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Comment by xhrpost | Hacker News Reader

What are people's thoughts/experiences with burnout happening without overtime? Over the past few years I've grown more and more bored at work. Even switching jobs from different ends of the spectrum didn't fix this. I can get myself into flow but it seems to take more and more will power as time goes on. Different tech challenges help, but it's nothing like my halcyon days of straight out of college. Of coming into work and just doing the job and enjoying it with no use of will power. I go home and then fight to do the "bare minimum", read, exercise, eat healthy, minimal home chores and decent sleep. I've wondered if having a home hobby would help but I have none. I feel like "burnout" describes where I'm at, but I have a hard time stating it as fact because I rarely work over 40hrs a week on the job. So, thoughts? Could I actually be in a burnout phase or is this something completely different?

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You say you sleep decently. Do you really get enough sleep? Recently I've had the chance to work from home for a longer period - more than a month - and during that time slept longer and better and it made me realise that I really was tired, seriously tired. That's me of course, not you.

If work is boring, and different kind of jobs don't help, find something besides work: go running, go dancing, go do a theatre course, singing. I tried all kind of things and am open to try anything that seems interesting. I dance a lot, weekly, and it made my life a lot better. I don't say dancing is for you, but whatever you do, it should be fun, something to look forward to.

Maybe singing, dancing and theatre don't appeal to you. It didn't appeal to me, I thought I couldn't do that, that it was difficult. I'm a typical introvert, not artistic or creative, prefer to stay in the background, but all these things were a lot more fun than I ever had thought and I discovered a whole new life.

Don't try them all at once, start with one, give it a good chance, and don't give up if the first course isn't what you hoped for. Try another teacher or school, a different group. All these things come in many varieties and it can be a challenge to find what works for you. Each experience brings you closer to what you want, teaches you something. If you're afraid about something, that is especially interesting.

This didn't make my work better, but it made my life better. And it opens perspectives to new areas, possibly for work. Not that I want to be a dance teacher, but having a new look on life can change work as well.

I want to second what you say about sleep. These days I get plenty of it, and the first thing I notice if I get a night or two of insufficient sleep is a lack of motivation, closely followed by a noticeable drop in cognitive performance.

Would you describe your problem as a lack of fulfillment?

Personally, I find my day job technically challenging, fun, and often rewarding, but I don't really find it fulfilling in some deep meaningful sense. I feel useful but not meaningful.

It took me a while to realize that this was the problem I was having -- and that just switching from software engineering job to software engineering job wasn't going to change it -- and I am still at a crossroads as to what to do about it. I'm not sure if I should seek fulfillment from outside my career -- family, community, a craft, a cause -- or if I should change my career to one I (think I might) find more fulfilling.

I think you have hit the nail on the head. I have a successful (very successful, bootstrapped) startup which basically enables marketers to optimize their ad spend and I dont think I realized that this would become my life.

There are a lot of kind of people in the world. With regard to life fulfillment (in the sense of "doing good things"), I think there are two broad categories: people who require their work to be personally fulfilling or who require life outside of work to be so.

From personal experience, if you're the kind of person who tends to be more invested at work (seeks out challenges, takes pride in your work, feels pleasure at a job well done), I'd hazard you might not be happy doing work you don't find at least somewhat fulfilling.

My thought process being that personal_investment_in_work + fulfillment_only_outside_of_work = eventually resenting time spent at work as unfulfilling.

Everyone can't work on cancer-curing, economy-stabilizing, poverty-eliminating, food-scarcity-solving, gender-equalizing, minority-protecting, free-speech-supporting things.

But we can at least move a little closer to working on something about which we can honestly say "Yeah, that does make the world a slightly better place."

In my case, my job isn't a drain -- it's useful, good work, not evil, good coworkers, fat paycheck, good hours, lots of flexibility. From a practical standpoint, I'm willing to wager that most people don't find fulfillment in their day job, and my job puts me in a pretty good place to find fulfillment outside of work.

On the other hand, at the moment I'm still young enough to start a second career -- it wouldn't be completely crazy for me to go back to school, learn a completely new skill set, grind up through the ranks, and try to have an impact in some other field.

On the gripping hand, I'm not so young as to be in an impatient rush about everything. I don't need to completely upset my entire life just yet. So I'm carefully researching alternate careers to decide if I'd actually find them fulfilling and have an aptitude for them (it'd be a shame to spend ten years and realize I'm not fulfilled by my second career either). And I'm trying to expand myself a little bit more outside my day job, so that my happiness doesn't rest on a one-legged stool.

I've been at it in this industry for over 20 years now and I don't get the kind of clinical burn-out that the author is talking about. I get tired and take a day off, go on vacation or whatever. I also have never had the luxury of being able to go traveling for 6 months (or perhaps I have never just prioritized my life to make that possible).

Perhaps it could be if you have supported yourself with a draining, minimum wage job, and a 2nd one in the evenings, struggling to pay rent, then your tolerance for computer work may be much higher? Whenever I get tired, I just have to remember back to my days of slinging cheeseburgers and I feel content with my current situation.

I personally find myself going through this with most aspects of my life. I have lulls at work where I'm less than 100% excited about the work at hand, and then after a while I'm back in top shape, but I now find it normal when the lulls occur.

