I don't post here much because I tend to hate the comments. When someone has shared a blog where I referenced mental health once, I was called out for it as "one of those people" and that's messed up.

Yes, tons of people go through this feeling and you never know because they don't talk about it.

In addition to info above - I'd share the following. You don't need these things to be better, necessarily, and anxiety will create traps to overemphasize the feelings of importance you have (and frequency) about certain thoughts. Comparison is also a source of dissatisfaction.

I would recommend talking with someone who can explain the traps of magical thinking and explain some resiliency techniques, as well as researching this on your own (i.e. CBT) but also looking pretty seriously into mindfulness and some of the core concepts that got built up around Buddhism.

People think of it as a religion but it's basically 2000 years of practice built up around mental health and understanding why people are unhappy and how to change that, and it solves it just by changing perspectives about thinking. Ignore the religious parts and it's still just as solid. Once you start to experience greater space between thoughts and understand some of the concepts about attachment to ideas and wants, and can minimize the concepts of "self", you can have a completely new perspective.

Anxiety will create a way to show you that you need things and you can't get to the things you have, and you don't really need those things (you can still get them) and the stories aren't necessarily true.

One of the dangers of programming is it teaches you to predict failure/disaster, and I think some of this thinking is an occupational hazard (running startups more so!) where you think you can anticipate how the future will work out and try to prevent "outages" of sorts, and this is something you have to avoid.

We tend to value thinking and the idea that thinking solves all of our problems, but the foreground thinking we do is not the most accurate and best parts of our minds, and takes us out from observing the things around us.

Finally, depression is technically a disease that has a bit of a feedback loop in it. It's difficult to reason in that situation. Don't make yourself try and don't worry about having timetables.

I also recommend the exercise suggestion and having some easy regular things to look forward to, even if it's just a couple of classes at the gym. Even that kind of socialization is often enough.

On the entrepreneurship question, I didn't have those skills either and still did ok -- that's just you probably wanting to be authentic and not fake. But making it isn't all you think either. Lots of people with a lot of wealth and success can still be unhappy, people with wives and kids can still be depressed.

Hence I think really diving into the mindfulness aspects and trusting in neuroplasticity is transformative - things can get better, even if they only get 1% better every day along some sort of Xeno's paradox curve, they are still getting better.

Even some basic supplement changes can make a big difference - vitamin D, adoptogens, etc. Rather than treating it like an experiment where you want to find one solution, it's reasonable to try a lot of things to make changes at once.

Another analog is burnout is kind of a form of brain damage (that can manifest about worrying about other things) - it takes a long time to recover from, so give yourself some credit and empathesize with having whatever issues, but realize they are also not "you".