Other people may have more luck than me. My situation, since being laid off half a year ago I figured I'd try to enjoy the time while it lasted, and travel a bit. Felt like I was close to burning out myself near the end of my previous tenure. Now... it feels like I've truly burnt out from job hunting 9 to 5. Only managed to get one technical screen I didn't pass, and they didn't give a reason. Drove me mad trying to figure out why, but I never did. Haven't gotten even a phone screen ever since, and it's been months.
I'm thinking that since finances and such are pushing me to the end of my rope my only option is menial work for the time being. I think I am depressed. Even if I got another screen and passed I don't know if I'd be capable of the work any longer. It's all hideously demoralizing and it's as if there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I was at a reasonably large company for five years previous, I guess there's only so much that can do in a zero-sum situation like now.
But again, I'm not sure if you'd have worse luck getting any sort of interview for an IC position at least. If burnout at work is that much of a concern and you're confident it makes less sense to go with "keep the job." But I certainly would have regretted leaving (if I had any control over the matter), knowing the job search has now turned into its own job for me, a mentally exhausting unpaid job with no guarantee of positive prospects and an endless stream of employers that reject you every week for no identifiable reason.
What’s your stack? I’d love to see your resume. I’m not hiring but I/HN community may have some constructive feedback. The market is slowed but not that slowed. My first thought is you’re in a stack that doesn’t have a lot of openings anyway, like Ruby or Swift.
Dunno about that, it took me 24 years to realize both my parents were sociopaths (hello autism) and I'd ended up learning some of the very same techniques they used to harass and belittle me for my entire life. And by "sociopath" I don't even mean anything that could come out of a book or movie, it was so subtle and "insignificant" seeming to pass undetected by so-called friends, support workers and therapists (one time I had a therapist tell me they had no idea what my parents did to me was traumatic, another said they were simply doing their part as parents by utilizing hard punishment) So long as you didn't know them in as intimate and private a context as familial, you'd never know what they truly thought of someone who needed to be smoked out
I almost wish my parents had enough cracks in their defenses to just beat me across the face instead of the long-term psychological punishment they sentenced me to under the guise of learning from my mistakes. At least then there's a concrete playbook to dealing with the aftermath of being a battered teen and I could have saved myself another decade of anguish and self-flagellation instead of continuing to be tricked. To this day they still treat me like a child and don't tolerate me as anyone else than their ideal, I have to force myself to hang up on them because I know from reason it's just a trauma bond, because my emotion will just drag me back to them every time
And the thing is, from the outside they've successfully passed undetected, and it doesn't seem like they will ever get their due as they could have both retired by now. Instead my mom works in healthcare to "give back" after recently being diagnosed with cancer, and my dad is a successful startup co-founder that has won contracts with supermarkets and IT firms, some of them huge companies that everyone has heard of (To be sure it makes me hesitant to pursue the founder lifestyle) To someone from the outside they could look like superstar parents, reasonably moral people. And in places they actually are, in a material sense. It is impossible to deny the material successes of my father that I'm sure dozens of other founders on this very site would be salivating to achieve in their entire lives. But when they speak from the heart you realize they have no emotional skills, instead they simply research what they think people need them to hear to not be called out and repurpose the syllables of those words to meet their own needs. And at the same time they're smart enough never to be cold with their genuine friends, co-workers or family who are on good terms, but me. Me and only me.
And the thing is it's good enough for society at large. No, sociopaths do not necessarily get their due from being inherently cold or amoral, because they can still learn the interfacing standards that allow them to pass and just do well enough on the tests of society.
The only reason you can call someone a sociopath to the world is because they've failed at being a sociopath. If the sociopath is indistinguishable from a non-sociopath, which is by design, nobody else will believe you except the people in the pseudosciences you pay to believe you
My life has taught me that there's no difference in a person who genuinely says something and someone who isn't genuine but says the words in a convincing enough manner. Not to mention, that has given me a whole new perspective on behavioral software interviews that has made me totally disillusioned about the industry and process. They convinced me I was in the wrong for so long, and... To this day I still believe that's at least partially true. In spite of denying contact with them now at every turn. I think I'm beyond the point of being fully convinced otherwise
So no, my parents had iron-clad social manipulation skills but they were both far from incompetent to anyone besides me who asked. it was a valuable lesson that life doesn't emulate fiction, because if life were translated to fiction without embellishments then people would get bored and tend not to care. They have ensured my story is a boring one that resists novelization for the social workers that attempt to listen but has traumatized me regardless
The only thing I can do now is move on, quit blaming myself for everything and pick up the pieces, because all I can tell myself is they didn't define my life and I am my own person, I am my own person...
