The 5-year plan to 50k posts - part douche

[FoxEye]

GD, press "back" now to keep your sanity and not become enraged by my utter uselessness

Or don't, but don't say I didn't warn you...

OK. One of my many (many) flaws is one I share with Homer Simpson That is, once anything get difficult, I quit/run a mile.

So I've had a progression of fairly elementary jobs since flunking out of college many years ago. During this time I kept telling myself that I'll develop some useful skill, start a career, get fit (etc). And I have /started/ many things (mostly past tense).

For example, I've tried to "learn to code" many, many times, scratching the surface over and over. The basics of any programming language are easy to learn and that's great - I love easy But sooner or later, I realise that I'm way out of my depth, which terrifies me and convinces me I'm not meant to be doing it. Only people who already know what they're doing should be doing anything!

But more to the point, learning to code - as with getting good at anything - gets seriously hard, once you move beyond beginner level. Suffice to say, when given the opportunity to build something from scratch, it was awful. Seriously, potentially the most bug-ridden, fragile, assumption-ridden spooge masquerading as "code", that the world has ever seen. And so, truly ashamed and dejected, unable to even look at what I'd spawned, I chose to give up, put away the editor, and go back to the (easy) day job.

But this thread isn't about my journeys and frustrations with BASIC (no, not really ).

It's about quitting when things get hard. I don't know /why/ I do this. It is obviously the worst thing to do. You'll never succeed (duh, obviously) if you quit. But pushing through the hard times just seems impossible. Or conceivable. And then I have the voice in my head telling me, "Even if you learn to code, the market is full of people way better than you, so why bother? You'll only ever be sub-par. And old; your average 14-year-old will be way ahead of you. At 40+ you'll never land a coding job. Why bother? It's hard AND you'll never get anywhere with it."

And I have no idea how to break out of that mindset, which is pretty crippling. How to embrace difficulty and challenge. They seem like hostile things to be afraid of.

Do you personally embrace challenge and difficulty? Do you see them as opportunities to progress and develop? If so, I'd love to be you. But I'm not.

So, what would you do if you had my mindset? Dignitas aside? Did you used to be me? Can you even relate, bro?

 

[FoxEye]

If you actually just want an easy life, then do that! Nothing wrong with this at all.

I can't help but think there is something intrinsically wrong with taking the easy route.

I think partly that's because my siblings have done well for themselves, and they all have a fighter/worker mentality.

But also my upbringing. As a (young) kid my teachers all said I had ability but not drive. They said "He just needs to apply himself." And I never did Seems like a squandering of a life if I just keep taking the easy way out.

Also as a (young) kid I thought I'd be a game dev. But I was wrong, I just liked vidya. Today I don't even have a passion for vidya I'm more enthusiastic about passing my dinner than playing games these days.

I've just drifted into my current job and I'm bloody awful at that too.

It's frustrating, and even more so when I acknowledge that nobody is driving this ship bar me. I'm a **** captain!

I guess I fixate on coding because it's just what the kid me thought I'd do. I'm terrible at it tho and should leave it to those with the right mindset to excel at it. Does mean I've got to find some passion for ... something else, tho. I have no passion for anything to be frank!

what did language did you try? it's probably better to jump in somewhere simple

It's not the language. I've played with dozens of them, from assembler to Pascal to C++ to JavaScript to Powershell, with splatterings of SQL, RegEx, CSS, HTML, X-Path, yadda.

I just can't engineer well-formed solutions for toffee. Coding is not just language familiarity. It's the related methodology, patterns, creating modular and re-usable code, logical solution design, etc. The more you know the more you realise your efforts are amateur-hour But you don't always know exactly how to get better.

I guess part of that is attempting to be 100% self-taught and not working with anyone else. Something I hadn't considered until reading an article tonight.

Hell if somebody looked at the code I've (occasionally) written for work they'd frog-march my ass out the building, stat! It's awful. So bad.

 

[FoxEye]

You don’t have to take the easy route, you just need to find what it is that you actually want to do. Coding is clearly not it!

True. But if I give up on that then I'm at square 0... "What do?"

It's no doubt for the best, but it means saying, "The last 40+ years never happened, you're starting from scratch and you don't even know what you might want to do, and you've got bills to pay."

Heck I pretty much stopped enjoying IT in general. There's little/no job satisfaction. People expect things to work (and rightly so) so generally the kind of IT work I do is just fixing stuff to meet their 100% uptime expectations

It's not like I'm in cutting-edge AI work or anything exciting. Just keeping the lights on. Really uninspiring stuff.

