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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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.
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 .
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.”
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.
They told me to not quit. So I’m still a crack addict.
Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!
“There are people worse off than you”
Thanks, that totally solves my problem.
I always tell them “Following that logic, there’s only one person in the world that can complain. But that dude really got it bad.”
My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”
“Just be happy” to a depressed person
Oh wow, jeez, thanks, why didn’t I think of that earlier!
Ah yes, the good ol’ “Just get over it” technique that is supposed to work for any mental health condition.
The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.
When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.
That’s fascinating. Do you have suggestions for any resources that talk about how to do this in a healthy way?
There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.
I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.
Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.
Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.
Thanks!
Similar to this: telling someone with ADHD “stop letting yourself get distracted”
Or to someone with anxiety:
“Just don’t be anxious!”
🫠…
“But it’s not actually scary!”
Yes, I know, that’s why it’s a disorder and not just being a reasonable person who’s afraid of frightening things!
Someone told me that if I wanted to be a history teacher I should get a degree in special Ed to “make myself more marketable.” It took 14 years to get out of special education and land a job teaching history
14 years is a long time. Hope you’re having a better time now.
Teaching as a profession sucks ass in general right now… but at least a lot of the special educator-specific bullshit is not my problem anymore. But thank you.
Coincidentally, I know someone who recently applied for a regular teacher’s assistant role and when they got to the interview the hiring director didn’t even ask questions about that position; instead they interviewed for a special ed job and then only offered that. It was a total bait & switch to try and fill a role nobody was applying for.
I got the same thing said to me but to go into math instead. I never listened to them. Now I’m looking for jobs and there’s a ton of openings for history jobs and I tend to feel a little smug about it.
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.
Ah yes the brand new exciting world of electricity. Rumor on the street is they’ve got this fancy new device called a tellyfone that uses this electricity. You can talk to anyone in the world!
Echoes of The Graduate…
“I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin. One word only. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Plastics.”
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
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.
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.
"Nothing is fun 8 hours a day" isn't an advice but at least it's true
Fastest way to kill your passion is to make it your paycheck, I say to those people.
That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.
My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).
That’s so rude. People make such wild assumptions about other people’s lives.
“sleep when the baby sleeps”
Yeah because there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they’re down too.
“Sleeping like a baby” had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!
I feel like the phrase “sleeping like a baby” was not created by someone who was a primary caretaker for a baby.
Exactly, unless they actually meant it to mean “for no more than 30 minutes then wake up crying inconsolably because I’ve shit myself.”
Then they hit the nail on the head and people have just misconstrued it!
Also, like, adult humans don’t do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don’t have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.
Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.
Here’s some more unhelpful advice: Hang in there, it gets easier! (for real though)
“Everything happens for a reason”
- technically correct, completely unhelpful.
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”
- Fuck. Off.
“You just have to work through the pain.” I’ve injured myself multiple times in the past exercising by following this idiotic advice.
It’s one thing to push through discomfort, that’s how your body gets stronger. But If you’re in actual pain, stop and listen to the alarm bells your body is giving you.
When I used to make notes because I don’t retain information instantly my boss said “Just don’t forget” I exclaimed: “Thanks, I’m cured!” The office got a laugh but it still bothers me that he thought it was a choice
For me it’s the opposite, at school I was forced to take notes. Teacher would give me bad grades if they saw me not talking notes. But notes are completely useless for me, and if I take notes I don’t understand the lecture. So I started the habit to sketch on notebooks pretending to take notes. Schools can be pretty stupid
My mother once told us to get “a male realtor; the woman realtors don’t care as much because they’re just doing it as a hobby - the men are doing it as their full time job.”
She’s a real gem.
Yeah… In this day and age where people struggle financially I’m sure women just do it as a hobby… 🙄
wtf does this even mean. Apart from overt sexism
Internalized misogyny
“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.