I am not the GP but for me it is when therapists strike at the same weaknesses you're still trying to get over, and aren't tolerant of the ensuing negativity or wounds that are reopened. From my understanding the person in therapy has to be at their most vulnerable to receive the most effective care, and if you happen to pick a therapist that disagrees with your state of mind at your most vulnerable moments, then that only validates your existing fears. "You should see a therapist" has been said to me (and I'm sure countless others) without any indication that therapy is only a tool that works on some and not others. It also doesn't encapsulate that you have to have a strategy in place for how you use therapy, you have to do the majority of the work yourself, and if you choose a therapist that doesn't accept your worldview, however flawed it is at the time, you could validate your deepest fears all over again. I thought I at least understood those parts but I wasn't prepared for the rest, namely that therapists (for the time being) are human, and by nature of being human will always be infallible
One of my (many) issues was fear of expressing my own feelings. (For reasons that will become clear it still is) I wasn't in complete denial of this at the time and in fact wrote a fairly long document "outing" myself, my past history and my behavioral tendencies so my therapist wouldn't be fooled by the unconscious things I said or did. It was because therapy has to be based on self-reporting because the therapist can't read your mind, so what you say to them will influence the advice they give. I had unconsciously trained myself to speak in such a way that whatever help they would give would be irrelevant to my actual situation by way of omitting details or blowing up issues out of proportion and I could eternally vent to them without getting over any of my problems. I understand this is wrong. It wasn't productive at all; it was a defense mechanism I put up to avoid talking about my feelings under the guise of being "gifted" like I had been labeled in my early years. This was what I wanted to unroot with my last therapist and though a part of me hated how I was trying to "test" them I was going to have these tendencies anyway so I thought it was better if I tried to be vulnerable about them upfront
In response to that long document of self-reflection my therapist at the time raised his voice at me and the one thing I can remember him saying was that he "was only human." I interpreted this to mean only a super-human was capable of dealing with me; that he was frustrated by something he couldn't understand. I brought this up with him but it seemed to just glance off. In fact, I realized that the entirety of my document where I had for the umpteenth time exposed my darkest feelings to a stranger had been glanced over. And indeed this exact fear of vulnerability was one of the problems I was wanting to work over with him, and now that fear had become a lot more justified in my mind. I hadn't even gotten to talking about that fear because there was still so much about myself that I hadn't written about yet and I was still planning to. Or rather, had yet to expose unjustifiably (at least how I felt in the moment). Certainly I wasn't going to write about myself anymore. I realized my latest therapist was just another person in a long line of people throughout my life, supposed friends and relatives included, for whom trying to be vulnerable only resulted in more harm to my psyche than good. And over the course of my life up to this point, that was a consistent pattern with other therapists, whether or not I was paying the person to listen. It felt like I was preventing my actual voice from being heard, and any attempt at metacognition to point at myself and say "this is the real problem, not any of the gobbledygook I was spouting earlier" was for some reason always stamped out, I guess one too many times. Maybe it's because they do take what I say at face value, and/or I really am that malicious to lead them down all the way that path. And I wasn't even looking for validation that anything in what I wrote was justifiable or didn't need to change, as my assumption was it wasn't and that was exactly what I was seeking treatment for, unconscious frames of mind that I don't normally think about every day that make people turn away
I kept going for a few more weeks but the writing was on the wall; I no longer felt comfortable there. That was after over a decade and a half of seeing dozens of therapists. I was tired of attempting the same thing in a multitude of different styles and variations and seeing the same result unfold each time. I can only conclude I'm not the kind of person that responds well to traditional talk therapy. If anyone is to blame for that it's me, not the therapist. Anything I write isn't an indictment that therapy as a whole is not helpful, because thousands of people say it is and I have no way of disproving them; all I know is that it's not helpful for me alone. I feel like I just don't resonate with anyone else's wavelength, in general, that thought biases me to avoid attempting to fit in where I possibly could have, and the cycle repeats itself. I've now fully internalized that I'm outside of the grain, so to speak, and that my opinions are irrelevant to anyone but myself
After the fact I considered that maybe the people who refused to talk to me and told me to go to therapy before I was "ready" to talk to them again had only suggested that to me because in their minds I had failed them, and I needed corrective action, that talk therapy was the corrective action, and once the specialists had done their work to set my views straight I could rejoin the grown-up league and talk to actual people again. In hindsight maybe I wouldn't have liked talking to the actual people as much as I thought I would, had their scenario come to reality
For what it's worth I still try to believe that most of the billions of people on Earth have good intentions; it's just that those intentions have nothing to do with me, it isn't big deal that they have nothing to do with me, and those people would lead happier lives if I left myself out of them. I don't want to darken anyone's day more than I feel I have to (because I deem the act of writing what's on my mind as selfish, and this entire comment is exemplary of that) so I don't persist in communication anymore; only when I feel like I absolutely have to scream out what's on my mind, and not any longer than I must from the fear of becoming yet another person that dumps their trauma on innocent people for need of validation. Past a certain point I just want to place it somewhere
