> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional
As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver.
Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
You can help by being curious about what they're saying, reflecting it back to them in your own terms, explaining how what they're feeling is understandable, and offering context or alternative viewpoints. These are actually complex problem-solving skills, although they can all fall under the umbrella of what people mean when they say "to be heard".
As a man, I've realised that once my emotions feel validated and accepted, I relax and the practical solutions just pop into my mind.
> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot.
If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful. It can be harmful.
I know this goes against the Reddit-style relationship stereotype where the man must always listen and nod but not offer suggestions, but when someone is prone to self-destructive emotional thought loops behind their emotional validator can be actively harmful. Even if validation is what they seek and want.
It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.
One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.
> Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning.
If “validating” someone’s emotions comes down to simply saying that, yes, I agree you felt that way, then I suppose that’s true.
But when people talk about validating other people’s emotions it implies that they’re saying the emotional response was valid for the circumstances.
I have someone in my extended family who has a strong tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst. When she was in a relationship with someone who constantly validated her emotions and reactions it was disastrous. It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
There’s a hand wavey, feel good idea where we’re supposed to believe everyone’s lived experience and emotions are valid, but some people have problems with incorrect emotional reactions. Validating these can become reinforcing for that behavior.
I’m not saying we should start doubting every emotional reaction or white knighting everything, but it’s unhealthy to take a stance that validating other people’s emotions is de facto good.
You’re making a reasonable point, but I think you’re arguing against a somewhat strawmanned version of emotional validation.
You’re treating “validation” as synonymous with “agreeing the emotional response was proportionate and correct.” But that’s not really what validation means in a therapeutic or even colloquial sense. Validating someone’s emotions typically means acknowledging that the emotion is real and understandable given how that person perceived the situation. It doesn’t require you to endorse their perception as accurate.
You can say “I get why you’d feel terrified if you believed X was happening” while also gently probing whether X is actually happening. That’s still validation. What you’re describing as helpful for your family member isn’t really “invalidation” so much as reality-testing, which is a different thing and can coexist with emotional validation.
Your anecdote is doing a lot of work here. We don’t know what “constantly validated” actually looked like in practice, or what the “level headed” person was doing differently. It’s possible the first partner was just conflict-avoidant and agreeing with distorted interpretations of events, which isn’t validation so much as enabling. And the second partner may have been effective not because they said “your reaction isn’t valid” but because they offered a stable outside perspective while still being emotionally supportive.
Your broader point about reinforcement is worth taking seriously though. There are absolutely cases where excessive reassurance-seeking gets reinforced by certain responses. But the solution isn’t to tell people their feelings are wrong. It’s to validate the feeling while not automatically validating the catastrophic interpretation driving it.
I disagree. I think the overly academic isolation of "validating emotions" into something that happens without endorsing the response isn't how real people communicate.
Any time you're "validating emotions" in the real world, there is going to be some degree of implicit endorsement that the reaction was valid.
The idea of "validating emotions" being synonymous with saying "I agree that you feel that way" is rather infantile. Nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced.
My partner and I have been through this cycle. Something happens, she interprets it a certain, very specific, way and then has an adverse emotional reaction.
In the early days of our relationship I would try to explain to her why her emotion doesn't 'make sense'. That just made things worse. Much worse. When she helped me understand that she needed me to validate that what she was feeling was legitimate - based on her interpretation of the events - she was able to let go and consider other interpretations.
Note that this "letting go" almost never happened in the moment, but only after the emotions abated and she had time to process the entire situation. We're talking hours, not minutes.
You’re collapsing two distinct claims. The first, that real-world communication is messier than clinical frameworks, is obviously true but doesn’t do the work you need it to. The second, that acknowledging someone’s emotional experience is “infantile” because “nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced,” is empirically false.
People frequently do need that. That’s basically what dismissive attachment styles and invalidating environments produce: people who aren’t sure their own internal states are real or legitimate. “I can see why that hurt” lands very differently than “that shouldn’t have hurt.” The former isn’t agreeing the other party was wrong or the reaction was proportionate. It’s communicating “your inner experience makes sense to me.”
The implicit endorsement concern is real but overstated. Skilled communicators navigate this constantly. “That sounds really frustrating. What do you think was actually going on there?” validates the frustration while opening space for reexamination. The failure mode you’re pointing at is when someone only validates and never probes, which is just conflict avoidance.
The “overly academic” framing is doing some rhetorical work here. These distinctions come from observing what actually helps people versus what entrenches them. Therapists, mediators, and anyone who’s gotten good at difficult conversations know the difference intuitively. It’s not academic. It’s practical.
> Any time you're "validating emotions" in the real world, there is going to be some degree of implicit endorsement that the reaction was valid.
Hard no.
In the real world, when I emotionally validate my friends or partners it looks like slowing down and being there, with them, with their emotions. Being present with their emotions then often addresses the underlying emotional need: for example, to feel heard, or to acknowledge their feelings to themselves, to feel cared for and accepted, to feel like someone has their back, etc.
None of this requires that I accept their interpretation of events. And almost always, there will be space at some point for me to disagree with their interpretation. It is much much much more effective to tease apart that interpretation once their emotions have calmed down.
TL;DR: addressing someone's emotional needs (aka "validating") doesn't imply that you agree with them about their interpretation of what happened
> Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance.
It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right. But this is quibbling over semantics; I think we both agree that challenging someone is sometimes the kindest thing to do.
I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition.
In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
The overly academic definition doesn't reflect how people communicate in the real world.
There's also a factor of consistency over time: It's no big deal to go along with someone venting from time to time, but when someone you're close to is overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time, validating those emotions consistently is going to be viewed as an implicit endorsement.
> It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right.
The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'.
Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.
Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.
Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.
I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.
A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.
I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.
> I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened.
The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.
> Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
IDK if anything here counts as a good container for emotion.
'validate' is very ambiguous.
'comfort' is very different from presence. It can actually be a way of invalidating funnily enough.
'not question' has a lot going on.
I definitely hear a lot of enablement in your example. It sounds like she is better off without that.
> This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.
I agree here. Validate itself is a loaded term, especially in the tech world. It sounds like it implies correctness. Maybe I'm onboard with just a need for 'emotional presence' over 'validation'.
Validation can slide into enablement. Challenge can slide into invalidation. Presence is the impossible one. Having someone you can openly explore an emotion, even just say it all without evoking a fear or anger response, a validation or invalidation response from. Let's it just hang in the air without reaction. Let's it exist without adding distance or withdrawing connection. Have endless curiosity.
I do think I am onboard with validation being a more dangerous term. I get its origin/concept - maybe trying to combat the amount of invalidation in the world but it's ironic to see how invalidating the wrong kind of validation can be.
I've clearly struck a nerve with how many people arrived in this comment thread to project different scenarios on to the situation, as well as all the different and conflicting definitions of "validate emotions"
To be honest, I'm growing even more distaste for the "validating emotions" academic concept after reading some of the mental gymnastics people are doing in this thread.
But in other instances in this thread I am not so sure each time you mention her emotions you are talking about her feelings, distinct from her actions or interpretations. There is a difference between anger (the emotion), aggression (waving hands, loud voice etc), and physical contact (undirected against objects, directed at objects, against self, against others). Maybe you are “striking nerves” since it’s not always clear which one you are referring to in terms of her “validation”. And these distinctions are not academic.
> To be honest, I'm growing even more distaste for the "validating emotions" academic concept after reading some of the mental gymnastics people are doing in this thread.
(chiming in)
It's not academic, but practical. For me, these skills have been immensely helpful for navigating both my own emotions and those of others. My relationships improved quite a bit once I started using these skills. I'm closer to more people, I can get to depth more quickly and more safely with new people, and me and those close to me are all growing/healing more quickly because we can meet our emotional needs while also gradually working to reshape those needs.
To me, "validation" is about addressing someone's actual underlying emotional needs. But it still leaves space for disagreeing with the interpretation/perception of what happened. My own saying is that we should "accept our emotions, but not always accept the story they are telling us".
> as well as all the different and conflicting definitions of "validate emotions"
> confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion
This is not emotional validation; nobody wants to be told something they can decide for themselves. Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion. When venting to someone, one doesn't want to hear "I understand that you feel that way", they want to hear "I understand why you feel that way". The former is a dismissal (taking the guise of a validation) and the latter is a validation. "I don't get why you feel $EMOTION about this" is the ultimate emotional sucker punch of invalidation from an active listener even though it necessarily implies said confirmation that they feel $EMOTION.
> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Notably, "sharing" the emotions is not the only way to validate them; I do not have to feel (or even understand) one's sadness for their sadness to be valid. The second part is the only thing they're looking for and it is very unlikely to be false given the appropriate context. From another comment, "the emotional response was valid for the circumstances" is accurate when one understands "the circumstances" to include the life experiences that cause them to have such an emotional response from something that doesn't trigger the same emotions in oneself.
> overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time
There are healthy avenues for expressing such emotions as well as unhealthy ones. Validating the emotional response to something is precisely what will allow the person feeling the emotions to calm down and decide on actions that will benefit their situation. If they are invalidated, they will instead spend effort seeking that validation.
> Just going along with it.
Well, if "it" is referring to behaviors and attitudes, then there's an obvious problem (in all likelihood) but that's also distinct from emotional validation. As I said in my other comment in this thread, one can logically say "it's okay to feel that way but you shouldn't think that". I strongly doubt that is the likes of the validation being complained about here. The negatives of the situation being described do not seem likely caused merely from emotional validation. And I would bet with near certainty that the partner they met who got them to choose healthy behaviors did so by first validating their emotions.
> Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion.
That's not the definition the others are using, but this seems to be a game of whack-a-mole with everyone's different ideas about what it means.
That said, I think your definition highlights the problem: By telling someone it's okay to feel the emotion, you've implicitly endorsed the response.
The situations I'm speaking about involve people developing inappropriate emotional reactions that lead to self-harm. When they surround themselves with people who do this "validate emotions" game, they're implicitly gathering consensus that it's okay to react that way. The cycle continues.
It's clear that a lot of people have picked up this idea of "validating emotions" being virtuous and good, but some times what people need is for people around them to explain that their reaction is not actually appropriate or okay.
> That said, I think your definition highlights the problem: By telling someone it's okay to feel the emotion, you've implicitly endorsed the response.
This tells me that you've not understood my meaning. One is not condoning or endorsing any behavioral response when they say the emotional response (which motivated the behavior) is valid and natural. They are distinct things and one does not necessarily follow or precede the other.
> their reaction is not actually appropriate or okay
I suspect we are talking past each other here. If "their reaction" refers to their emotions, that is not your concern; to think otherwise is wildly antisocial. If it instead refers to their actions and/or behaviors, you simply are not bemoaning emotional validation.
>> emotional response (which motivated the behavior) is valid and natural.
This is obviously nonsense. If an old woman falls over and breaks her knee, and one's emotional response is happiness - they have real problems - it's not natural or valid to feel that. If the idea of choking women to death makes one feel excited - no it's not natural or valid to feel that emotion, they have serious problems. One could go on.
Maybe you haven't met any really bad people in life - when you do you will often find they have very strange emotional responses to things.
I guess I should make explicit my general assumption that we are not talking about psychopaths given the overwhelming odds that a given individual is not a psychopath. That said...
> If the idea of choking women to death makes one feel excited - no it's not natural or valid to feel that emotion, they have serious problems.
I disagree. That is surely a natural and valid emotional response for whatever reason this hypotheticals individual feels it. Yes, they also surely have serious problems but I contend that said problems are obviously what lead to this "very strange" emotional response. Their problems are also valid, regardless of the personal damage (read: devoid of outward violence) they cause.
In this case, the response might affect their behavior such that they actually do it and that would obviously be tragic; that behavior is not valid regardless of the emotions (or lack thereof) which motivate it. Otherwise, speaking of their emotional response, I don't see a reason to condemn them for a reaction they have such little control over.
> You keep talking in circles around a definition of valid.
We could decide on a similar word to use if you prefer. Perhaps "acceptable" from a sibling comment. Replace "valid" with "acceptable" and "validation" with "acceptance" in all of my comments and the meaning is still true; that seems to suggest I've been consistent with my use of "valid".
> You are just wrong on this.
What you mean is that we are of different minds. You try to make yours the objective one in spite of the glaringly obvious fact that opinions are not necessarily shared between differing minds.
> You want to seem sophisticated and understanding
Genuinely, what a compliment! I was just writing about my perspective. My goal with the writing was primarily to espouse my understanding of this subject while secondarily avoiding "you" statements in my comments. If you think the result sounds sophisticated and understanding, I am more than willing to believe you. If you don't think that, well, you might want to consider where those words came from because I sure noticed. (It might also help to consider that you have no means of discovering my motivation; you must have made an assumption and expressed said assumption using your own words.)
The fact of the matter is that I spent the first three decades or so of my life being extremely emotionally unstable until I (at least somewhat) learned to manage that. I suspect this "sophisticated and understanding" sense you get from my writing on this topic comes from the care with which I write about a subject so dear to me.
I think their definition of valid is consistently aligning with the meaning of "acknowledging and accepting someone's internal experience".
As soon as you start trying to apply normative judgements to someone's feelings, as opposed to their behaviour, you inevitably end up drawing an arbitrary and cutlurally informed line between what you or socirty think is okay and what's not. It's only a problem if I feel excited by someone else's pain if my consequent behaviour actually leads to the other person suffering. I have no direct control over my emotions, but I can control my reaction to them. You just telling me it's wrong to feel excited is futile and potentially counter-productive.
> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Which is what the whole "empathy movement" of recent years seems to emphasize. The problem is that when empathy is unmoored from the objective good, this can become scandalous (not in the sense that it causes outrage, but in the older sense that it encourages evil). Not every response is a valid response. You must be able to identify whether something is good, you must refrain from actively enabling things that are bad, but you must discern whether to correct, and if so, how to correct. Not every problem is yours to correct. Busybodies think they are.
(N.b. the Catholic Church, drawing on ethical distinctions, makes distinctions between moral principle, the objectively moral status of particular acts in light of moral principles, and the pastoral needs of particular persons. So, e.g., while prostitution as a practice is roundly condemned as a matter of principle, particular prostitutes may be treated gently. This is especially true if he/she expresses remorse for the way he/she has lived his/her life (the parable of the prodigal son comes to mind).)
> It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
I guess at the risk of splitting hairs, I think it's more likely they stopped misappropriating more than they started invalidating. I see a difference between "you shouldn't feel that way" and "I disagree with that conclusion" such that one can logically say both (well, the former being "it's okay to feel that way") in the same breath.
So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote or substitute their own reality.
The reality is simpler: It was basically "Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work, but sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that"
Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
Feeling a little upset over minor annoyances is valid. Having your emotional state crumble at the slightest breeze is not. Having someone around who basically validates the latter is not good.
> So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote
For what it's worth, I imagined a scenario very similar to the one you described in this comment.
> Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work
This is emotional validation.
> sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that
This has nothing to do with emotional validation. It can be said before, after, or without said validation.
> Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
It sounds like the "validating emotions" person was validating the sulking behaviors (whether in addition to validating the related emotions or not) and saying that they were only validating the emotions.
Anyway, the purpose for my replies is not to get you to agree with that person or to change your mind about the anecdote, but to offer a more meaningful distinction of what's being discussed.
The good kind of "valid" is about whether (a) your process of measuring reality might be broken to your detriment. And by extension (b) whether your communications channel with the person you are talking to is working.
Chris Voss's mirroring is basically TCP ACKs.
Then there are the people who say that they lack validation and are just narcissists looking for yes-men. Big difference on how much of your time is being wasted.
Other people have given good insights, so I'll instead describe one of my pet theories.
Given by how we talk about emotions, I think they are "rational", but operate under a different set of rules than we normally apply to "rational" thinking. In fact, feelings are deeply intertwined with our supposedly "rational" thinking, to the point where I don't think there is a significant boundary. The lack of information is prevalent when feelings are in play, and I believe the same is true in general. Even physics feels far different than pure mathematics, after all. Instead of deferring to conventions in how to act when feelings are involved, as if they belong to a wholly different and mysterious world, we can make sense of the entire world. But of course, empathy, kindness, and good judgement are not exempt. None of this conflicts with what you're saying, but I think a subtle shift in mindset will be fruitful in applying it.
Yes, I'd agree with that. The way I think of it is that emotions are somewhat "mechanistic". I don't directly control them, but they follow certain principles. For example, fear often arises in response to a perceived threat (physical or otherwise). My boss calling me to an unexpected meeting might make me panic. And even once the peak of the fear subsides, I am more vulnerable to experiencing it again for some time. E.g. I get home and my wife's car is gone, then suddenly I'm scared that she's been in an accident or something. None of this is a rational response. There are some hand-wavey evolutionary-psychology arguments for why they operate that way. But the main thing is that there are principles that make sense out of it, and those principles are (perhaps) surprisingly consistent across humans.
They're heuristics! Or "heuristical", if that makes sense. Simplified ways of processing the world, present even in creatures with significantly less cognitive capability and complexity, and bestowed to us via that ancestry.
And because they are very-simplified ways of processing information and provoking action, they often get things 'wrong'.
Indeed, the more strong the feeling, the less rational it can become, even though the feeling is there for good reasons. A pure rational solution won't help, pure empathy as well not.
Being able to separate these situations out is part of ‘emotional problem solving’. Just like any problem solving, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all cases.
