This is one side of the elephant.

It's true a steel inner strength is required in day to day engineering. It's hard, and it lacks positive reinformcement almost always. When you hear something it is bad.

But let's define "buck up" and see the other side of the elephant. That blog post is a textbook example of negative self talk. You can have a world that looks down on you and spit back at it and do your best work, but if you look down on yourself you _will not_ bootstrap your way out, because you learn to believe you cannot.

That is depression, and depression is reinforced if not caused by that self-talk. Addressing the self-talk and stopping the flagellation will allow that steel inner strength to build up. Medication is a parachute but the wings and engine need to be rebuilt using self confidence, and that's a long road of:

* reframing failures as lessons

* honesty with self about your own role in your depression

* careful build-up of support

* learning to find the important and good in each memory, vs the deprecating and painful

Thanks! I'm cured! I'm glad you told me to man up, I'd never thought to do that myself.

I know that this is a glib response, but really that's the only way to respond to these comments. They're farcical and we have long known them to be unreasonable. Mocking them is the only way to get some people to learn it seems.

I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers).

You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Are you taking care of your foundations? Sleeping enough? Eating nutritious food? Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you haven't even acknowledged to yourself? Is your work environment healthy? What things aren't healthy that you've normalised? Are you seeing enough friendly people in your day to day life? And so on.

My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these, so "bucking up" can be seen as either great advice or irresponsible and insensitive, and it doesn't necessarely apply to "most of y'all". So maybe you need to buck up, but also don't be frustrated if you don't. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.

I definitely understand where your response comes from. You cannot work with people that keep screwing up the work you're doing. It costs the company money, it frustrates colleagues, and you end up just wasting people's time.

The thing is that I have now learned that I cannot do it. To play devil's advocate, I might just be a lazy bum. I still think it's good to be aware that you can walk away from a position that you know you cannot do.

Buckling up will not help me here. I've been upbuckling for two years now, and my buckles keep going down.

Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?is=YnnSt1292XjiGbEE

You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you’ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you’ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.

If there’s one thing I would like to add is that engineering is a much of a mindset than knowledge. I have friends in software development and they do not enjoy the practice at all. Everything is just chores to them.

I won’t say “follow your passion” (which is often a terrible advice). But if you can’t take some joy in what you’re doing (either the act or the goal), your body will rebel in various ways.

Very, very, very little of real-world software dev is anything close to "engineering".

You need to communicate better. One of the most important steps is to know your audience. This means you need to understand where they are coming from. Without this understanding, your words are unlikely to be correct and useful. To communicate clearly is to think clearly.

If you can’t follow these basics, why are you even writing comments? Are you meant to be using the internet?

Rare and needed reminder in the big '26