The Burnout Society
apposition.substack.com
apposition.substack.com
The book talks about many things that were on the edge of my eyes. I knew them, yet I hadn't realised they were there; that they were a thing. I hadn't realised it was us who introduced them. This is the definition of Castoriadis' imaginary [2][3]. I'd recommend The Burnout Society to everyone yet I hesitate because it challenges very foundational ideas, in an unpopular way as well.
Maybe the book's two things that struck out to me the most are:
* We strive for achievement so much that we tire ourselves to depression
* Burnout and depression are intrinsically connected
And the question that I ask myself after having read the book is: How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
[1] https://nutcroft.com/blog/book-the-burnout-society-by-byung-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/imaginary-institution-society
I always read him as saying that the valuing of achievement itself comes from the depression/burnout society he observes in his native South Korea. Ie, we only obsess over achievement in the first place because society is so stratified and the stakes are so high if you fail.
I think he overall has a distaste for what he calls the 'achievement subject', and is more aligned with people like Baudrilliard in favouring individuation through developing a contemplative and very singular personal identity.
"We" dont strive for achievement. There is a small group with certain specific biological and psychological traits that does.
Their energy and drive gets the whole chimp troupe stampeding in one direction or another.
These biological, personality traits aren't going to be stripped out of the human population any time soon.
So you just have to recognize who you are and who you choose to deal with so you dont get stuck in traps.
Learning takes Time.
We all enjoyed when Jeff Bezos delivered our products faster to our homes. We enjoyed when our food is delivered from any restaurant we asked, we enjoyed traveling to other places and generating CO2 along the way.
And do you know why we enjoyed them? Because those people who strive for achievements worked really hard to create these conveniences for us, for some of them there was no personal life, working nights, no family, just career! And they achieved what they wanted. Now they demand from everyone such dedication. Hence some companies (employees to be exact) are creating hidden rules not to promote people with kids, because at some point they might not be as productive as 21 years who just graduated, with lots of energy to burn and cheap to employ. People don't want to have kids because they might distract from their career.
Now our society has problems, pollution, low wages, homelessness, burned out people, because not everyone can perform on their peers level without kids, without personal life and so on
And "we" who don't strive for achievement didn't stop them.
I have myself mapped extremely well thanks to long term involvement with some extreme sports, backpacking around the globe and few times use of psilocybin in the right setting. I know exactly what makes me tick and what is superficial shallow BS, and what you describe is right there.
Again, achievements you describe as some holy grail of mankind mean next to nothing. My wife is a doctor, exactly same story - she can tell you all evening about true respectable achievements, and none of it is about some engineer figuring slightly more effective way for business to deliver.
And don't drag the topic into 'you didn't stop this from happening!' - we are adults, and responsible for our own development and life paths. Don't expect me or anybody else to babysit you and set your life straight to get happy and fulfilled life. If you won't, no guidebook nor internet course, nor aging itself will. Get your own shit together and do it yourself to be more precise.
I thought mushrooms dissolved ego, but what you are saying strikes me as filled with ego.
This is the case with everyone I've ever talked to about this. If anything it seems to be an ego boost more than an ego death, though I doubt thats as much the mushrooms as much as it is the person
Huh? Delivery drivers are generating CO2. And while I certainly enjoyed the service, I do not enjoy the ridiculous price premium thats being charged along with it
It is a seriously weird how common rhetoric to pretend only tech companies entering into a consumer space generate CO2 at all - as seen with Amazon and food delivery companies.
Really the food isn't having a premium attached to it - it is actually being subsidized by investors who expect to make up their losses with increased volume. It would be even more expensive with a sustainable business model.
Convenience is not worth that much to me. I really wish it wasn't worth so much to others
by travel I meant travel by airplane
I do apologise if my use of the word "we" caused anger. At the same time I'm happy you took the time to respond—it seems you're passionate about this point so I want to know more.
Why do you say it's a small group? It seems to me it's a pretty large group across the West.
