I'm also turning 40 this year! You may want to look up crystallized intelligence (wisdom) vs. fluid intelligence ("raw" power) (https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-is-emotional-intelligence-...) and let those concepts process for a bit. We tend to move towards crystallized intelligence as we age, which has many advantages that folks are alluding to here. The key could be to recognize the difference and where your current strengths lie without wishing for the past (probably fictionalized) you. You are who you are now, not what you were. Be mindful and appreciate the experience and strengths you have now that you didn't as a younger person. You might try to organize your work, and maybe eventually change your job/position/title, so that your current strengths are aligned with the expectations. In other words, you don't have to keep trying to be a great programmer, but you might become a great mentor, manager, author, oyster diver, etc. It's the reason many move from engineer to manager or musician to producer. You can actually be much more effective and valuable if your experience can help inform many people's code rather than just your own. You may also want to think about how great it could be not to even try being the "best" programmer. What a relief! Now you can focus on what you care about in your field and perhaps turn your focus outward towards helping other people instead of simply building your own resume.
Based my reading of that, what these researchers are doing is not prescribing psychedelics to patients with mental disorders and giving the whole "take one time a day with food". What these researchers are finding is that the drugs can be very effective in a therapeutic setting with a guide (trained therapist or otherwise) to coach and conform the experience to reach a goal. In other words to those familiar with these drugs, set and setting. That is, mindset and surroundings are at least as important as the drug itself to achieving anything. Without that, it's just a drug experience. This is very unique compared to the drugs we're used to.
No medication will ever be a miracle drug, and most drugs show a significant decline in effectiveness once they're out of small trials and methods have standardized. However, any drug or therapy that sees orders of magnitude of improvement over existing drugs and therapies is promising and not worth dismissing simply because of a moral panic from the 60s or the Puritan ideals of our Western culture. Given time and the leeway to experiment, hopefully we will find uses for this class of drugs that have gone shunned for decades for no reason other than someone's moral qualms.
The trouble is that talk therapy is already too expensive for most patients, and unless you plan to have people tripping with a therapist who is a complete stranger (not advised!) you're going to need to charge for some preliminary sessions. If a typical therapist charges $100 per hour -- and that's optimistic, in fact I've never paid less than $125 -- then the cost of treatment quickly runs into four figures.
That's already more expensive than a year on SSRIs, as crazy as that might sound. Human interaction is shockingly expensive.
The cost is something to consider, but let that not dissuade us from exploring the opportunity. There are many therapies that are covered by insurance due to their medical backing. Insurance companies would rather pay for life-saving procedures that are hundreds of dollars rather than trauma, end of life care, or life insurance payouts. The evidence needs to be persuasive, though.
I've always been curious about talk therapy, and as someone who hasn't tried it - or knows someone who has - what would you say are the perceived benefits?
How does it compare to an intelligent friend/partner?
"The trouble is that talk therapy is already too expensive for most patients"
Not necessarily. Under some insurance plans under Medi-Cal (the California Medicaid program), you get unlimited therapy (once a week) for free.
I strongly recommend that anyone who qualifies for Medi-Cal (ie. if your income is low enough) investigate this option, if you are looking for therapy. You actually get your own choice of therapists, as long as they accept your insurance plan.
Also, when choosing health insurance plans, make sure to take a look at how much therapy they cover. You might be surprised. Some plans definitely cover much more than others.
I'm not sure (you can look it up as well as anyone), but from what I've heard (again, Pollan's book), controlled, randomized trials are very difficult if not impossible with psychedelics. It's obvious to both the patient and the observer who has received a placebo and who has not. That's part of the problem with studying this class of drugs, what we have considered the gold standard for clinical trials isn't effective here. So do we trust what results we do see or dismiss them because of their nature?
When a small study shows that 80% of smokers stop cold-turkey after a single session and 60% of them are still abstinent a year later (versus 30% for therapy), it's hard to discount the results so long as other trusted methods are used.
N = 15. I understand that there are a lot of regulatory obstacles to performing large-scale clinical trials into psychedelics, but the overall quality of the research so far is indifferent. A great number of ineffective and mediocre interventions have been made to look miraculous by a handful of small open-label trials. The homeopathy community has produced a mountain of similar trials.
Psychedelics do indeed look promising and have a plausible mechanism for providing very large effect sizes, but it really is too early to draw any firm conclusions. The authors have registered a larger comparative efficacy trial, so I look forward to seeing their results if and when they are published.
Can you even judge the sample size separate from effect size?
If 15 out of 15 people register an improvement it's a lot more meaningful than 3 out of a 100 sample, despite the much larger sample size in the latter case.
