u/Last-year-was-great

I grew up in a nominally modern orthodox household. My parents had very different levels of observance. They fought (sometimes viciously) about how religious to raise me and my brother. My Mom was the more observant one, but for her, it was all guilt based (she’s a child of holocaust survivors, and her cousins are all ultra orthodox- which she sees as a superior lifestyle, but one which she can’t attain). My Dad was raised in a secular home, but became religious in HS, though he was always an avowed atheist and would frequently ridicule the orthodox community we lived in as superstitious and intolerant.

I went to yeshiva thru 12th grade, and had a mostly negative experience.

Elementary school was a compromise between the black hat Yeshiva my Mom wanted to send me, and the modern, co-ed one my Dad wanted me to go to. It was a poorly run school that did little to educate me.

HS was spent at a well known uber-Zionist school but I had a terrible experience there mostly because it was my first co-ed experience (and I had a lot of acne).

Fast forward 25 years.. I’m married with 3 young kids. My wife converted to Judaism (because when we started dating I told her I couldn’t marry a non Jew). We’re not observant, we’re not involved in any jewish communities, mainly because we’re disgusted by the Israel worship at the synagogues we used to belong to. And my wife is now reconnecting to her Catholic roots. The other day she told me she converted partly as an FU to her parents, and now that she’s older she’s reevaluating.

Although I ditched religious practice a long time ago, I used to have a generally favorable view of Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. Since Oct 7th I no longer do. Forgive the hyperbole (I’m prone to it), but to me Judaism has become a suicidal/genocidal cult.

When we got married we agreed to raise our kids Jewish, but my heart just isn’t in it anymore. Occasionally we do Shabbat dinner (at my wife’s insistence) but the thought of my kids singing engaging in Jewish cultural or religious practices (singing Kabbalah Shabbat, saying a bracha, learning tanach or Talmud) is distasteful to me.

Anyone else have similar feelings?

I’ve spent the last half hour trying to figure out why Hug isn’t appearing as an option in the Height settings on my frame. When I finally do, I’ll have a brief moment of “yeah, I rule!” followed by the sober realization that learning this bit of arcane minutiae took WAY too long and that too much of my day is filled with stuff like this at the expense of you know.. actually designing things.

Does anyone else feel like that?

Maybe it’s the ambiguity inherent in the field of design, or the literally endless amount of skills to learn. Or it could be just having started at a new company after 15 years with another one. But here’s how it plays out for me: I’ll do a bunch of work (hours, maybe days) thinking I’m being productive and doing a good job at design. And then one thing (whether it’s an elementary critique of my designs from a colleague, or the realization that I did something inefficiently, or maybe just fatigue sets in) and I’ll spend the entire next day absolutely certain that I have no idea what I’m doing and that practically every other designer at my company knows something I fundamentally don’t grasp and will never understand.