Then, you claim it's biological traits. Does that mean everybody has them?
Finally, what's the alternative? How could one get unstuck? Or maybe a better question would be: what are the traits of those that are not part of the group that has these traits?
I don't understand your logic. If I say someone has the biological trait being very tall, apparently it means NOT everybody has it.
I see what you mean though. I guess that might also be how opx9 meant it.
First, let go of this need that you have to achieve things. You try and keep up with others, to be better than others, but it's OK to be mediocre.
Counterpoint though, in today's economy, people are forced to achieve and push for higher wages, just to keep a roof over their head. That's another source of stress and worry, and that's down to government and international economic policy to solve.
Being worse is pretty ok also!
Realizing it was OK to suck and to do things for fun really opened up some hobbies. But I couldn’t imagine showing up for 40+ hours a week and being mediocre. That would burn me out because I’d be using skills or doing a job outside of my natural ability and seeing mediocre results. I’d keep looking until I found a role that a) paid the bills and b) used enough of my education or talent to be at least good with a moderate level of effort.
At the risk of sounding pithy, "make it about the journey" set a vague goal of being successful, identify key strategies you think will get you there ("excellence"), and take pleasure in figuring it out, find reward in the incremental stages and don't sweat it when you stumble.
this is inherently hard in a world of performance reviews, and corporate ladders to climb. especially when it’s heavily implied that you need to advance or move on.
I ended up on some sort of remedial training and career progression plan that onlt added hours to my work. Haha
Honesty just isn't selected for in an "evolutionary" system. It comes down to a true but unsatisfying tautology that things which survive better wind up being more common, especially when those things create more of themselves.
People need to burnout in order to fuel a world like ours, it's no different than in the past. Some would say there are simply "too many people on this earth" to escape the constant drive for workplace-related abuse, social inequality, criminal behavior, and injustice when people are tightly packed into cities unfortunately. You realize a different way of living when you escape the city and live in a less populated environment that fosters more of what really matters - Family, Health, Creativity, Communication, Mental Well Being, Nature, and Less of a Competitive/Combative Enviornment.
Once you visit other (more rural and natural) places where people live in communities, where the pace is much more slow, like farms, mountains, beaches etc, most thoughtful people pause and realize that none of the "concrete jungle" accomplishments really matter in terms of life merits. Unfortunately, the poor and working classes rarely if ever have a chance to escape on a vacation, so they are burdened most by burnout... That burnout feeds bad things like suicide, drug abuse, poverty, depression, crime, etc, while the rest of society simply remains ignorant to the root causes of those things. Not to say that those rural and natural places are perfect to live in, but they allow for less distraction from meaningful life goals in many ways over city environments.
Many (wealthier middle class) people occasionally get to take that nature vacation at points in their life, and then later return to the city grind, hoping to recapture the vibe in retirement, but they forget the true motivation as they get behind the city walls again often.
The super-wealthy buy homes in relaxed environments at their whim... And many even work in the city without leaving their super comfortable beach and mountain "vacation" houses. Some would say that's one of the major reasons they often think far beyond the constraints of their (less paid) employees who live in the city and work in the city office... Not because they are "smarter" it's possibly because they are far more often less "mentally distracted" and weighted down by finances, work commutes, and burnout culture of city living.
Except for Nature, many of us find these things more easily in a city than a rural environment.
Your current age.
Your current socio/economic/financial position in life.
Whether you are single or married.
If you have children or not.
Where exactly you live.
How much you really rely on things related in a city.
My statement was geared towards one's life over it's entire span, rather than being geared towards the current point we're each at in life... When I was younger, I greatly enjoyed living in the city despite all the expense and other issues like crime and close proximity to neighbors. As I grew older, a more quiet (suburban, but close enough to the city) life began to seduce me... Not saying it as concrete fact, but if you really talk to a wide range of people in older age, it's a recurring trend.
You're thinking of a very idealized farm.
