships as much as I can.
Despite all this I have a very hard time to find anything that motivates me, and I really wonder how I will go on in my professional life for another 10 years. Clearly I need some peace-bringing meaning, but it is very hard to find, and I do not even know how to start looking for it. So yes I think a meaning is paramount in a good mental health, but it is quite difficult to find!