Interesting to see Cortisone mentioned on HN. I was diagnosed with Thymus Carcinoma in 2020 (peak COVID), long story short, with God's grace - all healed in 6 months. In 2024 it reoccurred, then Chemo, then healing. 2026 has been tough for me, they found growth on one kidney, small and slowly growing, got it removed. Then doctors recommended immunotherapy, said it would be safe. But like the article, immunotherapy messed me up - extreme muscle weakness and caused inflammation in a lot of muscles even heart. Then I am on cortisone for last 2 months, getting the immunotherapy out. This has been quite hard, even harder than chemo.
Anyways, for you folks - life is a gift, I did not see many conventional "healthy" days since I turned 40, but with faith in Christ I have been healed many times, lived so many years and worked as a normal programmer. Things may have looked very difficult at some points, but faith and love of Jesus pulled me through.
If you have good health, take care of it and personally live a - "holy" life, the rest follows. I know I may sound strange but my biggest regrets have been when I messed up in life by hurting others or living selfishly with no self control.
I've been through exactly that.. I've just completed 30, and I was lay'doff on my 29's.
This such weird-dread-inducing modern world is so weird man.. In the past the anxiety of having bread next-day was completely attached to your hard-work.. nowadays it doesn't feel like that.
It fascinates me a topic that I was reading a couple days ago in a magazine (a old-professor of mine from college wrote it) about young people fantasizing about living in the past rather than the future.. and that could only mean that people is really anxious about the future.
Glad you seem to have found a way to deal with it. Have been dealing with a handful of severe health issues myself the last few years and it does get nightmarish at times, especially as one scratches out candidate causes.
IMO accessibility is an under-discussed benefit of the recent AI improvements. I've recovered from my RSI (typing injury) enough to use a keyboard a moderate amount but doubt I could ever go back to shredding through a codebase like I used to. In an earlier era I might have left the field entirely.
But still, even if all one has to do is read diffs and mumble to Claude, there's no getting around fatigue and brain fog when it's severe enough.
It's kind of strange that our existence has come down to working in an often unfulfilling job almost all of our waking time, and only finding fulfillment when you're out of a job.
But I keep being told that all jobs suck and I'm being silly seeking fulfilment at the place I spend 70% of my waking hours.
EDIT: in fact these days, people make fun of me because I sought fulfilment in my career as a whole, and it’s my fault now that I’m depressed that it’s gone. I’ve come across this snarky comment more than a couple times on this forum.
I think one could make the case that the human life lived during pre-agriculture was one which matched the evolution of our biological organism.
So this is kind of a pedantic point, but 95% of our history is us doing things exactly as we evolved to do. I don't doubt either that hunting must have been a very engaging activity, especially when done as a clan or tribe.
> I mean is this not most of human existence through history though?
That's not a good thing. It means we're failing to progress as a species. If we keep repeating history (with now, unfettered access to it), we're devolving, not evolving.
Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
Ignoring art with patrons which is a tiny percent of all art made, people just did things at home quietly. They painted, drew, told stories, knit, crocheted, etc. Even patron-led artists just made what their patrons wanted, namely all the famous religious art, which I imagine felt like unfulfilling work anyway.
What we like, that is to say gets things like our dopamine flowing, tends to tie in well with the idea of not being compelled to do it. Someone writing copy at work to further enrich the capital owning class and to pay their bills is very different than someone writing short stories in the evening after work.
I would say that past “jobs” had more of a sense of accomplishment and agency. Personally I have never felt the same level of accomplishment from building things that directly improved the quality of my house, hunting with my father when it was required to help maintain ecological balance (too many deer or elk can actually be bad for an ecosystem), or directly contribute to my family/community in some way.
Now my days largely consist of navigating a “game of thrones” political landscape where work means less than it ever has. The sense of agency I once coveted now feels like a distant memory in some ways.
But to be fair this is probably something that people experienced in many different ages of humanity.
>> It's kind of strange that our existence has come down to working in an often unfulfilling job almost all of our waking time, and only finding fulfillment when you're out of a job.
> Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
No. I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable. As technology has progressed, many jobs have gotten farther and farther from what we were meant to do.
And AI isn't going to help. The best case scenario is it replaces work with purposeless entertainments and ennui. The more likely case it that it removes fulfilling work from human hands, leaving more space for unfulfilling work and poverty (because capitalist logic CANNOT be questioned, or you're a heretic who should be burned at the stake).
Maybe the jobs themselves were not enjoyable physically but the satisfaction of a day’s work was.
Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.
Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.
I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.
Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.
> Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?
If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.
And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).
This life is still available in the least civilized parts of the world. And unfortunately it comes with all the other problems of that time: your children will die, other tribes will occasionally kill you, and you need to stay on the move to escape enemies as well as seek food.
