Alvaro Bernardes

Holy crap.. I'm sitting here listening to some classical music and it feels like everything is in place now. It feels like i found the last piece of the puzzle that was making me so unproductive. This morning has been the most joyful and hopeful morning I've had in the last 3-4 months of darkness. Let me share with you my story and hopefully help someone in the community with similar problems. I'm also wanting to share this because I'm afraid I'm wrong and want some feedback. OK so i finished school in October, and was eager to work in the free market and make a living after being in a pretty bad internship. I started programming but found it really hard to work for more than 1-2 hours a day. At first I thought it was because I wasn't used to working solo, without obligations, and that with time I'd increase work hours. Didn't happen. Then I thought rage against my family would be a good motivator. It wasn't (don't get me wrong, the rage was totally justified). I thought about so many things that could be the origins of my problems and worked through them but nothing changed my behavior, and I became more and more sad and hopeless. I started to think nothing would work, but I kept on looking. I decided to hear http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/1076/procrastination-and-crushed-ambition-listener-convo-video-recommended Stef said something among the lines of: If we're not doing something that would benefit us we should look into the past and see if we were attacked for it. So I did, I started thinking about how my parent's would make me unmotivated. When I found something I enjoyed, they managed to crush it with countless reasons why it was hard and all the complications I could encounter (thinking about this reminds me of my own behavior, thinking about all the possible negative outcomes of everything). At the same time they would also complain that I was lazy. That was a big one in my childhood. I was just lazy. I would get good grades and when proudly talking about it with my parents they'd say "That's just your obligation". When I'd get bad grades, I was punished. They'd take the playstation or the internet "rights" from me. Even worse: Videogames were the only thing I could commit to. I loved them. I remember when I got my first playstation i played tony hawk the entire day - no complaining from my parents. I played it a lot during the next weeks and little to no complaining. So I grew up playing videogames as the only thing my parent's wouldn't bring up reasons against. They would never say "Oh but later levels may be too hard for you" or "This game is easy but the next one will be harder". It was the only thing I wasn't afraid of. So they threatened to take away from me the only thing I could find pleasure in. If you were a sadistic person in search of children to torment and abuse emotionally, this would be a fucking master plan. When those things were taken away from me i would go to my bedroom in rage and think about suicide. It was terrible.. After thinking about all this I then went to program and it was fun. Not perfect, but not nearly as hard as it has been. I'm still afraid I'll get attacked, but I'll continue to work on it, also reminding myself of the terrible childhood I had and that I'm doing the best I can considering what I went through. I'd love to hear your thoughts

I'm interested as well!

Even if "All we would hear is "Look Stefan, I am a smart guy, I'm not a bigot, I know what is right, I know what to do to make America great again!"" or if he's just casting a wider net, I don't see how freedomain radio wouldn't benefit from the interview.

Awesome, welcome!

What attracted you here?

I'm going through a knee problem which should be fixed in the next 3 months, then I will follow your advice. even though cycling isn't "productive" as work is, it's much healthier and I don't feel bad for doing it. Thank you for your comment. Just to clarify one thing the pressure didn't come from my parents, but from my peers, though it was probably harder for me coming from them. If you don't mind, would you expand on how to connect with your final observation? Let me clarify: Usually when I'm working my mindset just switches from getting enjoyment from being productive to wanting to play video games. It happens really fast, and usually when I finish some part of the work. When I start going to play video games I sometimes think to myself "I shouldn't be doing this", but ignore it and go play.

That makes total sense to me. I do listen to podcasts while cycling, and like I said before, I don't think I'd play videogames if I wasn't listening to a podcast meanwhile. I wonder though, why do I play video games while listening... why not just listen? I sometimes feel it's boring to just listen (not that the show's boring, it's just that listening to anything for 3 hours and doing nothing meanwhile bores me) so i play video games, many times competitively, so I get some sense of achievement.

