Links and things that I’ve run across recently.

Return to Triskelion

To ordinary people with dictionaries, a triskelion is an artistic motif consisting of three interlocked spirals. Star Trek fans, however, will recognize “Triskelion” as the planet where the “Providers” (these ultra-powerful, disembodied, colored, light-up brain guys) betted on how fights would turn out between captured alien slaves from around the galaxy. (The ring in which these battles occurred was a triskelion, hence the name of the planet.) The Providers had been capturing and abusing slaves in this way since time immemorial, until they made the mistake of kidnapping James T. Kirk, who beat them at their own game. Unfortunately, as gamblers, they don’t always pay their debts, because they’ve apparently turned back on their words and are now gaming again, with a whole new generation of slaves.

I think my theme for this week is: life is getting better.

If you’re a Gilmore Girls fan, you might remember the episode after Rory and Dean had their affair, the one in which Dean’s wife Lindsay discovers Rory’s “heinous letter in Dean’s jacket.” Oy f***in’ vey! See, this is what happens when children grow up only on the outside.

And Rory and Lorelai, walking through the town common, almost run into Lindsay and her mother (whose name apparently is Theresa). At which point Theresa begins tearing into Rory, ignoring Lorelai’s urges to calm down, escalating her tone to the point of “You little monster!”

Developing software is supposed to be one of the best jobs available, because it uses creativity, and it requires professional independence. And those software jobs are out there. But some of us are not currently working one of those jobs.

In early 2009, I wrote a post entitled “7 Best Things About Being a Consulting Software Developer." In that post, I talked about how the world does not end just because I had one really, really bad job (or a whole string of them, as the case was). I should have listened to myself. That project I talked about in that post was the NOKWID project, which I told about in the previous part of this series. (So named because No One Knew What It Did.) This is the project that threw me into a deep depression, a hopeless depression, the straw that broke this camel’s back, which no amount of positive thinking could make up for.

As you may remember, after the NOKWID project several years ago, I crashed, hard, spent several months deep in depression. And I just now finally feel like I’ve climbed out of that hole, a hole I had ironically dug for myself.

I felt forever tired, forever useless, forever a burden on my family. Nothing gave me pleasure, no joy, no motivation, and I didn’t care. At one point, I even contemplated what steps I would need to take in order to make a strategic exit from this life. (Fortunately, there were too many steps, too complicated.) Oy vey! It makes sense that a demoralizing job might get me down. But that’s supposed to be temporary, not life-destroying.

Then, through the work of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, I found I could take steps toward rediscovering the joy and motivation I had lost from my life.

According to Dave Ramsey, money arguments are the number-one cause of marital strife.

Now, I’m not sure where he got that factoid. And I don’t actually know whether it’s true, because marriages—as all relationships—are more complex and nuanced than a single cause. Regardless, it is surely true that money arguments are a leading factor in failing marriages.

In early 2009, after a series of bad software development jobs, I sunk into a deep depression. At the time, I attributed my mood to the bankruptcy of the software industry— And I still believe the industry in general is broken in several key areas, and needs to be fixed. But I later discovered, my problem was mostly connected to my own reactions, my own thoughts, going through my own mind, what Perry Marshall calls “inner head trash."

Reading back through some of the old posts on this blog, I see a man who saw wonderful possibilities for his future, and an undiminishable drive to pursue those possibilities; a man who saw the future as his salvation, not as his curse.

What happened to that man?

He’s still inside me, beat down by patterns I’ve allowed to set over the past 6 or 7 years. He may no longer be fighting, but he still longs to escape, to live free.

Enter the Used Book Superstore. Browsing there one day in the Psychology section, I of course noticed the wanna-be-psych-textbooks, the pop psychology, the psycho-mumbo-jumbo. And then a book jumped out at me—literally, almost jumped into my hands—a hardcover entitled The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here.

I’m sitting here in my virtual living room with author Sharon Cathcart, to talk about psychological depression—which I’ve had my own experiences with, as you may know if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time.

