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What keeps you up at night?
Anxieties, fears, bad habits, childcare, etc.
What keeps you up? This is a place where you can get those thoughts out of your head and into words instead.
For those reading the responses here, please practice empathetic listening — especially for those sharing difficult thoughts or feelings. It is much more important that someone feel heard and understood than it is to try to solve their situation.
My country's leadership, if you want to call it that, and what it means for my children and for the world.
Your country's actions have also been keeping me up at night. For what feels like an eternity now I've had the ever present thought that my future could very well end defending my homeland in an unwinnable war against those that we previously considered our closest ally.
This is my response, too. Grim and scary here, right now and everyone around me acting totally normal. Feels surreally dystopian.
I feel the same way. It’s hard to know if I’m overreacting about how bad I think the country could get. I don’t run around cursing Trump across the internet, but I do discuss politics. Will it come back to bite me someday?
I also feel very connected to the country and wouldn’t ever want to leave, but will the day come where I don’t have any choice? I get homesick after a week when I travel internationally. Even if the country is lovely, I end up missing the familiar food, sights, and sounds of home. The US has always had its faults, but it’s a society that I at least know how to succeed in.
I'm the sole source of income for my family. Right now, we have a very decent life. Very middle class. I don't make much, but we have a house, everything we need, and enough left over to squirrel away every month if I'm careful with my spending.
What keeps me up is that all of that rests on a job I sort of lucked into. I have no connections, no real network, and an unexceptional resume. Not to mention, I live in Japan and my Japanese language ability is passable, but hardly at a professional standard.
If I lose this job, I'm not sure I can get another one as good. I have some savings, enough to carry me for a few months, but not much beyond that. Forget about any retirement accounts.
Life is good, my baby is healthy, and my wife is a blessing, but it just feels very precarious at times.
I’m feeling pretty similar, my company mandated RTO so I figured I’d see if I could find somewhere else or at least interview and see how other companies might look.
Dozens of applications later it’s just been 100% rejections without even a call from HR. I’ve been reworking my resume since it’s obviously not good enough to attract even an interview but it’s made me realize how screwed I am if I get laid off. Which just leaves me with a lingering sense of uneasiness.
Sometimes it feels like I’m a dam, with the immeasurable weight of tons of metaphorical water pressing against me. It’s unbearably heavy, and standing up against it — holding it back — is exhausting, but I don’t have a way of relieving the pressure.
The worst part is that I know the pressure isn’t even real in the first place, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling real.
Occasionally I get relief from the pressure. That feels wonderful.
And sometimes I don’t. That’s when it can be hard to get to sleep.
I feel this way sometimes. I manage mine with self-care - a massage, a quiet night alone watching a movie, a walk. Things that recharge you might be different, but I hope you can find something.
Trump and his sycophants' desire to destroy the US economy, the rights of women, and democracy. I'm a Canadian citizen, at least, but my girlfriend isn't and my job is here in Texas so I can't just super easily leave. In general, I'm worried about all that.
More literally, I just moved to a new apartment and didn't learn until after I moved that the shopping center across the street has its dumpsters picked up around 3 in the morning every night. If it were a single dumpster I could deal with it but it's literally 20+ minutes of banging and reverse beeps. I tried to make a noise complain to the city and they basically said "sucks lol" even though, as far as I can tell, the laws say you can't be making noise audible to a neighboring residential property before 7 am (reverse beeps are explicitly exempted, but you can still hear the dumpsters).
That’s one thing that sucks about apartments in the US. They are zoned as commercial properties a lot of the time, so they end up being built in areas that have more noise and traffic than single family homes.
Yeah, this is actually my first apartment since college where the road noise is kind of bad (in college my bedroom window was ~20 yards from the patio of a bar with $1 beers on Tuesdays...), but that doesn't really bother me. I can get used to cars going by, but the garbage trucks are something else. Ear plugs seem like they may be working. I also tried to call the number on the dumpster... and their phone tree didn't work. I tried to hit the button to talk to someone and it just didn't go through lol.
Plantar fasciitis. Take care of your feet. I haven't had a full night's sleep this past week due to throbbing feet.
