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Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting to me about this podcast was the suggestion that the solution to burnout is not less work or taking a break, but getting appreciation for the work you put in. Burnout seems to not be really about the work involved but the appreciation you get for doing that job and whether you feel your job is making a difference.

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Well, they focused more on that, but the first thing they mentioned was that they hired more people to reduce the workload...

The solution to burnout is to put the activity that's causing it in perspective. Stop being a victim, mainly.

While "stop being a victim" seems pretty dismissively sarcastic to me, if you reverse the meaning it can actually be useful advice in some work situations: if you are a victim, change the situation or leave.

I assure you - it's not snark, it's not sarcasm and it's not dismissive. There exists "the victim mentality". Don't do that.

I guess what I meant is that there are true victims who are being harassed or abused, and telling that group of people to change their mentality and perspective (without changing their circumstances) would be dismissive.

I mean more in the workplace, where it's possible to think of yourself as a victim, a sort of ... variation on self-pity. When I have seen this, it ... didn't help.

Amy Hoy wrote a great comment about burnout: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5633063

I wrote a comment about her comment on another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10157608

I remember her writing something about burnout being to do with your brain being effectively trained to associate hard work with failure (but I can't find where she said that, so it might have been someone else). My strategy to self-heal was to put myself in situations or activities where I had many small-to-medium-sized wins.

Very bad suggestion which may lead to death. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi

What is the connection between the parent and your reply? Is there something in that link regarding the appreciation given for work done that I'm missing? Do you deny that excessive quantities of work could be (partly) a response to the lack of acknowledgement?

If someone is working hard and burned out, then continue of that will lead to death, so advice to continue work is very bad advice.

For example, if someone is damaged a knee, he need to relax until knee will restore it health. What will happen if someone will continue to run and jump with damaged knee instead?

If your brain is damaged, I will suggest to relax at least until brain will restore it condition. If you will continue to damage your brain, as suggested, you may die, because, unlike a knee, our body cannot live without a brain.

The whole point is that there might be more effective alternatives. It's not rational to argue that the alternatives are bad because of things that can happen (in extremes) when the proposed alternatives are not used.

I tried that and damaged my brain to point that, when I think about a problem at work, I feel like knife is put in my head.

If you have some spare brains to throw out, you can try alternatives on them, of course.

You're right, there should be a balance, overwork is harmful even when you are doing something you are passionate about. But passion, appreciation, and the feeling that your work is benefiting humanity seems to ward off burnout. That seemed to be the case for the people in this podcast, and it also seems to be the case for people like Elron Musk who work outrageous hours but don't seem to get burned out.

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