haven't thought about this book for a while. Dang, it was a fun read. I generally love books that take a simple premise and then explore where it would actually go
Over the last five years I've been in and out of therapy and 2/3 of my therapists have "graduated me" at some point in time, stating that their practice didn't see permanent therapy as a good solution. I don't think all therapists view it this way.
But it's not fully self driving. SF Waymo can't bring you to the airport. You missed OPs point, which was that the last few percentage points are the hardest.
Okay how about this situation that one of my junior devs hit recently:
Coding in an obj oriented language in an enormous code base (big tech). Junior dev is making a new class and they start it off with LLM generation. LLM adds in three separate abstract classes to the inheritance structure, for a total of seven inherited classes. Each of these inherited classes ultimately comes with several required classes that are trivial to add but end up requiring another hundred lines of code, mostly boilerplate.
Tell me how you, without knowing the code base, get the LLM to not add these classes? Our language model is already trained on our code base, and it just so happens that these are the most common classes a new class tends to inherit. Junior dev doesn't know that the classes should only be used in specific instances.
Sure, you could go line by line and say "what does this inherited class do, do I need it?" and actually, the dev did that. It cut down the inherited classes from three to two, but missed two of them because it didn't understand on a product side why they weren't needed.
Fast forward a year, these abstract classes are still inherited, no one knows why or how because there's no comprehension but we want to refactor the model.
I'm a data engineer trying to teach myself React so I can build a full stack app using some APIs and it's certainly a good exercise, but I could also certainly build that in Python. Your app looks great and I'd like to explore that more!
P.S - fellow runner and cyclist and out and I'm checking out the app more now.
I have a lot of thoughts on this as well and I'm not sure. I definitely felt like my mental health got worse when I started therapy, but was it because my mental health was already doing worse?
The times in my life when I've been the most anxious or unwell have been when I'm questioning my mental health. And I think that the society we live in does encourage people to open up more. But if you have ADHD / obsessive compulsive tendencies, and your brain works like mine, that opening up can just look like obsessing over why you aren't feeling 100%. Then it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
n of 2, this has been my experience as well. I was almost killed in a shooting in 2021, and in 2022 I started seeing a therapist. Going into therapy made me relate to my trauma more, think about my trauma more often, and self identify as a "traumatized individual". I don't think any of that helped. The only thing that really helped was daily meditation/mindfulness, which does the opposite - it teaches you that the thoughts and experiences you have are fleeting and rather than hold on to them you can let them go.
That being said, I don't think this is a strong enough phenomenon that it explains the rather large trends upwards in self harm/mental health. I think a good control is the graph that shows Schizophrenia - a 67% uptick shows that the diagnosis rates are probably a lot higher than the early 2000s, since I doubt that schizophrenia is really becoming more common due to social media.
I agree with the authors premise and argument but the data visualizations are not well done, and I'm confused about the conclusions he draws from them.
For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to that conclusion.
I have a fondness of writing summary articles on to cap off a big work project (for instance, completing a database migration). A few of them get 'traction', but mainly I like the challenge of eloquently describing my problem/solution and giving myself a zitgeist of work I've done. It's satisfying.
Recently, I had an old colleague of mine reach out and ask if I had the time to be a part-time contractor/advisor for his tech consulting start-up, since their client needed to do a database migration. He had remembered me because of the articles I wrote. It's a nice bit of money on the side ($500-$2.5k a month depending on how much I work) and I'm always learning something new.