I think the important bit is to recognize that emotions are separate from (although related to) the situation itself. The problem many people have is approaching emotional problems as simply symptoms of the underlying practical problem, and that the way to solve the emotional problem is to simply go directly to solving the underlying practical problem.
Now, sometimes this is the correct approach. However, many times it isn’t. Sometimes the practical problem is not solvable by you or the person you are talking to. Sometimes the practical problem is actually not really a problem and is simply triggering something else. Sometimes you just need someone to share some pain, or some joy, or just need a connection with someone.
A good emotional problem solver can navigate all of these situations.
> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful
I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not".
The point is that the person is feeling what they're feeling, that's what the validation and acceptance comes in, not about what they're feeling those feelings about.
In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
I agree with your descriptions of the terms, but I think there's often a divergence between empathy (which I find great) and reflecting people's feelings (which I find good with caution). I want people to understand and help each other. But in some situations, reflecting people's feelings encourages them to make poor decisions. I should always provide a space for people to speak without scorn and with understanding, but I don't want to give a false impression of my concerns. Acknowledging that someone's life sucks is subtly different from acknowledging it aloud, and sometimes the subtlety is crucial.
Sympathy means expressing pity or sorrow at someone's plight. Reflecting feelings is more like a form of empathy. It's clarifying and/or paraphrasing the feelings so that the other person feels like they're heard and taken seriously. They're orthogonal behaviours - you can do one or the other or both.
I agree that I should understand the other person and take them seriously, and to convey this to the other person. However, sometimes verbal reflection serves the purpose of blind affirmation. I don't think the verbal component, construed this way, is so productive for empathy.
To me the confusion is the word "validate". Sounds like what you're talking about is more acknowledgement than validate. I hear / see how you're feeling and I empathize.
Dictionary definition of validate are things like:
- check or prove the validity or accuracy of (something).
- demonstrate or support the truth or value of.
Which don't seem like the intent of "validating" the emotion in this context.
> In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
If you say "that sucks" the other person is going to assume you're agreeing with them that the thing they're angry about sucks. They're not going to think you're saying "that sucks" that they have an emotion, as an isolated feeling that happened for no reason.
This is where the overly academic concept of "validating emotions without endorsing them" falls apart in the real world.
In actual human interaction, people don't debate if the other person actual feels an emotion. Angry people don't need other people to agree that they feel angry. They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
You described one of my misgivings better than I could (I made a sibling reply to parent), but I don't agree with this in all cases. Anger is easy to perpetuate blindly, but I think introspective feelings sometimes can die out if they aren't affirmed. Someone struggling with an internal conflict may reject a feeling that seems to resolve the conflict, and not take time to properly deal with the feeling. Affirming the feeling should affirm that the person may have felt and be justified in the feeling, without assuring that the feeling is definitely justified. Maybe taking that road is indeed foolish, but it would be too hasty to dismiss doing so just because it feels foolish.
> Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
Yes, actually, lots of people have healthy partnerships where they disagree with how their partner got into the situation, but can still recognize that the partner's feelings about that situation is valid, regardless, since it's an emotion their feeling, it doesn't have to be rational or logical and it's certainly not up to you to decide if it is/was neither.
This is what emotional support is, not validating their actions, but validating the emotions they're feeling, regardless of why. And not seeing some emotions as more "correct and valid" than others, they're all valid and correct, since we're humans after all.
> They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
This, in your words "falls apart in the real world", because people don't speak with others always with the same intention, sometimes people want to vent, sometimes people want to manipulate, sometimes people are looking for help, and a whole other rooster of reasons. Most of the time, people speak with others about their feelings because they want connection.
I think you're stuck in trying to separate "valid, rational and logical emotions" from "the rest of emotions" while that distinction matters less than you think, and you'll be seen as very emotionally cold/distant if you aren't able to accept people's emotion because they aren't "rational" (or whatever reason you use).
> since it's an emotion their feeling, it doesn't have to be rational or logical and it's certainly not up to you to decide if it is/was neither.
I think some of you have never had to deal with a person who had harmful emotional over reactions to even small inconveniences. It's an extremely self-harmful spiral.
Having someone who validates any emotions as if they exist in a vacuum is like adding fuel to the fire. It's implicit encouragement.
Emotional reactions aren't de facto good. Working with young children is another good way to observe that not every emotional reaction is acceptable. It's also a good way to see how people can learn how to manage their emotions, but it's hard to get to that point if they've surrounded themselves with people who will rush to validate their emotions and ignore the obvious harm it's causing.
> Working with young children is another good way to observe that not every emotional reaction is acceptable.
I have a two year old son and disagree with this. I wonder if you're using the phrase "overreaction" to mean both the emotion and the associated behaviour? I make sure to demonstrate that my son's emotions - sadness, anger, happiness - are always "acceptable" in the sense that it's okay for him to have those feelings. I never want him to feel like his feelings are not accepted, because that can easily leads to him hiding, avoiding, or suppressing feelings rather than acknowledging and learning how to process and regulate them. This is what basically all modern parenting books say and has accorded with my experience so far. But his behaviour can be unacceptable. It's okay for him to feel angry, but it is not ok for him to respond to that by hitting, biting, snatching etc. He needs me to help label and contextualise his feelings, and to show him how to divert those feelings into a healthier physical response.
This is super important. I'd argue that a huge part of learning to process feelings healthily is being and able to tell the difference between how one feels (which is an involuntary reaction that isn't controllable) and the actions taken as a result of that feeling (which require explicit choice to take). It seems obvious in the abstract, but I think it's almost a universal human condition for the line between them to get blurred. People will often say something like "I'm sorry I got mad" as if being angry is something that can be controlled, when what they should instead be apologizing for is the actions they took while mad (e.g. "I'm sorry for yelling"). There's a reason that "anger management" is a known term rather than "anger prevention", after all. If someone asks why you did something, "because I was mad" is not a healthy explanation; it removes your choice from the equation and paints yourself as a helpless victim of your emotions rather than someone with agency and the ability to act better even in the face of extinuating circumstances.
While it might seem like these are just linguistic quibbles, I've seen so many cases of people genuinely thinking that trying to suppress their emotions is the correct way to handle tough situations, and I don't think that ever works well in the long run. At most, it's sometimes beneficial to avoid expressing strong negative emotions immediately in certain situations, but that's only a short term tradeoff to avoid exacerbating whatever is currently going on, not a long term solution to avoid consequences of taking actions under the duress of heavy emotions. I believe that people would learn to act better by mentally framing their emotions separately from their choices and allowing themselves to feel them fully and ideally express them in a healthy way. Venting to a sympathetic family member or friend can be a good way of doing this, but that's also why therapy is something that would be benefit pretty much everyone in my opinion; having a trained, neutral professional to be able to talk through emotions without having to worry about overburdening them or worrying about having to interact with them in any other part of life is hard to beat in terms of a strategy for dealing with tough emotions in a healthy way.
> switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver
Thank you for this useful tip! I've recently become aware that I may not be as good a listener I thought I was - I too make the common mistake of immediately offering solutions, or talking too much about my own relatable situations and feelings, instead of trying to really listen to them and help them figure out their own world view and feelings of a particular situation (and thus understand them better too in the process).
“Don’t just do something, stand there!” - I love this quote. Standing there or being there for someone is amazingly helpful and it’s a skill to do it, congrats on working on this.
Be careful you don’t end up with people who have constant emotional problems that need fixing - or that you’re 100% sure that you’ll never need to say ‘no’. Speaking from experience.
Some people really don’t like ‘no’, especially when they have emotional problems.
Another pitfall with this approach is when someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything. Being the person who validates their emotions becomes harmful if they’re over-reacting or developing harmful emotional reactions and you’re always there to validate them.
> someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything
What are "emotions" if not "irrational chemical reactions in our brains"? Seems really strange to decide what it or isn't "irrational emotions" for someone else to have.
I, just like you I presume, see myself as a rational and logical person (maybe you're also a programmer), but I also realize that humans are humans, and having irrational emotions is very much part of being a humans, and emotions in general is such a subjective experience.
Everything in your body is a "chemical reaction". Pulling the trigger of a gun is a lot of chemical reactions. That doesn't mean the person isn't guilty.
In fact, it's problematic when people start thinking of their emotions as a chemical process that happens to them, outside of their control. A large part of getting people back on track in therapy is getting them to accept that they do have some control over how they react to situations in the world.
A lot of TikTok or Reddit style therapyspeak does the opposite: It goes to extreme lengths to try to separate the emotions or negative responses from the person, as if they're an outside force victimizing them. It's comforting to think that, because things that happen to us outside of our control seem like they can't be changed. Getting people to acknowledge that they can and should exert some emotional control over themselves is part of breaking that cycle.
You use the word "react" in an ambiguous way; I'm never sure if you mean the emotional response, the subsequent thoughts, or the subsequent behaviour. The latter two we have much more control over, whilst the first must be trained indirectly over a long period of time.
If it becomes damaging to you (the person that is expected to be emotional support), "grey rocking" is the next step. Acknowledge, but don't respond. "uh huh" instead of "I am so sorry" or whatever. Don't take advice from me though.
I've heard that's true; compassion and empathy can be a draw for highly insecure people. You need to balance it with assertiveness and self-regulation, which are also part of emotional intelligence.
> Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
Right, talking about feelings is a way of regulating yourself.
Conflicts with my wife are a lot easier if I'm able to empathize with her emotional distress, acknowledging it, instead of jumping directly into logical problem solving. If I'm only looking logically at the issue, I can't really understand the issue she is having.
I like the view of the therapist Terry Real, that during conflicts you can either be right or stay connected. That doesn't mean that you hide your views, but that you also emotionally acknowledge the view of your partner. It's surprising how effectively this takes out the fire in conflicts.
> they're actually trying to process those feelings
Exactly, help exploring their problem, maybe direct them into one nook or the other, support a proper perspective from different angles (to a small extent within the context and constraints they provided!!!), but don't solve the riddle for them. They might not even know how they really feel about it all, yet.
> I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver.
This perspective was a good stepping stone for me, but then I realized I needed bigger changes to keep growing. However I defined the problem to be solved, I was still setting up a dynamic that was arrogant. I thought I was air traffic control when others were looking for a copilot. Somebody along for the ride with them, not just requesting information about them and offering commentary from the ground.
I've been in therapy for over a year and one of the most valuable things I've learned as a fellow "problem solver" is to run through the "three H's" when something comes up:
1. Do you want to be Helped?
2. Do you want to be Heard?
3. Do you want to be Hugged?
I'm still trying to get in the habit of using this approach more often with my partner, and as I do, it has noticeably improved our relationship. It turns out most of the time, she just wants to be hugged.
> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution.
This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support.
I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a workplace, not personal relationship) it was a sign that something deeper was amiss: Being a perpetual victim of their circumstances and believing those circumstances were beyond their control was a safe, comforting place to exist. It was always easier to build up excuses that problems were thrust upon them by others, who could be held solely responsible for the results. In some cases I had to be very clear that they were responsible for working with teammates to address these issues together, not become a passive receiver of everything that happens with their peers.
Swooping in as the hero to solve everything for someone else isn’t a good solution, but (in a workplace environment) getting someone to switch from the passive victim mindset to the active mindset of engaging with their own problems is very important.
This is one topic where carrying advice from personal romantic relationships into the workplace isn’t a good idea, IMO.
Venting all the time can actually be quite harmful to the venter. Negative energy drives change and if all you're doing is offloading then you're going to get stuck in a loop of feeling bad -> vent -> repeat while the underlying problem doesn't get solved.
The next trap is loudly announcing how you’re going to get yourself out of that situation, getting the neurotransmitter hit that comes from the announcement, and then never doing it.
I have a person who has distanced themselves from me because I don’t provide the feedback they crave when they do this for the eleventieith time. I only have so many spoons and that passion play feels like throwing them in the garbage disposal. I just can’t for my own well being. Sorry.
Being stuck in any emotional overreaction state is harmful.
There are a lot of people reciting the academic concept of validating emotions without endorsing them in this thread, but in the real world when you consistently "validate emotions" of someone who is over-reacting, it becomes an implicit endorsement.
In the real world, the people I've known to get stuck in negative emotion states did much worse when they surrounded themselves with people who constantly validated their emotions in the academic speak that's being used in this thread.
We all know that person who is borderline Munchausen’s Syndrome, railing against an unjust world they have mostly manufactured for themselves. Or the person who has no life skills and blames all their problems on “bad luck”. Fortune favors the prepared mind.
Even there, though, there needs to be a balance. Sometimes my wife needs to vent to me about her problems, and I listen. But on the other hand, sometimes I need for her to not bring stuff up with me unless it's going to lead to a solution being implemented.
Tangentially, you could ask: Are you addicted to being useful or to being recognized as useful.
One is your own need, the other often a covered contract where you lash out or silently resign if you don't get the recognition that you think you deserve.
There’s an old adage that is very important to logical people (as software engineers are, for example).
“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”
My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battles.
That really depends if you like (or are mostly indifferent to) the new table. If you hate it then it becomes a game of "who of us two is more important to satisfy with a table". Definitely not a position you want to be in.
Relationships must be two-way streets, always.
I have made quite a lot of concessions for my wife for the current rented flat -- simply because I did not care about 99% of the things she wanted to change. I only gave her a rather loose framework: "this must fit these physical dimensions as you yourself can see here in this corner" and "I am not willing to spend hundreds to change something that is currently performing to 90% of the standards of both of us" and "how difficult it is to ship and install this?" -- and she has been mature and considerate enough to understand the boundaries and nailed them every single time so far in our 11.5 years together. And she still got almost everything she wanted and is visibly happier with the environment.
When both sides have preferences they feel safe sharing but are still reasonable above all, then things are going smoothly and flow naturally.
Of course there are the rare exceptions where I just gave up and said to her: "OK, I am leaving this to you, figure all the details out and I'll just pay it at the end of the process". I was not unhappy but she did not want to budge on a few things and I ultimately just stashed the old thing in the garage in case she understands she made a bad deal or the new thing was underperforming.
I agree strongly with "pick your battles". You have to be able to read the person in real time. It's actually much easier than most technical people think.
Our relationships sound very similar. We are so fucking lucky! Having 2 people that are striving towards a harmonious relationship is increasingly rare.
Some people have a habit of creating situations that are…. Not so easy to get out of. My favorite one essentially boiled down to ‘die die die, or I’ll kill you’.
Which, clearly, I struggled to find a useful compromise on.
Pro tip - that usually just makes people angrier haha. (Source: twice divorced, and was - per the court - always right, but it didn’t help me one bit).
The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
> The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solutions the first time you hear a story, but it's much harder when you hear the exact same story, with exact same underlying emotion, dozen+ times in the span of a few months. The other side is clearly not really processing their emotions - so if not that, and not practical advice, then what's the point of even talking about it?
It's really draining and in some cases I'm not in a position to disengage either.
Like with everything, none of the both extremes are good.
What helps me in situations where people talk about it for the umpteenth time is trying to drill down and find the root cause with carefully worded questions. I think I might be ready to become a therapist, lol. Though my fuse is quite short due to my own stress so I don't put myself in the "I am your emotional trash bin" kind of situations.
So to me even the situations you describe can be made use of. Think of it as a long-running background task with many steps; after each retry you get a new exception stack trace. F.ex. during conversation #7 you might understand one or two causes of the problem but at conversation #12 you might already have a nice root cause and you can then try to gently nudge the person towards addressing that.
Of course you are not mandated to. It's all about what you need in this current phase of life as well; you don't have to be people's therapist. It's just what I find super interesting the last year or so -- root-cause analysis of human problems.
But when I understand that somebody just wants to whine and be a constant victim, I mentally check out. Not worth the joules that my brain would spend on that person.
And there's no solution. Nothing you can do, say, or not do or say will help. Even just listening will be perceived, after the umpteenth time, as condescending; and voicing your opinion is obviously a no go. It's lose-lose.
I call that "you are the garbage bin for other people's emotions". And once you realize this process you can't unsee it and re-evaluate some relationships. If it is each side taking turns being the "emotional garbage bin" then it's a healthy relationship.
But if people only reach out to drop their toxic waste and leave you without the chance to get rid of your own toxic waste you feel not good afterwards. Like where you have conversations and then afterwards notice that you were not able to actually speak about any of your own problems and worries.
That's what I really like about the kids and their words of the year: They used "aura" and at first I thought what a bullshit term is that, but after a while I came to understand it. It's totally fine to listen to your stomach feelings, if someone's aura is negative or their vibes are off you don't need to give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave.
We've been trained to be helpful and nice to everyone but then wonder why we feel drained at the end of the day. It's because we're spending emotional bandwidth on people and things that don't give us any energy back.
The word "aura" for all of this is extremely nice. If you see a spooky person approaching you on the street at night you also don't need to explain to them what exactly put you off about them - you just switch sides.
You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people. I understand this is a strategy that is popular these days, but maybe consider how another fellow human will feel when you "don't give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave", and judge what they tell you as "toxic waste"; and how you might be the one to make it worse for them (and yourself). If you mentalize yourself into the other position, yours might appear arrogant and condecending if not psychologically violent from where you stand ("how's your aura looking?").