Sharon has been a journalist, a newspaper editor, and an award-winning poet. Now, she’s authored a novel, In the Eye of the Beholder, as well as a memoir—more a collection of thoughts on various subjects—called Les Pensées Dangereuses, “Dangerous Thoughts."

Hi, Sharon.

Hi, Tim.

In Les Pensées Dangereuses, you talk about your experiences with depression. Some people think depression means that your brain has basically shut down, that you’re not even thinking anymore.

Not at all. Everyone’s experience is different, but in my case—and in the case of many people whose work I have read or with whom I have spoken—the opposite was true. I couldn’t stop thinking. There were so many ideas whirling around in my head, like a carousel that was out of control. None of the ideas had a chance to get off and stand on their own. It is easy under those circumstances to feel overwhelmed and helpless—as though starting any task, even a tiny bit of it, is monumental and impossible because of the relentless thinking. Much of the thinking in depression is distorted to boot—it doesn’t bear up with the reality of situations in many cases.

Another part of this series of posts, “Depression and the Software Developer.” This latest story I started on Monday, part 4 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.

[Note: You can read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]

No client or employer will ever admit to you that he doesn’t want to deal with reality. What he really wants is for you to just deliver what he needs, with zero effort on his part, in zero time, for zero dollars. If he gives you any more than that, it is only in grudging acceptance of the fact that you are not the omnipotent God. But a surprising number of project managers still act as though developers are superhuman, even if they accept that we are not divine. And a surprising number of developers are willing to accept that they are superhuman, even if they can’t deliver the actual goods.

And that was the case with this project. So I had no idea what made up the NOKWID feature that I was supposed to be developing (called NOKWID, because No One Knew What It Did), and Pointy-Hair 1 (the developer-turned-manager) and Pointy-Hair A (the manager-turned-developer) both seemed to be going out of their way to keep me in the dark.

If I were a voice talent, it would be like giving me a stack of ill-digested notes scribbled on sticky pads and saying, “Okay. Here’s the voice-over script. We need this by Thursday. When can you have it recorded?”

Needless to say, it stressed me out.

Here’s a story I’ve been keeping on the back burner for almost a year now. I haven’t published it until now, because it still hit too close to home. But this week, I’ve scheduled an interview with Sharon Cathcart, author of In the Eye of the Beholder, which I am currently reading, and a memoir Les Pensées Dangereuses. And parts of her story reminded me of certain elements of my story.

This is the story of the software-development project that plunged me into a deep depression (a continuation from part 3 of “Depression and the Software Developer”).

[Note: You can read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]

It was only a couple months long, but it was the straw that broke this developer’s back. It was the project that made me realize how much I enjoyed making a difference, as I did in my first job after college. It made me realize how important it was to make a difference, rather than just being a cog in a useless, corporate, perpetual-motion machine. Most development managers simply don’t know how to let their developers make a difference, possibly because they’ve never known themselves what it feels like. And to this day, the memory of this painful project keeps me from taking the software-development industry seriously.

The project itself wasn’t that bad. I joined it as a consulting developer, along with a couple other consulting developers. The client had been desperate for short-term help, and I took on the project as a favor for a friend, who was already hip-deep in it. They were also on a limited budget, and so I offered a reduced rate, again as a favor to my friend. That was Idiotic Decision #1.

I’ve experienced the same thing, as a musician, whenever I give a big musical performance. As you prepare for the big event, you practice, you plan, you’re running on adrenaline. The big night comes. You perform beautifully. The burn of the spotlights, the adulation of the crowd, the feeling of accomplishment. You’re floating on air.

The next day, you crash, hard.

I always plan to take the next day off after a big performance. My father, too, when he was pastoring a church, Monday was his day off, because he had prepared all week for Sunday, and after it was over, he needed to decompress. And I experience the same thing after finishing a big writing project.

Once the manuscript is revised and put to bed, I start coming down off that adrenaline high. Up until that point, I’d been barreling through, planning, creating, writing, then revising, amazed at how good it feels, to read my own story, to have it excite me, the fulfillment, the psychological reward. And then, sadness.