Is our definition of burnout all wrong?(bustle.com)
bustle.com
Is our definition of burnout all wrong?
https://www.bustle.com/wellness/burnout-definition-what-we-get-wrong
131 comments
We have all been sold a lie. The major regrets people give when they are near death, are all linked to work. They wish they had been a better more active parent, they wish they had spent more time with family and friends. Where do these people spend most of their time? Work. Where do they regret spending most of their time? Work.
It's funny, you suggest the idea that "work" is a farce and people act as if you're recommending they stay still until they die. We cannot even fathom a life without "work" as it currently exists. To remind readers, when faced with imminent death, the biggest regret is work. Yet we prevent access to integral institutions based on whether someone is employed, we judge others based on where they are employed, the entire education system is based on funnelling people to work more, and we view homeless people as subhumans who just need to find a job.
Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
It's funny, you suggest the idea that "work" is a farce and people act as if you're recommending they stay still until they die. We cannot even fathom a life without "work" as it currently exists. To remind readers, when faced with imminent death, the biggest regret is work. Yet we prevent access to integral institutions based on whether someone is employed, we judge others based on where they are employed, the entire education system is based on funnelling people to work more, and we view homeless people as subhumans who just need to find a job.
Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
>Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
But think of the productivity hacks that are possible! We're just not telling ourselves the right thing. Cognitive worksheets. The Secret. Microdosing. We'll get it eventually! Musk and Jobs got it. We just have to hack it.
But think of the productivity hacks that are possible! We're just not telling ourselves the right thing. Cognitive worksheets. The Secret. Microdosing. We'll get it eventually! Musk and Jobs got it. We just have to hack it.
What if I can't afford 2 new organs or hair plugs tho
My dad is 71 and we just did an awesome remote wilderness adventure together.
He just said if he could have his life over again he would work less and do more fun stuff. I take that to heart.
He just said if he could have his life over again he would work less and do more fun stuff. I take that to heart.
> They wish they had been a better more active parent, they wish they had spent more time with family and friends. Where do these people spend most of their time? Work. Where do they regret spending most of their time? Work.
I don't think you have much evidence for that, do you? A 40 hour work week does take up time, but still leaves enough time for other activities. Most people don't die during their working life either.
Sure, working more isn't healthy, but work is unavoidable the way society is organized. Until you're willing to give up running water and supermarkets, you're going to have to work. There's not going to be a reevaluation of the modern idea of work. All you can do is limit the excesses.
So, unionize.
I don't think you have much evidence for that, do you? A 40 hour work week does take up time, but still leaves enough time for other activities. Most people don't die during their working life either.
Sure, working more isn't healthy, but work is unavoidable the way society is organized. Until you're willing to give up running water and supermarkets, you're going to have to work. There's not going to be a reevaluation of the modern idea of work. All you can do is limit the excesses.
So, unionize.
> [..] A 40 hour work week does take up time, but still leaves enough time for other activities. [...]
And then, there are all these (low-paid) jobs where 40 hours won't keep you alive, all those people that need to commute an hour each way and so on. And the , it's easily a 50-60 hours/week if you take door-to-door time.
Yes, change your life and get something better. But that's sometimes not so easy.
And then, there are all these (low-paid) jobs where 40 hours won't keep you alive, all those people that need to commute an hour each way and so on. And the , it's easily a 50-60 hours/week if you take door-to-door time.
Yes, change your life and get something better. But that's sometimes not so easy.
Join a union, and fight collectively for better remuneration and labor conditions.
> A 40 hour work week does take up time, but still leaves enough time for other activities.
How much is enough time?
> Most people don't die during their working life either.
But they do tend to have kids long before retiring.
Work is unavoidable, yes, at least until we can automate everything. But are 40 hour weeks unavoidable for our currently standard of living? I doubt it.
How much is enough time?
> Most people don't die during their working life either.
But they do tend to have kids long before retiring.
Work is unavoidable, yes, at least until we can automate everything. But are 40 hour weeks unavoidable for our currently standard of living? I doubt it.
How much is enough? With the dwindling labor force, 40 hours is going to be the minimum. Automating everything is a pipe dream. It's really hard, the break-through tech isn't there, and there are not enough engineers to build robots for all those tasks.
Do you think subsistence farmers had better work life balance?
Having worked both "grueling" manual labor jobs and "stressful" white collar work: I would rather be an ape living in some rain-forest.
I don't want to have complex thought. I don't want to have to perform feats of self-flagellation everyday in order to survive. I don't want to be forced to spend the entirety of my very short life in relative isolation, making some other ape filthy rich so he can escape the absurdity and emptiness of existence.
Let me hunt for other small animals with my tribe -- and then spend the rest of my time loafing about. I don't feel like contorting my body and mind as a glorified circus animal in order to get that metaphorical bread.
I don't want to have complex thought. I don't want to have to perform feats of self-flagellation everyday in order to survive. I don't want to be forced to spend the entirety of my very short life in relative isolation, making some other ape filthy rich so he can escape the absurdity and emptiness of existence.
Let me hunt for other small animals with my tribe -- and then spend the rest of my time loafing about. I don't feel like contorting my body and mind as a glorified circus animal in order to get that metaphorical bread.
I know what you are trying to say but just a reminder that rain forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Logic doesn't add up. First you rely on experience to say work sucks but then turn around and pick ape life even though you only have the vaguest idea what's like to be one.
No, but I can't help but think of what my grandmother said to me around age 95 - "Your generation may have more money, but we had less stress." That's saying something considering the dirt-floor shack type existence that she faced as a child and young woman. She said to me on more than one occasion that she saw modern life as worse than what she experienced where they were poor, but worked together as a family and enjoyed the natural rhythm of the seasons.
Highly highly recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks for this question.
Someone already suggested this book before I replied so I'll add some more information.
The comparison of "intuitive tasks" is one that sticks with me. So much of what we do currently isn't intuitive like it potentially would have been for farmers. We don't know who benefits. We go somewhere for an abstract amount of time, we "work", we go back home so we can afford to spend time with our family, but not too much time we have work to do to complete before the next sprint.
We have layers of people telling each other what they should be working on who in turn tell people "lower" than them what they should be working on. No intuition here!
Someone already suggested this book before I replied so I'll add some more information.
The comparison of "intuitive tasks" is one that sticks with me. So much of what we do currently isn't intuitive like it potentially would have been for farmers. We don't know who benefits. We go somewhere for an abstract amount of time, we "work", we go back home so we can afford to spend time with our family, but not too much time we have work to do to complete before the next sprint.
We have layers of people telling each other what they should be working on who in turn tell people "lower" than them what they should be working on. No intuition here!