Any advice on preventing this? What do you mean when you say take care of your feet? I never think about mine (probably because I haven't had any issues yet).
Do calf stretches everyday.
And stretch them with your legs straight at the knees. If you have knees bent and you flex your foot up to stretch the Achilles, that's not fully stretching it. The Achilles goes halfway up the lower leg and when you stretch, you want to feel it at that halfway point.
We think of the Achilles as being only on the back side of the foot behind the ankle. That tripped me up for years until a podiatrist corrected what I was doing. After that, PF went away.
Orthotics, too
Better shoes may help. I actually had less foot pain when I went from highly padded sneakers to more minimalist shoes.
I feel ya. I was so excited about my treadmill desk that I used it non-stop and now I have PF.
How's recovery going?
I turned 21 last month. Which, granted, isn't that old, but like that's over 25% of my life expectancy, and I feel I haven't done anything at all yet.
I'm currently a master's student, studying international politics. The plan was to finish up my degree and either continue in academia or go work for the federal government (I'm US based), neither of which is particularly appealing at the moment given the current administration. I don't know what I should do next. Applying for internships is miserable.
Nowhere in the world seems safe right now. It's not that most places are active warzones, but just that everywhere has some risk of something major popping off in the next ten years. My field of study being this exact subject doesn't particularly help (~ event 5018 option 2 for you EU4 players), but at least its interesting and relevant to learn I guess. It'll be a while before I'm no longer a draftable age too.
EDIT: I also received a key for a game on steam @xavdid in exchange for a review in one of the weekly threads of the game. I promise I've played it! I just haven't gotten around to writing the review
FWIW you're still very young, you are basically only just an adult, you have you entire life ahead of you.
I understand the feeling like you've not actually done anything because it's all really been prep work for real life up until now.
You seem like you are a bit of an overthinker. My completely unsolicited advice is both to spend some time working on positive thinking and also try and learn to do as much as you can while you can.
For the first one, your life will be much more conformable if you can learn to be more optimistic. For me it was a reasonably long process of catching myself thinking "I couldn't possibly do that, it's too dangerous" and following up with "wait, why, it might be a good experience".
The second one is the same vein. People have to live and you are just one person in many billions. The world might end up at war, we might all end up drowning because of global warming, but you're gonna be miserable if it keeps you up at night.
The Ukrainians, the Palestinians, many people across the world live in genuine fear right now, but they still need to live.
What I'm saying is, you can't count on it, it could happen to anyone, anywhere.
Go visit Europe or Thailand or something. Go on a year long internship and learn something. Meet people, see stuff. You'll not regret it!
Agreed 100%.
I’ll say this: the one thing I hated hearing most when I was 21 and feeling very much the same way as Fal was “you’re still young, don’t worry about it so much yet”. In hindsight, I wish I would have listened to those voices more.
I’m 36 now. I’m still young. Everything changed in my life in a way that I could have never predicted in my 20s. I met a wonderful partner who scaffolded our life while I made a potentially risky career pivot that ended up being a really positive change. We’ve been married for close to a decade now and continue to thrive together.
I’m happier and more satisfied now than I was in my 20s by a long shot, in ways and for reasons I could have never begun to imagine.
Hang in there, @Fal. I’m sure we’ll all be better off for your contributions to the world when the time is right!
I'm 37, and it's so easy for me to feel old.
But, I read a comment online the other day by someone stating they were 35, about where they were at, and for a brief moment, my brain completely forgot about me, and I just thought "wow, you have so much to look forward to".
It took me a moment of self reflection to reconcile how I view myself, vs. this very similarly aged stranger.
Quite a lot of therapy, in my experience, involves the therapist asking you how you'd treat another person in the same circumstances as you, and then getting you to realize you deserve the same kindness and compassion from yourself. We can be uniquely cruel to ourselves.
You spent those years of your life doing a lot of things -- growing up and becoming the person you are now. You presumably also got a bachelor's degree in there. I know it's easy to dismiss those things, but they're foundations for whatever you do going forward. I know it's hard to believe it when people tell you that you're still young, so I'm hoping a focus on the things you have accomplished to get to where you are can help you feel less existential.