And to be clear, I really, honestly believe that explanation still isn't enough to justify me writing this in such a public place, and I would still feel the shame even if I lampshaded every single motivation I have for writing it and ensuring I preemptively defended myself against every single counterattack an arbitrary internet commentator could respond to me with. In my mind being so open with my experience is merely an indicator that my ongoing metamorphosis into a person immune to emotion and vain desires has yet to succeed
Not to mention the search isn't just about finding "a" therapist, it's about finding one that's a good fit. As I've learned a bad therapist can set you back months or years. I'd be willing to bet half of them you'd find in any online aggregator could end up communicating more judgementally than even the LLM if something you say provokes them, hence the market for these kinds of bots, and those are the people have degrees in psychotherapy
Interesting question however, is I wonder if people will see these bots as a solution to the issue that human empathy is finite. As a human you can't support a depressed person forever if your actions do not cause change, there's only so much mental strain a person can handle moreso someone untrained. Many people talk of going no-contact with those that are extremely troublesome after so long, even if they're family. I don't really know how to solve that exhaustion except telling them to go elsewhere, which could be seen by some vulnerable persons as abandonment
On the other hand a chatbot with no filters will never tire of you
> I'd be willing to bet half of them you'd find in any online aggregator could end up communicating more judgementally
Whilst I do support the idea that "fit" is important, statements like these about unsupported statistics pulled out of thin air are damaging in and of themselves. It's sentiment like this that put me off seeking help for my mental health for twenty years because it just seemed like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't". The reality was very different.
Chatbots may never tire of you, but neither will a video game. Both are shallow and not a representation of reality, nor a solution to a problem.
Here's the thing: professionals are professionals. For as long as a patient sees them, they are paying their bills.
Exhaustion in non-professionals is because people trauma-dump and expect someone to be their guardian/protector/shield, if they're friends with them, they're statistically likely to be trying to manage their own problems already. In the pre-digital era, people would otherwise "need" a support network if they didn't have access to professionals. We didn't have a theory of psychology or professional therapists in the past. The early tribe/clan either took care of each other, or they let people suffer. Different peoples did different things with their mentally ill, elderly, physically ill, or unwanted female children.
Ego-centricity is a trait of modernity, not necessarily something reflective of the past because we can just replace the human gears in the system now without much hassle.
> Not to mention the search isn't just about finding "a" therapist, it's about finding one that's a good fit.
This is why I don’t bother tbh. I have no interest in throwing away money by “throwing the dice” so to say until I find someone who is a good fit. Some friends recommend to a site that aggregates mental health professionals in the area, and almost none of them were actively accepting new clients, except the ones who specialize in things that don’t apply to me.
As someone who lived with their problems for twenty years before doing anything about it due to anecdotes like the one shared above, consider rolling the dice.
Are these considered the most productive years of your life? What are the most productive years of your life worth? What could they be worth if you weren't mentally fucked? That question is going to vary depending on the individual, but even if you're not interested in the monetary worth—well, you only go round the once. Is it money thrown away if you eventually solve your problem? The way to look at is R&D of your mental health.
I'm biased since I live this philosophy but it sort of works for me, I've trained myself to realize these sorts of services operate by "interfacing" by emitting strings of words that sound appealing to the mind that consumes them. Look at virtual YouTubers for another example, it's the experience of watching people act "genuine" like casual friends because it activates the same social neurons, hence each month the actors receive a paycheck
The question becomes more complicated when the corpos are done away with and you have the model running on your own machine. The entity I tend to trust the most in life is raw, unfiltered silicon. When I program, it does exactly what I ask it to, to a fault. It doesn't turn its back on you because you said something stupid or you don't agree with an opinion it holds
But is an LLM repeating the tokens "you are worthy of this life" and its many variants thousands of times fundamentally any better even if you're in control? It strikes me as one step closer to wireheading honestly. But that's true for a lot of things like video games, just to a much more distant extent, it's all data in the end
But interest and anxiety have gotten the better of me when it comes to meeting strangers, so I'm at a loss. Maybe the solution for people like me is to just ignore all those things in the category of social or substitute and channel my efforts into other hobbies instead of continuing to associate stress with communication. Or intellectualize endlessly, like in this post, to prevent any emotional bond from easily forming when people read it
I don't like YouTubers, I don't like celebrities, I don't like personifying LLMs. Any parasocial relationship is toxic and to be avoided.