There is one psilocybin study by Compass Pathways starting this year in 8 EU countries with I think about 800 participants which if successful will pave the way for legal use of psilocybin therapy of depression. MAPS is doing another one for MDMA for PTSD, that's FDA Phase 3 in 14 international sites.
Call it what you like. It doesn't matter so long as whoever you're talking to understands what you mean.
Don't we have enough change and confusion in the *Script world without also trying to change the name? I just don't understand what the value would be.
Yes, I have felt the way you do. I feel like this for a few weeks, then go back to feeling a bit better and worth something. You are definitely not alone.
First, you should find a counselor, any counselor, and open up to her/him. Direct, immediate feedback from a professional "personal problem helper" will help you. You can stop reading here and act.
Now, on to my non-professional ideas that you should probably skip but my ego prevents me from omitting:
It sounds like you need goals like school gave you. Let's think about it. In school, you had short-term goals (assignments, next exam), mid-term goals (grades during a semester), and long-term goals (graduation, GPA). Our tech work is terrible at these things except at very small companies where there's too many obvious things to do, and very large companies where the career ladder is so defined that you just need to show up and follow simple instructions. In the middle lies the domain of the lost and the over-motivated. Choose your path.
If you choose to go back to school, you'll have these goals again, but you'll probably have the same problem and feelings again once you're done. Plus, you'll have more debt and thus more pressure to be "successful", which is probably counter-productive to your feelings.
Don't listen to people on the internet, including me. Nothing we say is true for you. Try to take a general consensus and make your own decisions with that input. There's wisdom in every comment above and below, but it's shaded by bias, experience, and fallacies that are not your own.
Please, seek help. Don't waste any more time trying to deal with this by yourself in your own head until you've been given a proven pattern for doing so by a professional. Visit them with an open mind and few expectations and be more frank and honest than you ever have before. You'll move whether you want to or not. It's up to you to choose the direction.
Drinking serves two purposes for me. 1) It is a social lubricant and 2) it helps me unwind faster. However, both benefits come with costs and risks like sleep problems and being too verbose. I try to consider these things before drinking, but the more I drink at a time the less I care about said costs and risks. Same as everyone else.
I don't consider drinking a problem any more than I consider eating a problem. If I eat too much or eat poorly, I feel bad and gain weight which further complicates things. If I drink too much the same things happen, plus I sleep worse and can get in trouble if I say or do the wrong things. Is it food that's the problem or me? Is it drinking that's the problem or me?
My 2p, quit asap. Start interviewing for the other jobs and enjoy your downtime in between jobs. It's not going to get better for you and now you know what working at an agency is like. Appreciate the lesson and move on.
As far as what your current company feels, consider this. Are you producing at the level you know you could? If not, is it really better for them if you stick around? I just heard an example of this from the Design Details podcast where Kim Bost left Etsy to go to a smaller company in arguably a more socially important field. She wasn't enjoying herself not was she capable of doing her best work so she left after 4 months on good terms. It's better for both sides to quit early.
I like the functionality, but I'm not keen on the title of this post or the fact that it's an app only.
If you like the app, though, you might want to check out Astral (https://astralapp.com). Extremely similar functionality, but Astral runs in your browser.
Not directly, no. However, the documentation states that you can use CloudTrail to log the requests from SQS to S3, then have changes to S3 trigger the events that can get your Lambda function to respond.
It's a little convoluted, but that seems to be the way they're going for now.
Wouldn't that be kind of unnecessary, when it's not too tough to write an SQS-reactive client?
Starting with S3 fills a gap as there is AFAIK otherwise no way to start processing based on changes to S3, without writing a rather wasteful program to list the resources, maintain state, and hunt for differences.
But if you have an SQS reactive client it would sit in EC2. With a service like Lambda, they are promising millisecond based pricing. A very ambitious project by them.
Pretty much the same as Heroku. As a developer, I want to deploy my application as quickly as possible without setting up nginx, gunicorn, etc. per service. I have a front-end service, three API services, and some daemon services. I'd like to be able to scale eventually.
With Deis, you first allocate the number of machines you want to be your cluster and install Deis on them. Think of the cluster as a large physical machine that can run many services. You might have a production cluster (7 machines), dev (3 machines), staging (3 machines), etc. Now, deploy your apps to that cluster via a git push for each.
Need to boot a new front-end server to handle load? Just run an extra container in your cluster. Same with API.
How would you do that with your current setup? I'm guessing provision an entire second machine (or VM, same thing) and put them behind a load balancer.
With Deis, each cluster is exposed behind a single load balancer and each app/service is exposed as a subdomain on that loadbalancer. Deis handles the internal load balancing.
Cluster getting full? Just add a new machine/vm to it.
So, if you like the idea of Heroku, you might like Deis, especially if you'd like to use your own hardware/VPC or want to use Docker locally and in production.
Good luck and get the sleep you need.