"The two biggest surprises of my transition from childhood to adult life were learning that:
1. Everyone is on cocaine. 2. Cheese is fucking expensive."
And sure enough, as I approach 40, practically every adult I know regularly uses at least one—and usually several—mood-, mind-, or perception-altering drugs, legal or otherwise. I'm sure it was true when I was a kid, too, but a combination of my own obliviousness and DARE programs had me thinking otherwise.
[EDIT] actually, I bet it's like that everywhere, period, with few exceptions. There was a travel photo-blogger I used to read a lot, and a common feature of trips to relatively remote and non-touristy/low-development areas was "here's the stall where they sell the one or two obscure-to-westerners drugs that every single adult here takes every single day" For developed areas I expect that only didn't happen because, outside of tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, maybe weed (quite a list already!), plus, you know, drug stores full of prescription drugs, the drugs aren't sold openly like that.
Doctors, nurses, lawyers, managers, psychologists, developers…bring on the modafinil, Adderall, cocaine, MDMA, mushrooms, and weed.
(Not that I would ever do such things, no sir, this current design I’m about to ship doesn’t taste like Provigil at all.)
Re-contextualizes a lot of cop and justice system stuff. "The defendant had coke in his car". Yeah, so? Decent chance the judge has some in his chambers, too. Doesn't mean shit. "The suspect smelled of weed" yeah, and so did some of the best teachers and professors I ever had, who were, I'm pretty sure, high more often than not.
Another weird thing: my view on alcohol has gotten a lot dimmer over time. As much as I love some of the flavors you can get out of fermentation and distillation, it really is one of the worst of the lot, as far as health damage and how it makes you feel, often stretching into the next day as general lethargy and feeling "off", even if you don't have every much.
Missed out on a lot of tasty craft brews.
1. US TV shows, where it seems like all kinds of drug use is more normalized
2. US 'high-status' culture seeming very odd - this whole thing about people having to always appear positive, high-energy, always busy (partly what I see from US TV shows, partly what my own experience) just doesn't seem sustainable without some sort of drug support.
"Stop trying to control everything, and just let go."
As far as the movie makes some sense, it's very strongly into finding balance.
I ask myself something quite similar but coming from a different place (so to say).
How can I practice detachment (buddhism inspired letting go) while simultaneously accomplishing goals?
I ask myself this because I see a relation between holding on (firmly grasping a goal; the opposite of detachment) and the perseverance of success at doing difficult things.
In my own experience it remains a fact that if I hold on on to something tightly, this is why I suffer (painful); there's a truth behind "no pain no gain". However this is quite close to "them who don't try don't fail"... so they don't suffer BUT do not really accomplish anything either.
Finally, I don't consider the ego to be inherently bad, it's a tool. IMO a problem with it is that one's self is not the only one capable of using one's ego (e.g. we all have been manipulated by someone else).
I think this is somewhat addressed in Hinduism -- the thing you need to realize is that there is your Self, and there is your Role, and those are two entirely separate things. Your Role might be "spouse" or "child" or "software engineer" or "soldier in an army." (not trying to assign any particular morality to a role). Your true Self is entirely independent of that. It is incumbent on you to perform your role to the standards expected, but it's also just a subsystem that exists within your greater Self, it is _not_ equivalent to your self. To find a role, you need to think about unmet needs in the universe. The role you perform is not about you and your self, but it is about something much greater.
Buuuut that doesn't necessarily address motivation - what if we're fine just wanting nothing and sitting around all day just wanting that nothing. The way that is typically addressed in Eastern religion is to actually make that into a virtue - sure, if you want to sit around and self-actualize all day then go ahead and do it, you will be one of the greatest saints ever to live. But that's the catch--it's _way_ harder than it sounds. Generally most of us will get bored at some point, and that boredom will drive us to look at the fuller picture of the universe.
I'd say that:
1) There's a reason for all the insistence on monasticism in Buddhism and many other traditions. Practicing otherwise is doing it on ultra-hard mode. You're unlikely to become A Buddha while having a family and 9-5 job, and that's just how things are. You can't have everything.