Cheers for the comment outlining more about the book, picked it up, I'm planning on having a big christmas break of reading!
I don’t have time to give a super in depth answer as I’m mobile - remind me tomorrow and I can - but the novel Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkenan I believe addresses this. They, in a sense, did actually as they relied more on natural clocks that started and stopped the day. I don’t remember the fine details, so I will try to edit with an elaboration tomorrow.
I spent three years in rural Africa in 35 countries. I spent most of my time where tourists don’t go. I met tons of people that had never seen a white person, border guards that had never seen a foreigner, etc.
Categorically, without question the vast majority of people told me they work hard for a few months a year during planting and harvest, otherwise they party, spend time with family and do whatever the hell they want. They don’t have Netflix or iPhones, but they have a huge amount of leisure time
Categorically, without question the vast majority of people told me they work hard for a few months a year during planting and harvest, otherwise they party, spend time with family and do whatever the hell they want. They don’t have Netflix or iPhones, but they have a huge amount of leisure time
David Graeber, citing other researchers in his recent book The Origin of Everything, certainly believes this was true. I think the answer was that while subsistence farming was a lot of work, it also left much of the day and the year to wait / hunt / do other tasks, while the crops grew. They certainly didn't work 40 hour weeks every week, year round.
You mention lack of meaningful work to be a cause of burnout.
Now this may be a difference between US and European definitions of ‘burnout’, but this doesn’t hold true for me.
I’m dealing with (the aftermath of) a burnout since 2016 after what at the time felt like the best half year of my life.
I did everything. A 40hr/week internship that was very fulfilling to me, social engagements on almost every week night, activities every weekend, and a romantic relationship I was trying—but failed—to make work.
It all felt great until I just couldn’t even pay attention to mental junk food anymore.
Now of course this is an anecdote. But I have been told burnout is first and foremost a deregulation of the stress (i.e. adrenaline/cortisol) system). This suits much better with my experience, since I love my work, but can’t do it 40hr/w anymore.
Now this may be a difference between US and European definitions of ‘burnout’, but this doesn’t hold true for me.
I’m dealing with (the aftermath of) a burnout since 2016 after what at the time felt like the best half year of my life.
I did everything. A 40hr/week internship that was very fulfilling to me, social engagements on almost every week night, activities every weekend, and a romantic relationship I was trying—but failed—to make work.
It all felt great until I just couldn’t even pay attention to mental junk food anymore.
Now of course this is an anecdote. But I have been told burnout is first and foremost a deregulation of the stress (i.e. adrenaline/cortisol) system). This suits much better with my experience, since I love my work, but can’t do it 40hr/w anymore.
This definitely reads similar to how my body reacted, as if it was under some sort of constant invisible stress.
Constantly hot and sweating, stomach muscles tight, and the feeling of an ever-present fear of something / anything happening.
Once I was able to attribute it to work, and address some of it, things started regulating themselves, but it took a long time; and still isn't complete.
Constantly hot and sweating, stomach muscles tight, and the feeling of an ever-present fear of something / anything happening.
Once I was able to attribute it to work, and address some of it, things started regulating themselves, but it took a long time; and still isn't complete.
Lost Connections by Johann Hari (2018), FWIW:
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/17/lost-connectio...>
(I've not read it myself.)
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/17/lost-connectio...>
(I've not read it myself.)
Search more on the author of this book. Some really bad things have been written about him.
Things don't become less true simply because you heard them from a douchebag.
Cheers for the comment, what do you suggest I do with this information?
I suggest that you should learn how to read.
I’ve always thought burnout is the same thing as learned helplessness, which is a pretty well studied phenomenon in psychology. It doesn’t seem mysterious to me that if you repeatedly do a task that is unrewarding for long enough, you no longer want to do it. Then the COVID burnout can be explained by a large scale reduction in the rewards that typically keep people going.
I spend most of my 15 year career working at startups I've worked long evenings, weekends, dealt with stress, tense situations (both commercial and social) and deadlines and never had any symptoms of burnout. I switched to a large enterprise company and enjoyed the relaxed pace for a year. The first 6 months took some adjustment but I quickly figured out that getting things done in a large company just required a bit of a different skill set. Sometimes it took weeks to get a simple configuration changed but when I finally talked to the guy I learned that he had 5 kids, three of them who were sick, instantly made me realize that my frustration about the pace was uncalled for.
Fast forward to the second year, I got a new manager who turned the office politics to 11, put people in positions that they were absolutely not fit for and in general made a huge mess out of everything, ignoring the advice and suggestions of the team while doing it while continuously reminding us engineers of our low place in the picking order. If there was a way to rank managers this guy would be in the bottom 5%, I've worked with about 30 managers (in one way or another) in my career so this was bound to happen at some point.
However, I was totally not prepared for the effect it had on me. Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping poorly and my physical health was suffering. It took an enormous amount of energy just to sit through online meetings without lashing out, the rest of the team was feeling the same so you can imagine what kind of environment it was. I was lucky to get a new job very quickly and after getting out of that toxic environment I was my old self again in mere weeks.
I can totally imagine how burnout can be modeled as learned helplessness. If, I, as young, healthy guy can be reduced to a wreck, in months, in a toxic environment, I can only start to imagine what people have to go through that don't have the luxury of switching jobs quickly (for whatever reason).
Fast forward to the second year, I got a new manager who turned the office politics to 11, put people in positions that they were absolutely not fit for and in general made a huge mess out of everything, ignoring the advice and suggestions of the team while doing it while continuously reminding us engineers of our low place in the picking order. If there was a way to rank managers this guy would be in the bottom 5%, I've worked with about 30 managers (in one way or another) in my career so this was bound to happen at some point.
However, I was totally not prepared for the effect it had on me. Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping poorly and my physical health was suffering. It took an enormous amount of energy just to sit through online meetings without lashing out, the rest of the team was feeling the same so you can imagine what kind of environment it was. I was lucky to get a new job very quickly and after getting out of that toxic environment I was my old self again in mere weeks.
I can totally imagine how burnout can be modeled as learned helplessness. If, I, as young, healthy guy can be reduced to a wreck, in months, in a toxic environment, I can only start to imagine what people have to go through that don't have the luxury of switching jobs quickly (for whatever reason).
> I was reduced to someone who was frustrated 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping poorly and my physical health was suffering. It took an enormous amount of energy just to sit through online meetings
I had this happen too - this is so important to understand - your performance is hugely affected by the environment. This is super depressing, causes so much self hatw and angst
If you find yourself in that position, you have to chabge team or company asap
If a manager find thia has happened, I dont know what you do
I had this happen too - this is so important to understand - your performance is hugely affected by the environment. This is super depressing, causes so much self hatw and angst
If you find yourself in that position, you have to chabge team or company asap
If a manager find thia has happened, I dont know what you do
I have been through the same. No burnout in startups, then a period of boreout in a large company, then a political manager, then depression, and then resigning. Although my company did retain me in the end.
