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Comment by ThrowawayP | Hacker News Reader

Having been in a similar situation, my sympathies; I've found it to be a very strange sensation. The burnt-out knows exactly what work tasks they need to do, they know that it's easily within their own capabilities, and they (at a conscious level at least) even desperately want to do the tasks to fulfill their professional obligations (or to simply continue getting paid). But the body just will not do it or forcing it to do so feels as strenuous as Olympic weightlifting such that one is exhausted at the end of the day not from being productive but from attempting to beat oneself into being productive. It's a very unhappy state to be in.

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OMG you've nailed exactly what I've been feeling for the past six months or so. :/

Take it seriously. I don't know if there's a ton of studies around this, but IMHO there's a lot of anecdata that suggests that this sort of burnout can be a lot like other bodily trauma... a little bit of it isn't permanent, but if you ignore it and keep re-traumatizing yourself, it can become permanent.

I've never personally experienced true burnout, but I also have a policy of taking it seriously and making sure that I do something about it long before it becomes a permanent trauma, and I have had to call a couple of multi-week vacations with relatively short notice, or perhaps announce a vacation a month before the end of some important project. Sometimes it's even as simple as waking up on Friday and just realizing that today is a "Nope!" and taking it off. I think if you nip it in the bud you often may not even need to do it that often. But take it seriously.

And if your job won't let you do that, take seriously the possibility of finding a new one. Yeah, finding a new job sucks, but permanently burning out sucks way more.

People at my office sometime wonder why I have a low PTO balance yet have been there for 5 years. It's exactly the same as the Friday comment.

Sometimes I'm just really not feeling like work and take a day off. Unless something important is happening that day, management could care less. Sometime I stay up late the night before because something caught my attention outside work and I couldn't put it down. I'll take the next day off.

Helps that my company have a seemingly generous PTO policy (at 5 years it a bit more than a day per paycheck (every other Friday)). If you're not a problem employee everyone just wishes you a good day.

But, I don't think I really felt burnout before the pandemic. Working alone has pushed me to the point where focusing feels like a strenuous task. My most productive stints (in my subjective self-opinion) are when I'm working with other people on a call (my role is basically half research / half implementing it).

Part of me hopes going back into the office will help calm my mind but I'm just not sure.

Not going to advocate that this is the answer for everyone, but what I thought was burnout for me - turned out I had severe anxiety, depression, and ADHD.

I'm on medication now, going through therapy, and still at my current gig doing better than ever.

So, what I want to say is that if you are concerned you are burnt out - it's very possible work is burning you out, but it's also possible to seek treatment before making a big decision like leaving a workplace with tons of great benefits and healthcare to support you.

Can we please not devolve every discussion about natural human behavior into ‘you must have adhd, get meds’. It’s standard pressure and human centric fear of failure around business expectations where those around you may or not give a flying fuck about your efforts. Thus, the pressure feels unfulfilling and driven by fear. It’s not always rocket science.

I don't think this was the poster's attempt to "devolve" the discussion. Simply sharing an anecdote that he thought might prove worthy of consideration for those who are suffering burnout.

I also suffered burnout at a job, but I didn't realize it until I was receiving therapy related to my anxiety. I don't know anything about meds or ADHD since that isn't anything I have experience with, but I think it's worth doing some introspection on one's self to see if there are thoughts or tendencies that are also there underneath the burnout.

Correct. I am sharing my current on-going experience with what I thought was workplace burnout, but was really a number of other mental health issues that were contributing to my overall feeling of doubt, anxiety, performance at work.

To be clear again, I am not advocating for everyone to assume their burnout is due to some sort of mental health issue - but to also not discredit exploring this prior to making a big emotional decision like leaving a job, and possibly making symptoms even worse if not addressed.

Can you alternate gigs ? I found this to be a great fix (maybe transient though). Manual labour 4h, coding 4h. Aiming at drag free day.

I found it useful to start a private project, find something fancy and interesting to get lost in and spark the creative juices. In other words work less, play more.