2) However—actions are inextricable from successful practice, I think, even in lay-practice. You can't think your way to enlightenment, you have to live it, and not just when you're meditating. And that's the hard part! Not all the reading, the listening, the meditating, the thinking. The doing. As Marcus Aurelius put it (quoting from memory, but quite close): "One can live one's life in a calm flow of happiness, if one learns to think the right way and act the right way" (emphasis mine). The thinking is the easy part. Acting in support of and in harmony with this blissful state, in the world, despite the necessary state of detachment is and always has been the hard part. That's why you can't just Do Buddhism (or anything remotely similar) from books and some part-time meditating.
I think the tension & contradictions between detachment and action is why it's so difficult—impossible, even—to record on paper what a state of complete enlightenment is in any way that fully covers it all on its own. You can't write the differential equation describing it. At best, you can just vaguely gesture in the correct direction.
(note: I am quite bad at the "and act the right way" part myself, so could be entirely wrong about all of this)
I had the opportunity to ask a monk almost this exact question, I phrased it "why do anything?" instead of "accomplishing goals?"
His answer: Duty. The duties you have to your family, your community, etc.
That resonates with me quite a lot, as I fell into this trap too many times, and am currently in the process of getting out once again. Being stressed out and anxious makes me depressed, which makes me unproductive, which then reinforces the stress and anxiety. While you are in it, it is also difficult to take a step back and reflect on how this isn't a very smart way of doing things.
https://axyl.us/post/3048516084/waking-up-to-fatigue-society
I wrote it before an English translation was published, so I called it "fatigue society", which I still think is a more appropriate term than burnout society.
(Knowing that the essay is more than a decade old should help explain the strong assertion right off the bat that we aren't living in a "viral" age.)
I know nobody actually reads Foucault, but doesn't anyone at least read the Cliff's Notes?
and then near the end of the article:
> I’m not really sure external coercion has gone away, so much as it has been made indirect.
However people at the upper echelons of society who you would expect to be all happy and cheerful are also burning out because of what’s described in the book.
You can see people who work in charity for chump change can go on for hours of work day after day for years without burning out because they gain energy from the work due to their strong alignment with the purpose, on other hand people who work without a strong alignment of purpose do work as transactional that drains energy and burns people out.
"This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, bodybuilding gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession. This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being ‘into’, hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
There's also a great Nick Land piece called Meltdown from his saner CCRU days that captures the 'Burnout' notion very well: http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
And I say that as someone who studied Philosophy and Media science, so I am definitly not just allergic to hard theoretical jargon.
I try to remind myself every day how much rougher it was before I got a dev job. The financial hopelessness. Living in junky apartments with roommates as a married couple. Commuting 4 hours one way 2-3 days a week for part time jobs with no security or benefits. Trying to live off $20-30k a year in California. And still feeling lucky to have any work at all.
I try to remember this while sitting at zoom meetings and feeling exhausted. But the memory is fading...
i remember one time i was on vacation in costa rica and on a zip line tour. guy asks me where im from what i do. he said "oh man that's the dream, you just sit in a chair in the air conditioning all day? you don't know how lucky you have it!" and this dude runs zip line tours in costa rica.
grass is always greener
This stuff has been very salient to me the last couple of years. I had a friend who was in a physically abusive relationship, and she was often comparing my behavior, feelings, and thoughts about my job to what she was going through. It's definitely not the same, I don't want to trivialize anything, but in some circumstances a workplace just becomes sort of [emotionally] abusive, extremely dysfunctional, and starts to have tangible harms for spouses, family, etc. in terms of lost time, income, career opportunities, etc. I wrestled a lot with questions like "is it better to not have a job than an abusive dysfunctional one, when it's hurting my family at some level too?"
This isn't the same as putting up with some awareness that what you're doing is existentially empty at some level (which has its own set of issues), but balancing costs and benefits of jobs sometimes is trickier than it seems initially. I think maybe it's the same as the grass-is-always greener you mention, although I think that can go pretty far.