If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection. There are other ways to not feel drained even after listening to the most horrible (or boring) stories that don't cut people (and thus yourself) off. You gain options, not lose any. You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort, and become more independent from what people around you are saying or doing, instead of turning your problem into their wrongdoing. Instead of having your world suddenly be full of energy vampires you need to protect yourself from.
> You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people.
No, none of this is comforting. For some people it is a big step to not drop everything just because someone is waiting for the bus and wants to have a 15 minute phone call in order to de-stress their own day.
> If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection.
Not every human connection is a net positive.
> You gain options, not lose any.
Please let me complete the options I already have before putting more options on my TODO list.
> You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort
That's ableism.
People are unique, and while I appreciate you taking the time to write these lines you might be coming from a very different place. To be a bit snarky, maybe you are more on the energy consumer side of things than on the energy producer side. People have a magic radar for others who make them feel heard, but there is a certain bandwidth and it's limits must be respected.
I don't see how something can be "ableism" that can be learned by anyone. You may not want to, which is totally fine, or you may not know how to, which is also fine, but to claim you couldn't do it without even trying is just yet another convenient and comforting display of avoidance.
It's OK not to want to be in connection with others whose behavior you don't agree with, but it's not necessary and from my perspective counter-productive for yourself and society as a whole to turn that into a permission to act in hostile ways against them, especially if you're not providing clear feedback. In fact, unless you provide that in an open way, they will not change their ways around you, so you're losing a lot of chances to influence people around you in situations where you simply cannot decide to avoid them altogether. You're not in control over which humans you interact with, and you're turning interactions into exchanges of aggression unnecessarily.
In my case, I really do want to be of use. In fact, I often tend to stay well in the background, and deliberately eschew credit.
That said, I do tend to get upset, when I’m taken for granted, but that’s really my own fault. I know it, rationally, but my inner brat still wants to throw a tantrum.
Well if none of the measures you already tried to stop that did not work, then maybe one thing that can help you is asking yourself whether you are not feeling drained after interacting with those people?
I, like yourself, cannot override my engineering mindset. I ALWAYS WANT TO HELP. But at one point I reframed it as an energy budget problem and how efficiently are my time and energy spent... and then it clicked.
I have learned to do that, but it actually makes me uncomfortable to do it.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, in my case, manifests as not being very comfortable, when people give me attention. That's why I like working on "infrastructure" stuff (and also why I used to be a bass player[0]).
> I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care
I can so relate. I once read something that shifted my perspective a bit and helped me start the work of learning to better care for myself.
It was basically somebody talking/writing about the safety instructions when taking a flight. They tell you that in case of an emergency, when the o2 masks drop down to first put your ownmas on, before helping others. Because you are no help, if you loose conciousness.
This image/metaphor , to first put my own mask on, so that I can ensure, I will be able to help others without falling over, was what helped me start this process.
I sadly can't remember if it was Brené Brown or where I originally read that.
It's a great analogy. I first came across it in Gerald Weinberg's 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit', where he spends some time talking about burnout, what it means, and how to get out when you find your way in.
Yeah there are some similar suggestions but all the examples I can think of are at least a bit of a stretch. Matthew 7:3–5 mebbe? Remove the log from your own eye before focusing on smaller chunks of wood in the eyes of others?
For what it's worth, I wanted to downvote this because it doesn't provide much additional context. Which verses? Is there a link?
(I didn't downvote)
Saying "oh yeah the bible mentions that" doesn't really add to a conversation - the bible mentions a lot of stuff!
However, if I downvote you because you didn't provide context, you might misinterpret it as "wow, hacker news hates the bible" (I have no opinion on hn audience feelings towards religion)
So for additional context, one could look up the "speck vs log" which seems most straightforwardly about taking care of your own issues first (although it's in the context of hypocrisy, which doesn't quite match the original thread iiuc)
I found a few others, but none quite seemed like the close match I was hoping for (Mark 12:31, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, etc)
One pattern I’ve noticed, however, is that if you’re really good at doing this - and the situations being created are artificial - you might run into a situation where someone cuts or poisons your oxygen mask first.
I would have said ‘no way is someone that evil’, but uh…. Ask most men in their 40’s or 50’s.
Buddy, this is the second comment in here where you want us to blame some unknown Other for our problems. That is a dead end. And gray hair doesn’t confer wisdom, as Thoreau said. Signed, some guy in his 50s.
It could be related to the personality trait of how much of our world model is "in our mind" vs "out there":
If I speak with you while working on the world model in my mind, it looks like I just "want to be heard". But your feedback is actually very important, it's just that it should only feed my mental world model.
I am then surprised that my math coprocessor reaches for the GPIO.
It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard.
I'm glad she managed to solve this problem in the end.
I learned this from the show Parks and Recreation. Ann is pregnant and trying to vent, and Chris is looking to solve all her problems. This drives her nuts.
I've fallen into this problem before, but theres an additional trap you should be aware of: You are not a therapist.
You cannot and should not just "listen" to problems that you're not allowed to work on or expect the other person to work on. You are an active member of this persons' life with your own point-of-view and emotional needs, not a dumping ground for emotional flotsam.
This is a good point. In countries with well regulated industries, therapists are required to go to therapy themselves for that very reason. It takes training and continual psychological maintenance to be that emotional dumping ground for other people and should not be taken up by normal people lightly.
You are missing the point, though. The complainer decides whether it's a solvable problem or not, not the listener. So "I'll listen if it's unsolvable (to me)" is a non-starter.
Yeah, I am still learning to not be logical and fix whatever ails her. Often she really just wants to be heard, not solutions.
I am ~30 years old, hopefully I will be able to just hear, without offering any solutions. It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
> It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good.
In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?
That has been tricky with my partner because many times she legitimately does want me to just handle the problem for her, and then you get into the fuzzy area where it is my job to interpret what she says and her job to communicate what she needs clearly and you are often left with an ambiguous conflict where both parties feel justified.
I do generally find it is easier for women to respond with empathy instead of solutions because there is no background expectation that they are capable of fixing a problem their male partner has.
Well said...I have discovered the same in my own marriage of thirty years. I would add that even bringing a good solution in a relationship can go unheard, especially if the motivation is to be the fixer, and to be honest make your own life easier by silencing the other's point of frustration.
This is kind of typical situation with men and women right, they need their girl friend coffee complaint time, we guys need similar beer time, albeit contents vary wildly. At least what you write fits every ex-gf I dated, and also fits my guy-brain expectations and resulting type of discussions.
Part of the setup by default, but should not take decades to discover or reveal. Similar to how women experience stuff mainly via emotions, hence what was fine yesterday may not be today albeit factually nothing changed.
101 of each adult should be also figuring out how one works (and how doesn't) and optimizing with other relevant parties further interactions.
In fact being or feeling useful can be addictive. It goes beyond fixing technical problems. If I know someone is sad or in trouble for a longer period of time, I tend to check in regularly. I need to hold myself back, not to do it too often. The reason is probably the dopamine (or some happy neurotransmitter) effect that respectful or thankful people invoke on me. So it is the help<->dopamine transaction.
> not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution
Relatable. Is true for even the simplest problems that some people have.
Sometimes they just didn't even address it yet and are only becoming adequately aware of it and here you are spelling out a plan of action during a 7 min encounter in the kitchen.
I've been with my wife for almost 4 years, and we both have the same problem. But, we both like having systems and routines, so now we have a system: lead with "I don't need help, I just need to vent." YMMV of course.
could this be a difference in male/female brains ? talks implies action for men, while women want to communicate most and maybe plan to act ? just curious, it's an issue that has been mentioned everywhere all the time
>could this be a difference in male/female brains ?
Maybe socially, but I'm not sure about naturally. It took me a long time to get where the GP is, realizing that some just like to he heard rather than offered solutions. Now I notice that my family are "fixers" and any problem or difficulty is countered with "did you do this" or "you should have done that" or "why don't you.." I now realize I don't like being second guessed in a moment like that, in contrast to the gender stereotype.
It becomes more challenging when the person is Carrie Fisher from When Harry Met Sally, “processing” the same information for years at a time. This is not a surprise. That he’s never going to leave her. You know the solution. You are the architect of your own stress. You’re torturing yourself for who? An audience of me?
I’ve watched that “you have a nail in your forehead” video again with the benefit of another ten years of life and it’s interesting how I saw what the women were saying the first time I watched it but on a rewatch it’s clearly making fun of her at least as much as him. You’re in the middle of a medical emergency and you want to just talk about it instead of calling 911. That’s a bridge too far.
And to think I always hated that trope in action and scary movies where the person wants to ask questions while being chased by a psychopath or a dinosaur. Compartmentalization is good - in appropriate doses.
Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating:
Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.
It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment.
Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.
I have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.
Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours.
Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.
Generally speaking, the clan you worked to survive with generally didn't cancel you because a seashell currency accountant saw some tangential benefit for a moment. Which might just be their own survival need to look busy or be a perforative hard ass, to avoid the same thing.
The loyalty you are dismissing as unnatural, was painstakingly discovered by our genes, precisely because it maximized survival in our natural environment.
On a more serious note, i personally enjoy it. Why? I find software engineering intellectually stimulating and i enjoy the _process_, but i don’t (usually) enjoy the _people_. There are really only a couple former colleagues I actually keep in touch with. You know - the “real” friends so to speak.
My outside-of-work friends are not nerdy like myself and that’s why i love them. Keeps me out of my work bubble and also gives me interesting things to do and talk about on the weekends. :)
Everyone is different though. Some people genuinely enjoy going to the pub with their work mates lol. I’d rather do anything else.
> corporate culture can and will take advantage of you
All jobs take advantage of you to some degree. The difference is that a corporate job pays much more, and the work load is a tiny fraction of other jobs. If you on top of this can work with something you enjoy, then you've gotten a very good deal.
I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.
So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
Sometimes it's useful to just solve the problem at hand and sometimes it's useful to solve the root problem. Sometimes solving the root cause is knowledge sharing or mentoring. Sometimes the entire task is just not what you want to be doing with your career.
Part of becoming more senior is learning when each is appropriate.
This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.
I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet.
I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.
Are the incompetent people your coworkers?
Ideally you can be solving your customers problems, which is a nice terminating lens of “always useful”, tho you may still want to pick and choose.
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money.
I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".
He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
This is a big topic in disability rights activism; there are a lot of people who can do some work some of the time, with a certain level of accommodation, and would benefit from so doing.
But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs.
Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generally unusual to have social housing without strict policies and monitored policies on job placements. This policy exists as social housing is highly limited and the administrators wants people to get jobs so that they move out (and into a better shelter they can now afford).
I don't believe UK social housing has any work requirements, it is just massively oversubscribed, such that you need to be very vulnerable to realistically be offered council housing. You do have to pay (below market rate) rent, so you probably need to be searching for work or have been declared to have limited capability for work or work related activities to get a benefit to pay for your social housing. I think there's some state where they've decided no one will hire you for minimum wage, but you're otherwise able so you have to do some kind of volunteering.
Saw a Wall Street Journal article (behind paywall) on this topic which was a short version of this upcoming book: _Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose_
"What these retirees were describing wasn’t just disappointment in a lack of opportunities. It was an erosion in something far more fundamental—their sense of mattering, the deep human need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. We plan for our wealthspan and healthspan, mapping out financial security and physical well-being. Yet very few of us prepare for an equally essential dimension of retirement: our mattering span, or how we will continue to feel seen, useful and capable of making a difference in this next chapter of life."
I understand, but retired people rank highest on the happiness index, same as children, and the thing they have in common is nothing to do but play, relax, and have fun. Social housing probably doesn't allow for any form of play, and it's just scrapping by level of "surviving". I don't think it's a good example, and letting those people instead work 12h days, 7 day a week, at some repetitive, low pay, job, isn't gonna be all that better, and might be even more horrible.
Hobbies are often personal, or at least self serving. Unless your hobby is volunteering. You can hear this in how people talk about out them. "I do this for me."
Ever since Lowtax killed himself and I felt a lot of undeserved guilt over it [1] [2] I have developed a sort of "savior complex".
I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong".
It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is.
The weird part to me (and a lot of people) is that I barely knew the guy. I had exchanged a few messages, we joked around a bit, and arranged to meet. This wasn't a close friend killing himself, this was effectively a Z-list celebrity that I liked.
What bothers me more than the actual suicide (though that's very sad too) is the fact that I chose to do nothing. I saw signs, I debated doing something, and I prioritized meeting my man-crush more than trying to do the right thing. I know that me doing something wouldn't have changed anything, I have no idea what I would even do. It just bothers me that I actively decided to not do anything.
Everyone thinks they're a good person, and everyone thinks they'll do the right thing when it matters. I certainly thought that, and ultimately I guess that's not strictly true, or at least it wasn't in 2021. I let being a coward and selfish stop me from trying to help someone, and in my mind it stopped me from doing the right thing.
I don't really believe in anything supernatural, but it feels like this was some kind of important cosmic test that I failed. Metaphorically speaking.
And I think at this point, I overcompensate; I treat people as surrogates to try and assuage some of the guilt that I have over that. If something bad happens, I can at least tell myself that I did what I could.
I realize that this kind of thinking is not healthy for me. Guilt isn't inherently bad, it's important to have guilt to learn from your mistakes and to make yourself as good of a person as you can be, but carrying this kind of guilt for someone I barely knew and aggressively trying to "fix it" by over-helping everyone is probably bad for my mental health.
At this point, and I'm a little embarrassed it took me until my 30's to reach this conclusion, but I've started living by the motto of "don't let being a coward stop you from doing the right thing". Taken to the extreme I'm not sure that's healthy either.
First off, my heart goes out to you. Thinking that you chose to be a bystander must have cut really core to your sense of identity. It's been difficult to reconcile being a good person and choosing to do nothing for you, and I don't wish that kind of doubt and angst on anyone. I'm sorry that it's affecting you now in ways you are worried can be counterproductive.
Second, I want to offer an unsolicited perspective that may help you. I read your linked post about Lowtax's death and how it went down for you. You're blaming the 2021 version of yourself for not making the right choice, but what I read wasn't selfishness or cowardice stopping you from speaking up - it was an assessment of your ability to make a difference. I'm not saying you should never speak up when you feel something is off, or demonstrate concern, but that person in 2021 understood the many, many barriers to saving Lowtax: the unpredictability of his response, the ambiguity of the message, the concern that it wasn't your place, the large possibility you were overreacting. What would you have done? What would you have said? How would you have been able to reach them that closer friends, family, and others would not? You are telling yourself you somehow had the knowledge, therefore the responsibility and power, but in reality you had no power and only the barest hint of knowledge. You had no idea if what you were doing was right or not, how it would be taken, how it would have been perceived, or what the consequences were. You are only _guessing_ that by taking some miraculous action you could have averted the outcome, but in truth no action might have been good enough - you could have spent a year and three months getting them the resources they need, and still they could have done this.
When someone takes their life, it isn't the fault of the lone stranger who wanted to say hello. You did not choose to be a bystander - rather, by taking their life, they made you a bystander. You have to separate your sense of moral esteem from the consequences of someone else's choices. Yes, anyone could have done something, said something - and for all you know people did!
Inaction by itself is not a moral hazard. Inaction when armed with the facts, the ability to make a difference, the understanding that the difference made will be significant or material, and where the action is scoped enough to not jeopardize the situation - this is the real hazard. In 2021, you did not have the facts or the ability to make a meaningful difference - only the slim possibility that a message in the dark might have ruined nothing and saved life. But that is fantasy talking, not genuine pragmatism.
I hope this gives you some permission and at least a framework to measure your "overhelping" against. Therapy has been helpful for me in the past when dealing with complicated emotions.
It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others.
I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
Yes, equanimity is a great quality to possess. It means that you never get too high or too low. When things are really going your way, you know that things can change for the worse. Yet you can be content. When things are not going your way, you know that things can change for the better. And you can be content.
This doesn't mean that you don't try to achieve anything. It means that you can still be content whether you succeed or fail.
No problem! Happy it was helpful. I learned about equanimity last year in a book I read about the science of self actualization, how to reach your unique potential.
> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.
> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.
I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)
The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.
I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.
So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?
Deciding which problems should be solved, identifying where there is business value in solving them, is pretty much the definition of business leadership.
I think the only real answer is moving into management, where you can more effectively argue against spending effort on things that aren't worthwhile.
Well that’s not what I wanted to hear! I think you’re right though, you get to choose your challenge: do you want your problem to be possibly working on things that don’t really matter or be responsible (and empowered) to figure out what really matters.
Yeah it sucks but unfortunately this is the conclusion I came to after pondering on this for my own career. I think you phrased it as well as I've ever seen it put though.
And of course there is always the other options. For myself I didn't relish either choice and now I teach programming and CS. But I'm old and this feels like a good way to end my working years.
I love every minute of my sysadmin job (different job, I know)..and it's not always easy. I enjoy the work. I enjoy educating the users. I even enjoy being on call. And it isn't necessarily the money. I enjoy researching and fixing issues that I might not have come across before, and improving on the current infrastructure and workflow. I even enjoy talking to the salespeople and vendors who call. I love putting projects together and seeing them work when finished.
Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always).
I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings.
I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.
I wonder if this sort of thing can lead to faster burnout or such. I've sorta over time leaned toward guarding my own space/time since somehow I get more tired out, and over time more burned out, if I don't.
I probably have a very similar "dysfunction" as OP. Can't say how it is for him, but I do get burned out somewhat regularly if I push myself too much for too long. However it usually takes few days to a week at most of low-effort activity or travel to recover.