It happens to me for most other hobbies as well. I enjoy working out a lot, but there are times where I just don't feel super excited about it, for like lets say a month or so, and I have to put in a lot of will-power to get to the gym. So I do basically what you do here as well, try different kind of workouts, etc., with varying results and that helps sometimes.

I think at the end of the day it's really hard to maintain that level of passion for something that you do day in day out. You just have to accept the downtime and know that it will pass in a bit. At least that's my take on it.

Edit: right after I posted I was reminded of a quote lifters use often: "motivation gets you in the gym, as it's fleeting, but discipline keeps you coming back". I think the same applies here, to some extent.

My current working theory on that is we always want what we don't have. For people who value their free time, rarely working over 40hrs a week is a dream. When they achieve that dream, suddenly they realize they want to be working less than that, and 40hrs becomes a drain and no longer the energizing freedom it may have been initially.

Just a theory.

Personally, I get bored with my current "life" from a given point in time, and need to radically change an aspect of it to add that excitement and focus back to it. Doesn't always go as planned though.

But as you get older, I find people in general get tired of the same bullshit that keeps popping up at job after job, and that almost never goes away.

When was the last time you had a vacation? And I mean a real vacation -- not just a day off to work on home projects. Also make sure the vacation itself isn't too much work (i.e., trying to cram as much activity in as you can).

Personally, I bought a camper that I leave parked at a local campground that is within an hour from home. I'll sometimes take off early on Friday and head up there for the weekend, other times I'll take a week off work. But my favorite is to take a 2 week vacation to someplace with an ocean and beach, and spend quite a bit of time either in the water or just laying on the beach listening to the waves.

But the best cure for burnout that I had was when I had a job that was regular 40 hours, that I got laid off from (6 years ago during the height of the last recession). Spent 4 months in the summer with only a couple interviews, but then when I started my new job I was totally refreshed again. It's only been in the last year that I've started feeling bored/tired again, so maybe it's time for another layoff.

I wonder if tech by and large has lost its focus on important things - curing disease, going to the moon, and all the other impossible goals. Instead, the industry focuses on social networks, business software, ect. Maybe burnout would not be such a problem if there were a true cause to line up behind.

It's easy to stop caring about something when its not really worth caring about.

I spent almost two decades writing software that saved peoples' lives. Trust me: after a while, everything becomes "just a job."

You might be depressed. Consider seeing a therapist, even just once or twice?

Yes, I wish people would stop consulting various buzzwords and tech ideals and, instead, suggest OP see a therapist. This sounds like depression to me.

I would caution against calling it depression, which is a set of symptoms classified as a disease and really can only be evaluated by a professional.

However, I recently went through a period of anhedonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anhedonia), which may be what OP is experiencing.

Things that I found that worked: exercise for pleasure (riding my bike!). Connecting with people (one-on-one -- i'd always been part of a big group before). Learning new things, new challenges. Yoga.

A book that helped me a lot was Frankl's "A man's search for meaning". I realized that I had a bit of fight club nihilism in me because I never chose my purpose in life, and so was just sitting on the metaphorical treadmill of existentialistic wallowing.

Are you me? Though mine lasts for several (many) years and other than exercise (gym 4-5 days/week) I haven't found a something that works or anything resembling a life purpose.

I wasn't advising anyone to self diagnose. In fact the opposite. It sounds like depression. See a therapist!

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson

Another thing to consider is that the problem might not be you, it might be that the situation sucks.

SNORT I hadn't heard that quote from him before.

(Edit: Apparently Gibson attributes it to someone else he retweeted, but the internet is unclear on where exactly it came from)

Any good therapist would probably ask "So, what are you going to do about it?" Changing your situation and changing your self are both acceptable answers, but the therapist should at least point out that changing your situation is possible too.

Agreed. I didn't mean for my comment to sound like I was discouraging people from seeking therapy. The best thing my therapist did for me was help me realize that I needed to be willing to cut people out of my life.

I'd suggest a therapist, honestly.

If it was just work, I'd say it was certainly just burnout. However, when its pretty much your whole life [it sounds like], it could be depression.

I'm always motivated to do at least a good chunk of my "after work" activities, every week. But yeah, work, ehhhhhhh I'm just not happy unless I'm working on something I'm proud of and that comes along maybe once every 18 months.

It's not as much about how many hours you work so much as how much of your life revolves around your job. Ask yourself this: if things aren't going well in your job, what happens? If your life revolves around one thing and that thing goes badly, it affects your whole life. Having more things outside of work helps a great deal.

I don't think it is burnout -- like you said you experience it as boredom, which I think is a different thing. To cure boredom at work, I've always felt starting a brand new project using new tech and with a new team works.

But being bored at work can lead to feelings of depression if you feel like you aren't really accomplishing anything.

Are you taking 'me time'? When did you last have a decent holiday where you did no programming, turned all your work-related email and phones off, and did something else that you enjoyed and found fulfilling?

It needn't be a home hobby, it might be reading, it might be an activity-club that you enjoy, it might be volunteering - but I've found that I need things outside of work, even work I enjoy, or life's pretty cruddy.

Similarly the stresses of work can really build up, even if the work's quite interesting. There's no amount of money I could be paid to work in a continual six month lump again. That's the sort of thing where you take a holiday and spend the first few days of it just decompressing; eating icecream, sleeping, and reading or watching TV or the like.

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