I would almost argue that having a physically tough day makes me feel sore and tired, but _accomplished_ at the end of the day. Having a mentally tough day doesn't confer any sort of sense of accomplishment, it's just a draining feeling.
Also consider the "happy" ending to Office Space--the protagonist ended up much more satisfied doing a physical construction job in the end.
The point is that no matter what you are doing there will be bosses you hate and annoying parts of the job.
When I'm having this conversation, I usually reply with something along the lines "yes, but imagine that most of your job in that air-conditioned office is doing math tests". It's not a perfect analogy, but it's a pretty valid one in terms of mental fatigue.
We (mostly) make enough money to do pretty well, might as well use it to enable ourselves to enjoy _something_ in life. For a while it was improv for me, now it's more powerlifting, but literally anything you can enjoy that's not work.
I banked the experience and learnings and moved to a company which wasn’t in the fatal decline stage of development.
In reality, Scrum went from "empower engineers" to "allow managers to micromanage their employees even more, but we call it Agile so you can't push back against it because then you're challenging the orthodoxy."
* We track velocity as the key capacity planning metric. We don't use it for performance or anything else (e.g. we don't care if it creeps or if two different teams have two different velocities).
* We then break down all of our work and estimate it. This gives us a scope.
* From there, we have a conversation with our PM. Here's the timelines you want to hit. Given the data, we need X. Do you want to cut scope or extend timelines?
-----
Lastly, we focus a lot on making decisions that maximize velocity over a medium-term (typically 4 to 12 weeks). There is little value in pushing hard in one sprint if it's going to have an opposite reaction in the next sprint.
There's no reason why anyone should need to be "certified" for a methodology to be applied. There isn't even a reason why SCUM methodology should be applied as a sort of universally applicable process.
The funniest thing about SCUM is that every diagram someone makes of it looks nearly identical to the straw man that is "Waterfall."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development)#/...
I mean, tell me that you couldn't change some of the jargon on that diagram and fool just about everyone into thinking it describes Waterfall.
The only thing potentially differentiating between SCUM and Waterfall is that the former has (in theory) a smaller iteration window and has liaisons between development and management. But the latter argument is nonsense because generally non-agile teams still self-organize into having liaisons and middle-managers.
And as you pointed out, the answer to why SCUM fails always comes down to not doing it "correctly". If no one can do it correctly, that's because it sucks. I've seen agile principles applied in different ways successfully, but I've never seen SCUM actually work any better than no formal methodology at all.
Scrum is only a capacity planning tool. Within a certain context, track velocity. When new work comes in, estimate it then compare to velocity. If you don't have the timelines you want, then you need to consider changing scope.
I suppose it's easier said than done, but the healthiest thing I did for myself in the transition to WFH during the pandemic was to set up and maintain appropriate boundaries between myself and work.
I'm done at 3:30. If you contact me after 3:30 I'm either ignoring the message until I'm "at work" the next morning, or I'm writing my time up as billable hours.
I've never been questioned on it, and the idea of muting my phone or leaving it in another room provides a mental break that helps with everything
Turn off that chat thing when you need to focus. Skip meetings where you neither will learn nor can contribute a unique perspectives. Turn the machine off when the workday is over to deal with the WFH blurriness. Push back on murky requirements.
Yes, it's hard, and it's scary. And I fully ack that in some companies, this would be career-limiting moves. If that's the case, you need to decide how much you want to work for them vs. going somewhere that actually lets you work as a dev.
This is a hugely important thing to learn.
Fact is, it's extremely unlikely a business is going to fire you for pushing back on something you can demonstrate is ridiculous. And engineers should be financially prepared to leave or be fired by employers being unreasonable with their requirements.
The biggest problem remains enough people being willing to put up with these insane demands that the requirements continue to get bigger. I haven't seen much fighting back until the "great resignation", and even that I'd consider mild.
I could not have said this better myself. Yes, we are paid extremely well, but the soul-crushing grind of building stupid web apps for companies that don't even need them really takes a toll eventually.