I have this obsession that life should be about play. Make productive outputs playful. I think biology made us aim for this. Individually we optimize for lower energy use and in group it's the same we like when things flow, when everybody is in tune. In those cases it's like playing.. and usually it represents peak performance at the system level.

Actually I've been doing a bit of exactly that... 1. I've been writing a Forth interpreter on the side for fun. 2. I'm learning how to distill liquor. :)

That's an interesting way to put it. Throughout 2020 I felt that way. I just could not force myself to work, and I've been in the workforce a while (I'm 39 and had a job non-stop since I was 12). I know how important it is to maintain income. I was thrown into a new position where I didn't know how to do the work, so I was trying to figure everything out with a new platform, and I was mostly isolated without any help. That situation and the pandemic crushed me.

I've had a lot of hard times in life, including the end of a relationship that for some reason left me with tremors in my hands for a couple years afterwards. That eventually went away. I know what suffering is, I can push through it for sure.

Today I'm in the same job, but I think I burned a few work relationships. Not on purpose, I certainly didn't want to. But I'm able to again get myself to work, I no longer feel like I can't control my own actions.

I think everything above is not burnout, but I've never had the luxury of burnout. I'm on my own and I think lose my marriage if I lost my income, I don't want that to happen, so it's do or die. I'm expecting to die early of cancer or other ailment but with no family support financially/emotionally/psychologically, in fact they drain people.. it's pretty much my place in life to make a rich man richer and that's the end of it. I'm happy I can at least be my own man and hold a job. My journey has changed my political view on the world, I started off being one of those competent, capable right wing guys. I still am competent and capable, but I now view the world as unnecessarily harsh on those not born at the finish line. I believe for people that reach retirement age, at bare minimum, Social Security should be guaranteed to be there waiting.

I hear you on the marriage piece. My wife was brutally unsupportive during my burnout and I’m just waiting for my kids to be grown up before I leave.

I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, I haven't wanted to find that out. I've been with my wife 10 years now and I love her more than ever. They say marriages last 7 years on average since that's the amount of time it took to get a self-sustaining child out of the door for the majority of human history. If you make it past that programmed span of 7 years, I think the odds of staying together go up significantly.

I would do the same thing you are. Leave once they're into college or otherwise move out. A spouse can think you're just some lazy, but it's harder than ever to maintain employment and being a developer is actually more stressful, not less. It always is for me, I'm pushed pretty hard. It's definitely not loving. I told my wife who has been struggling that we'll use all our resources to make her comfortable. To quit her job or whatever changes we need to make to where we live and the rest. My condolences to you, I think it's impossible to know what type of person you're with until you're in certain situations like that.

> make a rich man richer

While true, this can be a very self-defeating way of thinking about it. The reality is that we are paid quite well, and it takes an entity with lots of resources to be willing to take on the risk of a fulltime hire like us.

It's not easy to build a business that gets to that stage; believe me, I tried. So on the whole "working for the man" is a very rational choice, your end of the deal isn't too bad in the big picture, and you shouldn't feel bad about it.

Late response here, but I've never worked at a place where there was a risk involved with hiring people. The money is already coming in, or will be coming in, as soon as you start fulfilling the contract the employer is already holding.

What you're describing is far more rare. Building a product out with no buyer waiting at all. It happens, but that's generally known as bad business and a prototype is at least shopped around before any big money goes in. Usually the client has already signed on to start paying as soon as I join to work on it.

The rich man you're making richer is typically only different from you in that he's paying you less than the value you're creating. He's just holding the contract as a middle-man and his value add is perhaps limited to managing the project or relationship at most. Which you can end up handling as well in most cases.

The way you know my story is reality is because anywhere the money does not come in, you're let go. It's all contingent on you paying your own way and making the employer wealthier than they already likely are.

Employment is actually not a favor as people see it. It's a predatory arrangement with an extreme imbalance of power in the employer-employee relationship.

Finding a workers' cooperative resolves this conflict, or a professional lobbying organization (which are essentially de facto unions).

I feel this way and I have a very easy job and life

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