For my part, there is a huge price I’m willing to pay to be able to drink water out of my tap. I didn’t have this always and I really value it.
People look at Athens and Rome as some ideal. Labor there was mostly slaves. I don't think we fully appreciate how burdensome labor is and how that's the main motivation for people to offload it to the working class and make themselves the capital owning class. The American dream is being the boss or independently wealthy investor, not the best math teacher in your town.
Hi. I'm here on HN to post occasional very dry remarks, and to tell people about their autoimmune conditions. (You'll see my other post from yesterday on the ADHD story.)
You should visit this website, from a nonprofit funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, and maybe show your clinician the linked clinician guide (sift through it yourself, to see how many independent subsystems you have symptoms in).
Sorry to hear about your illness and job loss--though we don't know each other. As a fellow human, in addition to the words, I can share some of my own perspective:
The things that were meant to be, will be. That's for acceptance.
But we have free will (sort of). And that's for action.
Also, highly recommend these books so that you can also take a more active role for your health (but you need to exercise extreme caution and critical thinking as some of the stuff in there may not be valid or valid anymore):
1. Back to Eden (J. Kloss)
[says in one section on pregnancy that expectant mothers must avoid all meat--which is bad advice. But there are some good ones there, nevertheless]
Sorry to hear about the job loss. As for autoimmune problems: these can often be related to vitamin A and carotene. Try staying well below the vitamin A RDA for both combined for a while and get enough protein, Zinc, Molybdenum, fiber, to support the pathways that metabolize it. Not medical advice obviously, but good nutrition is important (helped my allergies, as well as diverse other conditions).
I was on Prednisone for a year I got what was described as moon face.
I didn't get any mania, but the bottle of pills had Delusions of Grandeur listed as one of the side effects, which my partner would always point out whenever I had an idea she didn't like.
Prednisone is nuts. I had to take that as a kid during Leukemia treatments and my mom would find me rifling through the kitchen cabinets at 7am eating my brother's single-serving pasta buckets on the floor like an animal.
Additional advice: check your blood iron levels including saturation etc. Haemochromatosis can cause same symptoms and stays undiagnosed in men for 10 years in average.
I have an autoimmune disorder and i want to warn you that stopping the steroids may cause your condition to regress quite a bit. I have used corticosteroids periodically for my condition and it helps cover the condition during disasters but theyve never caused the condition to go away, it always comes back after i stop them. Albeit in a better state i can manage more easily, but it's 100% possible to regress all the way back.
So please be careful after you're off the corticosteroids to not restart the things that might've contributed. Good luck, autoimmune disorders are hell.
Sorry that you've been going for through all of this.
For what it's worth the auto-immune issues can happen in periods of high stress. The low-energy, joint pain, etc, that could all have been a result of the stress from losing your job. The body is crazy and we underestimate the extent to which our minds and the stresses of life can influence our bodily health.
> In some phases of my life, I can take a giant step back, and look at it like from a bird’s eye view.
This is exactly what I'd be doing. Think about where the world is heading and how you might best position yourself for that world and where you want to be in it. Look at least 10 years out. Overly optimising to solve immediate problems is rarely the best move longer-term. For this reason sometimes these forced-reflection periods can be beneficial in the long-term if they shake you onto a better path.
Best of luck man. It's good to hear your optimistic. I hope everything works out exactly as you hope in the end =)
Anyways, for you folks - life is a gift, I did not see many conventional "healthy" days since I turned 40, but with faith in Christ I have been healed many times, lived so many years and worked as a normal programmer. Things may have looked very difficult at some points, but faith and love of Jesus pulled me through.
If you have good health, take care of it and personally live a - "holy" life, the rest follows. I know I may sound strange but my biggest regrets have been when I messed up in life by hurting others or living selfishly with no self control.
It fascinates me a topic that I was reading a couple days ago in a magazine (a old-professor of mine from college wrote it) about young people fantasizing about living in the past rather than the future.. and that could only mean that people is really anxious about the future.
Weird times.
IMO accessibility is an under-discussed benefit of the recent AI improvements. I've recovered from my RSI (typing injury) enough to use a keyboard a moderate amount but doubt I could ever go back to shredding through a codebase like I used to. In an earlier era I might have left the field entirely.
But still, even if all one has to do is read diffs and mumble to Claude, there's no getting around fatigue and brain fog when it's severe enough.
next time when its uprising, there shall be no mercy whatsoever to the exploiter class
Anamanaguchi - "Buckwild"
EDIT: in fact these days, people make fun of me because I sought fulfilment in my career as a whole, and it’s my fault now that I’m depressed that it’s gone. I’ve come across this snarky comment more than a couple times on this forum.