I can relate a lot to how you feel, though. I'm 28, and between losing my job and my wife leaving me, pretty much every plan I had for the future has fallen apart. I know that I have options going forward, there are plenty of branching paths, but the wide open emptiness where I'm not sure what comes next is fucking scary. And I have just as much trouble listening to the people telling me I'm still young lol.
I agree with kaffo, though, if you're able to swing it, travel.
The things I could have said to certain people 30 years ago. Well that's what I tell myself but usually I'm just replaying the memory of those mistakes over and over.
In a literal sense, a baby that sometimes isn't sleeping when the rest of us want to.
In a metaphorical sense, vaguely the future. Will we need to leave the country to better my daughter's life? Am I going to look for another job any time soon? Will I ever build up the courage to risk starting something of my own?
On the whole, things just work themselves out for and around me. Upon seeing the recent thread about what your past self would think of current you I was also thinking about what I would say back and it is probably, "Stop caring. Everything will just work out for you anyway." I don't like this part of myself. I don't like that the best advice I'd have for past me is just to not care. I don't like the feeling that I lack agency in my own life, but I also know it's entirely because I'm not doing the work of seeking it.
That last paragraph really resonates with me. I can check just about every box in the inherent privilege category and have thus far been able to stumble through life, getting things handed to me more or less right when I needed them. It's so hard to locate the line between what's been unfairly apportioned to me and what I can actually take credit for – it mostly just leaves me with crippling Imposter Syndrome at all times.
Yep, and it is certainly part of why I have some of the other open issues. For example, If everything is just going to work out why even look for a job? If I just do the bare minimum of responding to recruiters that ping me on LinkedIn something will fall into my lap anyway. I haven't even updated its details in years or reached out to anyone and still already have a phone screen scheduled. As you said, pretty much the embodiment of privilege, so much in fact that it's hard to separate me from it and it's easier to not bother.
Laying in bed last night I was thinking about some of this stuff again. What would give me the courage to take risks outside my comfort zone rather than waiting for life to come to me? The thought, "if an administration as deeply unqualified as the one that just came to power can do it, why can't I?" was oddly comforting. They're doing a horrible job, but people are still letting them. If being qualified isn't actually a prerequisite then maybe I too should be taking more risks.
I sometimes have an existential crisis about the concept of now.
It's sort of always now, and also never now. Whenever you realize the present moment, it becomes a memory. And then you realize whole years disappear and you still have a now but it's always gone as soon as you realize it.
I first realized this when I was about 12 years old and that was a long time ago. It was helpful at the time because it helped me get through some unpleasant things. But then I realized that both good and bad things are "dust in the wind".
I know that this isn't a deep thought compared to mindfulness talk you would get from a meditation book or video. But it's so odd if you try to be in a moment. Since time seems to speed up as you get older, this feeling keeps being weirder and can be quite upsetting.
You just reminded me of this
My career. I wanted to be a web developer so badly as a teenager and young adult. I felt lucky to have "figured it out" so young and I achieved that goal really quickly. I even dropped out of college because I got a full-time job offer in the field and realized I didn't necessarily need a the debt of a degree to make it in the industry. I do deeply regret never finishing college.
But after 15+ years of doing this I'm just so fucking tired. Constantly having to keep up with ever-changing trends, frameworks, languages, etc. I know it all makes for a more well-rounded developer, but sheesh. I'm only 37, so I'm not even sure I'm old enough to use the term "It's a young man's game", but it feels applicable. I don't have time to learn outside of work or take on side projects to expand my know-how. And I have deadlines at work, so there isn't a lot of time during the day for that either.
And working in enterprise software just feels so gross to me. The faux-professionalism, the LinkedIn Lunatics, the ever-changing goals, the bullshit political games you have to play to progress in your career. I love writing code, but I totally despise everything else that comes with that being your career choice.
And there's this constant feeling that I'm not good enough. That because someone younger than me is doing better than me, that I'm a total fuck-up. Or because I'm generally bad at conveying my knowledge out loud (social anxiety, in part), that means I'm a bad developer.
