Shinji_Ikari

I'm afraid quoting it will hit slur filters but the open sentence is just so

Yesterday I saw the typical gypsy/Romanian female looking pan handler on route 29, nothing new.

I've got a degree in engineering. I love engineering, programming, electronics, CAD and physical prototype design. I love identifying problems and figuring out requirements and designing something to solve it. I know I'm really good at it, but I can only really perform what feels like 20% of the time.

I'll get into some hyper focus for some problem, learn some complex technology, solve the problem, then not be able to look at tech for weeks. This is cool for hobby stuff but man I gotta work too.

I find it nearly impossible to work on things which I don't find personally interesting which isn't good because most "work" isn't interesting whatsoever. I envy people who are able to just go "ah time to do this boring thing" and they just fucking do it. It genuinely feels impossible to just start.

I'm medicated for ADHD but it feels like it only works like 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time my eyes just lose focus and I stare blankly at a screen waiting for hours to pass.

I don't know how to make this work for me either. I know theoretically I could be a prototype engineer, the type of freelance generalist who gets an idea out and disappears but I don't know how to network sufficiently enough to do that. I've got a good job right now, but COL is so high and full remote isn't possible so I'll always be living in a small apartment or be in so much debt I'll never be able to retire.

I want to do more hardware stuff but that's so rarely a remote type job and offices just hurt my soul with how uncomfortable I am all day long. I could probably make a living as a software engineer but I don't know if I'd be able to keep up any kind of pace long term that would let me keep my job.

I almost want to take a stab at doing youtube videos and see if I can make a handful of neat projects that get me a sponsor. enough to score a house in a rundown rustbelt town and be able to fuck off and work at my own pace without the impending doom of rent or mortgage staring me down.

I drink plenty of water, jog when its warm, use a pomodoro timer when I remember. I learned the fundamentals of Rust in a weekend, designed and manufactured a run of PCBs in under 3 months. I just can't keep that momentum going, even if I try to slow down.

thanks for letting me rant. Its not lost on me how privileged I am in this scenario. I'm quite lucky and comfortable but it terrifies me how even someone doing well like myself can't see an exit off this awful ride.

It's so easy shitting on techbro VC nonsense that only separates us from our humanity to sell adspace. What actual problems do you want technology to solve?

So quick disclaimer, both my wife and I are on the Autism spectrum, we both figured this out far too late in our 20s and have been working to re-frame our mindsets about it to understand ourselves better.

Recently, she reached out to a Psychiatrist for adhd and PMDD symptoms and was immediately clocked as ASD and prescribed zoloft to help long term with PMDD syndromes.

The first night was absolute hell of mood swings and discomfort so I was looking more into SSRIs, previously all I knew is you cant just stop taking them and they make certain people's dicks stop working.

Strolling into the zoloft subreddit is an absolutely crazy experience, half the posters are like "i'm going insane is this normal?" and they receive responses like "yeah just wait 12 weeks of these symptoms and maybe you'll be cool". The other half of the posts are people post 12 weeks being like "this shit cool", but there's a weird confirmation bias where the people who got off of it are not lurking in the zoloft subreddit. Every once and a while you'll see someone necro-bump a year old post about someone giving it time and they'll be like "oh yeah sorry for the late reply, the drug was incredibly bad for me and I had to get off of it".

My wife was experiencing this out-of-character rage at certain things, but also felt a weird control over said rage and began looking into posts about that and apparently its common? Weird rage too, like being frustrated with fellow ASD people. I started connecting the dots and thinking about people in my life who were on these and holy shit, they're absolute seething assholes to us, is this why? What is this drug???

And this doesn't even touch getting off the drug, apparently the withdrawal is absolutely demonic for many many days. Then you have serotonin syndrome, the endless list of side effects that you have no idea if you'll experience or not because doctors don't give a shit and blood panels for drug reactions are too expensive to bother with.

All this stuff basically points to "neurodivergent people are being tortured with the promise of a semblance of normalcy in order to cope with our capitalist world, and all the "normalcy" is, is the ability to control your emotions externally despite them being wildly out of control internally".

Rip me apart for this all you want but i'm leaning towards crank status being anti-anti-depressants. All this to say I'm prescribed stimulants and i'm grateful I can just take days off or just not take them when I'm happy to be my autistic-adhd self.(I know not all people can do this with ADHD, my heart goes out to them, but it's more an issue with existing at baseline rather than going off wrecking havoc)

psyilocibin therapy needs to become more widespread because SSRIs are far more terrifying than seeing god and your subconscious.

You can repeat "US imperialism bad" as much as you want but learning the play by play is just absolutely mind blowing. Its always so much worse than you could initially imagine.