Write post: About mental health

priv/posts/2024-09-04-about-mental-health.md

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+---
+title: "About mental health"
+description: "This post is a follow-up on my previous post about mental health. I talk about how I'm trying to establish limits to protect my mental health and how that's needed to build a healthy company."
+tags: ["Mental health"]
+---
+
+It’s not the first time I’m talking about mental health, and it won’t be the last one. I do so to structure my thoughts and leave my story in the hope that people can avoid falling into the same traps that I did.
+
+I’d describe my 20s as the decade of professional success: get a higher salary, climb the ladder, and get recognized in the industry. The dream was suddenly spoiled, and I was overwhelmed by many feelings. I was disappointed about the reality of the tech industry and how businesses work, which I hadn’t realized before. I also found myself with an identity toxically intertwined with my professional self. My work defined myself. Coding had evolved from a pure craft activity I loved into a tool to be recognized or successful in an industry filled with entrepreneurs and indie builders. I ought to be like them; I thought many times: work, work, work, and work. I made my health and the Pedro outside of work secondary. As bad as it sounds, I forgot about myself. **I became addicated to working.**
+
+[“Hacking Capitalism”](https://hackingcapitalism.io/) by [Kris Nóva](https://krisnova.net/bio/) started to open my eyes. It helped me better understand capitalism and the tech industry and shift the focus toward myself and my passion for the craft. However, we needed to turn [Tuist](https://tuist.io) into something we could make a living off, so I inevitably threw myself into the industry I had come out disillusioned. On one side, I conceived it as an opportunity to codify its values and a healthier approach to doing business with technology, one that values openness and empowers both the people who use our tools and the people who make it possible. However, you still need to navigate the unfair practices of the industry: *people saying that you have no chance to succeed with two founders being technical, companies refusing to correspond to the value that they get through financial contributions, or feeling tiny against the giants that have endless streams of capital to outcompete you or take their privilege position to shit on you.* It has been challenging to navigate, but I learned something about it. **Perhaps I’m still too connected to work?**
+
+Another book further opened my eyes here. It’s called [“Technofeudalism”](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781529926095) by [Yanis Varoufakis](https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/237985/yanis-varoufakis). It talks about the idea of cloud capital and how it tore down the walls that gave us freedom in this capitalistic world. The freedom to be someone else outside of work. The freedom to think without thinking about whether something should be posted. The freedom to take a nap without thinking about meetings. The freedom to have a timeless hobby. All of that is gone in this world that Technofeudalism is shaping, and I fell victim to that. This is not only due to the amount of thinking that went into work but also the peripheral X doom-scrolling and the ongoing feeling of having to work on my and Tuist’s brand to succeed in building a business. I succumbed to the cloud capital participating in it with my attention and time.
+
+I think **establishing limits there is needed for my mental health, and my mental health is, in fact, needed to build a healthy company**, so I’m not doing either myself or Tuist a favor by trying to be always online and giving away investing in myself. So I started to change that. It won’t be easy because I have to revert to many patterns that I acquired over the years, but it’s a must-do to remain mentally healthy. I uninstalled Slack and removed my work email address from the phone. I’m also limiting my time on social channels and stopped using X. More and more, it’s becoming a very hostile environment. I like it in Mastodon, and while the reach of what we post there is smaller, I’m becoming comfortable with that. It’s not my role to capture people’s eyeballs with shiny posts on X, but to share humane stories that people can read at their own pace if they feel like it. This last thing aligns more with our values, but it feels odd having jumped on the Twitter and X train for many years.
+
+I’m trying not to do things outside of work: resting, walking, or exercising. I’m reverting this idea that my life has to feel productive. I’m not a machine, and therefore, I shouldn’t treat myself like that. I have emotions, a complex brain that I need to take care of, a family to love and spend time with, and a life to live and enjoy instead of spending it jumping on the hamster wheels of becoming successful, whatever that means.
+
+I want to live a simple life with the people I love. Really.