But I can't just stop either. I'm the only source of income for my family and my wife's dealing with a bunch of mental health stuff that's making it hard for her to transition back to full time employment now that the kids are in school, so I'm just kind of stuck. I don't have time or money to invest in education to position myself for a career change. I don't even know what I'd want to do that wasn't this.
Closest I've come to finding something was the possibility of getting back into agency work rather than enterprise-level stuff. I could weather the possible pay-cut and the pace would be more my speed. But I've been applying on-and-off for that kind of work for well over a year now without even an interview.
So it's just this constant, gnawing stress about how stuck I feel. And it's usually very easy to ignore, but it's always there. And when I have a bad day at work it usually culminates in bouts of depression because I can't ignore the stress anymore.
That's been my experience for the past 3 years or so. Just applying every so often if something catches my eye. I've at least done a few interviews but all of those ended up without an offer.
I wish I knew. The only way I can get decent sleep is to take a beta-blocker because my heart just won't slow down, but it's not like I'm laying there worrying about things, so all attempts at therapy to address the root cause have been useless.
Do you think that you have a medical issue or is it anxiety related?
If it's anxiety, I don't know what things you've tried but this book may be helpful: "The Anatomy of Anxiety" by Ellen Vora. The book talks about different things that affect anxiety levels, from a physical baseline to diet to habits to ways of thinking.
I'm fairly certain it's anxiety, two ECGs (years apart) have been normal. But SSRIs, SNRIs, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and Psychoanalytic Therapy have all been ineffective.
I'll look into the book, thanks!
Right now, it's my French visa status. I have been studying in Bordeaux since last September on a 1 year student visa. France has a visa extension for job seekers that get a degree in France. From everything I have read about it, I should be eligible without any issues. The part that is stressing me is the tight timeline. I have to get an in person meeting at a local prefecture, which sounds like it is quite difficult to do. I read stories about people with residence permits waiting months to get these meetings. I don't think I can submit the paperwork until I have my degree, which I don't get until after my thesis defense in early July. However my student visa expires in late July. So I have all of about 2 weeks to get a new visa, in a country that stereotypically has a ton of bureaucracy and red tape. I think I am going to try and submit it early with my semester 1 transcript, and see if I can get a provisional approval once I get my diploma.
Good luck!
I think my dental health is once again bad, and I just... can't help but feel massive shame about it. I was already piss poor at dental health, but my selfcare practices have nosedived during my long term unemployment.
And also... lack of housing, still living at my parents. It feels like I'm destined to die without ever experiencing love at times, or having even the opportunity to start a family of my own. And the current political climate in the Netherlands makes me doubt that'll change anytime soon.
Usually my job. I'm the head of cybersecurity for a pretty large public organization, and have inherited a lot of other responsibilities there as well. I get calls in the middle of the night about twice a month, ranging in severity from "why did you call me" to "we're going to be in the news tomorrow if we don't fix this now".
The anticipation of that is stressful, but the day to day is stressful too. I spend much of my day having very difficult conversations with very (comparitively) powerful people that don't like not getting their way. Even though I have a lot of leadership experience from the military, I've spent most of my career in technical roles, and as an introvert and someone who is inherently geeky, that's where I'm most comfortable. Because of that, I spend more of my time with the technology and worrying about technical details than I should, but I think a lot of that is that I don't really have full faith in much of my team on that front. I'd like to hire better people to keep my stress level down and be able to trust them more, but public funding is what it is, and with most of the US focusing on "efficiency", cybersecurity is usually one of those things that gets tapped first to be cut as "extra fat", so I fear my budget problems will only continue.
I often curse myself for making the decision to get into management. The pay really isn't that much better, the hours are longer, the stress is much higher, and most of my day is spent making decisions that make other people upset, instead of sitting in my little hole and producing work that makes other people happy. There's unfortunately not really a good path back to that role for me.
I'm teetering close to that path too, I'm the most senior technical person on our cyber team and we've been tasked with implementing security into a business with 25 years of IT stagnation.
It's the start of a multi-year project and by the end they want me to lead the IR team as the primary responder/detection engineer, but if company plans change they could easily put me into a more managerial role, which I'm not sure I want...
