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Flunking my Anthropic interview again

(taylor.town)
369 points surprisetalk | 5 comments | 29 Aug 25 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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anigbrowl ◴[29 Aug 25 19:35 UTC] No.45068421[source]▶
Dear Author,

the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.

You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.

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1. JimmyBuckets ◴[29 Aug 25 21:26 UTC] No.45069579[source]▶
This makes me sad. Please don't speak to people like this. The small pieces of humanity that people sincerely share are about the only thing that it is worth living for. What a dark world we would live in when our public sphere is filled with insincerity. I can't infer anything about you from a single comment but it must be incredibly isolating and lonely to talk to you when you are in this mindset. I can see your good intentions but you have communicated a sadness and defensiveness that presents cynicism as truth.
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2. hebejebelus ◴[29 Aug 25 21:52 UTC] No.45069851[source]▶
I agree. We all have thoughts and feelings and emotions; denying that, making that invisible, hiding the mere fact of your humanity is surely a difficult and sad way to exist. It is OK to feel things; it is OK to write about your feelings; it is OK to publish those writings wherever you like.
3. anigbrowl ◴[29 Aug 25 23:48 UTC] No.45070662[source]▶
I feel you've misread me as objecting to the author's sincerity - I don't think there's anything wrong with that! What I meant was that the internet, where all communication is necessarily quasi-personal and heavily mediated, is really not the best place to reach toward for mental health help, and that it's tremendously important to maintain or pursue genuine interpersonal contact, unmediated by screens or abstractions.
4. vicnov ◴[30 Aug 25 05:06 UTC] No.45072043[source]▶
They spoke with respect and pointed out that, from the point of career growth, they may need to talk to someone. They pointed out that there might be more effective ways of dealing with what the blog post author is going through. This comment didn't make me sad at all, if anything I appreciated it.
5. ameixaseca ◴[31 Aug 25 19:13 UTC] No.45086115[source]▶
I see the opposite: OP's post sounds like a cry for help, and paints a picture of someone that is not in a good place mentally.

anigbrowl might have been too direct and harsh (I would say the first paragraph of his comment could be worded differently), but he was very clear in the second paragraph about where to go from here.

If this is truly how OP thinks and this post is how they feel about everything that happened, I strongly recommend for OP to look for professional help (with emphasis on "professional").