There's nothing worse than a clueless political manager.
There's nothing worse than a clueless political manager.
> Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping poorly and my physical health was suffering.
Always remember that it's jsut a job, and that your manager's opinion - outside of that org - is no more important than anyone else's opinion in the world.
Always remember that it's jsut a job, and that your manager's opinion - outside of that org - is no more important than anyone else's opinion in the world.
It's hard to get out of that mindset, especially as a young new hire.
In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood due to high rents, few social support structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.
There's a model of thinking taught in schools and universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or assume the burden of the imposition of value on their psyche.
In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood due to high rents, few social support structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.
There's a model of thinking taught in schools and universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or assume the burden of the imposition of value on their psyche.
To summarize, an abusive manager pays your rent and keeps you from dying. The only way to win this game is to be self-sufficient enough to walk away.
pledge fealty to a different lord
Welcome to America - compete or starve.
> in the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood
Has there been a time or place where this isn't the case?
To quote Karl Marx "He who does not work does not eat."
Has there been a time or place where this isn't the case?
To quote Karl Marx "He who does not work does not eat."
The safety net of (primarily European) certain countries is definitely easier to live with when losing a job. In theory you can probably continue indefinitely on some of those welfare payments, although for many people that leads to another kind of burnout (boreout?) again.
It’s also really not comfortable. I am sure you could live on it indefinitely as a kind of ascetic performance but people who actually need that to survive are usually very keen on getting other sources of income. Some of it undeclared and evading taxes, but that’s another problem.
Overall I think there’s a decent compromise to be found there. I am happy for the society to ensure that as many people as possible have a guaranteed bare minimum to survive, which provides opportunities to find better. If some people are content with surviving, well. More power to them. They are not in big enough numbers to matter anyway (the sums involved are dwarfed by companies’ tax fraud).
Overall I think there’s a decent compromise to be found there. I am happy for the society to ensure that as many people as possible have a guaranteed bare minimum to survive, which provides opportunities to find better. If some people are content with surviving, well. More power to them. They are not in big enough numbers to matter anyway (the sums involved are dwarfed by companies’ tax fraud).
Yes, many countries that aren’t the US provide health insurance regardless of your employment status.
Some countries (Germany, Switzerland, maybe others) will pay employment insurance even if you quit of your own accord and lower the elimination period if you had reasons to do so (as certified by a MD)
Some countries (Germany, Switzerland, maybe others) will pay employment insurance even if you quit of your own accord and lower the elimination period if you had reasons to do so (as certified by a MD)
> He who does not work does not eat
That was Lenin who wrote that, although it was originally from the Bible.
That was Lenin who wrote that, although it was originally from the Bible.
the issue is conflating work/livelyhood/job which arent always synonyms.
your survival being predicated upon engaging in state-enforced financial exploitation by a capitalist and being separated from the value of your own labor
isnt quite the same as
engaging in activities deaigned to produced a beneficial outcome to the self and society at a point in the future
your survival being predicated upon engaging in state-enforced financial exploitation by a capitalist and being separated from the value of your own labor
isnt quite the same as
engaging in activities deaigned to produced a beneficial outcome to the self and society at a point in the future
This is a rationalization, and while objectively correct and likely helpful to some degree, it ignores the emotional reality of the situation.
Related to this: one thing I saw somebody here say one time is that responsibility without authority is a key to burnout. Having the responsibility to complete a large amount of work without the authority to make the decisions needed for that work can be incredibly disempowering, which can make you feel helpless.
More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences. It could even be a good economic deal with a 9-to-5 minimal effort mindset.
Being a code monkey who thinks it's their job to be responsible for the company is hard. In that case, I agree with you. Such a code monkey needs to put themselves in a position of power somehow.
Being a code monkey who thinks it's their job to be responsible for the company is hard. In that case, I agree with you. Such a code monkey needs to put themselves in a position of power somehow.
It's not about being responsible for the company. It's about having the ability to make the decisions to guide your own work without endless bikeshedding, internal politics, red tape, conflicting messages from different layers of management, and constant meetings that go nowhere.
> Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences.
It's perfectly fine. It can also lead to burnout.
> Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences.
It's perfectly fine. It can also lead to burnout.
> endless bikeshedding, internal politics, ... , conflicting messages from different layers of management, and constant meetings that go nowhere.
This sounds more like manager incompetence than being a code monkey. But embracing code monkey-ism could help as I imagine it involves just doing tasks at one's own pace and putting up strong emotional boundaries to mismanagement. Can constant meetings or bikeshedding really hurt someone who's just looking to run out the clock?
P.S. I'm talking about choosing to be a code monkey as a philosophy, a choice. Not as a skill level that I'd call "beginner". Some people call beginners code monkeys, I am not a fan of that.
This sounds more like manager incompetence than being a code monkey. But embracing code monkey-ism could help as I imagine it involves just doing tasks at one's own pace and putting up strong emotional boundaries to mismanagement. Can constant meetings or bikeshedding really hurt someone who's just looking to run out the clock?
P.S. I'm talking about choosing to be a code monkey as a philosophy, a choice. Not as a skill level that I'd call "beginner". Some people call beginners code monkeys, I am not a fan of that.
> This sounds more like manager incompetence
Or it could be two or more competent managers coming into conflict. Or incompetent ones. It is not that rare l - if you recognise the situation, you can pick a side, but if you dont know what to do, you could be viewed badly by all participants
Or it could be two or more competent managers coming into conflict. Or incompetent ones. It is not that rare l - if you recognise the situation, you can pick a side, but if you dont know what to do, you could be viewed badly by all participants
> More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions.
Well, that is until the senior engineers or managers burnout from being "responsible" for keeping product from crashing, performance issues, and/or technical debt but without authority to change things! QED
Well, that is until the senior engineers or managers burnout from being "responsible" for keeping product from crashing, performance issues, and/or technical debt but without authority to change things! QED
Yes, burnout is not really about how much you work at all. It's caused by a mismatch between your values and your work. For many people here their values probably include curiousity and wanting to learn. I burnt out almost completely doing work that was easy - but that I totally and utterly despised because of how boring it was (and how little it would advance my career). This was indeed like learned helplessness (not being prepared to quit immediately when I had the means - which was actually at any point (!) - was the learned helplessness part).
