I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
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Me: having a hard time mentally and emotionally Someone: “You need to pray to God to make your troubles go away.”
“Nothing happens in god’s world by mistake.” “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Etc etc.
When 1 in 6 women has been sexually assaulted in their lives (and many men and NB folks), that’s a really fucked up thing to say. You never know what someone’s been through, and I’ve personally been through a lot of awful things. I guess it helps some people to tell themselves this kind of shit, but it is impossible to me to think of any kind of meaning that would make being a victim of violent crime “positive” or “worth it” or “a learning experience” blah blah blah. I think the term for that is “toxic positivity.”
So either “everything happens for a reason” is utter bullshit, or god is a sadistic fucking asshole.
I’m a Christian but I support the school of thought that says “shit happens”.
Another problem with the thinking “everything happens for a reason” is that it can lead to belief in “the just world”. When one thinks that life is fair you start to believe that bad things only happens to bad people, ie they deserve it.
Am I supposed to upvote this because it’s awful advice or downvote it because it’s depressing advice?
It seems like this person either had success with their advice or had nothing to say, but felt the need to say something.
My favorite advice for clinical depression is “just snap out of it.”
Is it inappropriate or off topic? Then you downvote.
Anything else? Upvote or abstain
Get an advanced education, work harder, never be the one to say, “That is not my job” was the worst advice I could ever receive. I got into debt and was abused and exploited by my employers.
Oof. A lot of “helpful advice” about jobs is helpful not for the workers, but for the owning class.
The problem is that when the people giving that advice were working, it was great advice. Companies took care of their employees. Tenure mattered. Companies today are mindless corporate blobs that only care about spreadsheet numbers and the next quarter’s results.
Maybe in some situations in the past owners were better to their workers, but in many cases there is an unbroken line of exploitation going back in the past. The idea that exploitation is an extremely new phenomenon benefits the owning class by concealing the long and bloody history of proletarian struggles.
If your children would just adopt a can-do attitude while they’re mining, they’d be getting promotions
Oh absolutely there was exploitation. Especially in certain industries.
Some of that advice is true … work hard, work at something all the time and do your best … but always for yourself and your well being and for your own self and your family.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and this is what all my family did including me. I worked for myself all my life … building, construction, renos, fixing stuff, building stuff all the time … I did some work for companies and businesses but always with the idea that I wouldn’t work more than I had to and only to gain a bit more money to move on as soon as possible.
Twenty five years later … I own three properties, multiple old vehicles that I maintain myself and I own everything I have without debt … I’m not the wealthiest but I am debt free and have a healthy savings and I still work for myself gaining a bit more every time .
Your experience is the exception rather than the rule. It’s been shown that rags to riches is a myth perpetrated by capitalism. At one time I had your level of success. It was all taken from me when I became disabled. As a Canadian, you have the distinct advantage of at least some social welfare assistance whereas your neighbor to the south has virtually none.
I agree that the whole rags to riches idea is a complete sham that doesn’t exist … unless you are already born wealthy … and then that doesn’t make any sense because you never had rags to begin with.
My story is more rags or bare clothing … I’m not wealthy … I just have enough to be comfortable … I’m not in debt and I drive old beater cars and trucks and never owned a new vehicle in my life … I bought small properties away from big city centers where land is cheap but living is hard
And yes … I know most people are probably not capable of doing what I did … I grew up with lots of people in my situation and I was fortunate enough to figure a way out, mostly through the luck of finding the right partner who worked just as hard as me, parents who were great guides and teachers and a small network of family and friends I could count on.
I have a less impressive, but similar story to yours. I’d say it’s fine to work hard and do work that’s not your job, but the key is to follow through by demanding the proper acknowledgement and gratification for it. Like, doing it for free a couple of times to be nice is fine, but after that, the value you bring with this has to be properly acknowledged and compensated.
If you’ve been working hard and helping out, and an employer doesn’t gratify you to that value, the proper response is not to give up and pin it on hard work being the problem. That employer is being the problem. Try to change that if you can at all.
Don’t ever quit.
Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.
“Don’t be a quitter” is like saying “Fuck your boundaries. Stay in toxic situations no matter how bad they get.”
“Don’t be a quitter” is something that makes sense if you’re in the middle of a board game or the likes. It definitely shouldn’t be applied to big things like jobs or relationships.
If I’m sick of something, I don’t quit, I change direction.
as everything this has contexts in which is valuable and contests in which it’s not
don’t quit because you’re demoralised. don’t quit because you’re tired. don’t quit because it’s hard.
if your first natural response to adversities is flying instead of fighting, it’s telling you to fight, because you are likely the only person losing when flying.
it’s not about never change your mind. never critically think what’s the situation and if it’s still worth it.
or check up with yourself and see if that’s still what you want.
after all leaving a situation you don’t want anymore, it’s not quitting, it’s moving on
it seems just semantics, it’s about knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.
nothing is black or white
You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.
Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!
They told me to not quit. So I’m still a crack addict.
“Just act like a man”
If you mean ‘like you’, fuck off.
“I am. Just one that’s not a miserable, insecure coward.”
On dating and relationships: “Just be confident.”
