This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?

I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.

I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.

Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.

I'm doing alright as far as my career goes, not great, but okay. Which is disappointing because me and everyone around thought I'd do great, because I/they thought I was a great software developer, since I'm smart and I know my tech and my programming.

Unfortunately working as a software developer is a different story entirely, I found many times that my chase for good simple code takes time, and sometimes I overthink things and I don't test properly, and I'm also slow, and don't communicate the problem with my team because I don't work consistent hours, because my brain cannot do consistency.

Turns out I have ADHD. Possibly autism too. So I understand your feelings of I just need to be better, because it works for other right? Even tho you know that fundamentally you are right, but it works for others so why not you? I don't have a solution. But sometimes you can't just "be better" and "more consistent", I also wish I could, but maybe it's not possible.

Maybe the only way is to find where we are good and do more of that. If you have struggle finishing things hope on calls with people that are good at finishing things. Talk with them. Be proactive and be open. I also don't do this as often as I should, because I'm also ashamed.

I don't know exactly what the point was to this, but so you know others also fail, even tho they deemed smart and skilled by others.

    This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.

The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.

(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)

She is smart, she is talented and incredibly curious and those things I really do not worry about. What will set her apart from the majority of her peers throughout life will be her ability to effectively communicate and interact with others in a way that is meaningful. It’s benefits go far beyond what most of us appreciate

1. It's okay to make mistakes. Pain + reflection = progress.

2. Try to shift your perspective so your sense of worth isn't tied to your work.

3. Anytime you say "I should", "I need to", usually this is sign you are blindly following some sort of cognitive script [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMghRYqk8o&t=1844s

I do have one comment though:

You mention stability in your goals, and how you want to find stability. What is stability to you? I've struggled for years with trying to find stability but it often just leads me back to thinking that there really is no such thing. You just never know what is going to happen in life. Finding a job and having stable employment are hard, and will likely only get harder as we age. Relationships have ups and downs, and their downs can be incredibly challenging to navigate. Most of us (at least in Europe) don't have the luxury of building wealth to escape the 9-5 grind. We simply need to work (and stay employable) until we have the ability to retire. I don't know how things work in your country, but here in Sweden I can't even start to collect my state pension until I turn 69. I need to find a way to remain employable until I am 69, or amass enough wealth to not need to worry about paying my bills if I don't have stable employment.

I could go on and on but honestly I think stability is a myth. Life is inherently unstable. But we human beings are also incredibly resiliant.

Take care of yourself. I wish you all the best OP.

I know several people who suffer with ADD, who are extremely intelligent and talented, and felt the exact same emotions before they were diagnosed. Those emotions were _much_ alleviated once treated, mostly through pharmacological means. Anecdotal but seems a strong pattern to me.

I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.

Wishing you the best OP.

Thank you so much for sharing.

Why are you an engineer if you are struggling to complete the basic tasks? Are you meant to be doing what you are doing?

After a lot of investigation, I suspect that air quality, lighting, ergonomics can have adverse effects. Only recently I read an article that said that in a room with several persons and poor ventilation the CO2 levels reach levels which are known to impair brain and other neurological functions.

That is, I suspect that your depression is the symptom of a bad environment and not the root cause of your problems.

The different usages of I or i though ... please fix the LLM type checking it.

One of the major themes I pick up in this piece is an unfortunate, very common, misallocation of mental effort regarding the past-present-future mindset. As in, the described course is simply regarding treatment of symptoms. There is little to no awareness at this point in the journey that the sources of the mental issues may be much deeper than simply imposter syndrome or poor culture fit.

I am not a Psychologist. I am a Writer. Psychology is the invention of a Writer, facts. To write convincing characters or portraits of events, it takes a long and often painful study of the human psyche. When I finally fell into circumstances where I was able to apply this to myself, the process, after years, has resulted in a fundamental change in my own mind. For the better, though it is occasionally foreign or akin to feeling “adrift” in life - such is clarity.

Point being? Looking outside for help is problematic, and “friends and family” were in my situation the actual causes and “negative feedback loops” which had decades long consequences. Only by turning my back on them was I able to identify the nearly subconscious roots of my guilt and shame issues having no valid reason to exist. To the contrary, I found how my life had been quite a reflection of well formed morals, ethics, and principles of a high minded, pragmatic, and good quality of character person.

That’s why AA and friends and family suck as resources. They are unreliable. One does not repair the mind by continuing to engage with others also of a broken nature. Healing happens in solitude. Being unable or unwilling to take this path is the first thing to address in pursuit of real, lasting positive change.

Or, ya know, just take handfuls of pills and keep rowing your boat in the river of denial. Seems to be the way Mormonism keeps its catastrophically delusional dogma in play. Read the experiences of ex-Fundamentalist cast outs or voluntary abandonment.

One must turn their back on the broken culture that broke them to find the truth and spiritual health within. Good luck to all.

One piece of advice is to start with the biological side. Getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and taking care of your physical health can have a surprisingly positive effect on your mental state.

At the same time, don't hesitate to seek help from a therapist. They can help guide the way you think about your experiences and how you interpret them. It's a gradual process, but it really can make a difference.

I believe you can get through this. :)

So it's not really mental, it's literally a disease of the physical body. The brains are then affected as a side effect.

You can look up low carb, carnivore, heavy metal elimination groups etc... and you will find thousands of real testimonials.

The problem is that many if not most of these are hard if not impossible to diagnose since the modern medical science is lacking completely at this plus the combination of arrogant doctors not taking these people seriously and gaslighting them makes it 10 times worse, so experimentation is needed and then a commitment for a year or two.

Many improve in 4 to 6 months. Some take longer.

No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.

Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?

realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.

therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.

working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.

It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.

But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.

That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:

* reframing failures as lessons

* honesty with self about your own role in your depression

* careful build-up of support

* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful

You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.

My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.

You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.

I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.

I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way

It takes a lot of courage to write down one’s struggles for all the world to see. Your analysis denies the OP their self-reflection, and instead reduces it to a thing you happened to find in your own life.

Yeah that's BS.

When you were a kid in class in winter you had 20 kids + the teacher in the same room submerged by co2 , plus you were in a literal prison taken from the comfort of your bed in the dead of the night, had to ask permission to use the restroom and you could be denied , once you managed to get to the restroom you'd be submerged by even more co2 because of all the cigarette smoking going on from the older guys. And I am not even considering bullying as a factor that for the least lucky or strong could be added to the above list.

Still no depression in sight .

The problem comes from within, life was never meant to be taken this seriously, all the improvements and technological prowness that we tout vs. Subsaharan Africa come with the cost of literal self torture.

We have evolved in a scenario in which if you had reason to believe to have >90% chance of being alive 1 week from now (something like 168 hours into the future) then you could literally go out of your hut celebrating with your dick swinging left and right .

We have now reached a point where people would be unhappy with 168 years because 'oh no what happens next OMG I am so scared!'

Mental health and thinking are 2 parallel lines, they can never be reconciled, thinking is much more toxic than CO2, lead, sniffing glue, meth, heroin, fentanyl and all the other so called harmful substances which as toxic as they might be they don't make you want to off yourself.

Paradoxically if we stopped thinking and ran New York City into the ground back to an African hut village it would be the best party in the history of humanity and so much happiness could be extracted from that, much much more than building it up further, even though it would not be visible from the outside