In other words, you can burn out at a job that's 12 hours a week and not burn out at a job that's 60 hours a week. It depends heavily on the nature of the work. Whenever people talk about feeling 'burnt out' purely due to how many hours they work I am always sceptical and suspect the root cause is actually different (note that I actually think our work week is too long even at 40 hours, I think too many hours of work are unhealthy for other reasons). In this sense I'd distinguish 'exhaustion' from 'burnout'. The former can turn into the latter but often does not but the root cause of exhaustion is exertion whereas this is not the case for burnout. They can converge, of course, the ultimate result may be severe depression in either case, but it's still worth distinguishing.
In other words, you can burn out at a job that's 12 hours a week and not burn out at a job that's 60 hours a week. It depends heavily on the nature of the work. Whenever people talk about feeling 'burnt out' purely due to how many hours they work I am always sceptical and suspect the root cause is actually different (note that I actually think our work week is too long even at 40 hours, I think too many hours of work are unhealthy for other reasons). In this sense I'd distinguish 'exhaustion' from 'burnout'. The former can turn into the latter but often does not but the root cause of exhaustion is exertion whereas this is not the case for burnout. They can converge, of course, the ultimate result may be severe depression in either case, but it's still worth distinguishing.
I can see the reasoning here but I think it's a little different. Learned helplessness is the phenomenon where people stop trying to change their situation or circumstance because they feel ("learn") that nothing will help. Burnout is a little different. Burnout is more like when you simply don't want to do something any more, but often people with burnout still have the capacity to change their circumstance. Often people with burnout will quit or take time off and seriously reconsider their situation, whereas that is not the case with learned helplessness.
In my opinion burnout is actually more of a natural phenomenon, which is the mind simply needing to do something totally different and perhaps more meaningful. I believe it is also due to the unnatural tendency for people to work in the same or similar field of expertise for far too long, which is simply not natural especially for highly intellectual fields.
In my opinion burnout is actually more of a natural phenomenon, which is the mind simply needing to do something totally different and perhaps more meaningful. I believe it is also due to the unnatural tendency for people to work in the same or similar field of expertise for far too long, which is simply not natural especially for highly intellectual fields.
> In my opinion burnout is actually more of a natural phenomenon, which is the mind simply needing to do something totally different and perhaps more meaningful.
Strong disagree. Scientists burn out harder than programmers and what they do is arguably more "meaningful", at least to the individual scientist. Actually I think burnout is often triggered by moral injury, which starts by having a personal investment in the narrative of your objective
Strong disagree. Scientists burn out harder than programmers and what they do is arguably more "meaningful", at least to the individual scientist. Actually I think burnout is often triggered by moral injury, which starts by having a personal investment in the narrative of your objective
Is it possible that the difference is just a matter of scope?
Like you said, "Burnout is like when you don't want to do something anymore". Isn't that what learned helplessness is, with a 'something' that's life-scoped instead of work-scoped?
Like you said, "Burnout is like when you don't want to do something anymore". Isn't that what learned helplessness is, with a 'something' that's life-scoped instead of work-scoped?
The key aspect of learned helplessness is that the person has a lot of trouble changing their situation. Just being very averse to doing something does not fall under than unless the person also has trouble exiting from the situation that they are burnt out from, which is generally not the case with burnout.
100% agree that it's similar to learned helplessness. You put in large amounts of effort only to be rewarded with failure (or miss the social recognition you expected, or didn't get a pay raise, or management cancels your project)... Perversely the advice to take a break is likely often counterproductive, because you will further associate a reward with the burnout. Honestly IMO the best move is to reassociate labor with reward. Do small things like refactoring, chores, etc. Then plan to take a needed break some time disconnected from the high effort event.
This is my take as well. A related problem is the idea of control. If you feel you have no control over a situation, then action feels meaningless.
The book "Lab Rats" explains this phenomenon very well. In fact, apparently, the way you make a rat depressed in a lab study is to constantly change small aspects of its environment, preventing it from ever feeling stable and comfortable. I wonder if the upheaval in modern social life resulting from things like the rapid changes brought on by capitalism and information technology are a contributor to this widespread feeling.
The book "Lab Rats" explains this phenomenon very well. In fact, apparently, the way you make a rat depressed in a lab study is to constantly change small aspects of its environment, preventing it from ever feeling stable and comfortable. I wonder if the upheaval in modern social life resulting from things like the rapid changes brought on by capitalism and information technology are a contributor to this widespread feeling.
The never-ending parade of software "updates", and the constant chaos of web-based services, has killed much of the joy I used to feel when working with computers. There's no real point actually learning the system deeply anymore, because they just keep changing it out from under you, and you can't really stop them.
I will never buy a Tesla, with that big screen controlling everything, which the true owners of the vehicle keep on reprogramming from afar! At least you can count on an older car to keep on functioning in the same way you're used to, from one day to the next.
I will never buy a Tesla, with that big screen controlling everything, which the true owners of the vehicle keep on reprogramming from afar! At least you can count on an older car to keep on functioning in the same way you're used to, from one day to the next.
I think there is a lot to this. Burnout is somewhat poorly defined. The more specific "learned helplessness" would cover a lot of the cases and would be a useful guide for treatment.
One of the things I've spent time helping other engineering managers understand is that burnout doesn't relate only to exhaustion.
Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales:
1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work.
2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work.
3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work.
So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough.
Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy:
* I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients.
* I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems.
* I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work
For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...
Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales:
1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work.
2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work.
3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work.
So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough.
Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy:
* I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients.
* I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems.
* I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work
For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...
In the workplace, I've seen a few people crash into a burnout and it was always your list in reverse order.
It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague.
Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't.
Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body.
Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over.
In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.
It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague.
Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't.
Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body.
Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over.
In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.
>In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.
That's provoked me into thinking why. Assuming it's true and not a trope, some possibilities:
- They're more plugged into social media and online communities which provide validation of some of the items we're discussing here.
- They're more skeptical and cynical broadly-speaking, maybe due to some political or some Zeitgeist unique to the moment.
Again this assumes it is true that they're really more cynical about work, and we've controlled for the weird economic circumstances of the last few years. Anyone without a high salary or who's tried and failed to purchase a property is probably somewhat skeeved at the moment.
That's provoked me into thinking why. Assuming it's true and not a trope, some possibilities:
- They're more plugged into social media and online communities which provide validation of some of the items we're discussing here.
- They're more skeptical and cynical broadly-speaking, maybe due to some political or some Zeitgeist unique to the moment.
Again this assumes it is true that they're really more cynical about work, and we've controlled for the weird economic circumstances of the last few years. Anyone without a high salary or who's tried and failed to purchase a property is probably somewhat skeeved at the moment.
I think it's Zeitgeist.
The narrative of their lifetime is 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Trump and deep polarization, COVID, another war, cost of living crisis, and a middle class existence increasingly out of reach.
