Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?

>AI

I'm apathetic. It's there, it's a tool.

>international conflicts

I am fortunate enough to not live in the countries mentioned. I am close to Ukraine so this one is sort-of important to me in terms that I don't want Russia to win, but at the same time there's no point in following the news closely. If something big happens I will most definitively hear about it whether I'd like it or not.

>The US / Europe

Nothing I can do about any of that so no reason to get emotional. The most I can do as an European is to vote. Anything else is entirely out of my control unless I'd dedicate my entire free time and career to change things and I am completely uninterested in doing that.

>the stock market

Invest in index funds and forget it exists. If even that's too much for you then you then just put the money in the deposit. Interacting with the stock market is entirely optional.

>tech sucks

Always sucked. If you don't believe me feel free to go back to any underpowered machine of your choice and use it as a daily driver for a while. Dealing with any tasks on an old PC with a single core processor and 5400 rpm hard drive is pure agony compared to what we have right now.

>How are you all staying sane?

Stop being terminally online and go do something you actually enjoy. Most of the stuff you mentioned doesn't even actually affect you in the slightest.

I am astounded by how many comments recommend completely withdrawing from worldly matters. While I can understand why this may seem like a smart move, it cannot be the right choice ethically (think of Kant’s categorical imperative). Of course, you cannot directly influence world politics. But choosing a small area where you can make something better—anything that positively affects your fellow human beings—seems to me the more appropriate path. In the end, it will likely also lead to less nihilism and more happiness. And more sanity.

Doing things I love:

  - Learning French and Japanese
  - Drinking tea and exploring tea culture
  - Playing Geoguessr (or in my case, Geotastic) to see different places in the world and just generally have a fun time figuring out languages, and unique traits of different countries and cultures
  - Reading and watching science fiction, lots and lots of it!
  - Coding. I really do love writing code.
  - Trying to improve my communication skills, and ability to break down and describe tasks. It relates to AI, but also relates to working and interacting with other humans. :)
  - Working
  - Hanging out with my family
  - Eating yummy food that I enjoy
  - Doing crosswords
  - Playing video games
  - Writing
  - Rock climbing, other physical activities like walking or doing a quick work out
  - Cleaning and fixing the home.

I have split my life into things I can control and I can't control. Both at home and at work. There are things that sit on the line of course but global affairs are firmly non-controlable in near term at least, baring any elections I can express my view through.

I do get why people are generally struggling more, the concept of stability in many senses of that word seems to be gone.

My biggest problem right now is thanks to Claude I'm making much faster progress on my passion project and I'm working in a maniac state almost, but then I remind myself that it's probably meaningless because if things progress as they have, anyone can just copy what I've built, and if we get to AGI all bets are off anyway. Balancing these two moods is tough. Lots of sleepless nights lately. Thankfully I have a large financial cushion to fall back on, but then again the market could tank 50% this year and then even that wouldn't be much of a consolation. Can't be in cash either, opportunity cost too large.

The world at large always sucks. Most enjoyable things in life do not come out of worrying about the world but from things close to you, your family, your friends, your community. Focus more on the things you can actually have an influence on than everything that's out of your control.

A lot of the replies here are saying to just not worry about any of this stuff because most of it doesn't really affect you and you can't do anything about it anyway. As someone who battles chronic anxiety every day, I don't think those answers are helpful.

Yes, the world is always full of uncertainty, and yes, you being less online will probably help, but that doesn't mean we should all just ignore the horrors unfolding around us.

While it may feel like there's nothing you can do, there's a phrase I've found helpful: action absorbs anxiety.

You don't have to fix the world. But you can try to improve your tiny corner of it. Whether it's creating a small stockpile of emergency supplies, or writing letters to elected officials, DOING something can help a lot more than you might think.

For me, I have made a hobby out of self-hosting as many services as I can so I can at least feel like I'm a little less dependent on big tech. I study history to try and better understand the present. I write a blog to give expression to my anxieties, and that helps too, even if very few people ever read it.