I think of Candide from time to time. Who can say if this is the paradisaical garden and alternatives could be much, much worse. Either way it's human nature to be restless. Maybe we can't all have the better job. This turns my attention to side projects, but I think as it pertains to tech, I don't have that much interest.
Plenty of jobs that involve moving around real stuff in real life rarely feel meaningless (though, again, they may have other problems, especially wear & tear on one's body).
But you know what? I still remember the feeling that you had at the end of the day, seeing stacks upon stacks of these bales, nicely filling the warehouse, how satisfying this was.
I don't remember the last time I felt like that when programming.
Nothing tech related I've done over ~20 years of being paid to do tech shit has been half as good. Buuuut that job paid barely over minimum wage and had no benefits. So. Here I am.
[EDIT] Oh, and not a single screen all damn day! Old-school cash register and paper records.
The thing about working home alone is difficult. I highly believe that hard deadlines and fixed meeting times destroy the whole concept.
I wake up when I feel to, and do whatever needs to be done and I feel more often motivated to actually do work then I did ever before.
I'll clarify that I do think post-industrial areas of Asia are actually "burnout societies." In the US, I don't get that sense at all.
But there is a pretty easy explanation for why people are burned out. All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on.
People are being pushed to do things that evolution really hasn't equipped them to do - sustained periods of low physical activity, high mental activity guided by willpower rather than instinct. That is pretty tiring.
Software is a great example. All engineering fields. Anything involving computers. Anything involving investment. Most creative work. Any customer service work (not mentally stimulating, but very demanding of continuous social engagement & othen in tense situations). Mechanical work.
It used to be everyone was a farm labourer. We don't have much work like that any more. Most of us have to plan out how we'll get physically tired out because it doesn't happen by accident any more.
I just bought an old house and I spend hours on it, working on shelves, building new floors etc, it's absolutely paradise.
More recently it's been woodworking for me, having spent this last Sunday building a small coaster set that someone commissioned from me. Completing the order was the absolute highlight of my month, the physicality of the thing allows for knowing every intimate detail about it that feels somewhat similar to the early programs many of us wrote. With early and simple programs, the ones written purely by a single person without management or team input, the programmer is able to fully encapsulate their ideas of the thing at the time of creation. This includes the good parts, the corners cut, the ideas they had when crafting it, and even the memory of where they were in the world when they created it. The problem with a program is that this can get lost over time, a change here, an update there, a PR from someone random, a critique from a new team member, and after a couple years it's different, the feeling of the thing is somehow lost. Having spoken to many building construction laborers, who if you survey them will typically say they have a high level of job satisfaction from seeing their work stand before them, I think the constant churn in the work we see today contributes to the sense of burnout many of us have felt.
With a physical good though, the essence of the craftsmanship in an item remains as long as the item is intact. I can still look at an old shelf a made a decade ago and have it put me directly back into the scene I was in during the time. The slightly odd pattern on one corner an indication of losing some footing while using an orbital sander, a scuff mark from transporting it from it's original home to a new apartment, the physicality creates a true mental time capsule. I'd encourage anyone who is in this field, especially if they've never done so before, to try building real things or to work with their hands in some way. Even if you don't make money from the activity in a direct sense, the stress reduction and life satisfaction it creates can go a long way in avoiding burnout and misery.
Exactly. The problem is that more and more of the "easy tasks" that high-skilled jobs are automated/moved to computers. 30-50 years ago, an Engineer still would find to make some copies, sharpen a pencil or get fresh paper from storage, check his mailbox etc. So even high-skilled jobs had a lot of repetetive, simple work parts that gave the brain room to relax. Nowadays the easy tasks are removed, and we mostly deal with hard problemes 8h+ a day.
For example, modern large scale farming is pretty harmful and is destroying top soil and striping soil of important nutrients. But we all like to run around saying, "automated", and it mostly is, but it comes at a cost.
