Top
Best
New

Posted by swah 1/20/2026

I'm addicted to being useful(www.seangoedecke.com)
603 points | 309 commentspage 5
_DeadFred_ 1/20/2026|
Being useful easily turns into to Superman syndrome. Superman syndrome easily turns into to/masks lack of self worth. It's sometimes healthy to figure out how to be comfortable with yourself without external validation.
medion 1/20/2026||
Being useful can often be a curse without strong boundaries - in work and relationships, I personally have ended up becoming overly extracted... Which later seems to lead on to resentment and in the worst case, contempt.
metabagel 1/20/2026||
> some people in tech companies will identify people like me and wring us out in ways that only benefit them

Absolutely. They inevitably get promoted to managers, because they are able to parasitically get things done.

Havoc 1/20/2026||
This only works if the environment caps the work somehow. Else there is an endless amount of problems finding their way into the plate of those with a rep for being helpful problem solvers
haizhung 1/20/2026||
Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are.

There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.

https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...

zhisme 1/20/2026||
giving a like for quoting Gogol and Akakiy Akakievich (I wish you could understand this russian wordplay and what's meaning about that nicknames and why they were chosen)
ambicapter 1/20/2026|
> I think in Russian this is supposed to be an obviously silly name, like “Poop Poopson”.

Is this correct? From the footnotes.

justsomehnguy 1/20/2026|||
Nope.

>> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations

Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_day#Russia

zhisme 1/20/2026|||
yep, that's right. The idea of his nickname that he is really silly. Small man and no good at anything. If you want to go deeper and harsh synonyms he is like "shitty" man, doing shit and receiving shit. His nickname fully describes him like useless, small, no influence, clueless, talentless man. One from the great unwashed
ChrisMarshallNY 1/20/2026||
I can relate to this. I find that I have the same issue.
mcv 1/20/2026|
Is this not something everybody wants to some degree? Maybe not to the extreme of Akaky, but of course I like being useful. I like solving problems. I like making things that people use, and love to use.

It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.

I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.

showsover 1/20/2026||
Seeing things being broken but not being fixed is a real source of frustration. The tricky thing in my experience has been figuring out which are issues that nobody bothered to fix and which are issues that seem simple but require huge changes to fix.

The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.

scjon 1/20/2026||
I think it depends on the person, I've had coworkers who struggle or don't enjoy solving problems. I enjoy solving problems at work so much that I find myself doing it on nights and weekends. I've also got an unhealthy mindset that I'm not going to let the "computer" win.
More comments...