I'd like to draw a distinction here:

$80k is very good, by the standards of what most people can get.

$80k is middling-to-poor compared to how fast the cost of living is going up. Housing prices are skyrocketing, people have no savings, can't afford emergencies.

The economy is leaving people behind. In my area, SWE pay moves closer to "normal difficulty" every year, while everyone else moves to "hard".

So yeah, you may be loyal to the company, and you may show loyalty by coming to all the "mandatory fun" events as well as the "all hands meetings." But the reality is that they pay the minimum what they can get away with. And the more loyal you are, the more they can pay less.

If you think about it, on one hand it's a market based approach -- which is probably the right answer for management to do. On the other hand, if there's no incentive for you to go out of your way, you won't. Nor will you work harder if all you're going to get is a %2 pay raise, even though the last year you closed on average 3 tickets per work day.

I was firmly told not to suggest it again unless I wanted to put all of us out of a job.

That seemed ridiculous to me — we had a laundry list of ways we could help the business if we got basic platform stuff off of our plates. But I sure learned something about how incentives affect otherwise-good engineers.

Plex being Plex, sometimes it's flaky. But I get to just show up and watch stuff like it's any other streaming service.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I don't mind paying for streaming, and I have in the past.

I just want everything in one place.

The person running my Plex uses an unlimited Enterprise plan, so this won't stop them.

And there are plenty of therapists (and researchers) who would definitely say that the quality of the relationship with a depressed patient makes or breaks treatment, in many cases it actually is the distinguishing factor. At the very least, it's a necessary one.

"The literature" isn't even clear on what major depressive disorder is. Well, the clinical definition is clear: literally sadness/low mood for at least 2 weeks. But what does that mean?

I guess what I really mean to say here is that we have essentially created a situation where people are pushed toward being alone. Then when a whole bunch of them feel empty about their state of being, we assign the label of "depressed" on them and give them drugs that are only barely effective. The lucky ones can afford to buy someone who basically takes the place of a close friend or parent. We have no framework to describe this state of affairs because every single one of us only has our permanently modern society as a point of reference.

It's easy to forget that the human brain is not designed to live the way we live. It's designed to spend every waking moment together with a very small group/family, always outdoors together, always doing something entirely tangible and physical together. Seeing a stranger was a rare occurrence. Imagine that!

"Sadness" happens when someone close dies. "Depression" happens when a huge number of human relationships that the brain needs get replaced by vastly inferior alternatives -- coworkers, social media, video game friends, service workers, etc. Nothing else but modern society creates this.

On an individual basis, the specific treatment matters, but statistically the human connection matters more. Your standard “what did you do on the weekend” friendship won’t cut it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

I don't know what the cure for my own case of depression is, and I'm sure if I were isolated/disconnected my condition would be worse, but the evidence available to me indicates that simply connecting with people is not what's going to fix me.

My wife and mother-in-law are both counselors, and routinely successfully treat people with depression. They have never indicated that level of social connection is either a dominant cause or reliable treatment for depression.

If you want something to read up on, a very popular treatment methodology for depression is CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). The premise is that depression is often caused by harmful thought patterns about yourself or your life, and CBT trains you to arrest those thoughts and replace them with thoughts that are constructive or more accurate (less exaggerated, etc.). It's not the treatment I need, but it works for an awful lot of people, and its solution isn't built around social connections (though it may reveal social connections as a problem in individual cases).

>but it works for an awful lot of people

I know CBT is awfully popular on HN. But it is worth reading into the stats on CBT. Even if you take them at face value, it certainly does not work for everyone. It is of course, most effective when there is a clear cause and effect, very effective with anxiety, and also generally with children in particular. But has been shown to be ineffective or even dangerous when used with certain cohorts, ie. significant trauma background, clinical mental illness including depression, psychosis etc.

There have been more studies on CBT than any other form of therapy, and those studies suffer from the same replication crisis that the rest of social science research does.

So if it is your first exposure to getting help (and don't get me wrong, it is good to try as a first response) and it doesn't work for you, it is not your fault. You are not 'treatment resistant', more just at a 'treatment deficit'. Generally speaking, if your counsellor says you are treatment resistant, it is time to get a new counsellor and maybe if it is warranted a referral in combination with other medical expert like a psychiatrist. Each case is different though, and you are always your own best expert in yourself.

*like pop psychology, but it burns your mouth.

Truth is, some CBT studies have repeatedly passed replication and others yet have failed. CBT studies in lots of areas where it is used have shown relatively low efficacy, but close to alternative options. Even across anxiety disorders, where is it most effective, it is with an average-ish 70-80% success, and often only a few points different with alternative options. Meta studies have shown it to be ineffective within certain sub-cohorts, even in general areas where it is shown to be effective. Lots of CBT studies are performed differently or with different cohorts to how or with whom they are instituted in practice.

None of this means it is junk science, it just means you have to be very careful to understand the precise limitations of the science. You cannot separate the outcomes you like from the replication issue, you have to test it all. You also cannot generalise the very real successes of CBT across areas where they have not been shown to be effective, or shown to be ineffective. It is worth keeping these things in mind.

This information is almost never shown to clients. Clients are told 'CBT works', with the implication (or outright claim) that if it doesn't work for you it is your fault. It is popular with clients and it is popular with the profession, because it sets expectations early, it is cheap, it is targeted, and it works for the majority of people with the majority of issues people seek counselling for (ie. anxiety and depression). If this doesn't work for you, and this is all your counsellor offers, they are doing a massive disservice.

Not specific to CBT, but as a general point, replication crises are behind the scenes. Publication bias means only positive results get published, even if it's only the occasional lucky studies (or ones with overt cheating or innocent bad statistics) which come out positive. Researchers know about it and grumble privately, because they wasted months or years of effort before figuring out it's largely false. But this knowledge isn't generally what goes into archival publications.

This part is useful to everyone well beyond the scope of depression. Simply becoming aware of one's thoughts is a revelation. Our ability to ride a stream of thoughts without being actively conscious to them is unfortunate; it must have some evolutionary reason, but it also means we can repeat and experience many bad feelings and thought patterns without recognizing that we have some choice in whether to allow them to run free or to shut them down/replace them.

I suspect that the evolutionary reason is rather mundane; introspection (thinking about thinking and feeling) is expensive, and while it may confer some small epistemic benefit toward constructing and maintaining a theory of mind, the main benefit is in masking the downsides of other traits (like neuroticism, depression, anxiety, paranoia), which, to be frank, don't usually have much in the way of an upside. Historically (and likely prehistorically) it is simpler on a population basis to select against the traits that introspection would mask, which leaves introspectiveness as a trait that isn't strongly selected for, and at least slightly selected against in most situations.

This calculation flips in any situation where neuroticism, paranoia, etc. confer an advantage, which probably happens often enough to keep those traits (and introspectiveness) from dying out, and of course much of the stress of modern living exacerbates any neurotic etc. tendencies, which may give introspectiveness a boost even as those tendencies are selected against more strongly. But on an evolutionary timescale, I'd place a bigger bet on human culture(s) becoming less stressful, rather than on people evolving to better withstand stress.

Much of this speculation, TBH, is a handwavy just-so story. And since a theory isn't much use unless it has predictive power, here is a prediction: low-trust societies are where you would expect to find some minor advantage to neuroticism associated traits and a corresponding greater advantage to an even marginally better theory of mind, so we might find a correlation to greater introspectiveness. I am not aware of any research that addresses that question (although on an individual basis, neuroticism is by definition negatively correlated with trust, since trust is a facet of agreeableness)