Great question. I wouldn't worry about feeling grateful. Just reminding yourself of "what you have," as you phrased it, is enough.
When we're depressed we have a tendency to fall into the mindset that everything is bad. Reminding yourself that there is something good in your life helps break that cycle. If you can make it a habit your brain actually gets better at finding the positives and it starts to create a positive feedback loop.
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence that gratitude is inversely correlated with depression, and a good amount that shows it to be useful as an intervention as well. Even the article that you provided as evidence to the contrary found positive effects, just not dramatically higher than placebo.
For example, here are the first couple pages of results I got for gratitude studies. Every single one found a positive affect.
There's some good stuff here, but it completely skips gratitude.
Focusing on what you're grateful for is one of the more powerful and best proven methods to combat depression. I've been through clinical depression and consider it the key to my recovery.
1. "Doesn't work for some people" is subject to the same fallacy as "worked for me." Not letting you get away with that one.
2. Working on yourself is very obviously the best way to attract someone else. Statistically speaking we get the most attention from those who perceive our value to be slightly above theirs (people tend to aim for the best around that they don't think are "out of their league"). Increase your own value and you will get more attention from higher value potential partners.
There's a little bit of a catch 22 in that if you work on yourself just to try to be more attractive you probably won't succeed. Things like genuine enthusiasm for a hobby are very attractive and hard to fake, for example. But if you become a person anyone would be lucky date it's not going to be hard to find dates, provided you leave the basement once in a while.
Yes. This was my favorite quote. With slightly more context:
You know what's amazing? Heinrich is old, he's 84 or so. He called this in the 70s, he said this would be possible. It's only possible now because these brand new lasers are capable of doing it. That, in my mind, is awesome.
Interesting. I'm surprised this actually works for people. For me it would it would just make me waste more time, and turn browsing into a stress multiplier instead of a stress reliever.
I favor extensions that give an alert or block the site after a certain time. More effective and less anger inducing for me personally.
Really? Your local government has far more power over you than China does. I wouldn't be nearly as worried about China unless I was worth stealing from, assassinating, or something like that.
Bootcamp graduate here.
Short story: Took a low paying startup job to get my foot in the door, 2 months later got a much better offer, first place offered me a raise but not match, I said ok bye. Next day I walk in the CTO (who supervises me) says "why are you leaving" I say "no match" he says "Let me smash some heads." An hour later I have a match.
tl;dr CTO fights to keep me.
Some other notes: I think the quality of instruction was very high at my particular camp. In retrospect I feel I was perfectly well prepared to contribute from day 1. However, I'm a philomath and my skill set and personality are both good fits for coding. I probably would have made it without a boot camp, the boot camp just got me there faster.
Happy to answer any questions about my camp experience, motivations, contribution level, etc.