Those things are mostly "easy" in that they're monotonous and no individual task has much risk of failure, but in aggregate it's demanding enough that it's super-hard
You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.
I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.
All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.
It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.
There are downsides to that form of existence. It is not optimal for extracting maximum contributions to society from every individual.
Our current social configuration seems to optimize for maximum “extraction” of social contribution from individuals.
But it follows some dark patterns: unless you’re fabulously wealthy, your contributions are generally opt-out instead of opt-in, and it coerces people into settling for local maxima (flipping burgers instead of writing code, writing code instead of research, research instead of etc.)
I also agree that the impersonal nature of this configuration is disturbingly dissociative, and it’s sad that the only antidotes are (1) work harder, so you have less time to think (2) opt-out.
"High mental activity guided by will power" sounds like a fantastic foundation for any role and my ideal.
There is a place for manual labour (been there, done that), and both can work.
People are burned out due to understaffing and/or misallocation of resources.
This is intensely acute for some right now due to the chips falling back down to earth while people adjust to pre-post-pandemic.
That means that, while writing code, I can go into what I term a “fugue state.” Hours can pass, and I barely notice.
This has one fairly visible artifact: My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green.
When I come out of this state, I am done. Totally exhausted. Not sore, like I was working out, but definitely physically tired.
I sleep well, those nights.
I apologize for the acronym. I thought it was common terminology.
You name one reason. And it's a true reason but there are many others. Your explanation doesn't cover them all.
There are only two reason people get burned out: long periods of mental or physical stress. A dancer can burnout when asking too much of the body. A fit person can burnout when the lie of an affair is going on for too long. And of course your explanation is also a very valid one.
A burnout is 100% physical (the body is exhausted), but the cause can be mental or physical (or both).
Unfortunately I have experience with being burned-out. So I can give my best advice to others who are struggling with a burnout: the key to recovery is acceptance. A burnout is potentially life threatening so you really need to step on the brakes and accept that you can't go on like you do. Also accept that it might take at least a year to fully recover. And accept that you will experience very strange thoughts and feelings because everything in your body is messed up. If you don't accept that you are burned-out you will really struggle to get better. Get help!
That resonates with me. As a developer, I feel an intense desire to either contribute to open source, or go into a more "creative" field. And it's not the "good" kind of desire that gives me energy or pushes me to do things, but it's the kind of "bad" desire that feels like it's eating me alive sometimes. I have a master's degree, and a nice job with very good people. But somehow it doesn't feel enough for me.
I know this is a mental health problem, and I know that this may be a "real" calling instead of just a kind of FOMO. But a few people around me suffer from the same thing, so I wonder if there's not some kind of mechanism at play here. While I don't spend much time with "regular" people on social media, I spend time looking at open source developers, and creative people. When I was younger I felt kind of immune to the social media trap (showing your perfect life and all of that). Now, I realise that I may have fallen from it, just with different values.
I have a very creative job and it provides me a lot out creative outlet but that doesn't stop me daydreaming about making something of my own and that desire is something I struggle with a lot. Interestingly it's become more acute as I've got older, had kids and have more time that is taken up by home-life. Before I could throw myself into other hobbies that have largely fallen by the wayside. It doesn't help that my health took a large oopsie this year and I'm still getting back on my feet from that. I've very slowly started scratching that itch and every time that I do I definitely feel more relaxed.
My other issue is that I've spent so long being creative in a commercial setting I find it very hard not to look at everything through a product lens.
It feels like that. I never really understood that I had a desire for recognition before and so I mostly ignored it, but these days it's getting harder.
> My other issue is that I've spent so long being creative in a commercial setting I find it very hard not to look at everything through a product lens.
That doesn't help too. Switching before "work mode" and "home mode" when coding takes a bit of time for me, which makes it harder to do things as I don't have that much time after work.
Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)
I don't think it's a mental vs. physical thing at all.
I've had jobs where I had certainty about what I was doing every day, I witnessed the fruits of my labor and I had certainty about where I stood in the organization. I never suffered burnout from them.
