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Comment by tomatsu | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's completely burnt out, I think the whole idea of doing any job 40 hours a week for several decades of your life is super scary.

It's too much routine. Too much auto pilot. Too many identical days and weeks which get compressed into nothing. Few new memories will be made. Your life will feel much shorter and uneventful.

Doing random blue collar part-time work (I currently work as a gardener) and working on interesting projects in my spare time works much better for me. I can think about my fun project during work, not think about my work when I'm off the clock.

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> Too many identical days and weeks which get compressed into nothing. Few new memories will be made. Your life will feel much shorter and uneventful.

It is profound that I'm not the only one who quit a day job because of this exact reason. This is a biological fact. Your brain compresses memories that are too similar down into the smallest size possible. The result is that a year can often feel like a week, with a few memorable weekends and absolutely nothing else.

This is utterly frightening, and can feel like you've hit the fast forward button on your life and are careening towards the end.

This, I think, is why it's so frustrating when occupations which have historically been fairly flexible and creative start to gain a lot of process and become more formulaic.

> As someone who's completely burnt out, I think the whole idea of doing any job 40 hours a week for several decades of your life is super scary.

During university I honestly could never imagine myself working more than 20h a week. And this issue was really on my mind, it worried me, I really couldn't imagine how, but whenever I brought this up people always said "you'll get used to it".

Nearing the end of my study funding, I took a part-time job programming in an office. Two days, 16 hours per week for two months was enough to wreck me for nearly a decade now. I won't ever trust people that tell me I'll "get used to" anything ever again. I don't know how they do it, I guess I'm just a different species or something.

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