And yes, limiting your social media time is a good idea. I recently set a "no social media after 8pm" rule for myself. I'll read a book, watch a movie, or play a video game instead. It helps.

  echo 0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com | sudo tee /etc/hosts

I am apathetic to everything because there is nothing I can do about any of that. I am a speck of dust on a cog of a machine. There is absolutely no point of worrying about any of this.

My 2c:

1) Reflect daily, and inspect your feelings. Most of the negative sentiments and positive sentiments of AI arise from how they impact your identity. ("I'm a great programmer", "I build complicated systems easily". Doing an RCA on your thoughts is like debugging.

2) List down things you can control, and you cannot control. "I cannot stop the launch of the new model." .. "I control my usage of these models" .. "My family needs me to do this, and I can" .. "I can do this in my team".

3) Fully accept both of above. It's a process.

4) Finally, you can then see what are the new identities and new things you can do in this disrupted new world, and you can begin to focus on those.

I think these also model the stages of dealing with trauma, because both require acceptance to truly figure out the next steps in a positive way.

Is this a mental health advice request or an invitation to rant? Serious question. We can do one of these, but not both, I think.

It’s a long story, for other venues. I participate in an organization dedicated to personal development, and helping others.

Gives me a purpose, and a framework for life.

Acceptance is a pretty key Principle for me. There’s only so much I can actually affect, so I’m best off, dedicating my focus where it will actually get something done.

Stay sober and mostly away from news.

It helps to have lived through some of this (especially conflicts) in 1990s (former Yugoslavia), so it is really more of the same.

Even the president US got, we have claim to being early birds ourselves with our current sitting president in Serbia for ~13 years now (they've switched between being a prime minister and president to work around two-term limit): we are very familiar with the rhetoric and "style" (lack of?) of communication, albeit from a less influential position.

AI, as mentioned, is just a tool. A very powerful one, so will cause damage left and right, but also some large productivity jumps when wielded well. Pick up and do good with it.

Just go out and talk to random people. Or if you're very shy, participate in a club of something you're interested in. When I was younger I found myself in a 'squat' with people I didn't know at first (very rural, with tents, stone abandoned homes), it cured my of my fear of ridicule (that and being a youth camp counsellor). Since we found ourselves there for the same reason, it was for the first time very easy for me to find common ground, and I think that helped a lot.

Staying sane is a gradient.

But personally the current war gives hope. Ayatollah was Putin's serious leg to stand on, not just in the region. If Iran's new govt is normalcy-adjacent, not just the terrorist orgs suffer without support, but also the Putin's war thing collapses. A decade (or less) of peace and prosperity is upon some of us.

And AI is neat, it highlights so many things about people. We start to value agency in fellow human beings. People understand context better now, and give more context proactively when talking; but also understand that there's context poisoning, which is why derailing is bad.

In the end everything is a tool: AI is a tool, war is a tool. We think AI is for coding, and war is for power, but in the end AI makes us know ourselves better. War makes us know ourselves better (and also gave us fast airplanes). This is the important, this is what will remain -- when the kingdom is ash, and the echo still drums.

I go outside in the woods frequently. It is quiet there. I find peace, within myself, and with the earth where we live. Trees fall from the weight of the snow, but the landscape has been there for millennia and it reminds me that this, too, will pass.

Just stop reading the news. Work normally, after work go for a long walk and read a book. Trust me on this one

Feels more like things are chaotic and uncertain to me rather than explicitly negative.

eg still think there is a fair bit of upside to be had from AI even if it does make me wary about job situation on a 5-10 year scale.

It sure as hell won’t be boring the next 10 years that’s for sure. And that to me is a positive on itself.

Road trips, bike-packing, overnight hiking.

AI: I use it - i can keep multiple things going in parallel which seems to work well with my ADHD.

Foreign BS: I worry a bit about my draft age kids, worry about donald rumsfeld's ghost making us go back to nation building again.