 

[FoxEye]

No update?

It's been 4 days (since you looked at me, cocked your head to side and said, "I'm angry").

Not a lot has changed in the last 4 days. If you're referring to that other thread, I'm still in the same job as I was back then, give or take. My employer is great and so are my colleagues, and in that regard I'm lucky.

I just suck at many of the things I need to do, and my accomplishments are getting fewer and further between. Mostly because I'm trying to do that coding stuff I mentioned earlier and I suck so hard at it. Either practice will make semi-competent or I'll just have a complete meltdown at some point. Toss a coin!

The idea of a total career change seems pretty impossible as I have zero idea what else I'd do. When you fall into a succession of (related) jobs and never actively explored other things you could do, you kind of do just feel grateful to have a job at the end of the day.

"I have no idea what I'm doing" could basically be my life motto

 

[FoxEye]

Your head is full of noise as your ramblings here show. You need to declutter that first.

You could be correct but I don't precisely understand your meaning, here.

And that's not me being contrary or defensive or anything. I'm genuinely not sure what you mean.

 

[FoxEye]

You really have to just look at what makes you happy, if you're happy at work and like it, that's fine... but it sounds like you feel like something is missing but you don't know what? Instead of putting pressure on yourself to nail something like coding, why do you want to learn it? What's it going to give you you feel you need in your life? What do you think is missing that you want?

Oh it's not necessary just coding anyway. My fault for putting so much emphasis on that at the start.

I always wanted to learn a language - but German was hard and I quit
I always wanted to git fit and lose weight - but it was hard and... I quit.
I always wanted to learn to cook, but I have fully convinced myself this is an arcane art beyond my comprehension.

And this isn't even the elephant in the room. I can't even talk about that, because ... ugh. I deserve to be mercilessly mocked for what I'm about to post. Mercilessly. Pitilessly. I sincerely doubt there are many people in the entire history of human civilisation to live their lives as singletons from cradle to grave. And that eats me, daily. Now I shouldn't have said that, it's pathetic. Utterly pathetic. I feel sick. Dammit, why... Something has to change, sharpish, because my life is more than 1/2 over as it is.

Oh.. the why... it's because human relationships are hard and I ran a mile from that one.

Generally, the theme is running/hiding from difficult things instead of embracing the challenge. It's not about coding - that's just an instance of something hard. Not even a biggie.

(Mods please ban me before I post any more pathetic crap here for no good reason. I shouldn't just spill my guts on the internet, it won't end well.)

 

[FoxEye]

@FoxEye have you considered this may be the case and if so, why haven't you seen anyone yet? Your answer to this question could help people who've been through it give you some more specific advice.

I've had the same mindset/internal monologues/anxieties my whole life. Ever since primary school. I don't recall anything traumatic in my childhood, so it's fairly safe to say there wasn't some specific trigger that knocked me off course.

I'm not sure I can have been suffering from depression my whole life. Is that even possible? From childhood?

Owing to the fact that this is all I know, I do kind of just drift about from day to day, with the overwhelming sensation that trying anything different would be hopeless anyhow.

"Some people are just made that way," is what I've sort of concluded about myself.

And this point my life course is so different from any normal person that I feel strategies that work for normal people couldn't possibly work for me. This is no doubt a product of incorrect thinking but it might explain why I haven't sought help from anyone.

I will attempt to write down some of my thought processes and see about sending them off to somebody for analysis. I certainly think I will need to do some preparation if I go down this route.

 

[FoxEye]

Writing my thoughts and life experiences down is a strange experience. On paper my thoughts and actions seem both rational and irrational at the same time. I'm not sure how much I understand, even. Maybe I don't know anything. Maybe they'll take a look at what I've written and just put me on ALL the drugs

I don't know what to expect. I can't imagine it'll be fun either way. I don't want to be prescribed any drugs. I hate taking medication. Multiple members of my family have been put on depression meds and it downright broke them until they got off it.

I hope CBT is not drug-based. Don't want no drugs. Drugs are bad, mmkay. Especially drugs for mood and the mind. I don't think they understand half of what those drugs do, I really don't. I'd rather not take them. Bitte keine Drogen, wir sind Briten.

 

[FoxEye]

Move out of Cornwall

I'm fairly sure the river Tamar is the edge of the known world. I've been told the lands beyond are wild and dangerous.