Strongly agree with this. It may sound good in theory, but in practice, especially with real people, it can come across as overbearing, stifling, and exhausting for others. This isn’t meant as a dig at the OP. it’s just an observation based on personal experience with someone like that in my own family.
edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play.
Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well.
Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing.
Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play.
All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work.
I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.
As we mature mentally, we need more interesting games to play, more interesting challenges. Work is many times the result of this.
It's the same with romance. When we are children we have a crush on somebody, become pretend "boyfriend and girlfriend", and as we mature the game becomes more interesting as it becomes real.
But it's all a game throughout life.
So perhaps it is those who enjoy work who has elevated their spiritual level, and not the other way around?
Was about to comment the same till I found your comment.
I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society.
If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.
I like this thought. It is interesting to look at our current societal/economic systems on the earth and realize none of them will survive the death of scarcity.
In abstract terms capitalism doesn't depend on scarcity? Capitalism as in centralisation of the means of production (even when there is no human labor anymore).
I think my warning would be that prioritizing tasks you know you can do and do well may be satisfying, but may limit growth. I identify with the author's POV quite a bit, but sometimes I find that when I take a step back and put in less effort on the day-to-day tasks, the feedback on my performance goes _up_.
Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.
The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys.
That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.
I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain.
I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.
I was this way for a long time at work. A re-org and management change broke me. It's been very hard to get motivated these days. I want it to be like it was, but I'm starting to think there is no going back.
I am kinda the same only I'm not clear how the author describes useful. Being useful to my team, my employer my clients is ok but a lot of my career has been building software for businesses I did not understand and sometimes actively disliked. I'm unofficially retired after 25+ years in industry and look back at a spotty record of building anything lasting and positive. I had plenty of great teams and received praise for being effective at delivery but honestly it feels hollow in retrospect.
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.
And if you like that, the good news is you will probably like most every Kidder book. Or at least House. His works tend to be inquiries into how systems work, just at different scales.
Interesting quote and certainly can apply to some people, but this behavior could also be considered as "acts of service" type of "love language". You can take any endearing and genuinely good behavior and make a toxic version out of it.
My SIL queues up household tasks when I come over. "Hey I got this new thermostat, can you help me put it on?" kinda stuff that she could do herself but she knows that's what makes me feel fulfilled.
Someone who stops at road side, and helps a stranger with a tire iron, likely has no reason other than it just feels the right thing to do; the recipient's smile being the most precious payment they could possibly receive.
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs.
Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience .
I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews.
If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.
I really don't mind PR reviews, as long as the author is cooperative. I do not like arguing over obvious things with someone who isn't participating in good faith. Thankfully I have a good team in which it doesn't happen.
This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem.
I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)
The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change.
I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59
Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone.
While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me.
I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s....
I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!
1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards.
2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.
I have something similar to this need to be useful but perhaps a different twist that is causing me problems. It's not so much a sense that I want to be useful but a feeling that I HAVE to be or bad things will happen. Lately it's a constantly running internal narrative that everyone around me is useless. Which breeds an anxiety that if I don't do everything then something important will slip through the cracks. That yields a sense of dispair and eventually anger because of this constant weight that I expect I'll have to carry indefinitely.
I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!
The working dog analogy really resonated. I've noticed this same trait in teachers, nurses, even parents; that intrinsic satisfaction from being needed. The tricky part is knowing when it tips from fulfilling to self-depleting.
This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible.
I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health.
The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work".
To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..
Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.
It's not addiction. That makes in sound like self pat on the back disguised as a problem.
It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems.
I think many people have that on various subjects.
It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.
Many of the problems are self inflicted or don’t deserve solving in the first place. In fact solving Facebook’s ad targeting “problem” is actively working against The Good.
Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction.
I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.
Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.
I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."
I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of:
> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?
The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:
> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
And this is the determining factor to whether a current dev will be replaced by AI or will evolve alongside with it, being the bridge between humans and AI.
Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.
I’ve never felt useful in any of the big tech companies I’ve worked at. It always feels pointless. Is it just the projects I’ve been assigned never being worth anything or whether it is my perspective on those projects, I have no idea
Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.
This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
>> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked".
Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day.
yep, that's right. The idea of his nickname that he is really silly. Small man and no good at anything. If you want to go deeper and harsh synonyms he is like "shitty" man, doing shit and receiving shit. His nickname fully describes him like useless, small, no influence, clueless, talentless man. One from the great unwashed
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.
It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.
I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.
Seeing things being broken but not being fixed is a real source of frustration.
The tricky thing in my experience has been figuring out which are issues that nobody bothered to fix and which are issues that seem simple but require huge changes to fix.
The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.
I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.
This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models.
Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".
> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying
I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.
If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.
Aka, identity-affirming obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with compulsive mastery as defense mechanism. Welcome to the club, we have cookies (and they're Michelin-rated but it takes us three weeks to make them).
Bullshit. There are some dysfunctional exceptions, but higher pay usually correlates with more freedom, more responsibility and access to more resources. You may get frustrated in Big Tech, because nowadays, people like to have no bounds in their expectations, but try changing your big tech job for a job in the oil or insurance industry with half the pay, and you'll see that most of the time, you not getting a blast out of your 600k job is mostly your fault.
> I don’t mind the ways in which my job is dysfunctional, because it matches the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional
As a fellow traveller, I offer one caution: learn to turn this down in personal relationships as it can be counterproductive. It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard. It bugs the hell out of me because I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care, but rather than seem heroic, I think this attitude can seem transactional or uncaring as though everyone is just a screw that needed a bit of tightening, etc.
I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver.
Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
You can help by being curious about what they're saying, reflecting it back to them in your own terms, explaining how what they're feeling is understandable, and offering context or alternative viewpoints. These are actually complex problem-solving skills, although they can all fall under the umbrella of what people mean when they say "to be heard".
As a man, I've realised that once my emotions feel validated and accepted, I relax and the practical solutions just pop into my mind.
> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot.
If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful. It can be harmful.
I know this goes against the Reddit-style relationship stereotype where the man must always listen and nod but not offer suggestions, but when someone is prone to self-destructive emotional thought loops behind their emotional validator can be actively harmful. Even if validation is what they seek and want.
It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.
One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.
> Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning.
If “validating” someone’s emotions comes down to simply saying that, yes, I agree you felt that way, then I suppose that’s true.
But when people talk about validating other people’s emotions it implies that they’re saying the emotional response was valid for the circumstances.
I have someone in my extended family who has a strong tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst. When she was in a relationship with someone who constantly validated her emotions and reactions it was disastrous. It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
There’s a hand wavey, feel good idea where we’re supposed to believe everyone’s lived experience and emotions are valid, but some people have problems with incorrect emotional reactions. Validating these can become reinforcing for that behavior.
I’m not saying we should start doubting every emotional reaction or white knighting everything, but it’s unhealthy to take a stance that validating other people’s emotions is de facto good.
You’re making a reasonable point, but I think you’re arguing against a somewhat strawmanned version of emotional validation.
You’re treating “validation” as synonymous with “agreeing the emotional response was proportionate and correct.” But that’s not really what validation means in a therapeutic or even colloquial sense. Validating someone’s emotions typically means acknowledging that the emotion is real and understandable given how that person perceived the situation. It doesn’t require you to endorse their perception as accurate.
You can say “I get why you’d feel terrified if you believed X was happening” while also gently probing whether X is actually happening. That’s still validation. What you’re describing as helpful for your family member isn’t really “invalidation” so much as reality-testing, which is a different thing and can coexist with emotional validation.
Your anecdote is doing a lot of work here. We don’t know what “constantly validated” actually looked like in practice, or what the “level headed” person was doing differently. It’s possible the first partner was just conflict-avoidant and agreeing with distorted interpretations of events, which isn’t validation so much as enabling. And the second partner may have been effective not because they said “your reaction isn’t valid” but because they offered a stable outside perspective while still being emotionally supportive.
Your broader point about reinforcement is worth taking seriously though. There are absolutely cases where excessive reassurance-seeking gets reinforced by certain responses. But the solution isn’t to tell people their feelings are wrong. It’s to validate the feeling while not automatically validating the catastrophic interpretation driving it.
I disagree. I think the overly academic isolation of "validating emotions" into something that happens without endorsing the response isn't how real people communicate.
Any time you're "validating emotions" in the real world, there is going to be some degree of implicit endorsement that the reaction was valid.
The idea of "validating emotions" being synonymous with saying "I agree that you feel that way" is rather infantile. Nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced.
My partner and I have been through this cycle. Something happens, she interprets it a certain, very specific, way and then has an adverse emotional reaction.
In the early days of our relationship I would try to explain to her why her emotion doesn't 'make sense'. That just made things worse. Much worse. When she helped me understand that she needed me to validate that what she was feeling was legitimate - based on her interpretation of the events - she was able to let go and consider other interpretations.
Note that this "letting go" almost never happened in the moment, but only after the emotions abated and she had time to process the entire situation. We're talking hours, not minutes.
You’re collapsing two distinct claims. The first, that real-world communication is messier than clinical frameworks, is obviously true but doesn’t do the work you need it to. The second, that acknowledging someone’s emotional experience is “infantile” because “nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced,” is empirically false.
People frequently do need that. That’s basically what dismissive attachment styles and invalidating environments produce: people who aren’t sure their own internal states are real or legitimate. “I can see why that hurt” lands very differently than “that shouldn’t have hurt.” The former isn’t agreeing the other party was wrong or the reaction was proportionate. It’s communicating “your inner experience makes sense to me.”
The implicit endorsement concern is real but overstated. Skilled communicators navigate this constantly. “That sounds really frustrating. What do you think was actually going on there?” validates the frustration while opening space for reexamination. The failure mode you’re pointing at is when someone only validates and never probes, which is just conflict avoidance.
The “overly academic” framing is doing some rhetorical work here. These distinctions come from observing what actually helps people versus what entrenches them. Therapists, mediators, and anyone who’s gotten good at difficult conversations know the difference intuitively. It’s not academic. It’s practical.
Thanks, you've put this in clearer and more concrete terms than I've been able to.
> Any time you're "validating emotions" in the real world, there is going to be some degree of implicit endorsement that the reaction was valid.
Hard no.
In the real world, when I emotionally validate my friends or partners it looks like slowing down and being there, with them, with their emotions. Being present with their emotions then often addresses the underlying emotional need: for example, to feel heard, or to acknowledge their feelings to themselves, to feel cared for and accepted, to feel like someone has their back, etc.
None of this requires that I accept their interpretation of events. And almost always, there will be space at some point for me to disagree with their interpretation. It is much much much more effective to tease apart that interpretation once their emotions have calmed down.
TL;DR: addressing someone's emotional needs (aka "validating") doesn't imply that you agree with them about their interpretation of what happened
I quite like the definition on Wikipedia:
> Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_validation
It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right. But this is quibbling over semantics; I think we both agree that challenging someone is sometimes the kindest thing to do.
I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition.
In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
The overly academic definition doesn't reflect how people communicate in the real world.
There's also a factor of consistency over time: It's no big deal to go along with someone venting from time to time, but when someone you're close to is overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time, validating those emotions consistently is going to be viewed as an implicit endorsement.
> It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right.
Not in this case. Just going along with it.
The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'.
Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.
Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.
Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.
I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.
A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.
I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.
> I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened.
The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.
> Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way. IDK if anything here counts as a good container for emotion.
'validate' is very ambiguous. 'comfort' is very different from presence. It can actually be a way of invalidating funnily enough. 'not question' has a lot going on.
I definitely hear a lot of enablement in your example. It sounds like she is better off without that.
> This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.
I agree here. Validate itself is a loaded term, especially in the tech world. It sounds like it implies correctness. Maybe I'm onboard with just a need for 'emotional presence' over 'validation'.
Validation can slide into enablement. Challenge can slide into invalidation. Presence is the impossible one. Having someone you can openly explore an emotion, even just say it all without evoking a fear or anger response, a validation or invalidation response from. Let's it just hang in the air without reaction. Let's it exist without adding distance or withdrawing connection. Have endless curiosity.
I do think I am onboard with validation being a more dangerous term. I get its origin/concept - maybe trying to combat the amount of invalidation in the world but it's ironic to see how invalidating the wrong kind of validation can be.
I've clearly struck a nerve with how many people arrived in this comment thread to project different scenarios on to the situation, as well as all the different and conflicting definitions of "validate emotions"
To be honest, I'm growing even more distaste for the "validating emotions" academic concept after reading some of the mental gymnastics people are doing in this thread.
You wrote
> validated her emotions and reactions
But in other instances in this thread I am not so sure each time you mention her emotions you are talking about her feelings, distinct from her actions or interpretations. There is a difference between anger (the emotion), aggression (waving hands, loud voice etc), and physical contact (undirected against objects, directed at objects, against self, against others). Maybe you are “striking nerves” since it’s not always clear which one you are referring to in terms of her “validation”. And these distinctions are not academic.
> To be honest, I'm growing even more distaste for the "validating emotions" academic concept after reading some of the mental gymnastics people are doing in this thread.
(chiming in)
It's not academic, but practical. For me, these skills have been immensely helpful for navigating both my own emotions and those of others. My relationships improved quite a bit once I started using these skills. I'm closer to more people, I can get to depth more quickly and more safely with new people, and me and those close to me are all growing/healing more quickly because we can meet our emotional needs while also gradually working to reshape those needs.
To me, "validation" is about addressing someone's actual underlying emotional needs. But it still leaves space for disagreeing with the interpretation/perception of what happened. My own saying is that we should "accept our emotions, but not always accept the story they are telling us".
> as well as all the different and conflicting definitions of "validate emotions"
What mental gymnastics do you see?
> confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion
This is not emotional validation; nobody wants to be told something they can decide for themselves. Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion. When venting to someone, one doesn't want to hear "I understand that you feel that way", they want to hear "I understand why you feel that way". The former is a dismissal (taking the guise of a validation) and the latter is a validation. "I don't get why you feel $EMOTION about this" is the ultimate emotional sucker punch of invalidation from an active listener even though it necessarily implies said confirmation that they feel $EMOTION.
> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Notably, "sharing" the emotions is not the only way to validate them; I do not have to feel (or even understand) one's sadness for their sadness to be valid. The second part is the only thing they're looking for and it is very unlikely to be false given the appropriate context. From another comment, "the emotional response was valid for the circumstances" is accurate when one understands "the circumstances" to include the life experiences that cause them to have such an emotional response from something that doesn't trigger the same emotions in oneself.
> overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time
There are healthy avenues for expressing such emotions as well as unhealthy ones. Validating the emotional response to something is precisely what will allow the person feeling the emotions to calm down and decide on actions that will benefit their situation. If they are invalidated, they will instead spend effort seeking that validation.
> Just going along with it.
Well, if "it" is referring to behaviors and attitudes, then there's an obvious problem (in all likelihood) but that's also distinct from emotional validation. As I said in my other comment in this thread, one can logically say "it's okay to feel that way but you shouldn't think that". I strongly doubt that is the likes of the validation being complained about here. The negatives of the situation being described do not seem likely caused merely from emotional validation. And I would bet with near certainty that the partner they met who got them to choose healthy behaviors did so by first validating their emotions.
> Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion.
That's not the definition the others are using, but this seems to be a game of whack-a-mole with everyone's different ideas about what it means.
That said, I think your definition highlights the problem: By telling someone it's okay to feel the emotion, you've implicitly endorsed the response.
The situations I'm speaking about involve people developing inappropriate emotional reactions that lead to self-harm. When they surround themselves with people who do this "validate emotions" game, they're implicitly gathering consensus that it's okay to react that way. The cycle continues.
It's clear that a lot of people have picked up this idea of "validating emotions" being virtuous and good, but some times what people need is for people around them to explain that their reaction is not actually appropriate or okay.
> That said, I think your definition highlights the problem: By telling someone it's okay to feel the emotion, you've implicitly endorsed the response.
This tells me that you've not understood my meaning. One is not condoning or endorsing any behavioral response when they say the emotional response (which motivated the behavior) is valid and natural. They are distinct things and one does not necessarily follow or precede the other.
> their reaction is not actually appropriate or okay
I suspect we are talking past each other here. If "their reaction" refers to their emotions, that is not your concern; to think otherwise is wildly antisocial. If it instead refers to their actions and/or behaviors, you simply are not bemoaning emotional validation.
>> emotional response (which motivated the behavior) is valid and natural.
This is obviously nonsense. If an old woman falls over and breaks her knee, and one's emotional response is happiness - they have real problems - it's not natural or valid to feel that. If the idea of choking women to death makes one feel excited - no it's not natural or valid to feel that emotion, they have serious problems. One could go on.
Maybe you haven't met any really bad people in life - when you do you will often find they have very strange emotional responses to things.
I guess I should make explicit my general assumption that we are not talking about psychopaths given the overwhelming odds that a given individual is not a psychopath. That said...
> If the idea of choking women to death makes one feel excited - no it's not natural or valid to feel that emotion, they have serious problems.
I disagree. That is surely a natural and valid emotional response for whatever reason this hypotheticals individual feels it. Yes, they also surely have serious problems but I contend that said problems are obviously what lead to this "very strange" emotional response. Their problems are also valid, regardless of the personal damage (read: devoid of outward violence) they cause.