Enshitification: well, I've thrown my ios26 powered phone a few times, its a constant source of ire. I long for something better to come along.

overall, I just play with my dogs, lift heavy things, and just keep my head down. Last night the wife broke the tractor and I had to improvise a fix - which entailed using the MIG welder. I went to sleep happy.

I think we are all collectively coasting on a wave of lagging behind the current technology. Yes the new models have been exceptionally strong. But I think it's just because developers are exposed to the ecosystem more that we fear its impact more. In reality most white collar work is about one or two generations of AI models away at most from being easily replaced. Basically anything that doesn't involve human contact. Like I'm sorry but a lot of jobs in billing or middle management or form processing are not more difficult to replace than managing a whole ass several million LoC legacy application with 8 layers of architecture. As soon as AI can reliably navigate these quantities of context and memory, it's over for a lot of professions as we know them.

I keep myself sane by one, as others have said, realizing that developers will still very likely have a better understanding of how to use AI to create stable and maintainable software; There's more to software development than just coding.

Second, I am increasingly becoming aware that I'm more than my white-collar output, which I feel like many devs struggle with specifically since programming is also many devs personal hobby. It's a bit depressing when you have an idea for a side project to solve a personal problem and Opus can shit it out in 5 minutes. But I've also realized it frees up a lot of time. I can realize a lot of those small automations that were piling up on my backlog now. Ideas that I dreamed up but never had the time to personally implement. I can write more. I can read more small blogs by real humans with real opinions. I'm learning more about networking and selfhosting, topics I never had much time for because I spent my little free time on coding projects. And I will probably also get back into game development since that's where creativity and expression, as opposed to implementation, really shines, and that's something that I don't see AI taking away from us very soon.

As for the economical impact, well, lol lmao we'll have to cross that bridge when we get there. I just think that personally by the time I myself am affected by this problem, we have a global crisis anyway so it's not really like I can personally prepare for it.

> No one can predict anything.

Nobody ever could. Accept this reality and everything will be fine.

A lot of people predicted all this. Check out Ray Dalio's analysis.

Empires rise because of resourcefulness, education, good work ethic and humanity, effective resource allocation (low corruption), high productivity. There's a snowball effect here. These countries become stable. Stability turns them into financial centers.

Then they get rich. There is no work ethic - cultural values reward consumption and not working, which tends to lead into things like colonization and slavery. The wealth gap increases. Wars overextend and become more cost than income.

To catch up with lowering productivity and the habit of war for wealth, there's more debts. They hit a point where it's not possible to pay debts, so printing money becomes excessive. Excessive printing causes them to be dropped as a reserve currency. The wealth gap causes internal conflict. There's more gatekeeping. Castes grow stronger (in modern times, it could be ivy league degrees, gender, and skin color).

All these conflicts and problems end up with weak leaders taking advantage of the situation. Eventually, it ends up in civil war or revolution/reformation.

That's the pattern of rise and decline. It's not chaotic but rather quite predictable.

Instability and poverty is the norm globally; the average person does not have disposable income. While Americans can afford to buy a car with cash lol. It's the US falling to the situation where they're similar to the rest of world. And place like China which are starting to feel things like disposable income and 40-hour work weeks.

I guess just adjust your expectations. The mismatch hurts sanity.

I believe we (humankind) have been transitioning to a phase of what I call "time compression." Everything is happening too fast compared to say 40-50 years ago. You can attribute it to many things (tech in particular), but primarily it's the fact that everyone has a terminal in their hands where they can access information, people, news, etc. at a whim. It's affecting both our mental health and our collective social fabric. I think humans were not meant to be overwhelmed this way; our mental capacity hasn't increased, but the stimuli have increased by orders of magnitude.

I don't have a solution to this problem. But one thing I've been trying is to immerse myself in a hobby I enjoy, and ignore most of the noise around me. I closed most of my social network accounts 9 years ago, and it has improved my mental health significantly. I still read the news, but I skim the headlines and go back to what I was doing. Yes, it does affect me, but I try to minimize its impact and focus on things that compensate their effect.

