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#life#burnout#job#purpose#human#better#something#don#isn#article
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The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person. This is something that some combination of family, traditional social structures and religion used to provide for a lot of people.
"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way. It's no wonder people end up feeling "burnt out" - that's your brain telling you that what you're doing is ultimately pointless, and your brain is absolutely right.
Treat work first and foremost as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and generally you'll be happier. You can (and should) take pleasure from your craft and a job well done, but honestly who cares how your Series A goes.
"Work coaching" or whatever this article is advertising will probably not help you at all
There is a good book on this topic "Selfish reasons to have more kids" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...
I'm starting to feel something a lot like how people describe burnout. I need to do a bunch of different things to stay afloat, but I ain't got any gas left in the tank.
I find pleasure in other aspects of my life, but I still need to put a roof over my head.
[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.
I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.
I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).
That maybe your own opinion. The older I get the more I realize that the ignorance is bliss - the less I know the better, nothing drains my energy more than human connections and I don't have to be better or worse, I'm just perfect the way I am and if anyone doesn't like that, it's their problem and not mine.
That shouldn't be taken as a sign that working more is good. It is a sign you need to fix your personal life which isn't easy. Work can be a useful part of making and keeping personal connections, but it shouldn't be the only part of it.
eventually that just leads to an even bigger crashout, burnout, break. Sinclair Lewis parodied this as early as 1922 in Babbitt [0], depicting a man who is economically satisfied and fits perfectly the mold of the white picket life and yet is devoid of meaning and satisfaction. he then spends his years in the wilderness crashing out before stumbling back into conformity because he knows nothing else
you can find meaning outside of work in so many ways. joining a small organizing group, help run mutual aid efforts, even dipping a toe into civic engagement. disentangle achieving goals that signify success from living your values and you'll be on your way to a better regulated life [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)
[1] https://psychwire.com/free-resources/expert-insights/resourc...
Until you slow down because you are sick, or you just get a slow day at work, and get time to do a bit of reflection.
These are nice things. But let's be honest, there is no objective purpose in life beyond the biological imperative. Purpose is subjective, and people will find that on their own. Or not.
I would add a little nuance. One thing is your job isn't advancing Humanity Progress in a very direct and unambiguous way, say you work for some Very Important Organization that Does Good All the Time. Another thing is your job is totally useless or even harmful to society.
Maybe most of us are in between?
I've worked at dysfunctional companies that made me personally unhappy (busyworks, company politics, waste, bad bosses, bad teammates...) that somehow made some good things in the grand scheme of things, other that made me very happy with more neutral results.
Someone has to do mundane things, even to raise children and give a chance to the next generation to improve the world.
I don't believe putting too much thought in purpose is healthy.
I'm coming at this from the perspective that I've been struggling with a lot of burn out and I'm mostly proud of who I am and what I do but I'm stressed because I constantly have to compensate for society's failure to reward people's contributions.
That could just be me though. I definitely agree that I think that meaning and purpose is a big thing that people are missing now.
Unfortunately largely it is what it is and can't be changed, the only thing we can change is how we choose to respond to it
I’ve contributed some time in a mentoring group. Many of the cases people would call “burnout” had little to do with their work. Once they started talking details about their life situation it would become obvious that their problems ran deeper, but blaming work was an easy way to externalize it and place the blame on easy villains: Corporations, capitalism, managers, coworkers.
There were a lot of situations like this where someone would get a new job, take fewer hours, or even some people requested demotions and took a pay cut. Then when nothing changed about their well-being, they’d shift to blaming something new at work. I talked to people who could seemingly find ways to “burnout” in every situation they’ve encountered from high school through job hopping. It’s really hard to get someone to accept that maybe the problem is running deeper than their environment, and maybe something they’re doing (unintentionally, I’m not trying to place blame) is actually leading to this outcome over and over again.
I agree that work coaching is not the solution. It presumes the diagnosis and anchors blame to work, which starts obscuring possibilities outside of that pre-chosen explanation. Regular old therapy from a trained therapist is probably a better place to start. Might be cheaper, too, especially if insurance is involved.
The actual “coaching” examples are about addressing the people’s self-worth and self-perceptions, which is uncomfortably dipping into territory that is better (and often cheaper, especially with insurance) served by actually therapists. A lot of burnout cases like these, especially where workloads are low and complications outside of work are major factors, are more appropriately matched to depression than typical work burnout, which is better addressed by trained therapists than career coaches.