The future: climate crisis, multi-polar world (China, Russia), more job instability, AI wrecking everything.
Western civilization peaked in the 90s, it's all downhill since then. The millennial generation has only known downhill.
The narrative of their lifetime is 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Trump and deep polarization, COVID, another war, cost of living crisis, and a middle class existence increasingly out of reach.
The future: climate crisis, multi-polar world (China, Russia), more job instability, AI wrecking everything.
Western civilization peaked in the 90s, it's all downhill since then. The millennial generation has only known downhill.
But the 70's and 80's were marred with inflation, booms and bust cycles, Soviet-US rivalry dominating the headlines, and proxy wars in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Inner cities were grim and it isn't obvious if Americans could be described as optimistic then.
The 50's and 60's may have been a uniquely optimistic time for Americans (less so for Europeans after WWII). The country came out ahead, growing, rich and dominant. The 1960's was a unique decade seemingly of optimism and change. However there were certainly massive challenges, you can find enough evidence of terrible injustices being committed against minority groups standing up for themselves.
We work backwards and find tragedies in all of them.
Fast-forward again, we have incredible technology - we have maps, video conferencing and infinity encyclopedias in our pockets; people are getting bodypart transplants and plasma injections; we have consumer devices that monitor our health. None of us have fear of draft. There's no rational fear of rockets raining on us. We're incredibly lucky.
I can see the downhill feeling though. There's a deep pessimism.
There's reason to be pessimistic, mind you - but the pessimism is very monetizable, making it difficult to tell how much of it is being fed to us for profit.
The 50's and 60's may have been a uniquely optimistic time for Americans (less so for Europeans after WWII). The country came out ahead, growing, rich and dominant. The 1960's was a unique decade seemingly of optimism and change. However there were certainly massive challenges, you can find enough evidence of terrible injustices being committed against minority groups standing up for themselves.
We work backwards and find tragedies in all of them.
Fast-forward again, we have incredible technology - we have maps, video conferencing and infinity encyclopedias in our pockets; people are getting bodypart transplants and plasma injections; we have consumer devices that monitor our health. None of us have fear of draft. There's no rational fear of rockets raining on us. We're incredibly lucky.
I can see the downhill feeling though. There's a deep pessimism.
There's reason to be pessimistic, mind you - but the pessimism is very monetizable, making it difficult to tell how much of it is being fed to us for profit.
Soul crushed by work millennial here, and this is exactly how it went for me, twice already.
I had never heard of the MBI before, thanks for that. Maybe using the
word "burnout" is doing us a disservice and distracting from deeper
causes.
I’m increasingly noticing that the word ‘burnout’ has very different meanings in the US and in Europe (or at least the Netherlands).
Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.
Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.
I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do.
The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out.
My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information.
After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.
The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out.
My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information.
After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.
> I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do.
Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase.
It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc.
It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople.
It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters.
They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.
Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase.
It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc.
It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople.
It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters.
They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.
> It was extremely demoralising and demotivating
This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
> And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised.
Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting.
I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship.
Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting.
I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship.
Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
I think we were in very similar positions, minus the exit interview threats. Two weeks ago marked the one year anniversary of my checking out of that insane asylum and I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result.
Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
> Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it...
> I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result.
Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!
Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it...
> I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result.
Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!
> and it fails to materialize no matter what you do
In my case, it was the exact opposite. It came after striving for a particular goal for several years, achieving it, and then realizing I had no gas left in the tank to do it all over again (product manager at a big SaaS/PaaS launching products within that platform).
The part that's more interesting is why the tank was empty, and it was for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments:
- Gaslighting by middle management about solving problems / addressing issues
- Responsibility (loads of it) without authority
- Lack of focus by execs (leading to massive churn)
I do think that constantly striving for something and not achieving it can also be a cause of burnout, but I think it's just one of many possible causes / factors.
In my case, it was the exact opposite. It came after striving for a particular goal for several years, achieving it, and then realizing I had no gas left in the tank to do it all over again (product manager at a big SaaS/PaaS launching products within that platform).
The part that's more interesting is why the tank was empty, and it was for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments:
- Gaslighting by middle management about solving problems / addressing issues
- Responsibility (loads of it) without authority
- Lack of focus by execs (leading to massive churn)
I do think that constantly striving for something and not achieving it can also be a cause of burnout, but I think it's just one of many possible causes / factors.
That's a possible trigger, but far from the only one.
I think what the author is seeing is the human reaction to prolonged stress. Trauma can create this, but so can many other things.
Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.
Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.
I still think this is largely wrong.
I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job. But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day. And the end of every shift felt so good.
In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't even know why. Something about staring at screens all day - something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how other people think.
Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a distinct feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find enjoyable.
So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties of different people - both activities that humans have not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in previous eras.
I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job. But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day. And the end of every shift felt so good.
In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't even know why. Something about staring at screens all day - something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how other people think.
Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a distinct feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find enjoyable.
So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties of different people - both activities that humans have not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in previous eras.
I've noticed a similar discrepancy in my life: Mental burnout wasn't present in my early, physical-labor jobs. It also wasn't present in my early coding jobs. It only started to appear later in my career when my pay was highest and my actual time spent producing tangible output (whether physical labor or code) was lowest.
One theory is that I became less physically active over time. Exercise is well known to have a protective effect against burnout, and physical labor jobs are a lot of exercise all day. I was also going to the gym much more when I was younger.
Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and fight against dirty office politics.
Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them. Something about being in a socially consistent environment makes everything easier to stomach. On the contrary, being in weird office politics situations where Bob in management gets to insult your work and upend your priorities every week just because he's got a certain title leads to burnout. It's like the burnout is a response to dampen your expectations and efforts in response to situations where more engagement will only produce more stress and frustration.
Physical labor jobs, on the other hand, have a property that more input will usually result in at least some tangible forward progress.
One theory is that I became less physically active over time. Exercise is well known to have a protective effect against burnout, and physical labor jobs are a lot of exercise all day. I was also going to the gym much more when I was younger.
Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and fight against dirty office politics.
Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them. Something about being in a socially consistent environment makes everything easier to stomach. On the contrary, being in weird office politics situations where Bob in management gets to insult your work and upend your priorities every week just because he's got a certain title leads to burnout. It's like the burnout is a response to dampen your expectations and efforts in response to situations where more engagement will only produce more stress and frustration.
Physical labor jobs, on the other hand, have a property that more input will usually result in at least some tangible forward progress.
> Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and fight against dirty office politics.
> Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them.
This coincides with my experience. If the job. is meaningless, then burnout is highest.
And the amount of peolle who say they job. is bullshit is increasing
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2015/08...
> Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them.
This coincides with my experience. If the job. is meaningless, then burnout is highest.