That's true, and you're probably right saying that i'm living a productive life considering my background. I should think about that more and try to have more empathy with myself. I do always listen to podcasts when i'm playing. I can't play without listening to a podcast be it FDR or others. I find it too boring... What I experience when I'm not working is just like a little annoyance as if it was saying "you should be doing something" and "why are you so lazy". Thank you for your comment, I'll really think about what you've said What pops into my mind is web development. That's an area I've some experience with and it's my work. That's what I feel like I should be doing during the time I'm playing. I find that there are big similarities in what I feel with the pressure... I'm not in therapy, and I agree it would be a good thing to do, tough I fear fear when considering it. What you wrote is probably correct, though I've not thought about it very much. Do you think it's healthy to remove the should? Because in my case I think all the "shoulds" are justified. Wouldn't it be negative to lie to myself to avoid the feeling? I hope I'm not misunderstanding what you're saying

I'm pissed. I'm feeling something I haven't felt in a looong time. I'm really angry at my parents, and I'm happy that I'm this mad. I was listening to http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/766/maternal-suffocationand I just had this amazing awakening moment. I just felt all the rage from the listener towards his parents and it made me remind myself of all the rage I felt during my teens. I thought about suicide for a year. I counted every minute in school. I felt like shit for not studying stupid subjects. I was bullied. I was pressured by everyone to get a girlfriend. I felt like a big failure with no future. I was put in the worst school in the city under the pretext that it would teach me life. I felt my life threatened among kids whose parents have been in jail. There were cases of rape in the bathrooms. If a kid from 5th grade asked me for my money I had to give it to him even though I was 4 years older, because if I didn't and escalated, his family and friends would be waiting for me outside. I was put in this situation by the people who are supposed to take care of me. The people I should be able to trust. Writing this made me feel really sad and even angrier! All this inside a 16 year old mind, who had no one to share it with. I could never ever trust my parents with this. I would never share it with them. They made fun of me when I talked about this girl I liked when I was about 6. My parents and grandmother, at the table, laughing at me for liking this girl. Mocking me... BAH IM SO PISSED!! So with this all inside my mind I got super pissed at them but I repressed it... until now. All this time I've been trying to get work done and be productive only to find myself procrastinating. It was like my brain was saying "There are more important stuff for you to deal with!". And I ignored it and played videogames. And then I felt like shit because I was being really unproductive, so i go work and the cycle continues... Today I figured out what my feelings were trying to tell me. Why I couldn't work for more than 30 minutes without going back to videogames. Why I wasted over 7000 hours playing fucking video games!!!! I'm so fucking pissed I wasted ALL THAT TIME. I could be living alone far from this hellhole getting a good salary. I denied job offers because I would feel depressed when i thought of working. Maybe because I had all this rage built up inside of me! I repressed all that I felt towards my parents and didn't face it! I hid behind videogames to waste time purposefully! I probably thought that work would be videogames 2.0 to repress my feelings towards my parents, since at leaste while playing I can listen to podcasts and think about my life. I'm starting to feel less anger and it's probably because I'm disconnecting emotionally... I'm super scared of letting this general feeling go away, and go back to where I was. I am afraid of continuing to live a unproductive life, feeling inferior when other people ask me what i've been up to.. "Oh you know just played 100h of league of legends, what about you?" I'm feeling sad and scared now and stopped feeling anger. All this time growing up i've had little to none emotional support and useful life lessons. I've never trusted my parents advice (thank god) and was going in a really bad direction until I found FDR. Thank you Stef Mike and Stoyan for doing this. You are literally saving lives. Thank you so so much. I wanted to share this with all of you and if anyone can help me out I'd be very very grateful..

