I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
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Get an advanced education, work harder, never be the one to say, “That is not my job” was the worst advice I could ever receive. I got into debt and was abused and exploited by my employers.
Oof. A lot of “helpful advice” about jobs is helpful not for the workers, but for the owning class.
The problem is that when the people giving that advice were working, it was great advice. Companies took care of their employees. Tenure mattered. Companies today are mindless corporate blobs that only care about spreadsheet numbers and the next quarter’s results.
Maybe in some situations in the past owners were better to their workers, but in many cases there is an unbroken line of exploitation going back in the past. The idea that exploitation is an extremely new phenomenon benefits the owning class by concealing the long and bloody history of proletarian struggles.
If your children would just adopt a can-do attitude while they’re mining, they’d be getting promotions
Oh absolutely there was exploitation. Especially in certain industries.
Some of that advice is true … work hard, work at something all the time and do your best … but always for yourself and your well being and for your own self and your family.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and this is what all my family did including me. I worked for myself all my life … building, construction, renos, fixing stuff, building stuff all the time … I did some work for companies and businesses but always with the idea that I wouldn’t work more than I had to and only to gain a bit more money to move on as soon as possible.
Twenty five years later … I own three properties, multiple old vehicles that I maintain myself and I own everything I have without debt … I’m not the wealthiest but I am debt free and have a healthy savings and I still work for myself gaining a bit more every time .
Your experience is the exception rather than the rule. It’s been shown that rags to riches is a myth perpetrated by capitalism. At one time I had your level of success. It was all taken from me when I became disabled. As a Canadian, you have the distinct advantage of at least some social welfare assistance whereas your neighbor to the south has virtually none.
I agree that the whole rags to riches idea is a complete sham that doesn’t exist … unless you are already born wealthy … and then that doesn’t make any sense because you never had rags to begin with.
My story is more rags or bare clothing … I’m not wealthy … I just have enough to be comfortable … I’m not in debt and I drive old beater cars and trucks and never owned a new vehicle in my life … I bought small properties away from big city centers where land is cheap but living is hard
And yes … I know most people are probably not capable of doing what I did … I grew up with lots of people in my situation and I was fortunate enough to figure a way out, mostly through the luck of finding the right partner who worked just as hard as me, parents who were great guides and teachers and a small network of family and friends I could count on.
I have a less impressive, but similar story to yours. I’d say it’s fine to work hard and do work that’s not your job, but the key is to follow through by demanding the proper acknowledgement and gratification for it. Like, doing it for free a couple of times to be nice is fine, but after that, the value you bring with this has to be properly acknowledged and compensated.
If you’ve been working hard and helping out, and an employer doesn’t gratify you to that value, the proper response is not to give up and pin it on hard work being the problem. That employer is being the problem. Try to change that if you can at all.
Don’t ever quit.
Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.
“Don’t be a quitter” is like saying “Fuck your boundaries. Stay in toxic situations no matter how bad they get.”
If I’m sick of something, I don’t quit, I change direction.
“Don’t be a quitter” is something that makes sense if you’re in the middle of a board game or the likes. It definitely shouldn’t be applied to big things like jobs or relationships.
Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!
They told me to not quit. So I’m still a crack addict.
as everything this has contexts in which is valuable and contests in which it’s not
don’t quit because you’re demoralised. don’t quit because you’re tired. don’t quit because it’s hard.
if your first natural response to adversities is flying instead of fighting, it’s telling you to fight, because you are likely the only person losing when flying.
it’s not about never change your mind. never critically think what’s the situation and if it’s still worth it.
or check up with yourself and see if that’s still what you want.
after all leaving a situation you don’t want anymore, it’s not quitting, it’s moving on
it seems just semantics, it’s about knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.
nothing is black or white
You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.
“Just be happy” to a depressed person
Oh wow, jeez, thanks, why didn’t I think of that earlier!
Ah yes, the good ol’ “Just get over it” technique that is supposed to work for any mental health condition.
The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.
When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.
That’s fascinating. Do you have suggestions for any resources that talk about how to do this in a healthy way?
There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.
I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.
Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.
Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.
Thanks!
Similar to this: telling someone with ADHD “stop letting yourself get distracted”
Or to someone with anxiety:
“Just don’t be anxious!”
🫠…
Someone told me that if I wanted to be a history teacher I should get a degree in special Ed to “make myself more marketable.” It took 14 years to get out of special education and land a job teaching history
14 years is a long time. Hope you’re having a better time now.
Teaching as a profession sucks ass in general right now… but at least a lot of the special educator-specific bullshit is not my problem anymore. But thank you.
Coincidentally, I know someone who recently applied for a regular teacher’s assistant role and when they got to the interview the hiring director didn’t even ask questions about that position; instead they interviewed for a special ed job and then only offered that. It was a total bait & switch to try and fill a role nobody was applying for.
I got the same thing said to me but to go into math instead. I never listened to them. Now I’m looking for jobs and there’s a ton of openings for history jobs and I tend to feel a little smug about it.
“There are people worse off than you”
Thanks, that totally solves my problem.
I always tell them “Following that logic, there’s only one person in the world that can complain. But that dude really got it bad.”