In this case, the response might affect their behavior such that they actually do it and that would obviously be tragic; that behavior is not valid regardless of the emotions (or lack thereof) which motivate it. Otherwise, speaking of their emotional response, I don't see a reason to condemn them for a reaction they have such little control over.
You keep talking in circles around a definition of valid.
You are just wrong on this. You want to seem sophisticated and understanding, and it's just lazy stupid thinking.
> You keep talking in circles around a definition of valid.
We could decide on a similar word to use if you prefer. Perhaps "acceptable" from a sibling comment. Replace "valid" with "acceptable" and "validation" with "acceptance" in all of my comments and the meaning is still true; that seems to suggest I've been consistent with my use of "valid".
> You are just wrong on this.
What you mean is that we are of different minds. You try to make yours the objective one in spite of the glaringly obvious fact that opinions are not necessarily shared between differing minds.
> You want to seem sophisticated and understanding
Genuinely, what a compliment! I was just writing about my perspective. My goal with the writing was primarily to espouse my understanding of this subject while secondarily avoiding "you" statements in my comments. If you think the result sounds sophisticated and understanding, I am more than willing to believe you. If you don't think that, well, you might want to consider where those words came from because I sure noticed. (It might also help to consider that you have no means of discovering my motivation; you must have made an assumption and expressed said assumption using your own words.)
The fact of the matter is that I spent the first three decades or so of my life being extremely emotionally unstable until I (at least somewhat) learned to manage that. I suspect this "sophisticated and understanding" sense you get from my writing on this topic comes from the care with which I write about a subject so dear to me.
I think their definition of valid is consistently aligning with the meaning of "acknowledging and accepting someone's internal experience".
As soon as you start trying to apply normative judgements to someone's feelings, as opposed to their behaviour, you inevitably end up drawing an arbitrary and cutlurally informed line between what you or socirty think is okay and what's not. It's only a problem if I feel excited by someone else's pain if my consequent behaviour actually leads to the other person suffering. I have no direct control over my emotions, but I can control my reaction to them. You just telling me it's wrong to feel excited is futile and potentially counter-productive.
> they have serious problems
Or they are practicing buddhists. Or victims of trauma. The former doesn't need (but won't mind) validation, the latter does.
> That's not the definition the others are using
For what it's worth, imo this is included in the definition of "accepting" someone's feelings. You are saying "it is acceptable" to have the feelings.
> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Which is what the whole "empathy movement" of recent years seems to emphasize. The problem is that when empathy is unmoored from the objective good, this can become scandalous (not in the sense that it causes outrage, but in the older sense that it encourages evil). Not every response is a valid response. You must be able to identify whether something is good, you must refrain from actively enabling things that are bad, but you must discern whether to correct, and if so, how to correct. Not every problem is yours to correct. Busybodies think they are.
(N.b. the Catholic Church, drawing on ethical distinctions, makes distinctions between moral principle, the objectively moral status of particular acts in light of moral principles, and the pastoral needs of particular persons. So, e.g., while prostitution as a practice is roundly condemned as a matter of principle, particular prostitutes may be treated gently. This is especially true if he/she expresses remorse for the way he/she has lived his/her life (the parable of the prodigal son comes to mind).)
This is a bit of a difficult stance to take if, like me, you don't think that there is an objective good or an objective moral status.
If there is no objective good, should I also share your view?
What do you mean by "going along with" ? Just that it sounds suspiciously like agreeing with an opinion, rather than accepting a feeling.
> It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
I guess at the risk of splitting hairs, I think it's more likely they stopped misappropriating more than they started invalidating. I see a difference between "you shouldn't feel that way" and "I disagree with that conclusion" such that one can logically say both (well, the former being "it's okay to feel that way") in the same breath.
So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote or substitute their own reality.
The reality is simpler: It was basically "Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work, but sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that"
Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
Feeling a little upset over minor annoyances is valid. Having your emotional state crumble at the slightest breeze is not. Having someone around who basically validates the latter is not good.
> So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote
For what it's worth, I imagined a scenario very similar to the one you described in this comment.
> Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work
This is emotional validation.
> sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that
This has nothing to do with emotional validation. It can be said before, after, or without said validation.
> Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
It sounds like the "validating emotions" person was validating the sulking behaviors (whether in addition to validating the related emotions or not) and saying that they were only validating the emotions.
Anyway, the purpose for my replies is not to get you to agree with that person or to change your mind about the anecdote, but to offer a more meaningful distinction of what's being discussed.
Valid feelings and validation are unrelated.
The good kind of "valid" is about whether (a) your process of measuring reality might be broken to your detriment. And by extension (b) whether your communications channel with the person you are talking to is working.
Chris Voss's mirroring is basically TCP ACKs.
Then there are the people who say that they lack validation and are just narcissists looking for yes-men. Big difference on how much of your time is being wasted.
Other people have given good insights, so I'll instead describe one of my pet theories.
Given by how we talk about emotions, I think they are "rational", but operate under a different set of rules than we normally apply to "rational" thinking. In fact, feelings are deeply intertwined with our supposedly "rational" thinking, to the point where I don't think there is a significant boundary. The lack of information is prevalent when feelings are in play, and I believe the same is true in general. Even physics feels far different than pure mathematics, after all. Instead of deferring to conventions in how to act when feelings are involved, as if they belong to a wholly different and mysterious world, we can make sense of the entire world. But of course, empathy, kindness, and good judgement are not exempt. None of this conflicts with what you're saying, but I think a subtle shift in mindset will be fruitful in applying it.
Yes, I'd agree with that. The way I think of it is that emotions are somewhat "mechanistic". I don't directly control them, but they follow certain principles. For example, fear often arises in response to a perceived threat (physical or otherwise). My boss calling me to an unexpected meeting might make me panic. And even once the peak of the fear subsides, I am more vulnerable to experiencing it again for some time. E.g. I get home and my wife's car is gone, then suddenly I'm scared that she's been in an accident or something. None of this is a rational response. There are some hand-wavey evolutionary-psychology arguments for why they operate that way. But the main thing is that there are principles that make sense out of it, and those principles are (perhaps) surprisingly consistent across humans.
They're heuristics! Or "heuristical", if that makes sense. Simplified ways of processing the world, present even in creatures with significantly less cognitive capability and complexity, and bestowed to us via that ancestry.
And because they are very-simplified ways of processing information and provoking action, they often get things 'wrong'.
Indeed, the more strong the feeling, the less rational it can become, even though the feeling is there for good reasons. A pure rational solution won't help, pure empathy as well not.
Being able to separate these situations out is part of ‘emotional problem solving’. Just like any problem solving, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all cases.
I think the important bit is to recognize that emotions are separate from (although related to) the situation itself. The problem many people have is approaching emotional problems as simply symptoms of the underlying practical problem, and that the way to solve the emotional problem is to simply go directly to solving the underlying practical problem.
Now, sometimes this is the correct approach. However, many times it isn’t. Sometimes the practical problem is not solvable by you or the person you are talking to. Sometimes the practical problem is actually not really a problem and is simply triggering something else. Sometimes you just need someone to share some pain, or some joy, or just need a connection with someone.
A good emotional problem solver can navigate all of these situations.
> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful
I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not".
The point is that the person is feeling what they're feeling, that's what the validation and acceptance comes in, not about what they're feeling those feelings about.
In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
I agree with your descriptions of the terms, but I think there's often a divergence between empathy (which I find great) and reflecting people's feelings (which I find good with caution). I want people to understand and help each other. But in some situations, reflecting people's feelings encourages them to make poor decisions. I should always provide a space for people to speak without scorn and with understanding, but I don't want to give a false impression of my concerns. Acknowledging that someone's life sucks is subtly different from acknowledging it aloud, and sometimes the subtlety is crucial.
Reflecting peoples feelings is sometimes called "showing sympathy."
Sympathy means expressing pity or sorrow at someone's plight. Reflecting feelings is more like a form of empathy. It's clarifying and/or paraphrasing the feelings so that the other person feels like they're heard and taken seriously. They're orthogonal behaviours - you can do one or the other or both.
I agree that I should understand the other person and take them seriously, and to convey this to the other person. However, sometimes verbal reflection serves the purpose of blind affirmation. I don't think the verbal component, construed this way, is so productive for empathy.
To me the confusion is the word "validate". Sounds like what you're talking about is more acknowledgement than validate. I hear / see how you're feeling and I empathize.
Dictionary definition of validate are things like:
- check or prove the validity or accuracy of (something).
- demonstrate or support the truth or value of.
Which don't seem like the intent of "validating" the emotion in this context.
> In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
If you say "that sucks" the other person is going to assume you're agreeing with them that the thing they're angry about sucks. They're not going to think you're saying "that sucks" that they have an emotion, as an isolated feeling that happened for no reason.
This is where the overly academic concept of "validating emotions without endorsing them" falls apart in the real world.
In actual human interaction, people don't debate if the other person actual feels an emotion. Angry people don't need other people to agree that they feel angry. They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
You described one of my misgivings better than I could (I made a sibling reply to parent), but I don't agree with this in all cases. Anger is easy to perpetuate blindly, but I think introspective feelings sometimes can die out if they aren't affirmed. Someone struggling with an internal conflict may reject a feeling that seems to resolve the conflict, and not take time to properly deal with the feeling. Affirming the feeling should affirm that the person may have felt and be justified in the feeling, without assuring that the feeling is definitely justified. Maybe taking that road is indeed foolish, but it would be too hasty to dismiss doing so just because it feels foolish.
> Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
Yes, actually, lots of people have healthy partnerships where they disagree with how their partner got into the situation, but can still recognize that the partner's feelings about that situation is valid, regardless, since it's an emotion their feeling, it doesn't have to be rational or logical and it's certainly not up to you to decide if it is/was neither.
This is what emotional support is, not validating their actions, but validating the emotions they're feeling, regardless of why. And not seeing some emotions as more "correct and valid" than others, they're all valid and correct, since we're humans after all.
> They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
This, in your words "falls apart in the real world", because people don't speak with others always with the same intention, sometimes people want to vent, sometimes people want to manipulate, sometimes people are looking for help, and a whole other rooster of reasons. Most of the time, people speak with others about their feelings because they want connection.
I think you're stuck in trying to separate "valid, rational and logical emotions" from "the rest of emotions" while that distinction matters less than you think, and you'll be seen as very emotionally cold/distant if you aren't able to accept people's emotion because they aren't "rational" (or whatever reason you use).
> since it's an emotion their feeling, it doesn't have to be rational or logical and it's certainly not up to you to decide if it is/was neither.
I think some of you have never had to deal with a person who had harmful emotional over reactions to even small inconveniences. It's an extremely self-harmful spiral.
Having someone who validates any emotions as if they exist in a vacuum is like adding fuel to the fire. It's implicit encouragement.
Emotional reactions aren't de facto good. Working with young children is another good way to observe that not every emotional reaction is acceptable. It's also a good way to see how people can learn how to manage their emotions, but it's hard to get to that point if they've surrounded themselves with people who will rush to validate their emotions and ignore the obvious harm it's causing.
> Working with young children is another good way to observe that not every emotional reaction is acceptable.
I have a two year old son and disagree with this. I wonder if you're using the phrase "overreaction" to mean both the emotion and the associated behaviour? I make sure to demonstrate that my son's emotions - sadness, anger, happiness - are always "acceptable" in the sense that it's okay for him to have those feelings. I never want him to feel like his feelings are not accepted, because that can easily leads to him hiding, avoiding, or suppressing feelings rather than acknowledging and learning how to process and regulate them. This is what basically all modern parenting books say and has accorded with my experience so far. But his behaviour can be unacceptable. It's okay for him to feel angry, but it is not ok for him to respond to that by hitting, biting, snatching etc. He needs me to help label and contextualise his feelings, and to show him how to divert those feelings into a healthier physical response.
This is super important. I'd argue that a huge part of learning to process feelings healthily is being and able to tell the difference between how one feels (which is an involuntary reaction that isn't controllable) and the actions taken as a result of that feeling (which require explicit choice to take). It seems obvious in the abstract, but I think it's almost a universal human condition for the line between them to get blurred. People will often say something like "I'm sorry I got mad" as if being angry is something that can be controlled, when what they should instead be apologizing for is the actions they took while mad (e.g. "I'm sorry for yelling"). There's a reason that "anger management" is a known term rather than "anger prevention", after all. If someone asks why you did something, "because I was mad" is not a healthy explanation; it removes your choice from the equation and paints yourself as a helpless victim of your emotions rather than someone with agency and the ability to act better even in the face of extinuating circumstances.
While it might seem like these are just linguistic quibbles, I've seen so many cases of people genuinely thinking that trying to suppress their emotions is the correct way to handle tough situations, and I don't think that ever works well in the long run. At most, it's sometimes beneficial to avoid expressing strong negative emotions immediately in certain situations, but that's only a short term tradeoff to avoid exacerbating whatever is currently going on, not a long term solution to avoid consequences of taking actions under the duress of heavy emotions. I believe that people would learn to act better by mentally framing their emotions separately from their choices and allowing themselves to feel them fully and ideally express them in a healthy way. Venting to a sympathetic family member or friend can be a good way of doing this, but that's also why therapy is something that would be benefit pretty much everyone in my opinion; having a trained, neutral professional to be able to talk through emotions without having to worry about overburdening them or worrying about having to interact with them in any other part of life is hard to beat in terms of a strategy for dealing with tough emotions in a healthy way.
It really matters how self-destructive the talking person tends to be.
I think you missed the bit where they suggested being curious and offering perspective - it really does work out differently
> switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver
Thank you for this useful tip! I've recently become aware that I may not be as good a listener I thought I was - I too make the common mistake of immediately offering solutions, or talking too much about my own relatable situations and feelings, instead of trying to really listen to them and help them figure out their own world view and feelings of a particular situation (and thus understand them better too in the process).
“Don’t just do something, stand there!” - I love this quote. Standing there or being there for someone is amazingly helpful and it’s a skill to do it, congrats on working on this.
Indeed, the more one knows about what it means to be a good listener, the more one becomes aware of not being such a good listener.
Being a good listener is one of the hardest jobs in the world.
And narcissists are soul sucking traps for good listeners.
Which is why you should not be an indiscriminate listener.
Be careful you don’t end up with people who have constant emotional problems that need fixing - or that you’re 100% sure that you’ll never need to say ‘no’. Speaking from experience.
Some people really don’t like ‘no’, especially when they have emotional problems.
Another pitfall with this approach is when someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything. Being the person who validates their emotions becomes harmful if they’re over-reacting or developing harmful emotional reactions and you’re always there to validate them.
> someone has constant emotional but irrational reactions to everything
What are "emotions" if not "irrational chemical reactions in our brains"? Seems really strange to decide what it or isn't "irrational emotions" for someone else to have.
I, just like you I presume, see myself as a rational and logical person (maybe you're also a programmer), but I also realize that humans are humans, and having irrational emotions is very much part of being a humans, and emotions in general is such a subjective experience.
Everything in your body is a "chemical reaction". Pulling the trigger of a gun is a lot of chemical reactions. That doesn't mean the person isn't guilty.
In fact, it's problematic when people start thinking of their emotions as a chemical process that happens to them, outside of their control. A large part of getting people back on track in therapy is getting them to accept that they do have some control over how they react to situations in the world.
A lot of TikTok or Reddit style therapyspeak does the opposite: It goes to extreme lengths to try to separate the emotions or negative responses from the person, as if they're an outside force victimizing them. It's comforting to think that, because things that happen to us outside of our control seem like they can't be changed. Getting people to acknowledge that they can and should exert some emotional control over themselves is part of breaking that cycle.
You use the word "react" in an ambiguous way; I'm never sure if you mean the emotional response, the subsequent thoughts, or the subsequent behaviour. The latter two we have much more control over, whilst the first must be trained indirectly over a long period of time.
If someone stubs their toe, some rage; some anger, etc, might be appropriate. Maybe rational, maybe not. Maybe even yelling at someone nearby.
If they go outside and kick a unrelated puppy to get ‘even’? That is when people start to worry.
Now the question is, which of these is which?
If it becomes damaging to you (the person that is expected to be emotional support), "grey rocking" is the next step. Acknowledge, but don't respond. "uh huh" instead of "I am so sorry" or whatever. Don't take advice from me though.
I've heard that's true; compassion and empathy can be a draw for highly insecure people. You need to balance it with assertiveness and self-regulation, which are also part of emotional intelligence.
Then their emotions are not their only problem.
> Often when someone wants to talk about a situation involving difficult feelings, they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
Right, talking about feelings is a way of regulating yourself.
Conflicts with my wife are a lot easier if I'm able to empathize with her emotional distress, acknowledging it, instead of jumping directly into logical problem solving. If I'm only looking logically at the issue, I can't really understand the issue she is having.
I like the view of the therapist Terry Real, that during conflicts you can either be right or stay connected. That doesn't mean that you hide your views, but that you also emotionally acknowledge the view of your partner. It's surprising how effectively this takes out the fire in conflicts.
> they're actually trying to process those feelings
Exactly, help exploring their problem, maybe direct them into one nook or the other, support a proper perspective from different angles (to a small extent within the context and constraints they provided!!!), but don't solve the riddle for them. They might not even know how they really feel about it all, yet.
> I frame it not as turning a dial down, but as switching channel from practical problem-solver to emotional problem-solver.