It’s not wrong, but spectacularly unhelpful. I mean, a brain surgeon has to be confident to go cutting into somebody’s head, but clearly that’s not enough, right? Confidence as a romantically-attractive quality is a very particular (and peculiar) performance. Going to a party 110% certain of one’s own value, sitting in a corner with a confident set of one’s jaw, and silently waiting for the ladies to form a queue is…
…sufficient, apparently, because you just to be confident.
I think they might have meant confidence in the sense to go out and try things you’d normally be shy to do. But that’s only how I’d interpret it.
“Why are you making mistakes? Just don’t make them!” - my German teacher
Like… yeah, thanks, that’s very helpful! Why didn’t I think of that?!
This advice has saved me so many times. Bless your German teacher 🙏.
It’s what Elon is missing from the code of Tesla’s self driving mode
if (goingToMalfunction) { dont(); }
As someone with ADHD, this is especially annoying. No, I’m not TRYING to fuck up. It’s not my fault my brain is actively fighting me at all times.
Student loans are an investment in your future.
I’d have been better off becoming an electrician.
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“Think harder.” You are already thinking, trying to come up with an answer and aren’t able to. What does “think harder” even mean?
You gotta do it like in the movies. Squeeze your eyes shut and poke your forehead with both hands. It unlocks the secret “big brain” mode.
Instructions unclear brain bigger thoughts slower.
When I was a teen I worked as a waiter at a dirty smokehouse/bbq place.
One of the kitchen staff there would make sexual comments about me. Say things like “You’re lucky you look good because you’re so stupid.” And would ask what kind of underwear I was wearing.
I told my parents about it, and the advice they gave me was “Deal with it. You need a job.”
Within a month that kitchen staff member had started to grab me and sexually assaulted me.
I don’t talk to my parents anymore.
“Deal with it. You need a job.”
WTAF? How can someone be so blase about their child being sexually harrassed?
Your parents are awful. You deserve so much better.
My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.
At the party, my dad’s friend took me aside and said “My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that’s an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that.”
Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I’m still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.
Echoes of The Graduate…
“I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin. One word only. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Plastics.”
“There are people worse off than you”
Thanks, that totally solves my problem.
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My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”
When I would have a problem with my body like shoulder impingement and ask for advice, I would often be told by people “nah, you’re too young too have that”
My wife (in her 30s) got shingles and doctors / people at the pharmacy said the same thing. “only people over 50 get that!”
She was in a lot of pain. 0/10 would not recommend getting shingles.
Yeah I got shingles at the age of 42, apparently extremely high stress/anxiety can trigger it. I agree, that shit sucks.
Strange, my friend got that when a teenager and doctors said yup, that’s chicken pox round 2, makes sense.
Hey, what did you end up doing about that? I allegedly have one in my left shoulder and the doctor is acting like there’s not really anything I can do about it.
I saw a physio, they gave me some exercises which didn’t help. I did a bunch of reading online and followed that advice and it worked.
- sleeper stretch
- external rotations from a stretched position, or sleeper stretch repetitions while holding a 2-4kg dumbbell
- serratus strengthening exercises
https://www.healthline.com/health/sleeper-stretch
I had quite bad impingement from months of poor exercise selection at the gym. Changed the routine to be balanced internal/external rotation, did 1/2 above 1-2 times a day. Took a few months but now it’s completely better. I still do the stretching as a prehab now.
It bugs me when told “nothing you can do” what they really mean is “the problem is chronic so the recovery will take a long time. Patient compliance is often very low and most people won’t last the months required for a solution so I’m not going to waste my time. I can help more people if I focus my efforts elsewhere.” If you’re willing to put in the time, you can fix this. And I suggest you do, if you do nothing impingement inflames each time it happens, decreasing the space in your shoulder, increasing the likelihood, etc.
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
- Every day is a day I’d rather have off.
- It ruined the thing I loved (programming) for me
“Nothing is fun 8 hours a day” isn’t an advice but at least it’s true
In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”
I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
Same! Last time I had a programming all-nighter was around 10 years ago
Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it’s the “a day” part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It’s one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.
I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I’m going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.
Fastest way to kill your passion is to make it your paycheck, I say to those people.
On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.
The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I’m like, “dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?”
Did the formal education before the job ruin it for you, or did the job itself ruin it?
My experience may be an outlier but…
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.
Ah, that’s fair.
I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).
It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven’t already started on something else, I’m sure it’ll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.
I went to my doctor for an infection (i had a swelling in my throat)
My doctor told me to drink water…
I said… “ok, thanks” and left.
Got a 2nd opinion.
This new doctor actually took a blood sample and gave me antibiotics. I was much better just a few hours later.
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report to the medical board would probably be more effective but what dobi know, I am not, and will never be, a whale biologists
How did you know they were a whale? Are you a whale soothsayer??
And not me directly, but some years ago when my friend and I were both desperately seeking work, and running up against the “you need experience to get a job to gain experience” conundrum. His mentor told him to stop being so precious, and get a boring corporate job with a pension, maybe one that would pay his law school tuition. It wasn’t a thing yet, but wow, it would have been the perfect time to reply, “OK, Boomer.”
That’s like when they tell you to “pound the pavement” and ask to speak to the manager when you bring back your hard copy job application in person. It’s hard to even continue a conversation with someone who’s that out of touch.
Oof this is like every bit of job advice my dad has ever given me. He means well but he also hasn’t job searched since like 1975.