And the amount of peolle who say they job. is bullshit is increasing
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2015/08...
I strongly agree with this:
"In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads."
For me, I feel the most intense burnout when I see stupidly wasted opportunities. For instance, if a startup has a great idea and plenty of funding, but the leadership is hopelessly stupid and engages in self-sabotage (and perhaps I try to save the situation but I'm ignored) and millions of dollars are wasted, then I get burnout. I felt burnout in 2016, after witnessing the insanely self-destructive leadership at "Celelot" destroy a brilliant idea, which I wrote about here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
"In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads."
For me, I feel the most intense burnout when I see stupidly wasted opportunities. For instance, if a startup has a great idea and plenty of funding, but the leadership is hopelessly stupid and engages in self-sabotage (and perhaps I try to save the situation but I'm ignored) and millions of dollars are wasted, then I get burnout. I felt burnout in 2016, after witnessing the insanely self-destructive leadership at "Celelot" destroy a brilliant idea, which I wrote about here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
> I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths.
<s>Testosterone</s>
I’ve worked cutting trees under a literal psychopath (just out of jail for murder), a guy had died of dehydration on that job the previous year. It was strenuous and I mourned/cried the loss of my girlfriend while sawing branches like a madman.
It was also the best time of my life.
See, using my body, requiring agility, quick varied microdecisions and physical strength, it makes use of the body I was given by mother nature. Compare that to working in front of a computer all day, using only the logical part of my brain, no emotions, gray screens everywhere: As much as I love being an entrepreneur and I love using my IQ 136, well, it uses 8% of the body’s capabilities - the brain and the fingers, period. It’s unnatural.
So I suspect hard physical work with actual people and emotions, triggers hormones (testosterone being the caricature of it) that regulates everything including motivation, a clean mind, and happiness. Of course I wouldn’t wish to work on a field all my life, but programming or Excel spreadsheeting may have a negative impact on the mind.
<s>Testosterone</s>
I’ve worked cutting trees under a literal psychopath (just out of jail for murder), a guy had died of dehydration on that job the previous year. It was strenuous and I mourned/cried the loss of my girlfriend while sawing branches like a madman.
It was also the best time of my life.
See, using my body, requiring agility, quick varied microdecisions and physical strength, it makes use of the body I was given by mother nature. Compare that to working in front of a computer all day, using only the logical part of my brain, no emotions, gray screens everywhere: As much as I love being an entrepreneur and I love using my IQ 136, well, it uses 8% of the body’s capabilities - the brain and the fingers, period. It’s unnatural.
So I suspect hard physical work with actual people and emotions, triggers hormones (testosterone being the caricature of it) that regulates everything including motivation, a clean mind, and happiness. Of course I wouldn’t wish to work on a field all my life, but programming or Excel spreadsheeting may have a negative impact on the mind.
Now try doing that job for 20 to 30 years, your entire body will be totally broken and riddled with arthritis.
For somebody proudly touting their Mensa membership, you seem to have fallen into the same transcendalist trap that everyone does who waxes poetic for natural and "Mother Earth".
Natural is one in three women dying in childbirth, natural is contracting rabies by being bitten by a rabid animal and having 100% mortality rate, natural is dying at age 50 to 60.
For somebody proudly touting their Mensa membership, you seem to have fallen into the same transcendalist trap that everyone does who waxes poetic for natural and "Mother Earth".
Natural is one in three women dying in childbirth, natural is contracting rabies by being bitten by a rabid animal and having 100% mortality rate, natural is dying at age 50 to 60.
> Now try doing that job for 20 to 30 years, your entire body will be totally broken and riddled with arthritis.
I see this a lot on HN, but never forget that sitting for eight hours a day has long term negative health consequences too, some that are very very serious.
I see this a lot on HN, but never forget that sitting for eight hours a day has long term negative health consequences too, some that are very very serious.
I do BJJ and once you get into it, it is extremely fun and rewarding. Strenuous physically. Mentally, extremely deep, popular with tech folks because although you have to be in shape skill development dominates. Strength will always be an asset. So will cardio, but skill dominates. Plus close human contact releases oxytocin and other hormones. And the physical activity does the equivalent of a runners high. And the mental activity gives you intrinsic learning rewards. I suppose you can burn out on it, it can be very frustrating at times, but once you get past the first humps it is golden.
I loved judo for this reason, although BJJ might be less dangerous. Exhausting; You take hits (unvoluntarily… maybe); You learn gestures. And more importantly: You learn with your body. I think our bodies demand to be used ;)
Socrates was right! There’s no mind without a strong body! (for a man at least).
Socrates was right! There’s no mind without a strong body! (for a man at least).
Test is definitely a factor in working out and feeling good for all men, but especially young men. Plenty of women enjoy BJJ for many of the same reasons men do though. BJJ is relatively safe. You will end up with injuries, but it is worth it for me as a desk jockey. :)
I suspect decision fatigue is a real thing. Especially the harder should/should not decisions, rather than the clear quick chat to the group then no-brainers.
Perhaps more like... 'engagement fatigue'? When it's truly rote or mindless work your brain can disengage and be somewhere else. With knowledge work you don't have that luxury, even when the work itself isn't what we could consider 'engaging', you nevertheless are obliged to be engaged mentally to carry it out. Do that long enough without deriving any satisfaction, it seems a perfectly sane reaction to want to escape the situation, or just plain shut off. It makes sense for our brains to realize we're spending a lot of brain focus and time on something that isn't activating any reward centers, and insist we stop doing that. That really seems like a fundamentally sensible and healthy response from a brain functioning properly.
I personally think a lot of psychological stress is caused by white collar work that’s stressful mentally but physically sedentary. This mismatch messes up your eating habits and also causes stress you can’t resolve. It used to be that mental stress was usually accompanied by physical exertion, e.g. being in fight or hunting an animal. Now we get all that mental stress but no physical relief.
Last week I quit my job due to “burnout”. The company I worked for was amazing. I worked with excellent people who I enjoyed being around. Good codebase. Plenty of autonomy. Flexible and very reasonable working hours, flexible working arrangements. I was never under any pressure. Company provided all the support I could ever ask for. It was a dream job.
And yet when I sat down to write code, I couldn’t do it. It’s difficult to describe - I was completely paralysed. The simplest of tasks required insurmountable effort. And trying to deal with that, day in day out, is the “burnout”.
Burnout may be likely or common in bad environments, but it isn’t the sole cause. In my case I can’t blame the company or the environment. It was about as far away from toxic as you can get.
I’m planning to take about a year off work, because that’s what the internet says I should do. But I really don’t understand what caused this to happen, or what I could do in the future to prevent it.