I've also had jobs where I was always uncertain about what I ought to be doing, where the fruits of my labor often didn't seem to amount to much (e.g. perpetual project cancellations/always changing requirements/sudden architectural direction changes) and I was really uncertain about where I stood the whole time.
I tried dealing with it with sustained periods of heavy physical activity (e.g. jogging between tasks), meditation, etc. It only helped a little.
This perpetual miasma of uncertainty and consequent stress built up over time and when it became too much - that's when I burned out.
I don't doubt that working on a farm doing heavy physical labor under similar conditions would burn me out too. My parents used to sometimes give me vague gardening tasks when I was a teenager and I absolutely hated that.
Dramatization of this in action:
Have to wonder too if there’s such a thing as the ambiguity of labor. Not knowing where one stands in an organization is a continuous passive stress, a background drone of worries. It’s an emotional labor that even comes with jobs that aren’t primarily social.
I think I've always found there to be some individuality and creativity in software work, so in this respect even when I'm burning out I feel more like Tony than Tommy.
>The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.
It makes a lot more sense for it to apply to software developers too with this definition.
My uncertainty was because I always found this concept a little vague around the edges. What the fuck even is a self realized human being, for instance? Would Tony be one and Tommy not? Or neither? Or would the example need to be fleshed out before you could say?
To stay with the kitchen examples, cooks would not be alienated if they could:
- afford to eat where they work
- have creative agency over the recipes
- have the chance to meet with the customers of the restaurant who eat their dishes
So... an autonomous, self realized human being is just another way of saying a human being? What additional meaning does it impart then?
>To stay with the kitchen examples, cooks would not be alienated if they could: >- afford to eat where they work >- have creative agency over the recipes >- have the chance to meet with the customers of the restaurant who eat their dishes
So Tony would be not-alienated and Tommy working at McDonalds would be only meet 1/3 of the alienation criteria?
And developers would meet more likely hit the criteria if they're working for an expensive B2B rather than a B2C?
(genuinely curious btw, this is an interesting conversation)
> So... an autonomous, self realized human being is just another way of saying a human being? What additional meaning does it impart then?
The thing is that the worker loses these innate human characteristics, such as being autonomous and self realized, by becoming an economic entity in a capitalist setting. That is how I understand it.
> So Tony would be not-alienated and Tommy working at McDonalds would be only meet 1/3 of the alienation criteria?
Perhaps it is important to consider the notion of sense of provided value. As Tommy, I wouldn't feel like what I'm doing is meaningful. I'm preparing low quality unhealthy food and I could be replaced at any time, making me similar to a tool. I agree tho that as Tony I wouldn't probably feel alienated.
But as I've never worked as a cook, perhaps it is easier to describe alienation as a software developer.
I'll take as an example 2 distinct jobs I had.
One in a small startup with a very flat hierarchy, where I was involved in most technical decisions and I met customers and users. It was a B2B model so I couldn't technically own the product I contributed to make, but I was somehow convinced that it would provide some value for the "greater good".
The other job was in a medium sized startup, where technical decisions were imposed from the top and I had very little agency. Being a large product, my contributions would only have tiny effects on the final result. I was "checked on" daily by anxious managers. I had no contact with our users, and this wasn't the kind of product people would make grateful reviews about.
Can you guess where is it that I felt alienated?
If you ever find youself typing a sentence that starts with this, please stop and hit the backspace button until it's gone. You are most likely going to to say something that is completely wrong or misses 90% of the actual reasons something happens.
What you're describing sounds a bit like alienation, where workers are alienated from the products of their labor.
The deep boredom that wasn't. We must throw people to the lions in a colosseum. People are suffering because they desire to solve this deep boredom. They will constantly escalate the risk or thrill to satisfy this desire but the cure to the boredom is impermanent. Pleasure must be fleeting and therefore the cure for the deep boredom is to not desire.
This isn't to say you cannot live life. You must give up control, give up greed, hatred, and ignorance.