Hacker News Reader

These people aren't genetic freaks, it's just a simple combination of:

1) being young & healthy

2) lots of coffee (and usually adderall too)

3) sleeping in heavily on the weekends

Almost everyone will quickly burn out if they're missing any of these criteria. It's not healthy, but it's doable.

Yes, and also a heavy impact on your health regardless of those things.

This. I spent 2 years sleeping 4:30hs on weekdays (a combination of college and full time work). But then I would sleep 10h+ hours per night on weekends, was constantly tired, and Mondays were always terrible days as I adjusted back.

It was "doable" in the sense that I didn't sleepwalk into traffic, but in the end my performance both at work and at school was terrible. It was a waste.

It's somewhat fine if you're doing rote work, which I assume these people are doing, but little else.

I used to need 8-9 hours of sleep to even function. Two kids later (one almost three and one three months old) I go to bed between 1-2am and get woken up between 5-7am now. After a while you sort of adapt to it but the mind is nowhere near as sharp as it used to be. I would never do that to myself working for someone else however I should add.

I’m in the same boat.

Can’t wait until the nights stabilise in a couple of months and I get my mind and my good mood back (those are the main symptoms for me).

Couple of months? You're in for a rude awakening (quite literally). There's some studies that parents don't get normal sleep cycles until the last child turns 6.

Mine are 4 and 6 now and while it got better, my sleep is still not back to normal. It seems also that the two have some silent agreement to prevent their parents sleep, for example when the younger one got old enough that she would regularly sleep through most of the night, the older one started waking up at around 2-4 with nightmares. Still wouldn't change a thing though, it's all worth it!

...and then the teens bouncing around the kitchen cupboards for late snacks, and pounding on bathroom doors after everyone else is in bed... then your own insomnia starts. sorry, I was hoping for the same peace. Nope!

It's also used as a kind of humble brag. I just read an example today in the Journal.

The subject of the piece Austin Russell seems really really impressive and SO young. But the advice from one of his mentors Nick Woodman stuck out to me.

“To be your best self, you have to take care of yourself,’’ he urged the Luminar CEO. As a result, Mr. Russell shortened his average workweek to 80 hours from 120. “Burnout can be real,’’ he says. “It’s all about finding the right balance.’’

It's great advice, but those numbers just seem unbelievable to me.

Maybe I'm just projecting my personal experience!

But to me it comes off as kind of the common Japanese trope of going into the office just to brag that you're "working" insane hours.

Those numbers are just insane to me and I have a hard time believing A it's physically possible, B you're actually being productive to the point it's worth doing 120 hours (literally only 6 hours of potential sleep almost every other minute working) versus 'taking it easy' (lol) at 80, which at least seems humanly possible with a lot of sacrifice.

http://archive.is/1e7Zs

These numbers are always made up. Sometimes you'll even see claims that people work more than ~170 hours a week (there aren't that many hours in a week).

Dissecting the claims can make for a fun thought experiment, e.g. in this case 120 hours translates to 17h15m each day and Austin says:

> What time does your alarm go off on weekdays? Around 8 a.m. Usually up until 2 a.m. night before.

That's ~6 hours. Austin now has ~15 minutes every single day to do everything else in life (bathing, eating, getting dressed, etc.).

> How do you relax? I enjoy going for a drive through the mountains or along the coast on weekends.

Uh-oh. Austin has only ~1h45m each week for everything else outside of work in his life. Is this drive an hour? He now has only six minutes each day to do everything which is "not work".

Austin just thinks if they’re having a two-hour lunch while being immediately available for a call as working hours.

Yeah, even 80 hours is nuts to me. I've done 80 before, for extended periods, and I was not happy or healthy throughout. Consider 80 hours a week is still more than 13 hours a day, assuming you work 6 days a week instead of 5. I guess some people are into that, but that kind of life does not appeal to me at all.

For most of my 20s I couldn't sleep more than about 5 hours at a time. I would go to bed, and like clockwork, wake up roughly 5 hours after falling asleep. I did not feel fully rested, and was not happy with that state of affairs, but I could lie in bed for another 3 hours but be entirely unable to fall asleep again. I would feel ok after getting up; not particularly well-rested, but not lethargic either.

Sometime in my 30s something changed, and I can sleep longer now (though I do still often wake up in the middle of the night, but am usually able to fall asleep again). Anytime I try to intentionally get by on a small amount of sleep, most of the next day is awful. 6.5 - 7.5 hours is my norm these days, and a solid 8 hours of sleep only comes if it's after a day of unusually very heavy physical exertion, or after having barely slept the night before.

As a sibling mentioned, age is definitely a factor. I could do several all-nighters in a row in college and feel mostly fine, but if I try to even do a single all-nighter now, I definitely won't make it through the next day, and might not even make it through the first night.

On the flip side, I never did the caffeine thing. I don't drink coffee (never liked the taste) or soda (stopped drinking it in college), and the most caffeine I get is from a low-caffeine tea, though I prefer caffeine-free teas.

Any chance your alcohol consumption changed in your 30s? It can screw with your ability to get a good night’s sleep.

> I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating their sleep loss.

I think stimulants also play a factor, legal or otherwise.

Most likely explanation is they're mistaken about how much time they spend working and sleeping. A BLS report found that people who estimated 70+ hour work weeks were off by 25 hours.