My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”
I was a new dog owner, went to /r/Dogs to ask about a particular behavior my dog was exhibiting I’d never seen or read about before (turned out to be normal tho) and every reply I got basically told me I don’t know how to care for an animal and that I should give him to someone else.
It was then I realized that it wasn’t just /r/RelationshipAdvice that was full of bitter, jealous losers whose advice is always “dump them.” It applied to literally every single subreddit dedicated to advice. They may have started with good intentions and knowledgeable people, but over time filled up with people who had no business giving anyone advice.
Oh yeah even lifeprotips, if you go in the comments it’s just full of people grasping at straws to find the tip useless and upvoting each other’s cynicism
There was one: “If you want a fridge’s compressor to turn on and off less frequently (ie: if you sleep in the same room), fill it with water bottles to increase thermal mass” and the top comments were “Actual life pro tio: get an apartment with 2 rooms???”
I was like: are these people actually that slow?
The less there is to say about an advice, the less reasons you have to go write a comment. Therefore the people in the comments are often outliers
Just fyi: That person was trying to make a joke.
As a fellow dog owner, the internet always seems to be the most judgemental place to get dog advice. If you dont spend 6 hours a day training your dog, feed the top of the line kibble, and vax them for diseases only 3 dogs have got ever, then you dont deserve to have a dog.
This is true. Even random articles found on search engines give messed up advice.
“Can dogs eat avocado?”
Websites: “Yes. No. Maybe? They are toxic. But what makes them toxic doesn’t affect dogs. At least not as much. Don’t give them avocado.”
People get so hand-wringy about what dogs can and can’t eat. Like I’ve had people tell me not to let my dog eat apple because there’s a chemical in apple seeds that’s converted to cyanide in the gut.
Like, first of all, I’m not feeding the seeds to my dog, and second of all there’s not enough of that stuff in one apple’s worth of seeds to hurt you, and third of all you’d have to basically chew the seeds into powder, a thing that dogs famously do not do, to get even that tiny harmless amount.
It’s not safe for dogs to eat chocolate, grapes, or alliums. Everything else is kinda fine. (And tbh growing up my family dogs ate all of those things a few times and were fine – how dangerous it is depends on the concentration of the toxic thing, the size of the dog, etc.)
My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.
At the party, my dad’s friend took me aside and said “My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that’s an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that.”
Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I’m still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.
Ah yes the brand new exciting world of electricity. Rumor on the street is they’ve got this fancy new device called a tellyfone that uses this electricity. You can talk to anyone in the world!
In another 10 years, electricity will rule the world - mark my words!
Echoes of The Graduate…
“I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin. One word only. Are you listening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Plastics.”
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
- Every day is a day I’d rather have off.
- It ruined the thing I loved (programming) for me
“Nothing is fun 8 hours a day” isn’t an advice but at least it’s true
In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
Same! Last time I had a programming all-nighter was around 10 years ago
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”
I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it’s the “a day” part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It’s one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.
I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I’m going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.
Did the formal education before the job ruin it for you, or did the job itself ruin it?
My experience may be an outlier but…
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.
Ah, that’s fair.
I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).
It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven’t already started on something else, I’m sure it’ll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.
On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.
The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I’m like, “dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?”
Fastest way to kill your passion is to make it your paycheck, I say to those people.
That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.
My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).
That’s so rude. People make such wild assumptions about other people’s lives.
“Just have one or two and then stop” when telling a friend I’m an alcoholic. Well shit, thanks! That never even crossed my mind!
Thanks, I’m cured!
It’s more a question of how many times it crosses my mind.
Which would inevitably be followed by “Just one more can’t hurt!”…
I hope you’re doing better now.
That is absolutely what follows. I am doing MUCH better, I’ve had 2.5 years sober in the last 3 years because I thought I was “cured” and started “moderating” last summer. The stop drinking subreddit was amazing insight and help. It’s on lemmy but the only posts are the daily checkin. I should start being more active on it to boost it.
Me: having a hard time mentally and emotionally Someone: “You need to pray to God to make your troubles go away.”
“Nothing happens in god’s world by mistake.” “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Etc etc.
When 1 in 6 women has been sexually assaulted in their lives (and many men and NB folks), that’s a really fucked up thing to say. You never know what someone’s been through, and I’ve personally been through a lot of awful things. I guess it helps some people to tell themselves this kind of shit, but it is impossible to me to think of any kind of meaning that would make being a victim of violent crime “positive” or “worth it” or “a learning experience” blah blah blah. I think the term for that is “toxic positivity.”
So either “everything happens for a reason” is utter bullshit, or god is a sadistic fucking asshole.
I’m a Christian but I support the school of thought that says “shit happens”.
Another problem with the thinking “everything happens for a reason” is that it can lead to belief in “the just world”. When one thinks that life is fair you start to believe that bad things only happens to bad people, ie they deserve it.
Am I supposed to upvote this because it’s awful advice or downvote it because it’s depressing advice?
It seems like this person either had success with their advice or had nothing to say, but felt the need to say something.
My favorite advice for clinical depression is “just snap out of it.”