I've had an LLM tell me that suicide seemed logical when recounting a low point in my life to it where I'd previously considered it after several people around me of vastly different ages and backgrounds had killed themselves following a shared trauma. These things aren't conditional logic and can fail in all kinds of bizarre and spectacular ways, they're no substitute for an actual human being trained to handle these kinds of delicate things.
What one patient calls x, another person will call y. And when discussing the human mind, trauma et al, especially when things happened, especially over the course of months or years, an LLM simply isn't going to be able to compete with a human being. Equally, physical tells are important too. A therapist might ask a patient if they take drugs, the patient may claim they don't, but the track marks, tone, body language and overall behaviour might tell the therapist something important that they won't even necessarily convey to their patient, but keep in mind.
Wishing you well, stranger. I hope you eat something good today and find something intellectually stimulating to amuse yourself with, even temporarily, and hopefully discover something new and positive before bed.
> But interest and anxiety have gotten the better of me when it comes to meeting strangers, so I'm at a loss.
Getting involved in my community doing different kinds of volunteer work as well as activities I find fun has been the best way to get to know strangers and make new friends. It's easy to make a new friend when the two of you share a couple of passions!
Putting anxieties aside and being more outgoing and having enjoyable small-talk conversations was not a skill that came naturally to me, but rather was one that needed to be developed over time.
It's a skill and the I think the benefits of it are well worth the effort to develop it.
The chatbot in that article did have safeguards in place to stop it from listing suicide methods, but he just kept asking until he found a jailbreak. He was looking for someone to give him the answer he wanted all along
Past a certain point is there anything that will stop someone that determined to find something to validate their own self-destructive viewpoint? If not AI then a site or faction or person on Telegram with a pro-suicide opinion could have the same effect, and it would still be just as tragic but no longer be noteworthy. It didn't sound like he had a happy life to begin with with the AI ruining it completely, like it sounds
I had an LLM tell me to that killing myself makes sense when recounting a low point in my life to it and how I'd contemplated suicide. I wasn't looking for any kind of "jailbreak" in prompts, this was following a genius on HN saying it's a "great alternative to a therapist". No, it isn't fit for purpose.
> It didn't sound like he had a happy life to begin with
Which are exactly the kind of people who are going to be using LLMs as a "therapist". See the problem?
Its not social anxiety for me, its asociality. It turns out the reason could be genetic. I talked to my mom recently, she said she came from a "line of sociopaths". I think she's exaggerating but I got the idea. Her father had multiple wives, and at least 3 male offspring still alive sound like me. My closest cousin has no friends and lives as a hikkikomori in his mid-30s. My mom's brother is extremely awkward and it took him a decade of concentrated effort just to be able to exist in a social crowd, and he still has no long-term friends. So much of my life made sense hearing that, and today I almost feel righteous in avoiding contact with others, having friends in my 20s wasn't a battle I was going to win with how unprepared and demotivated I was to fight it, and how my brain was working against me the whole time
I concluded that I really really really don't have much to add to any arbitrary meeting group, I've been in a lot of bad meetup.com meetings with people just like me that are lonely and awkward yet expect something to happen or work out...and it never does. And then there are groups that should work out, full of older persons with lots of social experience that treat me like a long lost friend...and yet it doesn't feel real to me. Like I can't stay engaged. Like it's artificial, constructed. Like there's no reason to talk to these people when the activity ends. And I keep thinking that's fine, to be left totally alone. I don't care either way. Everyone else screams at me "that's not okay, youre going to die early from isolation." So its like I have to eventually push myself into these situations I don't want to be in at some point or I'm killing myself. By having no friends I'm committing suicide. It's absurd to me. It sucks the joy out of it all every time, when its between remaining myself and supposedly dying miserably or forcing myself into situations I don't want to be in
I don't think this is at the level of "making friends is hard" anymore, like I used to. Its something so much deeper and so much more firmly rooted that most can't comprehend its depths. Hence why I feel alienated by people when I try to explain my condition to others in earnest, even when I'm trying to help them approach me. And admittedly it makes me feel like someone different or unique but I'm not going to say it helps me
Nearly outing related to a hobby I thought I liked...made me enjoy that hobby less afterwards, even alone. It's like seeing myself in a mirror. I questioned who I was outside of my work, never found a satisfactory answer, and just didn't want to keep going in the end.
