Ask HN: How did you rebuild yourself after having hit rock bottom?

• scaliendb

  2 84 10.0 C++

  ScalienDB is a scalable, replicated datastore.

Hey man, don't worry, it will be all right!

About ~10 years ago in 2012-2013, within a ~6 month period (i) my startup [1] which I've been doing for 4 years failed / we shut it down (ii) my wife left, and a few months later told me that she'd been cheating on me.

There was a ~6 month period when I was very depressed, sometimes I wasn't able to sleep for multiple nights in a row, even when I got sleep, it was a few hours at best. It was a truly terrible period, I felt humiliated and reduced to nothing. I looked at my friends with stable boring jobs and families and thought that I messed up big time. I was so depressed, I even went to church a couple of times Sunday morning, because I couldn't sleep and I felt so sorry for myself, even though I'm an agnostic physicist.

Then something really unexpected happened: I got a job at a successful startup [2], which had great culture and people, and suddenly I was partying 2x a week with great people. While I was doing my own startup I stopped doing sports, so I picked up a +15 kg. The depression helped me lose most of it, and since I suddenly had a lot of free-time (no startup, no wife), I started doing sports again [3]. Even more unexpected, being divorced turned out to be appealing to ladies (I jokingly call it the "wounded deer" phenomenon), so I suddenly had ladies sending me signals.

Overall, in another ~6 months, to my huge surprise, there was a huge turn-around in my life, and in the end 2013 became one of the best years in my life! It was super-surprising, because it started on such a downer (Jan-6 was when my wife told me it's over, next day she moved out), but by Q3 I was hooked up with my girlfriend [4], feeling super happy at work and I even did another Ironman that year!

So... it's completely normal to feel depressed in such situations. Just give it some time, build yourself up, and find a good social situation. I personally also started a Phd, which I didn't finish because of the aforementioned startup, but I don't want to tell you to do that. You can potentially create positive vibes around you even by going to a co-working place 2x a week, doing some team sports, etc.

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[1] https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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