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Mohammed Ashour
Mohammed Ashour

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The Talkative creatures inside the silent beings' head (The SW Engineer mental health problems)

You wake up every day, checking your backlog, your tasks, your issues that are waiting for you to solve, it's exciting somedays, boring others, painful others, but most of the time you kinda like it, it's telling the story of you, your effect in the world. The solutions that you thought of, are making an impact somewhere for someone. This is exciting, yeah it is.

Let me introduce myself, I'm a software engineer writing solutions in the Data and ML space, I'm also a researcher who tries so hard to find a problem so I can propose some solution to it, exciting life, isn't it?

Beyond my tech intro, I kinda suck! who else am I? Is there another intro that I can tell others about myself besides my magical solution that I wrote to solve the problem we faced in the production? or that solution that made our product faster? or that open source project that I contributed to? What are my hobbies? What are hobbies? are they some sort of problems we can fix? If they aren't, how I deal with them? something is missing.

Dealing with silent creatures too much makes another one

Alt Photo by Christina on Unsplash
Every day, I open my eyes, get my dose of caffeine, and start my journey this day with my everyday pal, my laptop, we are used to be silent, actually, we excel at it.
TBH, it taught me how to be good at it. Dealing with a silent machine made me a one, and made me prefer their existence, my laptop, my phone, my books, I like spending my time with them, and they never complain.
This isn't a problem? not for me at least, but for the ones inside my head, I don't think they like it.

Dealing with silent creatures too much created talkative ones trapped in my head

Alt Photo by Nicholas Kusuma on Unsplash

I think this created some conflicts in my own being, being that social creature that prefers to be silent most of the time is kinda contradicting.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that being silent is the problem, Personally, I think it's great not to be that annoying talkative person, but the thing I pointing to is being not able to express yourself, not able to talk out loud outside your inner zone, outside your inner world, with people that are outside your head.
Yeah, I know you have these people that you are talking to them in your head right now, I know that because I have similar people of my own, we discuss everything that I can't discuss out loud, and these things are a lot.

The life problem of being trapped

Alt Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
Can you stop a moment and try to think of a good hobby you enjoy and practice?
if you found one, good for you! if you haven't, what do you feel?
you can ask your inner creatures now about how do they think about it? let me share with you what they are discussing now inside my head.
One of them thinks that there is no problem here, asks the question of what are hobbies anyway? are they that important? what does it affect our life?
another one replies that he thinks the main issue that we struggle to define ourselves outside being an SW Engineer, he thinks that there would be a problem if we quit this, a life problem of what are we now, and what do we do?
another one thinks that may be the answer to all of this is to not think about it, maybe we should just keep ourselves busy with what we have, and then we won't have much time or energy to discuss this.
There are other ones, but their ideas can't be shared without being concerned about how badly they can affect you as a reader, so let's skip them

So, What are you outside your commits?

Alt Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash
For me, I don't have an answer yet, maybe that is the middle age crisis that everybody is talking about, don't get me wrong I'm not the old, but maybe my folks inside my head are having one now.
But what about you? Is there anything going on in your life outside your commits? so If I have gone through all your commits will I know the most about you and your life? or won't I?

Why?

I don't know, I don't know why we should talk about it, and I don't know why I wrote this, maybe there is a different being in my head, one who is old enough to know much about who I was and wondering now about who am I. I couldn't answer, so I tried to solve it, I searched StackOverflow, found nothing! So I thought maybe should be writing about it.

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