This perspective was a good stepping stone for me, but then I realized I needed bigger changes to keep growing. However I defined the problem to be solved, I was still setting up a dynamic that was arrogant. I thought I was air traffic control when others were looking for a copilot. Somebody along for the ride with them, not just requesting information about them and offering commentary from the ground.
Reading _How to Know a Person_ helped me a lot.
> You can help by being curious about what they're saying, reflecting it back to them in your own terms
Yes! Be an emotional rubber duck.
It's called emotional intelligence, and it's a very much needed adult skill that many lack, including self-awaraness as a pre-requisite.
I've been in therapy for over a year and one of the most valuable things I've learned as a fellow "problem solver" is to run through the "three H's" when something comes up:
1. Do you want to be Helped? 2. Do you want to be Heard? 3. Do you want to be Hugged?
I'm still trying to get in the habit of using this approach more often with my partner, and as I do, it has noticeably improved our relationship. It turns out most of the time, she just wants to be hugged.
I've also used "do you need affirmation or advice."
I like your 3 H's though!
> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution.
This can become toxic in itself, though. Some times venting and being angry is what someone wants to do, but in a workplace environment that’s not a good thing to implicitly condone and support.
I’ve had some team members who just wanted to vent but not discuss solutions and (again, in a workplace, not personal relationship) it was a sign that something deeper was amiss: Being a perpetual victim of their circumstances and believing those circumstances were beyond their control was a safe, comforting place to exist. It was always easier to build up excuses that problems were thrust upon them by others, who could be held solely responsible for the results. In some cases I had to be very clear that they were responsible for working with teammates to address these issues together, not become a passive receiver of everything that happens with their peers.
Swooping in as the hero to solve everything for someone else isn’t a good solution, but (in a workplace environment) getting someone to switch from the passive victim mindset to the active mindset of engaging with their own problems is very important.
This is one topic where carrying advice from personal romantic relationships into the workplace isn’t a good idea, IMO.
Venting all the time can actually be quite harmful to the venter. Negative energy drives change and if all you're doing is offloading then you're going to get stuck in a loop of feeling bad -> vent -> repeat while the underlying problem doesn't get solved.
The next trap is loudly announcing how you’re going to get yourself out of that situation, getting the neurotransmitter hit that comes from the announcement, and then never doing it.
I have a person who has distanced themselves from me because I don’t provide the feedback they crave when they do this for the eleventieith time. I only have so many spoons and that passion play feels like throwing them in the garbage disposal. I just can’t for my own well being. Sorry.
Being stuck in any emotional overreaction state is harmful.
There are a lot of people reciting the academic concept of validating emotions without endorsing them in this thread, but in the real world when you consistently "validate emotions" of someone who is over-reacting, it becomes an implicit endorsement.
In the real world, the people I've known to get stuck in negative emotion states did much worse when they surrounded themselves with people who constantly validated their emotions in the academic speak that's being used in this thread.
We all know that person who is borderline Munchausen’s Syndrome, railing against an unjust world they have mostly manufactured for themselves. Or the person who has no life skills and blames all their problems on “bad luck”. Fortune favors the prepared mind.
His advice was specific to the husband - wife relationship. You’ll understand if you happen to get married or enter a long term relationship.
Even there, though, there needs to be a balance. Sometimes my wife needs to vent to me about her problems, and I listen. But on the other hand, sometimes I need for her to not bring stuff up with me unless it's going to lead to a solution being implemented.
> You’ll understand if you happen to get married or enter a long term relationship.
What a remarkably condescending comment. I've been happily married for a long time.
The advice to surrive the workplace is to not act like a human lol
Treating workplace relationships with the same techniques as romantic relationships is a bad idea, IMO
Good point.
Tangentially, you could ask: Are you addicted to being useful or to being recognized as useful.
One is your own need, the other often a covered contract where you lash out or silently resign if you don't get the recognition that you think you deserve.
I'm surprised nobody asks whether you're at fault here, or she is.
Next time, maybe ask her to come up with solutions, e.g. do a brainstorm session.
If she then says she doesn't really want a solution, you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
> asks whether you're at fault here, or she is
Or maybe nobody is? Why does someone has to be “at fault”?
> you can tell her then don't phrase your issues like that.
Sometimes people just want to be heard. There is value in recognising that.
There’s an old adage that is very important to logical people (as software engineers are, for example).
“Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”
My wife wants to throw out our perfectly functional table to get a better looking one. Financially and practically, I am right in fighting this. Is a few hundred bucks worth making someone aesthetically-minded not feel satisfied? No, you have to pick your battles.
That really depends if you like (or are mostly indifferent to) the new table. If you hate it then it becomes a game of "who of us two is more important to satisfy with a table". Definitely not a position you want to be in.
Relationships must be two-way streets, always.
I have made quite a lot of concessions for my wife for the current rented flat -- simply because I did not care about 99% of the things she wanted to change. I only gave her a rather loose framework: "this must fit these physical dimensions as you yourself can see here in this corner" and "I am not willing to spend hundreds to change something that is currently performing to 90% of the standards of both of us" and "how difficult it is to ship and install this?" -- and she has been mature and considerate enough to understand the boundaries and nailed them every single time so far in our 11.5 years together. And she still got almost everything she wanted and is visibly happier with the environment.
When both sides have preferences they feel safe sharing but are still reasonable above all, then things are going smoothly and flow naturally.
Of course there are the rare exceptions where I just gave up and said to her: "OK, I am leaving this to you, figure all the details out and I'll just pay it at the end of the process". I was not unhappy but she did not want to budge on a few things and I ultimately just stashed the old thing in the garage in case she understands she made a bad deal or the new thing was underperforming.
I agree strongly with "pick your battles". You have to be able to read the person in real time. It's actually much easier than most technical people think.
Our relationships sound very similar. We are so fucking lucky! Having 2 people that are striving towards a harmonious relationship is increasingly rare.
Why even have furniture, you can eat and sleep on the floor. Financially and practically.
Ah, the old “a truly logical cow cannot pick between two identical hay bales and therefore starves to death”
Some people have a habit of creating situations that are…. Not so easy to get out of. My favorite one essentially boiled down to ‘die die die, or I’ll kill you’.
Which, clearly, I struggled to find a useful compromise on.
Yeah, that is quite the choice :p
I am definitely not saying that all relationships can work out. Sometimes you have to be right and happy. I meant more for trivialities
Pro tip - that usually just makes people angrier haha. (Source: twice divorced, and was - per the court - always right, but it didn’t help me one bit).
The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
> The challenge is, some people (most) get stuck on some emotional thing, and will drain you dry if you try to even engage with them on it. It’s especially prevalent right now.
Yup. I've long learned to suppress my problem-solver nature because "people want to be heard", but then what it gets is turning me into a sounding board for people who get stuck on something indefinitely. It's easy to not jump in with solutions the first time you hear a story, but it's much harder when you hear the exact same story, with exact same underlying emotion, dozen+ times in the span of a few months. The other side is clearly not really processing their emotions - so if not that, and not practical advice, then what's the point of even talking about it?
It's really draining and in some cases I'm not in a position to disengage either.
Like with everything, none of the both extremes are good.
What helps me in situations where people talk about it for the umpteenth time is trying to drill down and find the root cause with carefully worded questions. I think I might be ready to become a therapist, lol. Though my fuse is quite short due to my own stress so I don't put myself in the "I am your emotional trash bin" kind of situations.
So to me even the situations you describe can be made use of. Think of it as a long-running background task with many steps; after each retry you get a new exception stack trace. F.ex. during conversation #7 you might understand one or two causes of the problem but at conversation #12 you might already have a nice root cause and you can then try to gently nudge the person towards addressing that.
Of course you are not mandated to. It's all about what you need in this current phase of life as well; you don't have to be people's therapist. It's just what I find super interesting the last year or so -- root-cause analysis of human problems.
But when I understand that somebody just wants to whine and be a constant victim, I mentally check out. Not worth the joules that my brain would spend on that person.
I want to echo this.
And there's no solution. Nothing you can do, say, or not do or say will help. Even just listening will be perceived, after the umpteenth time, as condescending; and voicing your opinion is obviously a no go. It's lose-lose.
the solution is mutual recognition and understanding, but as a problem solver its not satisfying as you cant implement it in your own way :'D
I call that "you are the garbage bin for other people's emotions". And once you realize this process you can't unsee it and re-evaluate some relationships. If it is each side taking turns being the "emotional garbage bin" then it's a healthy relationship.
But if people only reach out to drop their toxic waste and leave you without the chance to get rid of your own toxic waste you feel not good afterwards. Like where you have conversations and then afterwards notice that you were not able to actually speak about any of your own problems and worries.
That's what I really like about the kids and their words of the year: They used "aura" and at first I thought what a bullshit term is that, but after a while I came to understand it. It's totally fine to listen to your stomach feelings, if someone's aura is negative or their vibes are off you don't need to give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave.
We've been trained to be helpful and nice to everyone but then wonder why we feel drained at the end of the day. It's because we're spending emotional bandwidth on people and things that don't give us any energy back.
The word "aura" for all of this is extremely nice. If you see a spooky person approaching you on the street at night you also don't need to explain to them what exactly put you off about them - you just switch sides.
I can only recommend to trust your feelings.
You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people. I understand this is a strategy that is popular these days, but maybe consider how another fellow human will feel when you "don't give them a reason why you stop interacting, you just leave", and judge what they tell you as "toxic waste"; and how you might be the one to make it worse for them (and yourself). If you mentalize yourself into the other position, yours might appear arrogant and condecending if not psychologically violent from where you stand ("how's your aura looking?").
If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection. There are other ways to not feel drained even after listening to the most horrible (or boring) stories that don't cut people (and thus yourself) off. You gain options, not lose any. You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort, and become more independent from what people around you are saying or doing, instead of turning your problem into their wrongdoing. Instead of having your world suddenly be full of energy vampires you need to protect yourself from.
> You're finding comforting explanations to allow you to act dismissively towards other people.
No, none of this is comforting. For some people it is a big step to not drop everything just because someone is waiting for the bus and wants to have a 15 minute phone call in order to de-stress their own day.
> If you feel worn out after listening to other people, that's one way to avoid that, at the expense of human connection.
Not every human connection is a net positive.
> You gain options, not lose any.
Please let me complete the options I already have before putting more options on my TODO list.
> You can learn to have more control over your own inner state without effort
That's ableism.
People are unique, and while I appreciate you taking the time to write these lines you might be coming from a very different place. To be a bit snarky, maybe you are more on the energy consumer side of things than on the energy producer side. People have a magic radar for others who make them feel heard, but there is a certain bandwidth and it's limits must be respected.
I don't see how something can be "ableism" that can be learned by anyone. You may not want to, which is totally fine, or you may not know how to, which is also fine, but to claim you couldn't do it without even trying is just yet another convenient and comforting display of avoidance.
It's OK not to want to be in connection with others whose behavior you don't agree with, but it's not necessary and from my perspective counter-productive for yourself and society as a whole to turn that into a permission to act in hostile ways against them, especially if you're not providing clear feedback. In fact, unless you provide that in an open way, they will not change their ways around you, so you're losing a lot of chances to influence people around you in situations where you simply cannot decide to avoid them altogether. You're not in control over which humans you interact with, and you're turning interactions into exchanges of aggression unnecessarily.
Says no one who has ever had to actually deal with people like this?
How would your mental health be if you listened to someone like Trump for even half your day?
No matter how much one meditates, they will still die if set on fire with gasoline.
In my case, I really do want to be of use. In fact, I often tend to stay well in the background, and deliberately eschew credit.
That said, I do tend to get upset, when I’m taken for granted, but that’s really my own fault. I know it, rationally, but my inner brat still wants to throw a tantrum.
Well if none of the measures you already tried to stop that did not work, then maybe one thing that can help you is asking yourself whether you are not feeling drained after interacting with those people?
I, like yourself, cannot override my engineering mindset. I ALWAYS WANT TO HELP. But at one point I reframed it as an energy budget problem and how efficiently are my time and energy spent... and then it clicked.
I have learned to do that, but it actually makes me uncomfortable to do it.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, in my case, manifests as not being very comfortable, when people give me attention. That's why I like working on "infrastructure" stuff (and also why I used to be a bass player[0]).
[0] https://cmarshall.com/MulletMan.jpg (That hair was in style, back then. I no longer look like that).
> I tend to need to solve All The Problems before I can do any self-care
I can so relate. I once read something that shifted my perspective a bit and helped me start the work of learning to better care for myself.
It was basically somebody talking/writing about the safety instructions when taking a flight. They tell you that in case of an emergency, when the o2 masks drop down to first put your ownmas on, before helping others. Because you are no help, if you loose conciousness.
This image/metaphor , to first put my own mask on, so that I can ensure, I will be able to help others without falling over, was what helped me start this process.
I sadly can't remember if it was Brené Brown or where I originally read that.
It's a great analogy. I first came across it in Gerald Weinberg's 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Tool Kit', where he spends some time talking about burnout, what it means, and how to get out when you find your way in.
For a more spiritual audience: the analogy is also widely recognized in the Bible
Yeah there are some similar suggestions but all the examples I can think of are at least a bit of a stretch. Matthew 7:3–5 mebbe? Remove the log from your own eye before focusing on smaller chunks of wood in the eyes of others?
My cup runneth over.
I spend a lot of time reading the Bible, and examples aren't coming to mind. Can you give some examples?
My cup runneth over.
For what it's worth, I wanted to downvote this because it doesn't provide much additional context. Which verses? Is there a link?
(I didn't downvote)
Saying "oh yeah the bible mentions that" doesn't really add to a conversation - the bible mentions a lot of stuff!
However, if I downvote you because you didn't provide context, you might misinterpret it as "wow, hacker news hates the bible" (I have no opinion on hn audience feelings towards religion)
So for additional context, one could look up the "speck vs log" which seems most straightforwardly about taking care of your own issues first (although it's in the context of hypocrisy, which doesn't quite match the original thread iiuc)
I found a few others, but none quite seemed like the close match I was hoping for (Mark 12:31, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, etc)
The Tao Te Ching also says a lot of things. You should look there.
Love the tao te ching (in translation)
One pattern I’ve noticed, however, is that if you’re really good at doing this - and the situations being created are artificial - you might run into a situation where someone cuts or poisons your oxygen mask first.
I would have said ‘no way is someone that evil’, but uh…. Ask most men in their 40’s or 50’s.
> I would have said ‘no way is someone that evil’, but uh…. Ask most men in their 40’s or 50’s.
WDYM with the last sentence?
Buddy, this is the second comment in here where you want us to blame some unknown Other for our problems. That is a dead end. And gray hair doesn’t confer wisdom, as Thoreau said. Signed, some guy in his 50s.
Sorry, my bad, fourth comment.
Hey, it isn’t always the case - but sometimes you really are being sabotaged, and not recognizing the possibility just screws you more.
I'm probably your wife.
It could be related to the personality trait of how much of our world model is "in our mind" vs "out there":
If I speak with you while working on the world model in my mind, it looks like I just "want to be heard". But your feedback is actually very important, it's just that it should only feed my mental world model.
I am then surprised that my math coprocessor reaches for the GPIO.
We should probably talk then!
It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. Some times people just want to be heard.
I'm glad she managed to solve this problem in the end.
;)
Same!
I learned this from the show Parks and Recreation. Ann is pregnant and trying to vent, and Chris is looking to solve all her problems. This drives her nuts.
Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdA8QNTqn-A
Yeah one thing that came out of couple therapy with my ex-wife is exactly this.
After I started explicitly asking if she wanted “problem solving” or “listening” things improved significantly.
Ultimately things did not work out for other reasons, but I have been able to successfully apply this in a new long-term relationship.
I've fallen into this problem before, but theres an additional trap you should be aware of: You are not a therapist.
You cannot and should not just "listen" to problems that you're not allowed to work on or expect the other person to work on. You are an active member of this persons' life with your own point-of-view and emotional needs, not a dumping ground for emotional flotsam.
This is a good point. In countries with well regulated industries, therapists are required to go to therapy themselves for that very reason. It takes training and continual psychological maintenance to be that emotional dumping ground for other people and should not be taken up by normal people lightly.
> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution.
There is a great YT video on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
It's not about the nail!
Yeah so far there's not enough nuance in the discussion.
I also like to separate between 1) solvable vs unsolvable problems: e.g. you cannot solve a deceased relative.
Also 2) first time vs multiple repeat problems
If find it very irritate someone is venting to me repeatedly about solvable problems.
But if it's a 1 time unsolvable problem, then it's important to be in listening mode.
You are missing the point, though. The complainer decides whether it's a solvable problem or not, not the listener. So "I'll listen if it's unsolvable (to me)" is a non-starter.
Well I decide if it’s annoying to me and I’m going to tolerate it or lend support.
Yeah, I am still learning to not be logical and fix whatever ails her. Often she really just wants to be heard, not solutions.
I am ~30 years old, hopefully I will be able to just hear, without offering any solutions. It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
> It bothers me too. I am a SWE because I love solving problems!
In my case, I've recently been wondering whether I really love solving problems, or rather just hate stupid bullshit and solving it - quickly and efficiently - is usually the best way to make it go away for good.
In many cases, the behavior is identical - I just find myself to be motivated by frustration more often than curiosity these days.
Yeah, I can relate. I would say I am motivated by frustration more than curiosity as well, not just with regarding to my partner but in general.
The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?