There's no silver bullet. Just know that you're not alone. Unfortunately time compression is here to stay (and it will probably get worse), and those of us who fight it back will hopefully stay sane.

This reads like a Jeopardy answer for "What is stoicism?"

Absurdism and appreciating the small things. Also, media hygiene.

- AI will not replace human attention / domain expertise for a long time

- International conflicts do not impact you at all

- Human systems are anti fragile (they get stronger with challenges). Trump migh actually reinforce Europe by antagonize it.

- Stock market doesn't matter if you own a farm (methaphorically and practically).

- Rights are eroding some places but also increasing other places (lgbt rights have been generally on the rise in the past 10 years)

- in general the quality of life EVERYWHERE (except the middle class of developped countries) has WILDLY improved in the past years: medical access / water access / education access has increased in most countries.

You are what you feed yourself..

- feed yourself with more positive news

- learn to ignore what doesn't impact you or you can't control (stoicism)

Ask yourself: could I be wrong? In other words, be humble. Maybe the world is getting better, but in your frame of mind, it is getting worse.

For AI: none know the future. The future you thought you saw before was an illusion, as it always is. So be humble, and take things a day at a time.

For Politics: Maybe the US and the US administration isn't the bad guys. Maybe the bad guys sent the murdering dictators cash, and maybe the good guys are taking them out, giving actual democracy and the people a chance. Consider you could be wrong. Be humble.

For Tech in general: choose agency. Take one area where you can try to build or use things which you don't think is slop and is good. Build, use, or support that. Ignore the slop and let it rot. You don't need to control the world. You just need to control you. You are limited. Be humble.

It's the same as it has always been, the only difference is that you are being bombarded with these issues because you are terminally online and use social media while previously you were blissfully ignorant. The solution is to touch grass and stop worrying about things outside of your control.

> How are you all staying sane?

Making some bold assumptions, eh?

But more seriously, you can do very little about most of the things listed. Do that little and leave the rest behind.

Tune out of news. Find sources of news that are relevant to you immediately. Like your local community, city council news, your employer, that sort of things. You can’t do anything about war in Iran or wherever, it’s not actionable, stop worrying about it, stop following the news.

Be more offline. Go for walks. Read paper books. Listen to music, preferrably not streamed. Meet real people. Like, talk to a stranger at a coffee shop shop or in a park.

All this and I'm just hoping that I will get a good job finally because of all this somehow

I'm not, just rolling with it.

All this and I'm just thinking how I might finally get a good job somewhere

real answer is touching grass

I assume previous generations had similar feelings with the looming threat of nuclear annihilation for 30 years. I came of age in that wonderful time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. It feels that was an unusual period of time without major threat - however still had the messes of the balkans, terrorists blowing up kids in my home town,

A couple of wise words. One from decades ago:

Que será, será Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que será, será What will be, will be

And of course one from more recent times

Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old-- and when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders

No one has a clear idea about what’s going on, especially with AI. I’ve spoken to a glut of people at this point, consumed months of content from leaders to influencers and used it myself.

Currently Singularity fears, AI factories, Vibe coding productivity are super positioned with unthinking hallucinations, vibe disasters, ghost productivity and cognitive debt.

“Nothing changes in my life if GenAI disappears tomorrow” coexists with “I’m wildly productive and having the best time of my life.”

I’ve heard of negative productive gains, 15% faster search times, to 2x productivity and an increase in new project starts.

I think the bull case for AI is wrong, and I have not yet seen a process that will work with the quality and process control expected of assembly lines.

You hear hints of it, or major headlines, which don’t pan out.

Recently LLMs were used to generate financial models, and they looked like they worked.

Except they got the historical wrong and made mistakes humans would not.

Many claims do not survive scrutiny. Except for the new project starts.

The best analogy I can share for this moment is to talk about sketching or pottery.

AI gets a master, with the right workflow, to a rough sketch or rough state quickly.

