Burning Out and Finding Stability (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Burning Out and Finding Stability (2019)

destroytoday.com

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"If you overwork yourself and feel like you’re burning out, stop what you’re doing and find stability—whatever you’re working on isn’t worth your health. Don’t feel the need to “hustle” because some people glorify it. Doing good work while living a healthy life is much more respectable."

Quite good advice IMO. I could relate to this author doing 'all the right things' (meditation, drinking less coffee, excercise, etc. - " I tried everything to calm myself down. I switched from coffee to tea. I tried rhodiola drops and CBD. I started meditating and using breathing apps.") and still not improving mental health. The truth is, in my experience sometimes a change in circumstances and/or medication are really necessary to start healing mentally.

I'm still recovering from my second burnout. Holy shiet what a fragile thing human psyche is.

I hope you recover well from it!

Jonnie Hallman shares a very personal story I think all of us can relate to at some point in our career. Finding sustainability in our career and personal life is something I wish more people would talk about. I've been thinking about it a lot in the past few years, figuring out decision frameworks for myself at work and home.

The timing of this is fortunate. I wouldn't want to have gone into 2020 burned out and limping along. I really liked the author's writing style and it led me to feel genuinely relieved that the conclusion was that they found awesome, stable work before the pandemic hit.

Ugh, I also experienced a few panic attacks along with a burnout diagnosis.

In my case the trigger was a bug that caused money loss in a customer's website. I had been diagnosed with burnout already, but was freelancing so I could work less hours. Bad idea.

The losses were very small. Even if I were to pay it all by myself it would be less than 10% of the amount the customer owed me (it was a 2 week project), but that didn't stop me from feeling like I had the world on my shoulders. In the end the customer said "whatever" and I didn't even had to pay. Lesson learned.

It's been my experience over the years that with notable exceptions - non-devs are more tolerant of bugs than devs - maybe we trained them too well that all software is shitty but no-one has ever beaten me up as badly over a bug as I do myself.

That isn't to say you shouldn't care but it helps to remember that what you view as a giant snow covered mountain with avalanche warnings the customer/client/business sees as a minor molehill.

In part I think it's something about the programmer mindset, we like things to be correct, we like things to do exactly what we expect and so it's sand in our gears when it doesn't where in most domains that degree of certainty isn't something you can count on.

My partner works in logistics/shipping and the amount of fuckups that occur in that industry every day make the worst software I've used seem positively reliable.

That's definitely true.

The whole ordeal actually uncovered a huge issue with perfectionism I had it due to a less-than-equal upbringing.

In therapy I learned to accept it better, to the annoyance of other perfectionists. But boy oh boy if it isn't worth the quality of life.

Is there a rise of late in up voted/front page “burnout” articles on HN?

It seems like there is, but I’ve been struggling with my own burnout issues more than ever before, so maybe the rate is the same as it’s always been and I’m just more sensitive.

Baader-Meinhof bias

You're probably right of course. But I've had the same impression recently (along with an increase in "everything is made-up nonsense" type articles), so I'd love to see if there's actually anything to my/their perceived up-tick in things like this. I wonder what's the easiest way to query front page Hacker News submissions over time...

Alt theory: the amount of freelancers never been this high. Most don’t set boundaries so they work weekends, take low pay gigs to support their passion project (like in the article) and at some point they crack.

You really don’t see a burnout coming, but if you work all your waking hours there is a good chance you reach that breaking point.

Stability truly is key to prevent it.

Now that we are closing two years of this pandemic; some people have had reduced activity (due to lock-downs) or travel (due to travel restrictions), been working from home (if you don't have the right conditions or you hate it), been going through some climate change (hot summers) and that's us (tech) folks who mostly didn't lose jobs or have precarious financial situation.

There are probably some countries with population-wide burnouts and on the risk of collapse (South Africa, North Africa, Colombia, etc...)

I suspect that it's linked to the pandemic. I've been running a small company for a little over four years now and the last year and a half has been pretty brutal.

Other than the obvious economic impacts of the pandemic on small businesses, the de-stressing activities I personally enjoy - lifting weight, martial arts, going to the cinema - have been unavailable for most of the pandemic. I think that this has led to a less well-defined stopping point at the end of each day both physically and mentally.

The knock on effect of this has been more chronic stress. Before I had a really strong demarcation between the working week and my leisure time: up until things opened up again recently (Scotland), I haven't.

Have you tried anything to create a better demarcation?

I continued to "get dressed for work" each day, then would change out of a shirt at the end of the workday which helped more than I thought it would. I'm lucky enough to have a dedicated home office so also stopped doing anything resembling leisure (even technical reading) in my office after hours.

Taking the dog a long walk after work each day showed promise, but it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped. I ended up just thinking/talking about work the entire time.

Thankfully, most things have re-opened here (Scotland) now so I'm able to resume all those hobbies that were sorely missed.

I believe it reflects reality. Many people got more free time that they can handle and started quiestioning things. Been there myself when I got my first remote job long time ago

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