That has been tricky with my partner because many times she legitimately does want me to just handle the problem for her, and then you get into the fuzzy area where it is my job to interpret what she says and her job to communicate what she needs clearly and you are often left with an ambiguous conflict where both parties feel justified.
I do generally find it is easier for women to respond with empathy instead of solutions because there is no background expectation that they are capable of fixing a problem their male partner has.
It's Not About The Nail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
I usually ask if we're chatting if my partner is looking for any feedback/solution or if she just needs to be mad. It's pretty effective
Well said...I have discovered the same in my own marriage of thirty years. I would add that even bringing a good solution in a relationship can go unheard, especially if the motivation is to be the fixer, and to be honest make your own life easier by silencing the other's point of frustration.
Classic treatise on this topic: "It's not about the nail" (<2 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg
This is kind of typical situation with men and women right, they need their girl friend coffee complaint time, we guys need similar beer time, albeit contents vary wildly. At least what you write fits every ex-gf I dated, and also fits my guy-brain expectations and resulting type of discussions.
Part of the setup by default, but should not take decades to discover or reveal. Similar to how women experience stuff mainly via emotions, hence what was fine yesterday may not be today albeit factually nothing changed.
101 of each adult should be also figuring out how one works (and how doesn't) and optimizing with other relevant parties further interactions.
Super-relatable.
Now that I think about it, most of my advice starts something like "Here's what you're gonna do..."
Wait, that itself sounds like a problem, but how do I fix it...
I saw a show where the listener asks at the beginning of the interaction: "wait, do you want me to try to solve a problem, or just to listen?"
In fact being or feeling useful can be addictive. It goes beyond fixing technical problems. If I know someone is sad or in trouble for a longer period of time, I tend to check in regularly. I need to hold myself back, not to do it too often. The reason is probably the dopamine (or some happy neurotransmitter) effect that respectful or thankful people invoke on me. So it is the help<->dopamine transaction.
I specifically ask my wife "Are you looking for me to help you solve this, or just venting?", because I automatically try to solve.
> not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution
Relatable. Is true for even the simplest problems that some people have.
Sometimes they just didn't even address it yet and are only becoming adequately aware of it and here you are spelling out a plan of action during a 7 min encounter in the kitchen.
I've been with my wife for almost 4 years, and we both have the same problem. But, we both like having systems and routines, so now we have a system: lead with "I don't need help, I just need to vent." YMMV of course.
could this be a difference in male/female brains ? talks implies action for men, while women want to communicate most and maybe plan to act ? just curious, it's an issue that has been mentioned everywhere all the time
>could this be a difference in male/female brains ?
Maybe socially, but I'm not sure about naturally. It took me a long time to get where the GP is, realizing that some just like to he heard rather than offered solutions. Now I notice that my family are "fixers" and any problem or difficulty is countered with "did you do this" or "you should have done that" or "why don't you.." I now realize I don't like being second guessed in a moment like that, in contrast to the gender stereotype.
true, there are families, groups who have naturally different reaction to the same event..
Counterpoint - she should have known what she was getting into marrying an engineer. It cones with the territory.
I was a nineteen year old majoring in drinking (and Economics), so it doesn’t really count!
The solution is to get a gambling addiction, a drug addiction, trouble with the law, or a healthy mix of all three.
Then your wife (or husband) will stop bitching to you about their problems, and start bitching to other people about their problem (you).
It becomes more challenging when the person is Carrie Fisher from When Harry Met Sally, “processing” the same information for years at a time. This is not a surprise. That he’s never going to leave her. You know the solution. You are the architect of your own stress. You’re torturing yourself for who? An audience of me?
I’ve watched that “you have a nail in your forehead” video again with the benefit of another ten years of life and it’s interesting how I saw what the women were saying the first time I watched it but on a rewatch it’s clearly making fun of her at least as much as him. You’re in the middle of a medical emergency and you want to just talk about it instead of calling 911. That’s a bridge too far.
And to think I always hated that trope in action and scary movies where the person wants to ask questions while being chased by a psychopath or a dinosaur. Compartmentalization is good - in appropriate doses.
listen, don't problem solve.
advice for every engineer, ever, lol.
(also related - do you listen, or wait to talk?)
Nothing wrong on the surface with this, and the author explicitly acknowledges this risk, but it bears repeating:
Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.
It is true that finding a job that "resonates" with your personality is key to living a fulfilling life, and that software engineering is the kind of profession that is really going to fit certain personality types extremely well, but despite that corporate culture can and will take advantage of you, divide you and your work "friends", exploit your willingness to serve, and discard you like trash at any moment.
Be mindful of how much of yourself you derive from serving the financial goals of others.
I have similar reservations that this expresses, and it leaves me wondering as to what kind of person is suited for this kind of environment. Perhaps that's a pointless question, although I think that there is at least one useful answer to it: I'm not the kind of person who's suited to those environment. I'm not well-suited to take such a huge chunk of my life and basically throwing it away by creating a barrier between it and my emotional life; I find it difficult to imagine even asking another human to do such a thing, and wonder how 'natural' it is to members of a species that evolved without such artificial separations between work and emotions and life.
Throughout the vast arc of human existence, you worked or you died. Nature does not hand you food, shelter, clothing, and flush toilets for free. Most of us, if dropped naked into the wilderness, will die within 24 hours.
Bone evidence from colonial America is the colonists worked like dogs and died young. Bone evidence from the Indians showed repeated famines.
Generally speaking, the clan you worked to survive with generally didn't cancel you because a seashell currency accountant saw some tangential benefit for a moment. Which might just be their own survival need to look busy or be a perforative hard ass, to avoid the same thing.
The loyalty you are dismissing as unnatural, was painstakingly discovered by our genes, precisely because it maximized survival in our natural environment.
If you didn't find your work in the clan to be emotionally fulfilling, and stopped working, the clan would not be likely to share the food with you.
Yes, that would be an expected and natural outcome.
You've misunderstood what the person is saying.
Nature also doesn't hand out corporate welfare or export subsidies but some how that's perfectly natural.
I thought we were talking about capitalism, not the things government does.
Yeah it's really not that serious
Please tell me who is going to die if I don't push my employer-mandated vibeslop up to GitHub. I'm genuinely curious.
you might enjoy the tv series Severance.
On a more serious note, i personally enjoy it. Why? I find software engineering intellectually stimulating and i enjoy the _process_, but i don’t (usually) enjoy the _people_. There are really only a couple former colleagues I actually keep in touch with. You know - the “real” friends so to speak.
My outside-of-work friends are not nerdy like myself and that’s why i love them. Keeps me out of my work bubble and also gives me interesting things to do and talk about on the weekends. :)
Everyone is different though. Some people genuinely enjoy going to the pub with their work mates lol. I’d rather do anything else.
> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs.
A job (corporate or government) is exchanging labor for money.
Generally, people tend to be good at jobs they enjoy doing. The idea is to get educated in something you enjoy, and make that your career.
Famously, the world doesn't need people to farm or clean toilets. We can all become "coders".
My wife enjoys her job as a cleaner. But she cleans much more than just toilets. But she cleans the toilets too. The world needs such people.
> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs
Luckily the only emotional need my work fulfills is getting money.
Seems like a torturous way to spend 8 hours a day if you only enjoy it for the money. Do you at least _like_ you job?
It's okay. But I will never truly enjoy creating wealth for someone else.
> corporate culture can and will take advantage of you
All jobs take advantage of you to some degree. The difference is that a corporate job pays much more, and the work load is a tiny fraction of other jobs. If you on top of this can work with something you enjoy, then you've gotten a very good deal.
And many people can and do take advantage of corporations.
>> Corporate environments are almost always toxic places to fulfill your emotional needs
Thats the reason I avoid big companies at all costs
Also, Gogol's Chichikov is a better metaphor for the dysfunctional corpo software dev than Akakyevitch...
Old Soviet joke:
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!
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I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.
So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.
Sometimes it's useful to just solve the problem at hand and sometimes it's useful to solve the root problem. Sometimes solving the root cause is knowledge sharing or mentoring. Sometimes the entire task is just not what you want to be doing with your career.
Part of becoming more senior is learning when each is appropriate.
This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.
Mind sharing what that worthwhile problem is?
I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet.
I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.
"Convincing others" is a serious problem on its own, and it's okay to let someone else handle it full-time.
Are the incompetent people your coworkers? Ideally you can be solving your customers problems, which is a nice terminating lens of “always useful”, tho you may still want to pick and choose.
I feel the same way. I retired last summer, but that only means that I found a place that needs me, where I can work part time without worrying too much about money.
I remember, decades ago, reading an article about some African politician visiting the UK. He was given a tour, which included some of the social housing. The UK bragging about how they took care of their people. He saw people sitting around with with their housing and food paid for. His comment? "How horrible!".
He found it horrible, because - from his perspective - they had no role in society, nothing to do, no purpose to their existence.
This is a big topic in disability rights activism; there are a lot of people who can do some work some of the time, with a certain level of accommodation, and would benefit from so doing.
But that's not how the system works. It forces everyone into binary categorizations, with the aim of removing help if at all possible. So it becomes economically necessary for people to present themselves as helpless and stay away from work or even volunteering, because doing so jeopardizes their means of surviving the bureaucracy.
I'm skeptical of this perspective as most social housing in the UK and the USA have stiff REQUIREMENTS that housing residents be either either employed OR be showing proof of interviewing OR enroll in a job placement program (which requires active training participation). If you fail these, you are generally kicked out of these social housing programs.
Maybe there are some exceptions here and there, but it's generally unusual to have social housing without strict policies and monitored policies on job placements. This policy exists as social housing is highly limited and the administrators wants people to get jobs so that they move out (and into a better shelter they can now afford).
I don't believe UK social housing has any work requirements, it is just massively oversubscribed, such that you need to be very vulnerable to realistically be offered council housing. You do have to pay (below market rate) rent, so you probably need to be searching for work or have been declared to have limited capability for work or work related activities to get a benefit to pay for your social housing. I think there's some state where they've decided no one will hire you for minimum wage, but you're otherwise able so you have to do some kind of volunteering.
Because you aren't familiar with UK policies pre-Thatcher.
Saw a Wall Street Journal article (behind paywall) on this topic which was a short version of this upcoming book: _Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose_
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FFZY9V8V/
"What these retirees were describing wasn’t just disappointment in a lack of opportunities. It was an erosion in something far more fundamental—their sense of mattering, the deep human need to feel valued and to have a chance to add value to the world. We plan for our wealthspan and healthspan, mapping out financial security and physical well-being. Yet very few of us prepare for an equally essential dimension of retirement: our mattering span, or how we will continue to feel seen, useful and capable of making a difference in this next chapter of life."
https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/the-retirement-crisis-no...
I understand, but retired people rank highest on the happiness index, same as children, and the thing they have in common is nothing to do but play, relax, and have fun. Social housing probably doesn't allow for any form of play, and it's just scrapping by level of "surviving". I don't think it's a good example, and letting those people instead work 12h days, 7 day a week, at some repetitive, low pay, job, isn't gonna be all that better, and might be even more horrible.
… had he never heard of hobbies?
Hobbies are often personal, or at least self serving. Unless your hobby is volunteering. You can hear this in how people talk about out them. "I do this for me."
Ever since Lowtax killed himself and I felt a lot of undeserved guilt over it [1] [2] I have developed a sort of "savior complex".
I always liked being helpful, but at this point I've sort of become "aggressively helpful", which ironically probably isn't helping. I feel a constant need to take care of people and help people, and I think it's in no small part because a tiny part of me is afraid they're going to do something horrible to themselves, or they're going to make some decision that I think is "wrong".
It's more than a little frustrating, because at some level I'm aware I'm doing it, and of course I have to ask myself "who made me the 'correct' decision-maker?", but I also can't really stop myself from doing it either, and at a certain level I'm considerably more willing to help other people than myself because I'm ultimately a coward and I'm really afraid of guilt. Many people have told me that it's not my job to assume responsibility for everyone, and they're objectively correct about this, but human psychology is stupid. Or at least mine is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185822
[2] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/July-2023/Guilt-and-...
I think having friends suicide does that. It sucks because you also see the patterns repeat and it feels like something solvable with intervention.
A friend put it well - sometimes people are sick, and you can help them heal. And sometimes it's just terminal. First, do no harm.
The weird part to me (and a lot of people) is that I barely knew the guy. I had exchanged a few messages, we joked around a bit, and arranged to meet. This wasn't a close friend killing himself, this was effectively a Z-list celebrity that I liked.
What bothers me more than the actual suicide (though that's very sad too) is the fact that I chose to do nothing. I saw signs, I debated doing something, and I prioritized meeting my man-crush more than trying to do the right thing. I know that me doing something wouldn't have changed anything, I have no idea what I would even do. It just bothers me that I actively decided to not do anything.
Everyone thinks they're a good person, and everyone thinks they'll do the right thing when it matters. I certainly thought that, and ultimately I guess that's not strictly true, or at least it wasn't in 2021. I let being a coward and selfish stop me from trying to help someone, and in my mind it stopped me from doing the right thing.
I don't really believe in anything supernatural, but it feels like this was some kind of important cosmic test that I failed. Metaphorically speaking.
And I think at this point, I overcompensate; I treat people as surrogates to try and assuage some of the guilt that I have over that. If something bad happens, I can at least tell myself that I did what I could.
I realize that this kind of thinking is not healthy for me. Guilt isn't inherently bad, it's important to have guilt to learn from your mistakes and to make yourself as good of a person as you can be, but carrying this kind of guilt for someone I barely knew and aggressively trying to "fix it" by over-helping everyone is probably bad for my mental health.
At this point, and I'm a little embarrassed it took me until my 30's to reach this conclusion, but I've started living by the motto of "don't let being a coward stop you from doing the right thing". Taken to the extreme I'm not sure that's healthy either.
First off, my heart goes out to you. Thinking that you chose to be a bystander must have cut really core to your sense of identity. It's been difficult to reconcile being a good person and choosing to do nothing for you, and I don't wish that kind of doubt and angst on anyone. I'm sorry that it's affecting you now in ways you are worried can be counterproductive.
Second, I want to offer an unsolicited perspective that may help you. I read your linked post about Lowtax's death and how it went down for you. You're blaming the 2021 version of yourself for not making the right choice, but what I read wasn't selfishness or cowardice stopping you from speaking up - it was an assessment of your ability to make a difference. I'm not saying you should never speak up when you feel something is off, or demonstrate concern, but that person in 2021 understood the many, many barriers to saving Lowtax: the unpredictability of his response, the ambiguity of the message, the concern that it wasn't your place, the large possibility you were overreacting. What would you have done? What would you have said? How would you have been able to reach them that closer friends, family, and others would not? You are telling yourself you somehow had the knowledge, therefore the responsibility and power, but in reality you had no power and only the barest hint of knowledge. You had no idea if what you were doing was right or not, how it would be taken, how it would have been perceived, or what the consequences were. You are only _guessing_ that by taking some miraculous action you could have averted the outcome, but in truth no action might have been good enough - you could have spent a year and three months getting them the resources they need, and still they could have done this.
When someone takes their life, it isn't the fault of the lone stranger who wanted to say hello. You did not choose to be a bystander - rather, by taking their life, they made you a bystander. You have to separate your sense of moral esteem from the consequences of someone else's choices. Yes, anyone could have done something, said something - and for all you know people did!
Inaction by itself is not a moral hazard. Inaction when armed with the facts, the ability to make a difference, the understanding that the difference made will be significant or material, and where the action is scoped enough to not jeopardize the situation - this is the real hazard. In 2021, you did not have the facts or the ability to make a meaningful difference - only the slim possibility that a message in the dark might have ruined nothing and saved life. But that is fantasy talking, not genuine pragmatism.
I hope this gives you some permission and at least a framework to measure your "overhelping" against. Therapy has been helpful for me in the past when dealing with complicated emotions.
It’s really sweet that you still think about him and bring it up. You’re a good one.
What sillysaurusx said, good on you.
It’s great to be useful as living for your purpose is the best way to achieve life satisfaction. But it’s important to establish boundaries and avoid developing codependency and not to define yourself through the perception of your acts towards others. Having a skill that helps others gives you a sense of mastery. The fact that you have this skill and apply it in good faith should be enough to establish a good sense of self without feedback from others.
I love being an engineer and solving problems that I’m good at, which are problems too complex for most people to approach. But not everyone feels that way, some or most people don’t care or don’t understand the motivation, as they may have different motivations of their own. Learning to accept that and be confident without validation from others is very tough but possible, as you apply yourself consistently with focus and clarity, you gain a stronger sense of purpose. You are never fulfilled, but continue to pursue anyway, that is the trick I learned for myself. The trait is called equanimity and is more of a sustainable attitude vs a feeling, that is transactional. It’s easier as you get older and comes with maturity.
Yes, equanimity is a great quality to possess. It means that you never get too high or too low. When things are really going your way, you know that things can change for the worse. Yet you can be content. When things are not going your way, you know that things can change for the better. And you can be content.
This doesn't mean that you don't try to achieve anything. It means that you can still be content whether you succeed or fail.
Thank you for reminding me about this word.
No problem! Happy it was helpful. I learned about equanimity last year in a book I read about the science of self actualization, how to reach your unique potential.
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/books/transcend/
cheers
Yeah I see the plot here. From this one:
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/
> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.
> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.
And this one:
https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/
I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)
The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.