And yet when I sat down to write code, I couldn’t do it. It’s difficult to describe - I was completely paralysed. The simplest of tasks required insurmountable effort. And trying to deal with that, day in day out, is the “burnout”.
Burnout may be likely or common in bad environments, but it isn’t the sole cause. In my case I can’t blame the company or the environment. It was about as far away from toxic as you can get.
I’m planning to take about a year off work, because that’s what the internet says I should do. But I really don’t understand what caused this to happen, or what I could do in the future to prevent it.
For me also, there had been times I worked several weeks from 7am to 23pm and on weekends. This was no problem. The task was clear, it was possible to do (with much overtime) and it had an clear end. Later in my career, on a different job, different position I almost got a burnout, because I thought I could solve some problems with much work. But the problems there had been endless. So there was no chance ever for me to solve all the problems. I asked my boss for a different position in our company. I just realized later how close I was to a very bad burnout. I guess I had also a bit luck and good people around me.
[Edit] The job, where I almost got a burnout. The job was empty and they asked me for it, because the person before left with a bad burnout. The person now in this job is now also close to a burnout.
[Edit] The job, where I almost got a burnout. The job was empty and they asked me for it, because the person before left with a bad burnout. The person now in this job is now also close to a burnout.
> And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do
continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties
of different people - both activities that humans have not
historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in
previous eras.
Perhaps oddly, I absolutely thrive on those challenges. Constant adaptation, analysis and overcoming, all forms of mental soldiering (even against the odds) feed my addiction to "dare and win". So long as I have agency.
There's something else going on. Seems to me there's a lot of people exhibiting a torpor/apathy that's at odds with their good physical fitness, high mental energy levels, and general enthusiasm. Something demoralising that saps our souls.
Perhaps oddly, I absolutely thrive on those challenges. Constant adaptation, analysis and overcoming, all forms of mental soldiering (even against the odds) feed my addiction to "dare and win". So long as I have agency.
There's something else going on. Seems to me there's a lot of people exhibiting a torpor/apathy that's at odds with their good physical fitness, high mental energy levels, and general enthusiasm. Something demoralising that saps our souls.
I think burnout is not about the amount of work, or conflicts at work. It is about lack of meaning in what you are doing that leads to burnout. We humans can do tremendous things if they are meaningful. In case the work is less, but its meaningless, can lead to burnout rather quickly. Doing meaningless work is basically not being mentally aligned with work.
I can relate to this. It might not have been the same level of intensity physically but I worked as wait staff for a couple years in my mid-twenties and despite my exhaustion at the end of shifts I always felt good. I have never once felt the same about my full-time programming job. On the contrary I have gone through what I can only describe as deep burnout twice in my 15 year career and those burnouts lasted agonizing months of time. It was brutal.
For me I think it is the level of perfection that is required to actually have development proceed smoothly. It is extreme particularly when coupled with peers who frequently break things or put together solutions that are overly complex or bug riddled.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a perfect programmer by any stretch of the imagination but it is my desire to reach perfection that causes severe emotional drain I think.
For me I think it is the level of perfection that is required to actually have development proceed smoothly. It is extreme particularly when coupled with peers who frequently break things or put together solutions that are overly complex or bug riddled.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a perfect programmer by any stretch of the imagination but it is my desire to reach perfection that causes severe emotional drain I think.
It might have a lot to do with expectations too: illusory ones. If one gains meaning from their work with the idea that they are "changing the world" in some Utopian sense they might be more prone to burnout.
It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support yourself.
It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support yourself.
In my experience this cuts both ways. Becoming emotionally invested in a product you don't have a huge amount of control over is dangerous, but on the other hand, believe that your work is unimportant is depressing when you have to do it for a few decades.
For me the balance is finding some part of my work that I control, that I can also really care about. I can be proud of the quality of the code I wrote even if I don't care much about the product or the business.
For me the balance is finding some part of my work that I control, that I can also really care about. I can be proud of the quality of the code I wrote even if I don't care much about the product or the business.
This article went from "everyone was stressed during the pandemic" to "everyone actually has complex PTSD now" alarmingly fast.
The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom:
> The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large.
I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition.
I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.
The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom:
> The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large.
I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition.
I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.
> People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom
The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?
The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?
I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed.
Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.
If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere.
It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.
If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere.
It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
> Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.
While the troughs of that sorrow are undoubtedly deeper, childhood deaths in your family weren't a 24/7 stressor.
I think the issue is that people can log in to Reddit, Twitter, or even any news website and receive a constant stream of tragedy, bad news, and worry. It's no longer an exception, it's the everyday experience available on demand.
I see this come up in extremely online young people I work with: They're always invested in a new tragedy or catastrophe or drama or concern somewhere in the world, but those worries disappear and get replaced with a new one as soon as the news cycles shift. They weren't actually invested in it, they were just reacting to what they put in front of their eyes for hours per day.
While the troughs of that sorrow are undoubtedly deeper, childhood deaths in your family weren't a 24/7 stressor.
I think the issue is that people can log in to Reddit, Twitter, or even any news website and receive a constant stream of tragedy, bad news, and worry. It's no longer an exception, it's the everyday experience available on demand.
I see this come up in extremely online young people I work with: They're always invested in a new tragedy or catastrophe or drama or concern somewhere in the world, but those worries disappear and get replaced with a new one as soon as the news cycles shift. They weren't actually invested in it, they were just reacting to what they put in front of their eyes for hours per day.
This probably depends on the parent. One of my older brothers died when I was in 3rd grade. After that, the head vice was pretty much constant until my mother kicked me out at 14. Things rapidly improved after that.
> I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed.
I'd say that it isn't the world that's under-stressed, it's upper-middle class NYC/London feature writers. Other people still suffer plenty.
I'd say that it isn't the world that's under-stressed, it's upper-middle class NYC/London feature writers. Other people still suffer plenty.
I agree. In prior generations, if you survived childhood you probably went to fight in a war as a young adult (if you were male) or you had a loved one who did and you had to struggle to keep things together at home. If you survived that, you had a hard life working in fields or factories until your body was so broken you couldn't do it anymore. You didn't have time to worry about the types of things that many young people have as their big concerns today.
In my experience, intentionally stressing yourself in controlled ways (i.e. with exercise) is an incredibly effective way to counteract this issue.
I would say it's because they are stressed about problems that are much too big for them. A single person has essentially 0 influence over politics, climate change, and social issues, yet people spend hours a day getting fed news and hot takes over these issues, on any side of the political spectrum. Surely ingesting so much of this content will impact your mental health. If it turns into some sort of productive action, that's great, but that may not be the natural response for everyone.
> I would say it's because they are stressed about problems that are much too big for them.