Thank you for your insight, I'm 20 years old. It's definitely true that it was a let down, but i don't think i had very big expectations. I was looking forward for it since it would be my first time working 8h a day. I agree that I was expecting for this experience to be a positive change, but i'd like to also point out that I really felt that I finally found the job for me, but lately I've had no motivation to code and it's making me fearful of my future. I feel like I should already know what I want to do for a living and feel passionate and commited to it, getting started with my career and be independent. This is what I believe to be the trigger of the depression, but i wonder why i suddently stopped enjoying the work i loved for a year, and even started learning by myself. Hello kevin, and thank you for sharing your experience as a web developer. I'm sorry if I'm ignoring what you've said (I feel like I am) but I don't think i feel overwhelmed while debugging, in fact i feel quite bored. With the website I sold to a friend I stopped wanting to make it and recieve the payment, This happened when I was integrating it with paypal. It took me a while to start reading into the paypal integration, and i'm not sure why but I really didn't want to do the job towards the end. I didn't have any motivation. I'm starting to realize I felt this way because I though one teacher had unrealistic expectations. This is similar to the perfectionist expectations I think my current employer (where I'm interning) has. Maybe they were justified, but at the time I didn't think they were and still don't. What has been your experience with this? Also I'd like to ask where do you find motivation to code? Edit: I just saw that you build fdrpodcasts! It's awesome and I've used it for a long time!

Recently (about a week from now) I began feeling depressed and anxious about my work, which right now is being an intern in a furniture store, developing their website. I feel really confused about where these feelings come from, and I'd love some feedback from the FDR community about this. This last year i decided to take a one year course on web development, which here in Portugal is the (and I think Europe) is level 5 education (lvl 4 is highschool and 6 is college, i think). I was very excited in the beggining and really loved programming, and although there were some really useless classes, the course was a overall positive, and I was enjoying my time there. In the end of the school year, came all the exams and i was really under stress for two weeks. I needed to build a webstore from ground up as evaluation for multiple classes. I was really enjoying building this website in the start, and it made me very happy since I've had problems finding motivation in the past, and i was building a website that was really exceeding everyone's expectations, and I was also going to sell it to a friend. But in the end of programing it I started getting really annoyed with all the bug fixing and testing and working on it started to be really boring, like I didn't want to finish it. During the last 3 months I also started interning. It was ok in the start, but quickly turned boring because I wasn't programming, I was adding products to the furniture webstore I'm interning for. I was always thinking I'd have fun programing for the webstore i work for, and i was really looking forward to start since I was tired of the repetitive work. After some time interning, we finally started programming a website, to generate traffic to the webstore (a gallery of furniture to attract new customers). The planning was fun in the beggining, but almost as soon as me and my 2 friends also interning there got to work, I felt really unmotivated, and finishing the website felt more like a obligation and less like the job i wanted to have 6 months ago... I started feeling deep sadness and anxiety, mainly in the bug fixing and testing. During this period one of my colleagues asked the supervisor to start interning from home, which is doable given the nature of the job, and since it's almost 1h to get to work. He started being much less productive and everytime we'd have disagreements he'd respond with passive agressive comments, which was really annoying. My other colleague and I also started having problems and getting upset at eachother, for reasons that I won't go into here, but if you need details I'll respond to. To top off this combination of being upset at the job i was doing and my colleagues, the place i was working at was a badly lit cubicle, with barely any natural light. This is when I started to feel really bad. Everyday I went to work i felt so sad I had to take breaks to cry. I was counting every minute to go home. Even writing this made me tear up. I decided to ask my supervisor if i could work from home two days a week, and he agreed, while hearing me crying about it. I felt sad and anxious. Every day I worked there I was hoping for when I could stay home. Every day I worked home I was sad that the next day i'd have to go work there. Today is monday, and I decided to not go to work because i'm feeling too anxious and almost depressed. I didn't feel like eating (I'm a bit overweight), I didn't feel like doing my morning routine, I feel like ****. *I forgot to mention my girlfriend has been helping me through these tough times. ** Also yesterday my cat (he's very important to me) got really sick and the vet told me he could have the feline equivelent of leukemia or aids.

