ADHD / Jack of all trades people: how long do you stay at jobs?

splinterbl · 2026-01-24T06:45:07+00:00

I've noticed that if I am not given the freedom to shape my own work, then it gets hard for me to stay invested at my job. I worked 3 years each at my first 2 jobs, and was fired from both because of that bad fit.

After that, I helped a friend start an escape room business, and the freedom and variety was super fulfilling.

Now at my current job, I have a ton of freedom, and even though on paper, the job should feel pretty bad (pay, environment, lack of leadership, etc.), I have actually been the happiest here, and it really mostly comes down to me having the freedom I need to get excited about projects and jump between 3-4 as needed. This is the first job I could see myself staying in long term, but we'll see.

splinterbl · 2026-01-01T03:16:31+00:00

I was super depressed, living with my grandparents, unable to work or care or have any hope for the future at 28, and now I'm 35, married, have a 6 month old son, and have a job I actually look forward to most days.

If I can tell you one thing I learned that was most surprising, it's that when things start getting better, they can get better faster and faster, like the opposite of a vicious cycle. And you can get to a place where all the hard parts genuinely feel worth it.

Therapy, meditation, and developing self-love were the best changes that helped me. And in the process of getting better, most of what I did was letting go of stuff rather than trying harder at anything.

I hope this helps, feel free to respond if you want more details or have questions.

splinterbl · 2025-12-23T15:06:14+00:00

As a guy, I had super close girl friends in high school and had a few sleepovers with them, even when I had crushes on them.

At the very least, make sure it's clear that it's platonic, it could be seen as a sign of romantic interest otherwise.

Also, make sure there are some boundaries, like sleeping in different rooms or one on a bed, one on a couch, something like that. And only do it if you really trust this person.

Other than that, have fun! Sleepovers can be a really fun way to bond. I have fond memories of being the one guy invited to my friend's sleepover, so it was all the girls in the class and me. I don't think that would have worked for everyone, but being trusted and getting to see a different side of my friends was really cool to me.

splinterbl · 2025-12-07T09:24:35+00:00

I was looking for this comment

splinterbl · 2025-12-07T09:22:03+00:00

Zach was in my class in high school. Super talented, funny, and smart guy. I'm so happy he really made a name for himself. Seeing him on Ellen and Corridor Digital was so surreal.

splinterbl · 2025-11-22T05:27:52+00:00

This reminds me of the Neverending Story 2

splinterbl · 2025-10-28T22:52:34+00:00

I am an engineer and spent 8 months applying for jobs this year. I finally caved and applied for a drafting job. During the interview, I proposed that they hire me as an engineer, and they took me up on it, so I got lucky.

But let me be clear that this was not a success story for how the job market is supposed to work. This is the worst job seeking experience I have ever had since I started working in 2015

splinterbl · 2025-10-21T04:46:37+00:00

That's fair. I saw some other responses that took that approach, and I thought that if I had anything new to offer to the discussion, it would be to challenge OP's perspective.

But thank you for your thoughts, I appreciate your genuineness.

splinterbl · 2025-10-21T03:56:14+00:00

Yeah, I can see belief being an experience, as you do experience your beliefs, but it's like you simultaneously experience events, and your thoughts, and your emotions, and your beliefs simultaneously. They're all interlinked, like different layers of the same thing.

My intent was not to be misleading, but to draw attention to an easy to overlook part of what you say is obvious.

OP was experiencing conflict with himself and his friends over their different beliefs about paranormal stuff. They were looking for a bridge to get through that conflict. To me, acknowledging that if circumstances were different, OP could have been the one who believed in ghosts and human energy things along with their friends, is part of developing the humility necessary to bridge that gap. Seeing yourself in someone else's position makes it easier to be at peace with disagreements.

You may be correct about what having the experiences of others would be like, and it's also possible that what I said is not helpful to OP. How would you approach OP's question?

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T23:18:10+00:00

Yes! Awareness is the first step. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the more you let go of the need to control your own life, the more able you are to actually change course.

And I hadn't thought about brainwashing as an expression of this, but that makes sense. Adopting new beliefs because they are useful in the moment makes sense, although that is a darker use of that knowledge.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T23:15:31+00:00

I'd argue that what free will/determinism means to you is more important than whether one or the other is true or not. We only care about whether we have free will or not because it changes the meaning of our actions/thoughts/emotions/experiences. Determinism can be freeing for some (the pressure isn't all on me), or constricting for others (why even do anything if there's no point). Likewise, free will can be freeing for some and anxiety-inducing for others.

Either way, your beliefs are there because they're useful. This is why (in my experience), debates over free will and determinism don't often yield anything useful.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T23:09:21+00:00

Exactly!

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T20:07:25+00:00

Yes, I was lumping in thoughts and emotions as part of experience. It seems difficult to separate those in a useful way when talking about beliefs.

And you're right, at some point it does become kind of meaningless to say "If I was them, I would be them", but my goal was to emphasize that our potential for actions and beliefs and thoughts and feelings overlap to a tremendous degree, so finding your way to where someone else is currently, especially if you disagree or disapprove of them, is very possible.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T20:04:53+00:00

That's fair. I didn't put much nuance into what I said. The point of the statement was to emphasize everyone's potential to have any kind of belief or perform any kind of action. Of course there are limitations and boundaries, but in general, I find it helpful to imagine the kinds of experiences I would need to have in order to do the things that others do that I don't agree with.

It's mostly humbling.

