An open letter to Delilah Rene, the (now) nationally syndicated radio DJ
Dear Delilah,
Last night, I had some extra time before I had to pick up Margaret from work, so I took the kids on a tour of Dedham. (It was on the way.)
I passed the house where you used to live, where we once cooked homemade scrambled eggs and hash browns for breakfast, where Read More »
I’m readying for the release of my latest book, Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, the true story of a romantic idiot who was lucky enough to find love.
I just finished a first cut of the cover copy. Read More »
Forty years ago, on June 20, 1969, at 2:00 in the afternoon, I first came into this world, probably kicking and screaming, but not going anywhere fast. Since then, I sometimes whether I have gone anywhere ever.
When I was a teenager, one of my older friends turned 40. I could hardly believe it.
“You’re 40?!” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded.
I remember, I thought that was so old. And since then, from time to time, I myself have felt old. But what does that mean, “old”?
“Old” means obsolete, yesterday’s relic.
“Old” means tired and broken down, worn by time.
“Old” means showing the signs of age, wrinkles around the eyes, a paunch on the belly, love handles hanging off the sides.
“Old” means disease, closeness to death, a course of medications to take every day, the fear of time itself, keenly aware that time is escaping.
Why? Read More »
Earlier, I wrote about scientific dream interpretation, using the Expectation Fulfillment Theory of Dreaming. Here’s another example, this time of a nightmare. Read More »
Ever since man has been able to think, he has tried to understand his dreams. He has called on dreams for divine guidance or for self-understanding. Many methods have been put forward for interpreting dreams. Some theorists have written off dreams as mere random thoughts that intrude into our sleep. Others have gone through great lengths to control their dreams, in order to experience them as entertainment or as paranormal phenomena.
One of the most persistent misconceptions regarding dreams is that they represent wishes. This notion was first popularized by Freud, and since then, it has stuck to the pop culture like Super Glue. Every one of us has at one time or another dreamed of a romantic encounter with some partner other than his spouse. And every one of us has been afraid to share that dream, lest she get the wrong idea.
But dreams do not, as Freud supposed, represent wishes. Rather, as recent research has suggested, dreams represent unfulfilled emotional expectations. That is, during the day we expected to feel a certain way, to have a certain emotional experience, and we didn’t. Someone did something or some event occurred to emotionally arouse us, but we never acted on that emotional arousal. In the meantime, our brains are geared up for the feelings that would have resulted had we acted on our feelings. Dreams are the result, dreams about those feelings, but not about the same people and events that caused the feelings.
This is called the Expectation Fulfillment Theory of Dreaming, first published in 1993 by psychologist Joe Griffin, who first stated the theory. Since then, the theory has gained support, as more research has borne out its conclusions and predictions. Since I’ve been keeping track, in my own informal research, it has also consistently explained my own dreams. Read More »
(This is a continuation from part 2 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.)
[Note: This is a recounting of an experience from several years ago. Read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]
According to psychologist Joe Griffin, the cycle of depression starts when innate needs are not being met. Among these are a sense of achievement and knowing that we are valuable to others. Setbacks like this, however, are just a part of life. What turns setbacks into depression is when they dominate one’s thoughts, they overwhelm him, and he loses hope.
Unfortunately, if my previous work situation epitomized camaraderie, this one did the opposite: Read More »
By J. Timothy King
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Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories
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Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress
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(This is a continuation from part 1 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.)
If one of the most powerful weapons against depression is hope, one of its most powerful fuels is hopelessness.
I attacked my next job with gusto and enthusiasm. The company had previously outsourced a project to an offshore contractor, and now that the fit had hit the shan, they were looking to bring it back in-house. The product was a stand-alone box with embedded software, and they hired me to take over the hardware diagnostics, which are used to ensure that the units sent to customers actually work.
Somewhere, I read that it takes six months for a new employee to become situated in a new job. But I did it in four. And then I crashed. Hard. Read More »
By J. Timothy King
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Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories
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Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress
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I’ve created a new blog at stories.JTimothyKing.com, at which I’ll serialize fiction and creative non-fiction that I’m writing. If you subscribe to that blog, that will allow you to keep up to date with my newest stories, in bite-sized chunks.
-TimK
April 17, 2009 – 11:10 am
Knowing what I know now, I wonder how I avoided depression for as long as I did:
- Stress causes depression.
- Perfectionists are more prone to depression.
- Isolation reinforces depression.
As a software developer, those frequently go along with the job description. Seasonal Affective Disorder has gotten the rap for at least some of the funk, because many software guys spend most of their time indoors, duty-bound to their office chairs. But surely SAD can’t take all the blame. Long hours of solitary work in front of a computer screen, the amateurish demands of tech-heads-turned-managers, the over-constrained projects, the intolerance we have toward bugs, the widespread myth that software is “free,” and (most importantly) how we as developers respond to these pressures, all these must take some share of the blame for developers’ depression. Read More »
By J. Timothy King
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Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories
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Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress
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