What happens if something happens to me and I can't take care of my partner. Will it be my fault if he gets an infection, if he dies from it? What about if Medicaid goes away? Or if it is slashed? What happens if I lose my job due to the higher ed cuts?
Can I maintain the "no deaths on campus" streak since I got here?
What about my trans students? Undocumented students? How do I give them hope in this world? If I can't find hope, how can I give it to them?
Am I wrong for choosing the ability to keep taking care of my partner over the moral/ethical obligation to protest what's happening? What if I get assaulted for being visibly queer? Should I.... Look straighter? Am I growing my hair out because I'm a coward or because my mental health is shit. Should I take out the nose ring? Am I just a coward? Should I drop the "they" out of my pronouns set for safety? Should I double down and drop the "she?" When will the university be pressed to pitch trans people under the bus in exchange for financial aid, and when will they do it?
How do I keep going about my day to day like this?
A confluence of responsibilities and personal desires.
As things currently stand, I’m the only person in my immediate family who’s managed to come to thrive financially, which means I’m also the only one who can act as substantial support in times of need, as well as my family’s only chance to break free from generational poverty. I’m not rich and can still be knocked on my ass by a particularly disastrous chain of events, but I have enough resources that if I play my cards right I might be able to at some point down the road (5-10+ years from now) start a living trust to fund my siblings’ kids’ school and things like that.
This is in conflict with my personal goals, though. I’m now past the midpoint of my 30s and am feeling the clock ticking more every day. The window of opportunity to find a partner and start a family is starting to close, and that’s terrifying. Biologically I’m in not as bad of a situation as someone with a uterus would be, but I want to have some youth left by the time my kids become fully formed people, ya know? It’s something I wanted to ideally do at some point between 28-32 but that’s not how things played out. I’d also like to move abroad, which complicates these plans further.
Ideally, I’d like to do both of these things but I’m worried that I’ll be forced to choose, and it’s not a fun choice. I don’t think my family would hold it against me if I chose to prioritize myself, but if I don’t lift them up who will? Am I going to be able to live with not having been there when I could’ve been?
It really just makes me wish I could subtract a good 10-15 years from my age.
It is probably a mix of regret stemming from what I could have gotten done the previous day, and high aspirations for the next that keeps me up at night. The days are how we live our lives. I'm constantly anxious if I'm doing the right thing in as an efficient a manner that my goals demand. I know it's not good, but I don't know how to turn it off. I listen to sleep beats, or put on white noise to force a steady distraction. This often helps me fall asleep.
Also, life can be tough, yeah? Loneliness, not enough disposable income, constant deadlines can screw up the mental fortitude.
Tonight, it's literal: My kid, tossing and rotating, on the same hotel bed, because they didn't have the booked 2 queen room.
Usually, it's lights out for me within a few minutes of laying down putting the phone away. But when I think about things and fret, I'm in a very similar position as @Odysseus. My partner can't work and my kid is young; it'd be exceptionally difficult to get work as good if I lost it. Even if we float along financially with a local minimum wage job, it means I won't have the ability to frequently visit my elderly and soon to be gone father. But: as mentioned, it's rare
Quite literally last night, Formosan termites kept me up. It's swarming season in South Florida and I trenched the perimeter of my house ~8 years ago, but it must be time for another treatment as I found 100 or so crawling out of my ceiling light sockets. Which means they've formed mud tubes from the ground into my attic -- awesome. These things are something out of a horror film. A colony can eat nearly a pound of wood a day, so yeah, my trusses giving way and having my roof collapse on me keeps me up at night. Will have to get on that inspection and treatment this weekend. Count your blessings, cold weather climate folks.
Also, I guess my country's leadership is kind of shit too, but not as pressing at the moment.
I've lived this when I lived in FL, one of the many reasons I am enjoying my new location in the north.
