Why Poker is so cruel

Sometimes when things do not go well whatsoever in Poker, you can feel like shit, why is that?

I think it is in a big way related to the fact that we as humans want to see progress in what we are doing.
If I write this blog post, there is one more article up in my blog, if I fix cars for a living and I fix a couple a day, there is stuff you can look back at the end of the day and see progress.
Not so much in poker.. you can go through periods of time where you go even backwards in progress, if you define progress as money you made. You can even go backwards in stuff you learned if you concentrate on a different style or just had a break for a bit and now feel you play a lot worse. You can have progress if you look at the number of hands played, but if those then do not result in anything.. back to feeling like shit.
It is also very hard to confirm the progress you HOPE made on a theoretical side with your results because of
the huge variance, just a good session means nothing and once you have a meaningful sample size your game has changed already.

Being a programmer, I also missed that progress there sometimes. If you look for a bug for hours and you just do not find it.. or even worse, you work on something and then management tells you that that is not needed anymore..

Well.. at the moment I am in one of those spots, playing worse, being in a downswing..sux.
Especially playing worse and in general being less interested in learning atm probably because I am behind where I once was.. Seeing my viewer numbers decline on twitch does not help my motivation to stream either..

There is a reason that it is probably the single most important thing for a game designer to make the players feel that they progress in the game.

Here is a good youtube video that inspired this article, he recommends just pushing through or setting new goals, have to think about this in general I try to do stuff that motivates me intrinsincally, but sometimes that will come back after a down period too..

I also have to say, that I have been at this point in my life before and well.. I regreted not sticking with poker the first time around I guess at least in some sense.