Podcast #2817 WIN-WIN or WIN-LOSE – Wednesday Call In Show October 8th, 2014 is currupted beyond 1:35:00

First of all, thank you all for your interest! Ok, incoming wall of text: Not much happened. It was the weekend after the first week of classes i've had in over a year, but the day was quite lazy, browsing the web and playing video games. I'll divide this reply into pharagraphs, as in your text: It's amazing how many things you got correct on my life. So yes, I played a lot of videogames last year, having taken a break from school to do some side projects and dealing with my life. I wouldn't say I was confortable with it, as I was often feeling useless while playing video games. What do you mean by control here? The first sentence is true, though I don't understand how the my family got you to this conclusion. I'm 19 years old. What do you mean by the fire being an expansion? "There is a fear of going somewhere you really want to go because you are afraid of what you might find there." Yes. I've been feeling this more and more, being afraid to go to therapy. I don't really understand why, and I feel there's something in my mind blocking me from knowing and going. The remaining of the paragraph makes absolute sense. I was leaving australia, and I agree with your sentence:"If it is that you leave that space of recognizing you are holding yourself back and perhaps wasting your life and you decide to go back to your old ways -- not so productive." The first and second paragraphs ring so many bells, and it makes complete sense, thank you so much! Unfortunately, I'm 19 and taking classes for web development and have a girlfried who's in college. Moving to Australia would be really nice, but I don't have much information about its laws and it isn't a possibility in the near future, but i will definitely consider it before I have kids and when i'm financially independent!

I think I don't open up to them because of fear. I always feel very unconfortable doing it. And even though what you think is completely rational, I sometimes do that mistake when I give my opinion about a subject. I try to give some thoughts about anarchism, and even though they agree my parents just say its good theoreticly but not praticly. I do this more often than I should.

Hey guys so I had this dream less than an hour ago, what do you think? Text between [ ] are explaining my real life, not the dream itself. I arrived in a tropical place, an avenue, close to the see in the start and turning inland in the end [it's similar to a place in my town, but in a tropical setting]. This is all very confusing, and i'm not sure what happened first, but I start walking down the street and the first thing I notice is this jaguar becomes agressive towards a man and he extends his hand to his nose, making him docile and run away. After this and a bit further down the road the jaguar starts coming after me, but having seen the man I do the same thing and make him friendly. I started petting the jaguar and he was really enjoying it, laying down with his belly up so i'd pet him [i have a cat, and this is known as one place that cats wont let you touch unless they completely trust you]. The jaguar leaves, not sure why, and I continue down the road and enter the house with some of my family, that have joined me midway. My family never happeared, but I had the feeling they were there. So after entering the house, I notice there are people there but get the feeling they don't really matter, so i dont even recognise anyone. I hear someone saying there's a fire and I try to go outside and put it out with a recipient and water. I don't really know where I'm getting the water from, but its not really important. So I start putting out the fire thats going on in the front garden, in the plants. After a small battle we finally put it down. I was the only one outside and felt like there was a voice telling me to go outside. I felt like I was the only one doing productive work there. After the fire I see the jaguar outside and go pet him, he's really happy to see me. I start walking back the road in the direction I came, and my family joins me midway. I asked them If we can keep the jaguar, since we'll be leaving. She says no, because jaguars are too dangerous and if they bite me it will hurt. [i'm always wrestling with my cat playfully and he bites my hand, controlling his strenght. It doesn't hurt much so I continue playing] This part of the dream ends here, and another one starts, in which i'm writting a letter to a friend I met there. I don't remember where I met him, maybe at the fire? Maybe he was the voice? Maybe the guy who controlled the jaguar? So I'm very sad writting this letter and telling him that australia is my dream place to live [it is in real life, but I'm afraid of all the dangers there] I remember this guys being a friend like no other, best friend. [i have some people I play games with, but I don't consider them true friends. I'm pretty lonely] I also remember he made youtube videos about australia, debunking misconceptions about it. The dream ends here, with me thinking that I don't really have to leave, but leaving the place.