> But the work is tedious enough that I am too tried in the evening to do something interesting.
Same; sounds normal.
> Have you been able to detach yourself from the constant flow of information and focus on your own stuff?
I put the xbox in the closet for while and made it just a little harder to indulge the impulse. Don't tell yourself you have to swear off podcasts or HN or whatever forever—just ask yourself if you'd be willing to try a brief but significant break, and make sure you have some ideas for what you'll replace it with.
I also rarely spend free time programming. Once in a while I'll get an idea and the motivation to do so, but I find that if I spend a significant chunk of my productive/creative energy during the day on work, I'm much happier if I then spend the rest of the day socializing, exercising, doing stuff around the house—basically anything not in front of the computer.
Habit change can be daunting, but the hardest part is often recognizing something that you want to change, and you're already there! Good luck with the rest :)
> A common argument I've heard is "well ok, maybe layoffs don't help the company directly, but it is an opportunity to get rid of dead weight". Sure, except presumably at-will employers could have done that at any time if they had hard data that suggested this pool of employees weren't working out.
I'm guessing letting an individual go carries higher risk of a wrongful termination suit than a bulk layoff, so there is still an incentive to mask performance-based decisions with economic justifications.
I share this perspective. I don't have acute trauma behind my anxiety and depression, but I have been through periods of poor self-care wrapped up with those states, and I relate to OP. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, and spending time with even just one person who likes you are pillars of (mental) health, and without them, all the other tools (meditation, psychedelics, therapy) don't seem to have much leverage.
Not having read the much more authoritative response above (or any such), I'll foolishly offer the one fact about trees I recall from boy scouts or outdoor school:
The core of a tree is much less alive than the bark—so much less, in fact, that if you walk in a circle around a tree scraping off a thin strip of bark and make sure to stop where you started, the tree will die.
Having googled this just to be sure, I also learned that trees can only lose up to about a quarter of a circumference of bark (in the fashion describe above) before facing mortal peril.
What's extreme about it? I'm new to ML, but this seems great from a testing and verification perspective. I actually feel like Christmas came early, here, because I'm eager to explore novel model architectures, and having a small and easily manipulable dataset to experiment with seems perfect for that.
36, relatable. My recall and retention both seem to improve with all the basic (yet rarely completely implemented) grandmotherly advice you can imagine: sleep regularly, enjoy as much daylight as possible, exercise daily, eat the rainbow, meditate (ok, grandma never included this one), spend time with people that make you feel good.
is what I saw as the primary difference. Whether that's going to pan out in reality as well as it does in HN comments is "the devil's in the details" though
> But the work is tedious enough that I am too tried in the evening to do something interesting.
Same; sounds normal.
> Have you been able to detach yourself from the constant flow of information and focus on your own stuff?
I put the xbox in the closet for while and made it just a little harder to indulge the impulse. Don't tell yourself you have to swear off podcasts or HN or whatever forever—just ask yourself if you'd be willing to try a brief but significant break, and make sure you have some ideas for what you'll replace it with.
I also rarely spend free time programming. Once in a while I'll get an idea and the motivation to do so, but I find that if I spend a significant chunk of my productive/creative energy during the day on work, I'm much happier if I then spend the rest of the day socializing, exercising, doing stuff around the house—basically anything not in front of the computer.
Habit change can be daunting, but the hardest part is often recognizing something that you want to change, and you're already there! Good luck with the rest :)
1) Not.