I have heard these described as gravity problems; problems that might be worth solving, if they are solvable at all, but which are almost certainly not the problems you should be concerning yourself with. Instead finding the right sized problems and solving them can be very satisfying.
I have heard these described as gravity problems; problems that might be worth solving, if they are solvable at all, but which are almost certainly not the problems you should be concerning yourself with. Instead finding the right sized problems and solving them can be very satisfying.
This is not a rebuttal of what you are saying and I think your caution is valid, but your post prompted a musing about observations of my elders (all whom have now passed away.)
All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases.
This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period.
I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)
All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases.
This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period.
I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)
They're called life-changing events, right? :)
The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life.
Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades.
But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life.
Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades.
But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
I also think it was somewhat appropriate not to have a concrete idea of the future early in the pandemic. We didn't know what was coming. Lots of speculation turned out to be false. One scenario that was suggested very early on was a low single-digit percentage of young healthy adults being hospitalized, which could realistically have caused interruptions in basic municipal services in some places. Other scenarios were too optimistic. We really didn't know the future and couldn't make firm plans about it. Feeling that way all the time, no matter whether it's appropriate, is a symptom. Feeling that way when it makes perfect sense is not a symptom.
I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here.
Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake.
Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever.
I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it.
These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again.
I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you".
I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019.
> expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist
I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.
Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake.
Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever.
I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it.
These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again.
I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you".
I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019.
> expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist
I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.
Throw away the cell phone and get a break.
I met our then-current chief at the band office up in Long Lac #58, and she shared with me this cool story. She said she had been chief before but near the end started feeling "burnt out", but she used terms like "disconnected", "not in touch", "something missing"; so you know what she did? She told me she packed up a few essentials and _walked for days into the bush_ until she found a spot that felt right. She set up camp. Hunted and gathered what she needed. She said she initially thought she might be out there a few day. It turned into weeks. The grounding and reconnection she was experiencing, with creation and the Creator, was too profound to leave. After a time one young lady, then another, then another came out looking for her, liked the atmosphere, and stayed too. After a time, there was a group of them, just (re)connecting. It was about a summer times length, I think. After awhile, she felt re-energized, strong, so she disbanded the camp and they all walked back. She then ran for, and was re-elected as chief (this was like 10 years ago) since she felt ready to do it again.
I often think of that. Not just that she had time to do it; but that she chose to do it, and left it unstructured, allowing for more time. I often think I need to do that, as I face the next (last) 25 years of my life. I need to be able to do it well, with strength, and grounding.
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Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various definitions I've seen seem to disagree on whether that includes me (birth year 1980), but I was in the Army before getting into software and am definitely part of the generation that joined up post 9-11 and served in a pretty horribly-paced environment of long, repeat deployments that continued forever because of how long those wars lasted. Echoing other comments, I've definitely worked under psychopaths, including a guy who bragged about how hard his dick got blowing up hospitals in Mosul. I've seen a lot of what this guy is writing about in terms of people who become totally trapped in the present, believing they have no escape from their current predicament, and also become so accustomed to stress that they lose the ability to live without it and can never adjust back to regular civilian life. This is certainly a form of PTSD, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that anyone working a regular office job in media experiences anything like this.
On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout.
Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism.
As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.
On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout.
Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism.
As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.
If you move the goalposts, you will never burnout.
burnout is realising your work creates elon musks
With the mental disorder(s) I suffer from, whatever names might be attached to them, my stamina is poor and I find it somewhat impossible to serve as a full-time employee.
My last in-office part-time job was stressful. My supervisor criticized my obvious unwillingness to stand up and move around so much. I woke up every morning in fear and this fear propelled me to arrive on time, lest I be reprimanded and fired for tardiness. I spent 2 or so days every week in "bliss" which meant doing nothing whatsoever except Internet games in my shorts and trying to soak in the air conditioning. I was arguably burned out every week, day in day out.
It was this same scene when I had fulltime jobs, I would spend Sat-Sun attempting to recuperate some energy and sanity off the clock. I couldn't budge. It was not pretty.
Thankfully I have found a WFH remote job that does not burn me out whatsoever, and I'm happy to put in 20-30 hours per week and it's really somewhat energizing. I get paid good money for it so I'm thankful for the lack of burnout. I hope and pray that this job lasts me through retirement, which will be real soon now.
My last in-office part-time job was stressful. My supervisor criticized my obvious unwillingness to stand up and move around so much. I woke up every morning in fear and this fear propelled me to arrive on time, lest I be reprimanded and fired for tardiness. I spent 2 or so days every week in "bliss" which meant doing nothing whatsoever except Internet games in my shorts and trying to soak in the air conditioning. I was arguably burned out every week, day in day out.
It was this same scene when I had fulltime jobs, I would spend Sat-Sun attempting to recuperate some energy and sanity off the clock. I couldn't budge. It was not pretty.
Thankfully I have found a WFH remote job that does not burn me out whatsoever, and I'm happy to put in 20-30 hours per week and it's really somewhat energizing. I get paid good money for it so I'm thankful for the lack of burnout. I hope and pray that this job lasts me through retirement, which will be real soon now.
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Yes. Don't even need to read it. Anytime you read the sentence "our definition" it's wrong. There is no such thing as "burn out". It's a marketing term. Practice root thinking (https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html). Ignore marketing buzz words, especially if they come from social sciences like psychology, psychiatry, et cetera.
Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition—it's almost always B.S.
Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition—it's almost always B.S.
You need to hold in your mind two completing concepts. One is that you might have a condition, and that condition may not be fully understood by medical science, and need some self-experimentation (for example, meditation, diet, blood tests, psychotherapy, drugs). The other concept is that it might blow over with rest, time or a change in thinking patterns and there is nothing to fix. Since you can't know which is true, both need to be nurtured!
Agreed. I think the problem is we have 100 "conditions" for every 1 actual physical condition.
> All ideas are trees. All products start as ideas. Therefore all products are trees.
The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
I suspect if you're commenting in this thread, you'd probably enjoy it.
Anyway, the one thing that seems to always be a consistent theme in discussions of burnout, is work. I've not yet seem a conversation on burnout where an employment scenario is not brought up.
One of the chapters in Lost Connections talks about meaningful work, and how a reduction or elimination of personally fulfilling work, can lead to a depression, as can a few other things.
I can't help but feel at this stage after dealing with a long running depression, that our relationships with work are probably broken, and we've all been sold a lie.
My issue with the term "burnout" is that it feels like it's loading the topic to be a personal issue (which it technically is), when in reality, it's a reaction to a bad external stimuli.
I'd write more, but I feel like I'm waffling, I'm happy to discuss more if people want to chat about it.