For now I have accepted that the reason I keep getting roiled up about people talking about having trouble making friends is because we had to make friends or form communities to survive as a species. It's the human condition. So I keep coming back to the thought like a mutt in heat. My mind is wired to care at some level even if there's a veneer I can't scrape off. And infall outside the grain. But I don't see anything wrong with it. Hell, in another life if I cared about going out more I could have been an actual socialpath singularly focused on getting what I wanted out of people, and had I been any more charismatic in this life I sincerely believe that might just have come true
I found one of the best parts of travelling to a country where I don't speak the language is that I can keep to myself without feeling obligated to bother anyone, and after a few days I can just scurry away without being seen or cared about. It's a liberating feeling when I keep feeling pressured to perform correctly in my home country and I've been continually shunned or ostracized for not fitting in at X or Y social club, exactly like I expected from the start. Its also why when I learn a language (Japanese) it's like an "emotional blunting" to consume media in that language. even though I understand the meaning of the words/sentences perfectly it's like there's no "weight" to them. It puts distance between me and people who speak my native tongue. I don't get emotionally attached like if I read the same story in English, because I have no real connection to Japanese besides side interest.I can live within these texts that all others around me can't understand. And at times it feels like a metaphor for my life
I think the language/japan thing shows that it's stuff created in your head in isolation that is holding you back. And only a different view of things (forced on you through using another language) is what you need.
Keep it up with the languages though, always time well spent.
Maybe stop navel-gazing and use your money to go somewhere like Japan and get a girl (assuming you're male) knocked up or something so you don't have so much free time to mope about you not having a same-sex comfort blanket.
There are two problems I see with just saying this
- "working on yourself" is left unclearly defined
- the assumption that you have to "work on yourself" before you can get in front of other people (apologies if that wasn't what you were insinuating but I've been given this advice by others)
Addressing the first the most obvious way that society deems "working on yourself" if I had to guess is going to therapy. Well I have troubles going to therapy because evidently some part of my brain related to forming any sort of human relationship (romantic friendly business or therapeutic) is stunted. For me the interest you speak of and work ethic for dealing with humans over objects just fades. They can be as enthusiastic as possible and I can completely forget they exist after a week if they aren't physically in front of my face by then. And there are plenty of states of apathy in between. So therapy doesn't work out that well. I go back to those people who recommended therapy for advice. They say "well go to therapy again, wrong therapist." At that point Im willing to believe theyre telling me that because they have no idea how to deal with me and want me out of their sights asap so a professional can take the brunt of my miasma. And that is a legitimate tactic when dealing with severely depressed people, see "codependence", it is just the truth. At that point I cant bear to be around them any more
Addressing the second, I think that would contribute to more alone time for someone seeking self help, whereas experience by doing is better for learning. Though, by now Ive learned the hard way that dragging my clearance-shelf mind into someone elses good time feels like it would be selfish to them and unfulfilling for me, but thats me personally
So my new idea of working on myself is just trying to stay employed as a single living thing and hoping I can retire without any more mental defects forming. Sometimes I feel empty. Maybe I got the wrong idea.
The things people have been talking about in this thread. Get in shape. Consider improvements to other aspects of your appearance like hair, skincare, and clothing. Work on your personality by developing hobbies that get you around the kind of people you want to meet, make conscious effort to improve social skills.
> the assumption that you have to "work on yourself" before you can get in front of other people (apologies if that wasn't what you were insinuating but I've been given this advice by others)
Sometimes getting in front of other people is all that is needed. But if your current practices aren’t seeing the results you expect after the passage of time, then it’s worth considering whether an adjustment is needed.
> Addressing the first the most obvious way that society deems "working on yourself" if I had to guess is going to therapy. Well I have troubles going to therapy because evidently some part of my brain related to forming any sort of human relationship (romantic friendly business or therapeutic) is stunted.
