Ask HN: How do you keep motivated if nobody supports you?
First, if you&#x27;re feeling discouraged by people telling you to &quot;suck it up,&quot; just realize that some people don&#x27;t know or remember what it&#x27;s like to be in your position. Everyone&#x27;s doing the best they can in the moment, even if that means telling someone with a broken leg to &quot;walk it off.&quot; It also means some people confuse financial support with emotional support &amp; encouragement. Money&#x27;s merely a strategy for meeting our needs, but emotional support is literally something social creatures need. Nobody comes out of the womb with an actual physical need for money. I hope you can forgive anyone who fails to recognize that when giving you advice.<p>I&#x27;m a 33 year old programmer &amp; my story&#x27;s like yours, except I became addicted to researching before coding. Instead of motivation to monetize what I produce, I&#x27;m trying to learn how to actually produce. The &quot;support&quot; I got growing up embedded a deep fear of failure in me to the point that merely thinking about working alone on something paralyzes me. I&#x27;ve been unemployed for 2-3 years now &amp; so I also have anxiety around simply applying for jobs.<p>I don&#x27;t know if any of this applies to you, but I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;ll help.<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve learned through just the past year of struggling to recover from my addiction:<p>- I tend to take other people&#x27;s advice more easily when I hear it in the form of stories about other people&#x27;s experiences, though I used to think that if I talked about myself, I&#x27;d just be viewed as selfish&#x2F;narcissistic. I&#x27;m still working on that bit of self-consciousness, so this first point&#x27;s kind of a disclaimer for the rest, which will mostly be things about myself I consider relevant or citing things you&#x27;ve said about yourself.<p>- Nobody asks for support who doesn&#x27;t need it in some way. You&#x27;ve said you grew up without it from your parents&#x2F;community, don&#x27;t have any peers, and you&#x27;re asking for help here. I hope you&#x27;ll keep working to develop a support system for yourself.<p>- I lived most of my life in a small town in Louisiana where the local values are very different from my own. It&#x27;s really hard living in a place where the message &quot;you don&#x27;t belong here&quot; is heard time &amp; again, even if it&#x27;s followed by something like &quot;you belong in Silicon Valley or some place like that.&quot; I had to get out to separate myself from those messages (including any coming from my parents) so I could learn to think differently. I have to catch myself thinking in old ways &amp; immediately follow it with telling myself something different.<p>- My parents have no idea what I need or have any business telling me how to live. It doesn&#x27;t matter who&#x27;s supporting me. I&#x27;ve thought for a long time that financial independence doesn&#x27;t have to come before interacting with my parents like an independent adult. The problem was I quickly reverted back to acting like a dependent child when they tried to play the role of parent (and vice-versa) instead of any of us behaving like independent adults. Being assertive with them has been key to me regaining some sense of autonomy in my life, but it&#x27;s been really hard. It means I have to set boundaries with them and not negotiate on them. An example: I told my mom I would no longer respond to her text messages as she gets upset when they&#x27;re too long for her taste. The reason they&#x27;re too long is her phone&#x27;s font size is huge because she&#x27;s choosing to not use her glasses. Instead of getting into a fight with her over what constitutes a reasonable text length, I just said &quot;Ok. If this is how you&#x27;ll be responding when I&#x27;m trying to communicate over text, then I&#x27;ll stop communicating with you via text until you&#x27;re able to take emotional responsibility for the decisions that make texting with me hard for you.&quot; (The book &quot;Nonviolent Communication&quot; has been AMAZING for me learning this!)<p>- I desperately need collaboration right now. It&#x27;s not that I can&#x27;t get into a productive mindset where my old ways of thinking don&#x27;t plague me at every turn, but it&#x27;s way more difficult to stay in that headspace when I&#x27;m not connecting with people. I don&#x27;t know how to get it &amp; wish I could give you a suggestion for this, but I&#x27;m in the same boat as you right now. (As I type this, it&#x27;s occurring to me that maybe I don&#x27;t need to connect with people over what I&#x27;m working on, as long as I&#x27;m connecting with them, but I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s actually the case &amp; don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m in a position in my life where I can risk being wrong about that.)<p>- 20+ years of interacting with text on screens more than faces has led to a huge emotional disconnect in myself. I&#x27;ve only just started learning how to recognize more emotions than the basics of glad&#x2F;sad&#x2F;mad&#x2F;afraid. Teenage years are when we&#x27;re supposed to learn how to emotionally self-regulate, but I missed out on a good bit of that. Taking time away from information (computers, the internet, looking things up in books, puzzles, strategy games, brainstorming, asking people questions, and more) was required for me to get to a point that I was able to admit that I was traumatized as a kid &amp; part of that trauma stemmed from how I interacted with my parents (neglect, emotional&#x2F;verbal abuse). When I literally said to myself out loud &quot;Ok. Let&#x27;s assume the opposite. I was traumatized.&quot; I was immediately overcome with fear, anxiety, and sadness within seconds. That was the first step for me to start learning how to emotionally connect with myself &amp; only then did I start learning how to emotionally connect with others. Maybe you&#x27;ve experienced some kind of trauma or maybe not. The point is that before I could truly emotionally connect with others, that block had to be removed. Maybe you don&#x27;t have that problem, but if you do, I&#x27;d suggest finding the block &amp; working to remove it because things become much easier then.<p>- Another side effect of not interacting with people: I didn&#x27;t learn the value of human connection. It&#x27;s difficult to describe, but there&#x27;s a physical feeling that comes with solid connection. My chest feels light and warm when I&#x27;m able to connect. Connecting starts with me accepting and empathizing with people, which, again...&quot;Nonviolent Communication&quot; is my guide for that.