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Comment by lvturner | Hacker News Reader

I think the scariest thing about burn-out, is that not everyone is financially able to take the recommended time off to recover - what then?

I've certainly been close to being in this boat, had to take a job before I fully recovered, so took one I felt might be a bit lighter on the load and still give me some chance of recovery.

Pleased to report it has been mostly successful.

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Don't forget if you stop working for any reason, you're now a failure, met with suspicion, and expected to explain that for the rest of your life. It's not even about the financial aspect, our society is very punitive to people that want to leave their cages for a while. What you wanted more than this office for one year out of your 30+ year career? There must be something wrong with you.

I've had some really weird experiences with this. Directly after school, I took a year off basically "waiting" for my job to finally accept me (long story, they eventually did) and now, every single recruiter or company I talk to demands I explain why I took a year off. "I see you didn't immediately join the workforce, care to explain?" is what they hit me with every single time. It is unbelievable that I need to explain it to them. They are usually accepting when I tell them I was just waiting for my first job to accept me, but I can't imagine it would be the same if I just needed some "me" time before starting my career.

Yeah, it's super dumb, and makes me depressed about the world we live in.

This happened to me. At the end of a long and stressful divorce, I realized that I needed to take some time off (or else). Took about six months and then discovered that it's very difficult to get rehired after such a gap. (Being "old" doesn't help either.)

You have to play the cards you're dealt, though, and if you really need a break, it's way better than the "or else".

You just say "My ____ died and I had a tough time with that" (where blank is mother, father, daughter, son, whatever). If they have a problem with that you don't want the job anyways.

I was usually honest and said "bad divorce". Your suggestion would elicit a more reasonable level of sympathy and is a far better idea.

what if the 'recommended time off to recover' is wrong? I believe that burnout comes from a missing a reward that is expected after protracted and intense labor, thereby training your brain that labor = bad. Maybe the right thing to do is to retrain your brain that labor = good, with primary stimuli. Making green dots appear is definitely one very effective way to get over burnout. I haven't had a major burnout incident in years, don't know if it's because I'm getting older and wiser, or if it's because I'm learning how to do little bits of work that are 1) guaranteed to succeed and 2) nearly guaranteed to reward me, at least in ways that matter to me, if not financially or socially (those are the types of reward you can't control and often lead to the hardest burnout).

As someone who hit the brick wall pretty hard at the end of last millennium this is the best most relatable description I've seen.

Does anyone know if there has been any research into this explanation and, if so any pointers to where I can read more?

Sources like the book “Tiny Habits” say that feeling successful often builds momentum and gets you to perform better.

I’d guess that the opposite is also true. Feeling unsuccessful too much would erode and destroy whatever it is you’re bringing to the table.

Yeah. My contrarian opinion on burnout cones from about 10 years of observation as an academic track researcher in the physical sciences (typical 80+, occasional 100h+ workweeks in sometimes physically dangerous environments - carcinogens, implosion and explosion risks, one time a Dewar imploded in my face at 2am). The two leading triggers for burnout were "literally the universe" causing your experiment to repeatedly fail, and possibly more pernicious, "your boss switches tracks on you", due to funding or political concerns. Of course the management class (PIs) has zero empathy because the funnel is so selective that almost all of them had it easy, and anything less is merely a dumb or incompetent employee.

One of my buddies went into a burnout phase where he would use his pipette tips in a geometrical pattern and play flash Gameboy Tetris, or sometimes go to the casino and play poker (all of which he got really good at).

By contrast, programming is a cakewalk.

> I believe that burnout comes from a missing a reward that is expected after protracted and intense labor, thereby training your brain that labor = bad.

I personally think the problem is we don't really see much of a reward. Weeks of living in flight or fight mode and then a "good job" from the boss isn't a reward. Knowledge workers don't get real tangible rewards. And even if I had $100,000 dropped in my lap today, that wouldn't even be tangible, it'd just disappear in to the mortgage. I'd never actually enjoy it, no part of my monkey brain would think it did a good job.

It's hard for our profession to provide obvious, immediate rewards.