Not necessarily but in many cases therapists can point you in the right direction! Also, if you’ve had a go with therapy a few times with no results, it’s possible that garden variety therapy practices aren’t for you and you need more specialized expertise. You might want to check out any university medical centers in your area that offer psychotherapy. The intake can take longer and there’s more bureaucracy but the quality can be a lot higher.
> Addressing the second, I think that would contribute to more alone time for someone seeking self help, whereas experience by doing is better for learning. Though, by now Ive learned the hard way that dragging my clearance-shelf mind into someone elses good time feels like it would be selfish to them and unfulfilling for me, but thats me personally
IDK where you live, but living on the West Coast I know exactly what you mean, the “positive vibes only” culture can be incredibly draining. I would say two things.
1. Not everywhere is like this, and if you can move, you might find the social environment in another place more to your liking. Midwesterners and New Yorkers famously love to complain.
2. There’s also an element where you have to learn to suppress negativity around new people. As your friendship becomes deeper - it doesn’t have to be all that deep - you can drop the mask and reveal how you really think. You will likely find that more people think like you than you might imagine, they’re just more practiced at masking.
I once read that the Outsider (as defined by Colin Wilson) lives their live in the pursuit of truth. I think that may partially explain why such a tactic is so ineffective for those people. They are concerned with what they think is the truth behind the words above what the words makes them feel, when the latter is supposed to be more important to the speaker of the words. The words are a tool to get someone to clean up their act, get off the couch and get employed again, and after they're said they've served their purpose they're forgotten about. The Outsider seeks that obvious admittance that never comes
I can understand the purpose of self-help statements like "if it frightens you then do it." The point is for the consumer of the help to do things they wouldn't. But I'm tempted to say "I'm frightened of punching people out of the blue, vividly imagine myself doing so out in public every day and have to constantly repress my urge to do so." The author says "thats not what I meant." Then I'd say "then say what you mean." But the point has been lost in a mishmash of semantics. And in the end I'm still frightened of punching people
Im in the habit of peeling back the ulterior motives behind such tactics. Its more concerned with what the people are trying to get me to do if they're making a subjective statement more than the content of the statement. I call that kind of act 'positive gaslighting'. The term gaslighting is almost a universally negative connotation but nobody really talks about the flip side, when you have to look to faith instead of working with truth to feel better. Honestly Id let myself be stoned to death than accept such words uncritically just because it makes me "feel better". I have to twist them into a narrative that makes sense with my worldview
(The irony is that blackpilled incel culture is just another tribe that you can't cross with the wrong words ("maybe I have a chance") or youll get decapitated, I want to remain outside of any tribe for the rest of my life if it kills me)
> Being the cause of, and the sufferer of a "broken heart" is a formative experience. There's nothing like healing a broken heart to teach you that actually things get better, and it wasn't right anyway.
I've never understood this, when I was a teen I had fallings out with a person who was a friend but I couldnt read her social signals, I was nowhere near dating her in hindsight and she was too shy tell me what she actually thought of me until it was too late. Combined with a subsequent brutal fallings out with my family lasting for months that caused me to give up any idea of talking to a woman for more than one day
It took 5 more years for me to be diagnosed as autistic. By that point I figured that had been a death sentence for my social life. Lack of success with male counterparts after the social skills sessions and years of therapy solidified that no amount of help would allow me to look past it
Im now going into my thirties and have no friends, still I guess I'm posting on some guys Hn submission about being single so that counts for something, sounds more appropriate a comment on Tumblr though. I'd be willing to believe the only thing keeping me coming back at this point is hormones and the results of evolution. I reject any advance from all genders so nothing is logically inconsistent. I get what I put in. I just want to live a constructed narrative. Some days I wish I could just burn out all my mirror neurons and stop anguishing over it all if I'm really not going to go back again. But even now I guess I still want someone to hear me rant, just so I don't turn insane, its been my one real worry recently
I'm thinking that since finances and such are pushing me to the end of my rope my only option is menial work for the time being. I think I am depressed. Even if I got another screen and passed I don't know if I'd be capable of the work any longer. It's all hideously demoralizing and it's as if there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I was at a reasonably large company for five years previous, I guess there's only so much that can do in a zero-sum situation like now.
But again, I'm not sure if you'd have worse luck getting any sort of interview for an IC position at least. If burnout at work is that much of a concern and you're confident it makes less sense to go with "keep the job." But I certainly would have regretted leaving (if I had any control over the matter), knowing the job search has now turned into its own job for me, a mentally exhausting unpaid job with no guarantee of positive prospects and an endless stream of employers that reject you every week for no identifiable reason.