>It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you
Over the last five years ago I finally realized that is an issue for me. A combination of that plus having far too much of my (low) self-esteem bound up in needing praise from work. I chased my way to a senior role at a big SaaS that would look grand on my resume and paid quite well. After a little over two years, I simply resigned because the crippling feeling of not being useful at all was killing me. And I knew it wasn’t fixable, because my role was a “bullshit job”. So I took the summer off and that was wonderful, but when I started looking for work, for the first time in decades I had to chase it instead of it chasing me. Wound up at a startup that was a perfect fit: my chosen technology stack, still really small and needed fires put out.
It turned out they couldn’t live without the fires and thought the disaster they kept enlargening was good (VC money is a hell of a drug) and they severed me (along with a bunch of other firefighters they had hired) and finding a new gig wasn’t easier that time. Plus the one I found went under 6 days before I was to start.
I wound up taking on a QA role at a huge, old-school company and it is theoretically mind-numbing drudgery, but there was so much room for improvement that I started to dig it. Somewhere in there, two decades of depression eased all the way up. Now they’ve transitioned me into inventing their QA for AI and I am over the moon, digging into research papers, butting into high-level academic discussions and feel like I’ve found a fit. So I do think there’s something to what the author is saying.
I can work 80 hour weeks if it is a project that I am invested in or find interesting and feel zero burnout. I am working on a project currently I don't believe in and often I work maybe 6 to 10 hours of a 35 hour week and find it difficult to care about the work.
This is where employers fail them. I get that employers actually want dedicated, committed, enthusiastic employees, and that these employers (and managers) do the same thing, taking their job home, living for the job, etc. But it's their job to protect their employees and themselves. If a manager finds out one of their employees is taking their job home, they should intervene.
But this is the double edged thing that managers - and lawmakers - have to deal with.
To be fair, I’ve reached the point where most random blog posts I read on the internet seem AI written, so it could just be confirmation bias on my part.
It doesn’t sound too AI generated, and the stories flow well without much text that mean nothing. (Also, she’s a consultant, so writing this content is meant to signal some professional skill. There’s not much spam, just 1 blog article a month.)
Even if it had AI help to edit, the content still matches my lived experiences of people mgmt.
Most likely this is the author's story enhanced with AI and then edited. That is the future I think.
Right now I have a mental block with reading ai written or ai enchanced text. So unless the article has a pre-2021 date... I'll ask ai to summarize it
I think I'll eventually have to get over that bias
That's uh, an interesting solution. As long as it's your LLM?
In my opinion, it boils down to what ideas/experiences were seeded.
In this article for example, the author is clearly sharing their first-hand experience, therefore injecting observations from reality and their own reflection on top of it, and they then probably shaped/refined it with AI.
A slop, as I see it, is when you generate content from a very thin prompt and then share it as is.
Doesn’t mean it’s not an ad for coaching. I share your sentiment. (So do ChatGPT and Gemini, they also agree that the article sounds like an ad)
Burn out isn’t caused by putting in too many hours at work. It’s a symptom of forcing yourself to do work you don’t align with.
Forcing yourself to care about KPI’s and goals you don’t give a hoot about will usually result in collapse.
Also, potentially chronic sleep deprivation. (Sleep apnea, disrupted circadian rhythm, possible artificial light, news/social scrolling)
Humans need alignment there, then we thrive.
especially now, if you want coach-style advice, just put your thoughts/problems into chatgpt or whatever. that's probably all the coach is going to do anyway.
yes, sorry, to be abundantly clear i am not suggesting to replace a licensed therapist with ai.
i am suggesting to replace uncredentialed "life coach", "job coach", etc.
I did read some actually until the cheap output quality started showing.
I have a hypothesis which has solved burn out for me, it’s contrarian to most health advice out there. “Just follow the sun and cut stimulation after it’s down”. You can use a tracker or my app sunsignal.app to help track it. As long as you: a) take a big break in the middle of the day b) cut stimulation after sunset (blue light, food, etc) and c) place most of your work between the daylight and otherwise let you body do what it pleases you will cure most of your health ailments. Fuck everyone else who tries to over complicate it and get you to resign into thinking you should accept the industrial age’s noise pollution and pretend you can override a broken environment’s poison with wearables, supplements, etc. you are being told to buy expensive solutions to symptoms rather than addressing the root cause.the industry has no problem selling you solutions to a problem it created.