So this is kind of a pedantic point, but 95% of our history is us doing things exactly as we evolved to do. I don't doubt either that hunting must have been a very engaging activity, especially when done as a clan or tribe.
That's not a good thing. It means we're failing to progress as a species. If we keep repeating history (with now, unfettered access to it), we're devolving, not evolving.
Ignoring art with patrons which is a tiny percent of all art made, people just did things at home quietly. They painted, drew, told stories, knit, crocheted, etc. Even patron-led artists just made what their patrons wanted, namely all the famous religious art, which I imagine felt like unfulfilling work anyway.
What we like, that is to say gets things like our dopamine flowing, tends to tie in well with the idea of not being compelled to do it. Someone writing copy at work to further enrich the capital owning class and to pay their bills is very different than someone writing short stories in the evening after work.
Now my days largely consist of navigating a “game of thrones” political landscape where work means less than it ever has. The sense of agency I once coveted now feels like a distant memory in some ways.
But to be fair this is probably something that people experienced in many different ages of humanity.
> Isnt this the human condition and fundamental to our species and everything about us? People in the past weren't fulfilled doing back-breaking farm labor or out hunting all day hoping to catch a meal and knowing if you don't catch a meal a few days in a row you'll be too weak to catch anymore.
No. I think if you go far enough into the past, the "jobs" were fun and enjoyable. As technology has progressed, many jobs have gotten farther and farther from what we were meant to do.
And AI isn't going to help. The best case scenario is it replaces work with purposeless entertainments and ennui. The more likely case it that it removes fulfilling work from human hands, leaving more space for unfulfilling work and poverty (because capitalist logic CANNOT be questioned, or you're a heretic who should be burned at the stake).
Which jobs specifically were fun and enjoyable and during which period? What is the evidence for that?
Many jobs also improved your fitness unless you were injured. Anything manual required more aerobic capacity and strength hence making you more fit.
Modern people are sleep deprived, weak, and aerobically deficient unless they spend time outside of work focusing on these things. We simply aren’t meant to sit around all day staring at a screen only to then sit and drive a car.
I’d argue modern life is much more comfortable but counterintuitively there is a constant discomfort that is chronic because of it.
Another way to think about this is that humans are meant to suffer everyday. If you are not forcing it through physical exertion it slowly leaks and if it is not exhausted it is constant.
If you go back to hunter-gather times, I'm sure human physiology and motivation was much better suited to the kinds of jobs people had to do to survive. A lot of those things (hunting, gathering (e.g. mushrooms), gardening) are still things people do for fun now.
And it just makes logical sense to evolve to like to do the things you need to do to survive, and we had evolutionary-long timescales to do that (unlike things like code-reviewing LLM PRs).
For my part, there is a huge price I’m willing to pay to be able to drink water out of my tap. I didn’t have this always and I really value it.
You should visit this website, from a nonprofit funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, and maybe show your clinician the linked clinician guide (sift through it yourself, to see how many independent subsystems you have symptoms in).
https://allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources/
The things that were meant to be, will be. That's for acceptance. But we have free will (sort of). And that's for action.
Also, highly recommend these books so that you can also take a more active role for your health (but you need to exercise extreme caution and critical thinking as some of the stuff in there may not be valid or valid anymore):
1. Back to Eden (J. Kloss) [says in one section on pregnancy that expectant mothers must avoid all meat--which is bad advice. But there are some good ones there, nevertheless]
2. Let's get well (A. Davis)
3. You can get well (A. Davis)
I didn't get any mania, but the bottle of pills had Delusions of Grandeur listed as one of the side effects, which my partner would always point out whenever I had an idea she didn't like.
So please be careful after you're off the corticosteroids to not restart the things that might've contributed. Good luck, autoimmune disorders are hell.
For what it's worth the auto-immune issues can happen in periods of high stress. The low-energy, joint pain, etc, that could all have been a result of the stress from losing your job. The body is crazy and we underestimate the extent to which our minds and the stresses of life can influence our bodily health.
> In some phases of my life, I can take a giant step back, and look at it like from a bird’s eye view.
This is exactly what I'd be doing. Think about where the world is heading and how you might best position yourself for that world and where you want to be in it. Look at least 10 years out. Overly optimising to solve immediate problems is rarely the best move longer-term. For this reason sometimes these forced-reflection periods can be beneficial in the long-term if they shake you onto a better path.
Best of luck man. It's good to hear your optimistic. I hope everything works out exactly as you hope in the end =)
Attitude is everything in tough situations and your positivity is inspiring; thanks for the post. Cheers