It depends where you are, but a lot of people are struggling more because the very rich are using automation to eliminate jobs, take the extra money made for themselves and more easily move factories to other countries by chasing the cheapest workers. Also, consider that the decaying of the welfare state in many places has led to increasing homelessness, worsening medical conditions, shorter lives and more misery. Then there's ageism, where older workers worry constantly that they will be fired for being old and they worry that no one will hire them. And then there's the homeless, which in America as not all people know, there is a very loose patchwork of few services to help people who are permanently disabled or unemployed (but could work) to find housing, support and work. In America, if you're broke or working dead-end jobs/below livable wages: "sorry, it's your own fault."

Only a privileged few can take sabbaticals or work wherever/whenever they want.

Depends where you are - in many European countries you'll get paid during medical leave (and you'll get medical leave for burnout) plus companies won't fire you.

Here in the Netherlands the balance of this is quickly tipping the wrong way. For certains low end job types (cleaning, delivery, etc) people no longer get permanent contracts because of the risk for the employer. Instead people work using a sort of pseudo-freelance construction. Having all the risk but having non of the freedom/benefits. New laws to protect these pseudo-freelancers, like manditory insurance or Wet DBA (to determine how much of a real freelancer you are) go against the will of true freelancers and thus are hard to implement as well.

Many US companies provide white collar employees short term disability insurance for medical leave. You'd need an actual medical diagnosis though, "burnout" isn't one. You'd probably also need to be going to some sort of regular treatment during your leave for a doctor to sign off on a disability claim.

If the claim of the scale is true, its a good marker for societal collapse.

You already see this in the US, murder, suicide, drug dependency. Hundreds of people are losing their mind everyday.

99% of the world has a job they can't afford to take leave from. and if you imagine that 99% of the world doesn't have a job that's taxing enough that they'd be burnt out then you don't understand menial labor and how utterly psychologically exhausting it is to do repetitive boring tasks.

So what then? People suffer and struggle and try to improve the lives of their children and then they die.

I say all this not because I'm the first one to realize it but because it's worth repeating. Hopefully someone reads it and it occurs to them how unfair it is.

Mindless repetitive tasks are just fine. You don't have to think about what you're doing, so you are free to let your mind wander to better places. I've done this sort of thing for years, I know what I'm talking about.

Mental labor is crushing.

A summer of thinning apples 7am-6pm was one of the most skull-numbing, awful jobs I've ever had. I would rather try my luck living by myself in the tundra than do that for my whole life.

The manufacturing work where you have to use humans is usually not as devoid of mental work as may think - things change all the time in your environment, you have to identify different kinds of things to be aware about.

If you're part of a production chain, how many parts are coming down the line? Am I letting people wait further down the line? For many manufacturing steps in a production line you need to manage an amount of tools and parts and keep control of your 'caches' because when you are not working on a part coming down the line, you're preparing intermediate steps, to be able to keep the pace.

Edit: And this task switching all the time can make it hard to get into any kind of flow state with the work. Because the 'disturbances' don't happen in a constant rhythm.

I did a summer working at a printing house where we assembled printed calendars by hand (post-soviet country, people were cheap, machines were horrendously expensive). The job consisted of walking around a long table in a circle and assembling all pages for a calendar, then putting it in a pile for further processing by someone else. 6am - 3pm all day every day. That job instilled a burning need to never, ever be at a place where something similar is what I need to do for a living, that I feel to this day. It was absolutely crushing.

I've done both repetitive boring jobs and mentally taxing jobs.

Repetitive boring jobs were not psychologically exhausting for me, at least the ones I did (I worked a couple of warehouse jobs one sorting and inspecting parts before they were sent to an assembly line, and another sorting merchandise coming off a truck, stuffing envelopes/shrinkwrapping for shipping and receiving, data entry, etc).

They can be physically exhausting, especially if you work long hours, but not psychologically. Since my brain didn't need to be taxed I got to let my mind wander and think about things for 8+ hours a day, or have audiobooks play, or whatever, and I still had mental energy afterwards to work on personal projects.

Mentally taxing jobs steal that energy away from you. They tend to pay more, but they take your creative and mental energy away in exchange. And my mental and creative energy is more valuable to me. At least with the more physical jobs I was able to stay in shape a lot more easily.

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