Then the master has enough experience and skill to know if the foundations are solid, and what to discard to get to a final working vase.

Something that can actually hold water, doesn’t have holes in the back or a stem which is blocked, or is made of paper.

This is a very understandable way to feel, but I promise you the world is not quite so close to destruction as you might feel, though that isn't to say the risks aren't real and worth counter-acting. The goal is to ensure that you are well-grounded within yourself and avoid becoming overwhelmed but at the same time to stay engaged with the things that matter; total disengagement is not the way.

Stepping away from rolling news and/or social media of the scrolly-scrolly variety is probably a good step 1!

Next, try finding something you can work towards that exists outside of the spaces that are causing this stress: e.g. take up running, practice a musical instrument, or read some fiction. In short: touch grass.

Finally, when you feel calm: identify issues in the middle of the Venn diagram of things you care about and things you have the ability to affect. If this is, e.g. US domestic politics, then maybe join an activist group or attend some protests about issues close to your heart; if it's the genocide in Palestine, then there are many international solidarity campaigns you can get involved with; if it's the environmental poly-crisis then look at ways you might be able to leverage small efforts for big payoffs like joining a campaign for walk-able neighbourhoods or donating money to legal foundations looking to hold the people most responsible for these crises to account. If you want to find the power to affect change, you must join with others in an organised fashion; relying on individual action and market forces sure as shit hasn't helped yet and I doubt that will change anytime soon.

Go to anthropic/google/openai/xai/whatever website. Navigate to Jobs. There are still a motherfucking load of openings for software engineers? If yes, go back to work and stop worrying.

Oh, but tomorrow....

Tomorrow is another day, you worry about it when it comes.

That's what happens when you have to hit the ground running. Welcome to USA.

Personally I just adopt an attitude of utter nihilism and fatalism. I remind myself regularly that I'm going to die someday, like a mantra. Everything I think or care about won't ultimately matter. The only rational choice is to try and make the most of today.

Just ignore it and go outside, unironically. I finish work, shut the laptop, and go work in the garden or lift weights. Venezuela is not affecting my foxgloves nor my deadlifts.

I feel very similar. I'm not sure if it's all the issues you listed, or just being at a specific point in my life and career, or a combination of both. Nothing is enjoyable to me anymore, and I find there is nothing I am looking forward to. There seems to be so much evidence for the "everything is getting worse" line of thinking, food prices, housing prices, wealth distribution, the job market. I think all the commentors noting "it doesn't affect you, go talk a walk" are really missing the point. On one hand I feel privileged and lucky with what I have materially but on the other, a really deep feeling of despair that is getting harder to hide day to day.

I have plans.

First, study history. Our generation is downright lucky. This is the best time to be alive, truly.

Then avoid the news and politics. Live your own life, and enjoy analog hobbies.

If your sanity depends on things going the way you expected them, you were never sane in the first place.

Define sane.

I’m deep into nihilistic territory myself, but here’s one neat trick to turn nihilism on itself!

Jokes aside, the fact is that humanity will always find ways to disappoint you.

So the moment you completely give up hope, humanity will find a way to prove your doomsaying wrong.

For AI and policy, the questions I found that was useful to ask smart people is “what are you sure of / 100% confident about.” If it’s people who have a tendency to not be taken away by hype you can add “confident about In a practical, ‘I am betting money on this’ way“.

Hopefully that helps extract signal from noise for you.

Popcorn

Off topic? By a throwaway account AI slopper no less.

All the issues you mention are about uncertainty.

Uncertainty is one of the largest perceived threats by the human brain, it’s normal you feel it like a threat, it can even cause you anxiety and force you to take severe and unnecessary decisions. If that’s the case talk to a mental health professional because it is not an issue.

However if mental health is not an issue, try some of the many techniques that are there on how to handle uncertainty psychologically, you may start with stoicism (a modern book is fine) and with distribution of risk only of the threats that are an actual problem to you and you have any little of control over them

Depends what you mean by sane I guess...

