Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

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I think extreme apathy to the point of "throwing your life away" is extremely common and should be warned against. Whether its quitting your job, leaving a relationship, moving, large decisions are often not best made in emotional states or under extreme duress - though they are completely understandable.

From personal experience the only advice I would beg people in similar situations to take is to reach out for help on all fronts. Professional, family, work, friends, etc. can all offer advice at times like these. I say this hypocritically because I myself did not choose help throughout my life when I was in similar situations. Getting help is really hard sometimes. But if you are not trying to get help you are not actively accepting all your options.

And I want to say I'm not trying to take away from your story at all. I've just seen many who have thrown it away where it didn't "all turn out ok".

I think the only warning you need to give people is that this needs to not be a bluff. You need to be fully prepared to accept the consequences. It needs to not be grandstanding, thinking that if you are willing to "throw your life away" it will somehow magically open doors and those consequences will go away, like you read on the internet that they did for someone else.

I had a similar experience to the OP, not with burnout per se, but with health issues. I spent 3.5 years in constant, excruciating pain. When I no longer cared whether I would live or die, I just wanted to hurt less, I stumbled across a path forward. It turns out that doing things that genuinely reduce your pain (after pain meds no longer work) tends to get at the root cause of the problem.

I was medically on "death row" anyway. This is not a thing you can recommend for people to just throw caution to the wind and wildly experiment. But, when you are 100 percent clear that this path is so broken that anything else is preferable (even literally death), it can be very freeing in terms of allowing you to make choices that were previously unthinkable.

Oh, yeah. Health issues. For me, it got to the point where every morning I would wake up and vomit. It got to be part of my morning routine to just get it over with before heading straight to work. Otherwise it might happen in the car.

I think the apathy that accompanies depression and burnout is your body's way of telling you: "your current set of goals and priorities is really, REALLY not working for me, and you need to change something". What leads to burnout is ignoring these increasingly desperate signals from your body and brain.

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