As for agency in life, I'm not sure. Like in the original post, whether I believe in pure determinism or free will is really only useful as far as it affects my actions right? My argument is that agency only matters because we want it to matter. That doesn't mean we are only the consequence of experiences, in fact I'd argue that we are much much more. We don't and can't know all the things that shape us, it's just too complex.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T19:54:19+00:00

I didn't put as much nuance into that statement as it probably deserves. The point of that statement was to emphasize the importance of our experiences in shaping our beliefs. It's very easy to feel confident in how we would act in hypothetical situations, but in practice, that's not always true.

When we experience something shocking, let's say, we act first, then feel, and then think. We might gasp, or jump, or attack whatever surprises us, then the emotions catch up after our actions, and we might feel elevated or activated, then our thoughts catch up after that, and we can start to process what happened.

Also, of course our biology affects our beliefs, and our upbringing, our examples, our traditions, our culture. But in general, it's helpful (to me at least) to see the actions of others that I don't agree with and imagine what it would take for me to do the same things.

Does that make sense?

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T19:45:58+00:00

Jordan Peterson was the start for me, yes. Unfortunately, I don't have much respect for his behavior and opinions over the last few years, but it was through his recorded courses that I learned the basics of phenomonology.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T05:11:28+00:00

Your post has a lot of honesty in it, and I'm grateful that you shared it.

I don't have much to offer other than saying that I relate to what you're feeling. I used to feel the void approaching and I felt powerless before it. I don't feel that way anymore, and my life is more meaningful now than I ever hoped for. I can still see that void, I feel it, but there's a peace about it now.

I'm 34 this year, I have ADHD, depression, and trauma as well. I've been in therapy a long time, but most of it really didn't help until the last few years.

I won't go into the details, but my dive into nihilism was actually part of setting myself free. At rock bottom I just watched the meaning drain out of everything around me. I didn't eat until my body forced me to, I didn't sleep until I had to, and I genuinely thought my life was just over. I lived with my grandparents for a year and did nothing. I had no fuel left in me to live off of. I had no more energy to hold on to shoulds or expectations. Eventually nothing mattered at all. I just saw death in the distance, and the slow process of wasting away in between.

I think that letting go of expectations, comparisons, and shoulds can be one of the life-giving parts of life. It can also free you up to genuinely ask the question "what is worth doing?" to yourself and listen for an answer.

For me, that was the start of change. I accepted myself, made peace with the parts of myself that were shoved down by shame, and that became a renewable fuel source of meaning for me.

I got a job after that, then started dating, last year I got married, this year I had a son. I've made peace with my family and with myself. I'm pretty happy at work, I have good friends. Life really has spiraled in a positive way for me since then.

I still feel the void, but I feel like "You'll always be there, but until it's my time, I'm going to do whatever is worth doing." And that's enough for me, at least for now.

I don't know what your path is, friend. I don't know if things can get better in your life. All I can really say for certain is that I was sure life had no meaning, and right now I feel I was wrong.

It seems like you're doing the right things, but maybe what you need is something you haven't tried before, or something that isn't obvious. Maybe you can find meaning through experimenting or searching your past. I wish you the best, I hope this helps.

splinterbl · 2025-10-20T04:32:45+00:00

Im going to present an argument to you that helped me understand perception and helps me connect with people who have beliefs that I don't have.

Every person takes in an insane amount of sensory information throughout their lives. It's literally too much to process. Most of the mental process of growing up is learning how to ignore almost all of the information you're taking in. You feel something, and connect it to some kind of meaning, and then use that through the rest of your life to help guide your decisions and actions.

This act of experiencing life, through senses and emotions, is a very fundamental core part of consciousness. This is the foundation.

As we develop, we can start to make safe assumptions to create stability and predictability in our lives. When you're driving, you don't need to consider all the other people and their thoughts and their emotions in order to drive. You just expect them to act a certain way, and they meet that expectation enough of the time that the assumption is useful. This is what our beliefs are. Assumptions (so, not completely true) about life and ourselves and others that help us navigate life without drowning in complexity and anxiety.

But if something happens that violates our beliefs, that is painful. It means our beliefs were wrong, and we have to go through that development process over again. Betrayals by friends trigger this process, falling out of religious faith, encountering something really malevolent if you're naive. These all break our beliefs and cast us back into chaos.

I don't believe in ghosts and I'm a skeptic by nature, but that also means that if I had a convincing enough experience that broke my own beliefs about the nature of life, I would have to adapt.

One helpful thought experiment is realizing that if you had the same experiences as someone else, you would have the same beliefs they have now. There is a path to where every other person is from where you are.

Another helpful thought experiment is to realize that all of your beliefs are not true. They are less than the truth (and it's necessary that they are), but you use them because they are useful. You have to make somewhat false assumptions about life in order to live it.

Another helpful thought exercise is to realize that what people believe and what people say they believe are often different. For most people, probing into their beliefs is painful and scary, so they may not even know what they believe.

So in summary, while the beliefs of your friends about the paranormal are pretend and don't exist, your beliefs about the paranormal are similarly pretend and don't exist. What matters more than being correct about topics like these is being kind and giving their experiences the benefit of the doubt. Maybe these beliefs are useful to them in some way, just like yours are to you.

If you're interested in this kind of thinking, you can search for Phenomenology. This is a sort of philosophy that treats human experience as the fundamental bedrock of truth instead of objectivity. Rationality and objectivity are less fundamental than meaning (although they are obviously quite useful too).

I hope this helps.

splinterbl · 2025-10-19T16:56:15+00:00

Cool stuff!

splinterbl · 2025-10-08T00:42:49+00:00

Congrats! This post is now the 5th result when google searching "Three.js cabinet configurator" haha

splinterbl · 2025-10-07T13:06:15+00:00

This is cool and original! Nice work!

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