I've been thinking (and worrying) about AI for decades so this last few years have been extremely hard for me. A lot of the stuff I worried about when deep neutral networks first began to work are now beginning to play out and if anything timelines are significantly shorter than I imagined they would be.

I've believed since around 2012 that the most likely way I'd die is from AI so this isn't new, but until around 2021 the error bars have always been quite large. In the last few years that error has rapidly compressed to the point at which I'd now very confidently bet we're all doomed (were there any point in me betting on that). I have few uncertainties left in the core trends of how things will progress from here, and the uncertainties that I do have are really more about how quickly doom will come and how bad the ending will be.

People who know me IRL kinda get why I'm freaking out right now because stuff I said that sounded insanely stupid before are actually now starting to materialise. But online I keep having to decide if I'm okay with sounding insane on this given how important it is and how concerned I am. I think the right thing to do is to sound insane and at least try to convince people we need to change course ASAP because this will not end well. Plus I'm having nightmares constantly at the moment so I'm really feeling the need to just express myself.

The number of serious risks we now face are almost endless and the probabilities that they occur are relatively high for the most part. Even most people with vested interests in the AI industry who are actively building these systems will give high single digits to low double digit odds that they're helping to build a technology that will kill us all lmao. And more concerningly most them are either lying or genuinely uneducated on why alignment is hard. The lunacy of the situation we're in is astounding.

So how am I staying sane? At this point I've more or less come to terms with what's coming. I'm just worried about those I love because I don't want them to suffer. It's frustrating so few seem to be thinking beyond risks like job losses right now and that's making me feel a bit insane at the moment tbh. I suspect people will catch up within the next 12-24 months.

As for the geopolitical uncertainty, that's always been a thing. 9/11 felt far more scary than anything that's happening today imo. The full scale invasion of Ukraine was significant, but hardly unexpected or even unprecedented.

maybe stay away from news if they make you anxious?

Focus on what you can control. Detach from social media. Get outside. Spend time with the people in your life who matter. We live in an information age where we know everything immediately, but it's a blessing and a curse.

"Chaos isn't a pit, chaos is a ladder."

Go hiking.

And drop the "the". It`s cleaner.

You're just feeling what the rest of non western world has felt for centuries. Welcome to the club.

the beach. mantras. tapasya.

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If you open yourself to be cranked up, you'll get cranked up constantly.

Pollution is real - a legit problem and a worthy cause, but the anthropogenic global warming thing was always just wealth extraction by elites. They cranked up at least three generations scaring them half to death and making them crazy and depressed and now, oh ... it was nothing, we need more power for AI data centers, you can go sod off now. No one can claim otherwise: the models' predictions never panned out and the data was always cooked for $$$. The trash we sort into the blue bin goes to the same landfill as the grey bin.

Almost all the latest crazes are like that. How fast did we go from Covid-to-Ukraine-to-destroying Tesla dealerships? Just don't get cranked up, it is all intended to stun you. Live your life. Focus. The people doing this to you need you to be unproductive and vulnerable.

I said "almost all" because the wars are real. The isolation and despair brought on during Covid lockdowns was real, oxes were gored, people were emotionally stunted and scarred. Covid itself likely came out of a lab, and it seemed to be designed to kill the elders.

Regarding the real harms that happened to real people and myself, I keep them separate as lists in my mind, I try to remember to hold scoundrels accountable if I am ever personally given that honor, and I try not to go to bed angry and to forgive people.

"Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold."

As for me I feel the AI fear. Just a few months ago, narrative that AI won't replace programmers, made a lot of sense, and still somewhat does.

But after spending a few weeks totally vibe coding my new project, which is technically advanced, which for sure would be very hard to do on my own, I felt the pressure of what happens in the future with my career.

The only thing keeping me sane is hope, that even if AI takes SE jobs, it makes us a potentially strong founder candidates, we know how to code, how the good architecture should look like and have amazing tool, to iterate very quickly. Although the fact that rapid development is not enough to succeed is another thing.