Normally it's a tossup between climate anxiety, health anxiety, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life anxiety, financial anxiety, social anxiety, feeling like the world is so shit that there's no point in thinking long term because why bother paying into a pension if there's going to be no society to spend it in in 50 years, etc, etc. These days the health anxiety is winning out most of the time though, it being a more tangible issue than the others. I live a fairly healthy lifestyle and try to be health-conscious as much as I can, but for months now I keep getting weird symptoms that suggest scary things and stress me out. Going through the UK healthcare system is a Kafkaesque trial where it's taken nearly 6 full months just to get a basic blood test done because every time you get to a step where you think you're done they come back with "we just need to do this one last thing, are you free for ten minutes at 8:13am on this random date 5 weeks from now?" So I have a lot of time to ruminate on it all while waiting and waiting and waiting. Never struggled with health anxiety before these past few months so trying to discern which things are anxiety brain worrying and which things are actual worrisome things is a chore. It's just annoying how constant it all is. Every time I think "okay I'm probably fine" a new weird thing pops up and sends me right back into worrying.
The idea that I'm not good enough. Personality wise, ethically, morally, politically. I feel like there is constant pressure from the rest of the world to constantly reevaluate myself and change and improve, and if Im not constantly doing that then I am personally responsible for standing by allowing or contributing to all the bad things in the world.
I end up spending every minute of every day relitigating every potentially controversial question in the back of my head so I can convince myself that I have a sufficient justification for all my choices. Just in case I find myself in a situation where some stranger decides to confront me about some issue thats important to them and demands I explain myself to them.
But theres no end to that line of thinking. I understand other peoples arguments and perspectives and I recognize that there are internally consistent logical rationales behind many opposing viewpoints. I can think of endless counterpoints to my own arguments. Theres no decisive end to the debate and theres nothing I can say to definitively get people off my back.
I should probably just stop caring about what anyone else thinks of me, but I just cant shake my insecurities of being insufficient. Its compulsive. I spend hours every day looking through forum posts about controversial topics and figuring out my defense for them even though I hate contemporary politics and it never leads to anything but me feeling frustrated and annoyed. Its frankly a terrible way to live and every day is a waking hell of my own design.
I absolutely grapple with this same thing. The thought exercise then tends to leave me so emotionally exhausted that I then feel guilty for not doing as much as I would’ve liked. Blech.
Something that did help me a little along these lines was reading Michael Schur’s book How To Be Perfec t, which gave me some interesting frameworks to consider when it comes to morality. It gives me peace a little more quickly than what used to be.
Oddly enough, this video came out just after I posted: the fear of never being enough
Thank you! That was a meaningful watch.
I’m going to try to take a breath and meditate a bit, instead of beating myself up for a lack of focus. I hope you have a wonderful day!
My country is being destroyed by hateful selfish morons and there is fuck all I am able to do about it without completely destroying my life.
It's kinda funny because I was talking to my therapist about this yesterday, but funnily enough I think the reason I'm literally up at night so late is because there's comfort in the peace of nothing crazy happening after 12AM EST usually. There's comfort in not needing to check my phone to see "what crazy stuff has been going on now" so I've been sleeping every night recently at like 4AM. Definitely not great for my health but it's the little things.
I am so bad at getting to sleep at a “reasonable” for that last reason too.
I’ve always been a bit of a night owl because to me, the night is peaceful. There’s not a lot going on, except for what I will to do. And maybe some of the west-coast sports teams I follow. But mostly just the calmness of the end of the day.
(And then unfortunately I have to drag myself out of bed in the morning to get to work operating on not enough sleep. I swear I do best with 9 hours of sleep, which is impossible to get when I like being up past midnight so much).
Mortality, life feeling like it's whizzing by and I don't have functional brakes. A fear I'm going to wake up and joyful life events that have yet to happen are already going to be in the rearview mirror.
There's also been a lot of change in my life over the last 6 months: engaged, first home purchase. I'm also about 2/3 of our household income; we have savings for several months maybe a year if I were to work to cover groceries and utilities. This transition to a settled life is weird for me; I'm comfortable kinda floating along. I'm good at this too though I just don't want to lose my identity.
Also my dogs aging. If I ever have to cry on command that's an easy way to get me misty eyed.
You guys have basically covered most the answers I was going to give (hellish US government, job anxiety), but also I have had very poor sleep my entire life. I have rarely been able to get more than 5-6 hours of sleep in decades and I get woken up a few times a night. You get used to it, but I am glad other people don't have to deal with it.