Is it inappropriate or off topic? Then you downvote.
Anything else? Upvote or abstain
Just be yourself.
Oh yeah ok. Thanks. That fixes everything.
Lost out on a good job opportunity with this one. I was going to do some interview prep and someone just told me to, “be yourself, they just want to get to know you.” Yeah bullshit… didn’t get that gig and did interview prep for a different opportunity. It went incredibly well the second time around.
As long-term career advice, I think this is helpful In finding something that doesn’t drag you down. If you can’t be yourself at work it’s going to be far more taxing.
But I absolutely understand this is a luxury to be able to be in that position of being choosy about your employer.
You’ll be far happier in an environment that enjoys you for being you, but you’ll find a job quicker by saying what they want to hear
I’m an asshole if I don’t put my filters on, no one would like me.
I envy the people who can be themselves at work without losing their job the same day. But only a bit, because it looks incredibly boring.
Find a trade. If you’re good at what you do, it really doesn’t matter how wierd or fucked up you are. You can even get in full-on arguments with your boss that get forgotten about once everyone calms down.
As if you are not already yourself!
I like to think what people really mean when they say that is “be your best self”, but that’s still not very helpful.
“sleep when the baby sleeps”
Yeah because there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they’re down too.
“Sleeping like a baby” had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!
I feel like the phrase “sleeping like a baby” was not created by someone who was a primary caretaker for a baby.
Exactly, unless they actually meant it to mean “for no more than 30 minutes then wake up crying inconsolably because I’ve shit myself.”
Then they hit the nail on the head and people have just misconstrued it!
Here’s some more unhelpful advice: Hang in there, it gets easier! (for real though)
Also, like, adult humans don’t do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don’t have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.
Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.
The usual acne related ones, like washing my face more or using tooth paste on my spots. Turns out clearasil won’t fix your hormones.
Use olive oil instead of sun screen because it works better than SPF and isn’t full of chemicals.
When taking a taxi on a short stop over in Dubai, the taxi driver told me not to have blue hair (which I had) or no man will ever want me, while my then boyfriend was also sitting in the taxi, masquerading as my husband (we were wearing rings and just letting people assume we were married, which everyone did. Including the taxi driver!)
Work related: don’t make my code too “complicated” or my one coworker can’t understand it (read: my coworker doesn’t know what async means, and instead of him learning, I’m just not ever meant to do anything async… When processing huge amounts of data… Also, error handling is too hard, don’t do that either) yes, I will forever be salty about this. He deleted weeks worth of work while I had covid because he didn’t even try to understand it - his reasoning being “it doesn’t work anyway, so there’s no point in understanding or learning what I’m doing”
Where do you work that allows someone to just delete someone else’s work all willy-nilly? If someone did that to my code I’d be PISSED.
Someone did that to my whole project. I had catefully migrated all the source control to a new and improved system. Out boss decided which project went into which organization.
Some idiot went and intentionally deleted a project I was meant to do maintenance because he had decided all by himself that it wasn’t meant to be there.
I had to do a long train ride to the idiot’s office for a training and when he told me what he did (proudly!) I gave him the sort of verbal bollocking I have never done before or since.
To the point where he contacted our boss to complain. I got a call from my boss to excuse himself on behalf of the idiot.
^a
Del
^s
Fixed your code :D
ggdG:wq
I like reading vim commands as if they were spoken. “Good game daddy girl colon wanna quit” (idk)
A game changer I had for acne as a teen was putting a new towel on my pillow every night. My pillow was likely riddled with Cutibacterium acnes from sleeping with acne.
It helped another friend with an acne problem as well.
Mind you that bacteria isn’t always the cause of acne, but it’s worth trying this trick for any people out there going through it.
Yeah, my painful acne lasted far into adulthood. Found out it was 100% hormonal and finally got on something to treat it.
There’s a lot of things that can cause acne.
Same. The amount of times I’ve heard “have you tried Proactiv?” as though it wasn’t the first thing I went and bought when I was 15 is just aggravating. The fact that not even doctors seem to know much about the internal causes of acne and how to treat it is really just embarrassing.
I’ve also heard the “change your pillowcase” thing far too often. If your pillowcase is so dirty that it’s the one thing that stands between you having acne and not having acne, then it sounds like you might have bigger issues lol.
tho to be fair “change your pillowcase” is probably a decent bit of advice for a lot of teen boys in particular. I knew a lot of guys in college who only washed their sheets once a semester. 🤢 It’s the “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” of acne advice.
That would have been actually useful advice! I actually did start doing that a couple of years ago, and it really did help. It didn’t clear it up, but the acne hasn’t been quite as aggressive since. I also do other things now too, so I’m in a pretty good place for my face skin at last lol
Wow that last bit sucks. I’m assuming you don’t use GIT and could roll back your changes or fork it from a previous point.
I think that would push me over the edge.
“You just have to work through the pain.” I’ve injured myself multiple times in the past exercising by following this idiotic advice.
It’s one thing to push through discomfort, that’s how your body gets stronger. But If you’re in actual pain, stop and listen to the alarm bells your body is giving you.
