Techniques for dealing with lack of motivation, malaise, depression

Best advice I heard was from Jonathan Blow: link to this video And Dr. Huberman: link Everything else didn't have enough data for me to latch onto. Life is difficult, and some tasks are not meant to be fun. You can't fix that. You can however reframe your minds' perspective on the manner. Instead of thinking "Man there are so many dishes to do, I'd rather be playing Helldivers 2 now" you can think "I can do 5 dishes... That was easy, I can do 5 more dishes... Look how many dishes i did! I can do 5 more". Even if it's clearly a lie to yourself that you enjoy it, you'll find that your brain will start to believe it. Over time, your brain will take on the new perspective. This is why "faking it until yo…

Here's the YouTube mirror, since Twitch VODs often have janky buffering problems in my experience: link to this video + link

> in four decades of living on this planet I don't think I've ever come across anything that fits that bill. Keep looking! But also, it's possible at 40+ that you may have already found it. Perhaps you've not given that thing the chance it needed for you to fall in love with it — the days and weeks of exploration and the obsessive iteration mentioned in the GQ article that it takes to grok something and absorb it until it feels like it's yours . I'm almost your age and now rewinding my career path. I kept chasing different tech career paths hoping to find something that “fit the bill”, which only showed me that nothing was as interesting to me than what I started my career doing (game design…

It seems his teachings are based on the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti. There are some good audio books by him on Youtube, like Freedom from the Known . On a slightly related note, Jonathan Blow also has a talk called Techniques for dealing with lack of motivation, malaise, depression ( link to this video ), where he also talks about the importance of observational skills as a means of understanding / "putting out" your (negative) emotions and thoughts.

…my interpretation, though; like any work of art, you may have another valid interpretation). • The author, Jonathan Blow, is a "programmer's programmer", who built his own game engine for The Witness and is in the process of writing his own programming language for his next project. He's also an interesting speaker. Here he talks about depression: link to this video • The Witness is as close to a video game equivalent of "film d'auteur" as you can get (at least compared to most of the other games out there, which are commercial Hollywood productions) (Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer, and haven't played more than 2-3 games in the last decade.)…