Re: the plot, there's also this one which fits in among those two: https://www.seangoedecke.com/shareholder-value/
I'm kind of this way also. My work motto was always: "Be the best worker and you'll always have a job." This was easy, because I was always curious about how things worked and didn't mind helping others. In my thirties, while training for a new position, I thanked my trainer for his help and he told me: "You seem willing to work and now I won't have to do your job for you." That simple statement changed how I thought about coworkers. Gradually, I became less helpful to the ones who thought it was a good idea for me to do their job with/for them.
So insightful! This idea that some people just like the puzzles and some people like the control struck me. I get why Factorio is addictive but I can't really stand to play it much. I'd rather be refactoring something useful. And the idea that the same mentality covers forum mods. This is incredibly helpful to understand some of my friends and colleagues a little better.
> I'd rather be refactoring something useful.
Ya, that's the thought I have sometimes too, and then bugs attack my coal train and I have to accept I won't be useful for another 10 hours
I get stuck on asking “why am I solving this problem” too much. I am surrounded by technical problems that it would give a dopamine hit to solve and I’d feel the pleasure of helping my fellow man, but 99% of them feel like they shouldn’t even exist and solving them doesn’t really lead to any meaningful progress beyond providing me job security and money. (How) do people deal with this?
Deciding which problems should be solved, identifying where there is business value in solving them, is pretty much the definition of business leadership.
I think the only real answer is moving into management, where you can more effectively argue against spending effort on things that aren't worthwhile.
Well that’s not what I wanted to hear! I think you’re right though, you get to choose your challenge: do you want your problem to be possibly working on things that don’t really matter or be responsible (and empowered) to figure out what really matters.
Yeah it sucks but unfortunately this is the conclusion I came to after pondering on this for my own career. I think you phrased it as well as I've ever seen it put though.
And of course there is always the other options. For myself I didn't relish either choice and now I teach programming and CS. But I'm old and this feels like a good way to end my working years.
I love every minute of my sysadmin job (different job, I know)..and it's not always easy. I enjoy the work. I enjoy educating the users. I even enjoy being on call. And it isn't necessarily the money. I enjoy researching and fixing issues that I might not have come across before, and improving on the current infrastructure and workflow. I even enjoy talking to the salespeople and vendors who call. I love putting projects together and seeing them work when finished.
Many people in my line of work do not share my attitude, and many of my coworkers are grouchy and complain they're overworked. They do just enough to get by, and are generally rude to the users (but, not always).
I am in my early fifties, and have been in the business most of my career. I have worked at only two different companies, and have had a great life, even the long days that turned into late nights/early mornings.
I would definitely say I am addicted to being useful.
I wonder if this sort of thing can lead to faster burnout or such. I've sorta over time leaned toward guarding my own space/time since somehow I get more tired out, and over time more burned out, if I don't.
I probably have a very similar "dysfunction" as OP. Can't say how it is for him, but I do get burned out somewhat regularly if I push myself too much for too long. However it usually takes few days to a week at most of low-effort activity or travel to recover.
Oh, that's really fast recovery for burnout
Computers were never a job to me. They were curiosity, play, obsession. Until, quietly, they became work.
Can definitely relate to this. But I have found that, when running a team, it can be very counter productive.
If you constantly solve all the problems that come it can be stifling for the people you manage.
I see this as "my problem is to grow these people" so I don't solve anything for them
I think it's just a case is perspective
Strongly agree with this. It may sound good in theory, but in practice, especially with real people, it can come across as overbearing, stifling, and exhausting for others. This isn’t meant as a dig at the OP. it’s just an observation based on personal experience with someone like that in my own family.
edit: I am not critiquing enthusiasm itself, but a compulsion that can be productive and unhealthy.
I find it kinda amazing how these vaporware equivalent nullprose keep on hitting the front page.
vagueprose = vagueposting
This internal compulsion is just learned behavior. The society conditions you to work instead of play.
Nothing wrong with that, I have that compulsion as well.
Having a compulsion to play, purely for the sake of playing is a much healthier view. Useful, not useful, hard problem, easy problem, should not matter, you're playing.
Sometimes you can't be useful, yet you can always play.
All stems from inability to have systems without labor. Work, work.
I like how Pope John Paul II flipped the narrative and said work exist for the person, as a way for person to express itself. Made me realize how even communism stays trapped in labor mentality.
As we mature mentally, we need more interesting games to play, more interesting challenges. Work is many times the result of this.
It's the same with romance. When we are children we have a crush on somebody, become pretend "boyfriend and girlfriend", and as we mature the game becomes more interesting as it becomes real.
But it's all a game throughout life.
So perhaps it is those who enjoy work who has elevated their spiritual level, and not the other way around?
Was about to comment the same till I found your comment.
I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society.
If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.
I like this thought. It is interesting to look at our current societal/economic systems on the earth and realize none of them will survive the death of scarcity.
In abstract terms capitalism doesn't depend on scarcity? Capitalism as in centralisation of the means of production (even when there is no human labor anymore).
I think my warning would be that prioritizing tasks you know you can do and do well may be satisfying, but may limit growth. I identify with the author's POV quite a bit, but sometimes I find that when I take a step back and put in less effort on the day-to-day tasks, the feedback on my performance goes _up_.
Perhaps it's because completing those tasks elicits a dependency on you, and stepping back from them allows others to step up and fill that gap. In the meantime, you might not _think_ you're doing more impactful work, but perhaps the mental cycles stepping back from those tasks frees you up to think about more important / higher value work.
I haven’t read them but there seemed to be some links to other articles about being wise about what you chose to work on, as you say.
The article’s title is awkward. In it, he says he is addicted to being useful to his management queue. He avoids “time predators” and dismisses Jira ticket jockeys.
That is the author’s real intention is to assert engineers should deliver what their bosses ask.
I don't think that's necessarily the case, it could just be that, in the author's role, the only people that articulate a need for help from him is his management chain.
I've had roles where my job satisfaction came from largely ignoring my management chain and helping people outside of my org for whom I was the point of contact for a set of services offered by my team's internal platform, and this piece really resonated with me.
I was this way for a long time at work. A re-org and management change broke me. It's been very hard to get motivated these days. I want it to be like it was, but I'm starting to think there is no going back.
You need a new job to feel energized again (and so do I)
I am kinda the same only I'm not clear how the author describes useful. Being useful to my team, my employer my clients is ok but a lot of my career has been building software for businesses I did not understand and sometimes actively disliked. I'm unofficially retired after 25+ years in industry and look back at a spotty record of building anything lasting and positive. I had plenty of great teams and received praise for being effective at delivery but honestly it feels hollow in retrospect.
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.
And if you like that, the good news is you will probably like most every Kidder book. Or at least House. His works tend to be inquiries into how systems work, just at different scales.
Help is the sunny side of control.
Interesting quote and certainly can apply to some people, but this behavior could also be considered as "acts of service" type of "love language". You can take any endearing and genuinely good behavior and make a toxic version out of it.
Helping people is 100% my love language.
My SIL queues up household tasks when I come over. "Hey I got this new thermostat, can you help me put it on?" kinda stuff that she could do herself but she knows that's what makes me feel fulfilled.
Point being: GP - calm down bud. ;-)
Someone who stops at road side, and helps a stranger with a tire iron, likely has no reason other than it just feels the right thing to do; the recipient's smile being the most precious payment they could possibly receive.
I thought about this without instantly rejecting outright.
I agree. I am not interested in controlling someone's thoughts or actions and I do not help.
An extremely toxic mindset.
I can very much relate to the OP in this. I enjoy writing code, figuring out problems, finding solutions and in general helping other people with things that require some kind of software to be created or updated. And until year or two ago I thought I'd be able to continue to do what I love while getting paid decent money for it. With the advent of vibe coding and AI I'm starting to feel less sure in the future.
I feel more useful now more than anything.
The amount of ai generated planning and fluffy workloads that I've been able to just delete from the team has saved the company many engineering hours. Not least of all in bugs.
Value your expertise and experience. It's only greeting more valuable, not less.
It's great that this is a case for you.
I actually enjoy process of writing code, understanding deeply the system I work on, finding elegant solutions to business problems - not just a list of checkboxes with features for a given sprint that agent churns in background. Sure, practically I understand that business doesn't care how well something is written as long as it works somewhat reliably. I might eventually adapt to this new horrible reality of developers who have no idea what's going on in the codebase they "work" on.
You can still understand a system deeply and find elegant solutions, and use LLMs to translate your idea into code, then review the code. It's still much faster than writing everything by hand in a lot of cases, if done properly.
Reviewing code that was written by somebody else is one of the least fun and enjoyable activities in my experience . I personally don't know any programmers who enjoy process of doing PR reviews.
If you only care about number of features Copilot implements for you or lines of code Claude Code gave you - you must be a manager.
I really don't mind PR reviews, as long as the author is cooperative. I do not like arguing over obvious things with someone who isn't participating in good faith. Thankfully I have a good team in which it doesn't happen.
Writing slowly is a boon.
This resonated a lot with me. I am also addicted to being useful and find that off days where my output and usefulness isn't where I'd like it to be really tank my self esteem.
I do think it can be a double-edged sword that often leads to burnout. Respecting your limits and occasional therapy seem to help, as does ensuring you're in as stable and supportive environment as possible so your efforts are sustainable and "heroics" don't get normalized in your org. I wish I had a full solution but have yet to find one in my career that works :)
The problem of doing this now is that no company will care, they will be happy that you are doing more for less, so no salary increase, no job tittle change.
I used to love my job (DevOps, Platform, DevSecOps Engineer) but I learned the hard way to disappear after 4:59PM and never get online before 8:59
Also, no more e-mail, teams, slack, etc, on my personal phone. While working be in the office or WFH, I do my best but outside that, you won't find me.
I am addicted to being useful culture died in early 2000s.... I am seeing projects where the goal is to have AI Teams managing AI Teams without human intervention, so enjoy your life and take workplace less seriously, we are gonna be replaced and you will regret spending more time working than living!!
1. Disagree. Plenty of companies still care about impact as a key metric in promotion processes so if working more increases impact, then it can increase rewards.
2. Not all this type of work is transactional. I’ve “worked” many extra hours for the pleasure of it, in which case it’s not working instead of living, it is living. This is the spirit of OPs article IMO.
I have something similar to this need to be useful but perhaps a different twist that is causing me problems. It's not so much a sense that I want to be useful but a feeling that I HAVE to be or bad things will happen. Lately it's a constantly running internal narrative that everyone around me is useless. Which breeds an anxiety that if I don't do everything then something important will slip through the cracks. That yields a sense of dispair and eventually anger because of this constant weight that I expect I'll have to carry indefinitely.
I've been in therapy off and on through the years and I think this stems from a childhood with neglectful parents. I need to start seeing someone again. Thanks for the reminder!
> something important will slip through the cracks
Unless you work with life-and-death situations, what's so fucking important?
The working dog analogy really resonated. I've noticed this same trait in teachers, nurses, even parents; that intrinsic satisfaction from being needed. The tricky part is knowing when it tips from fulfilling to self-depleting.
This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible.
https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/
I can relate to this and in my journey, I was able to maintain feeding my need to be useful to the world around me and do well money-wise. The latter was my desire to be there for my family so they can focus on their health.
The best part about HackerNews, is that you get a very good sense of the envious and jealous nature of people. A lot of the "hate" or "angry" comments, are basically people who hate their relationship with "work".
To the author, I think you'll continue that process of being useful, but you'll see that in this new world, you're usefulness now scales..
Anyone who finds this relatable (like me) might benefit from learning more about the last couple of decades of research on emotional regulation, trauma, and the nervous system. I have a great “trauma informed” therapist and over time this tendency of mine feels much less compulsive and more like a choice I can make because I know I’m good at something. At least for me having a calmer internal life has made it way easier to pick my battles and it usually means I end up feeding my desire to be useful on more satisfying and impactful things than I would have chased in more obsessive times in my life.
It's not addiction. That makes in sound like self pat on the back disguised as a problem.
It's the equivalent of being neat freak. Some people are annoyed when they see breadcrumbs on the floor and feel a compelling urge to clean it. You experience a compelling urge to fix tech problems.
I think many people have that on various subjects.
It's not really a problem though. More an obsession than an addiction really. Being obsessive about your work is not a problem as long as you maintain proper live/work balance.
Many of the problems are self inflicted or don’t deserve solving in the first place. In fact solving Facebook’s ad targeting “problem” is actively working against The Good.
Unfortunately, my career has been solving such things; and once I realized that, there was no going back and no job satisfaction.
I also take offense at the belief of “being the only one who can solve the problem”. This is an arrogant self serving justification to blind oneself of the harm the solutions cause.
Nietzsche would approve that you are seeking power through usefulness. Even if he disdained money, he is a bit idealistic/outdated here. Hobbes says riches is a form of power.
I agree broadly with this, but was surprised to see the staff software engineer callout. Then OP linked to some other docs about how to avoid being stuck in rut at "merely" useful. At my job we call that "You can't get promoted to next level by doing the job of someone 2 levels above you."
This is a fantastic intro to the article I wanted to read, which was Sean's advice on how to best leverage this trait.
I'm similar, but make sure you're addicted to being useful, and not addicted to being needed - the latter can come about by being useful enough. Sometimes it comes from a feeling of wanting control, but opens the door wide open to abusive relationships (both ways).
I identify very strongly with this. More than once in my career I have gotten feedback along the lines of:
> We really like your work! How can you help other engineers be more like you?
The thing I think (but usually don't say) is:
> You realize I'm like this because I often work directly against your instruction in order to satisfy my personal sense of professional pride and responsibility?
One of thing I have noticed of good software engineers is while they are trying to solve problems, they also communicate with clarity to upper management chain. The clarity they bring to the table was always appreciated and also puts them in the career growth path easily.
Every good engineer is an excellent communicator. Everyone who is not an excellent communicator is not a good engineer. Everyone hates that this is true but it remains true. A lot of people are very good programmers who have mistaken that for being good engineers, however.
And this is the determining factor to whether a current dev will be replaced by AI or will evolve alongside with it, being the bridge between humans and AI.
Which is not really different to what we're already doing, translating human requirements to machine code. Just that communication skills will become an even bigger part of the job.
people who do not understand orthogonality also take poor measurements.
I'm not sure what you're implying.
I’ve never felt useful in any of the big tech companies I’ve worked at. It always feels pointless. Is it just the projects I’ve been assigned never being worth anything or whether it is my perspective on those projects, I have no idea
Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.
> some people in tech companies will identify people like me and wring us out in ways that only benefit them
Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.
This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers
Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are.
There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.
https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”.
Is this correct? From the footnotes.
Nope.
>> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations
Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia
yep, that's right. The idea of his nickname that he is really silly. Small man and no good at anything. If you want to go deeper and harsh synonyms he is like "shitty" man, doing shit and receiving shit. His nickname fully describes him like useless, small, no influence, clueless, talentless man. One from the great unwashed
I can relate to this. I find that I have the same issue.
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.
It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.
I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.
Seeing things being broken but not being fixed is a real source of frustration. The tricky thing in my experience has been figuring out which are issues that nobody bothered to fix and which are issues that seem simple but require huge changes to fix.
The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.
I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.
See I like this but also the majority of software jobs these days are a net negative to humanity
This concept comes up a lot, especially on this site. I am sometimes surprised how seldomly it is mentioned by this name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
I fight for the Users
If anything, coding agents gave me more autonomy to experiment and implement stuff. Management used to pretty much risk-adverse, and between building something in-house or paying for another crappy SaaS offering, they would perceive the second one as the least dangerous path in terms of schedule and cost. And then we would be fucked integrating with some shitty API and somehow shoehorning their nonsense abstractions and metaphors into our domain models.
Sometimes I feel that if I said tomorrow that we need to have our own operating system, they would say "sure! go ahead! just make sure to send the expense reports if you need to pay for more tokens with the company's credit card".
> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying
I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.
If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.
And I have a fear of rejection
does it not bother you that your company is not useful to society?
I thought this meant he worked for a blood diamond trader or maybe Ticketmaster, but no, he works for GitHub.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a Philip Dick novel where the world is not what I thought it was.
I am not sure where you found this, but I would agree that GitHub is very useful, for code backup and for sharing with the world.
this resonated so much with me, thanks for sharing
Cog loves machine!
Aka, identity-affirming obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with compulsive mastery as defense mechanism. Welcome to the club, we have cookies (and they're Michelin-rated but it takes us three weeks to make them).
to feeling useful
This sounds almost like "adult female fetish".
I mean you shouldn't let people take advantage of you, but being useful to others is the essence of humanity.
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>> But despite all that, I’m still having a blast
This is proves its mostly over for the high income industry.
There are no good paying jobs where you are having a blast. Otherwise there is a lot of those who want to do that job which drives wages waay down.
High paying jobs are tough/stressful/not fun. Which was the case with software before.
What if I'm having a blast doing the tasks no one wants to do that are in the backlog.
Maybe you're incredibly lucky? But I wouldn't count on that luck lasting.
Bullshit. There are some dysfunctional exceptions, but higher pay usually correlates with more freedom, more responsibility and access to more resources. You may get frustrated in Big Tech, because nowadays, people like to have no bounds in their expectations, but try changing your big tech job for a job in the oil or insurance industry with half the pay, and you'll see that most of the time, you not getting a blast out of your 600k job is mostly your fault.