Is our definition of burnout all wrong?
bustle.com
bustle.com
I suspect if you're commenting in this thread, you'd probably enjoy it.
Anyway, the one thing that seems to always be a consistent theme in discussions of burnout, is work. I've not yet seem a conversation on burnout where an employment scenario is not brought up.
One of the chapters in Lost Connections talks about meaningful work, and how a reduction or elimination of personally fulfilling work, can lead to a depression, as can a few other things.
I can't help but feel at this stage after dealing with a long running depression, that our relationships with work are probably broken, and we've all been sold a lie.
My issue with the term "burnout" is that it feels like it's loading the topic to be a personal issue (which it technically is), when in reality, it's a reaction to a bad external stimuli.
I'd write more, but I feel like I'm waffling, I'm happy to discuss more if people want to chat about it.
It's funny, you suggest the idea that "work" is a farce and people act as if you're recommending they stay still until they die. We cannot even fathom a life without "work" as it currently exists. To remind readers, when faced with imminent death, the biggest regret is work. Yet we prevent access to integral institutions based on whether someone is employed, we judge others based on where they are employed, the entire education system is based on funnelling people to work more, and we view homeless people as subhumans who just need to find a job.
Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
But think of the productivity hacks that are possible! We're just not telling ourselves the right thing. Cognitive worksheets. The Secret. Microdosing. We'll get it eventually! Musk and Jobs got it. We just have to hack it.
I don't want to have complex thought. I don't want to have to perform feats of self-flagellation everyday in order to survive. I don't want to be forced to spend the entirety of my very short life in relative isolation, making some other ape filthy rich so he can escape the absurdity and emptiness of existence.
Let me hunt for other small animals with my tribe -- and then spend the rest of my time loafing about. I don't feel like contorting my body and mind as a glorified circus animal in order to get that metaphorical bread.
Someone already suggested this book before I replied so I'll add some more information.
The comparison of "intuitive tasks" is one that sticks with me. So much of what we do currently isn't intuitive like it potentially would have been for farmers. We don't know who benefits. We go somewhere for an abstract amount of time, we "work", we go back home so we can afford to spend time with our family, but not too much time we have work to do to complete before the next sprint.
We have layers of people telling each other what they should be working on who in turn tell people "lower" than them what they should be working on. No intuition here!
Categorically, without question the vast majority of people told me they work hard for a few months a year during planting and harvest, otherwise they party, spend time with family and do whatever the hell they want. They don’t have Netflix or iPhones, but they have a huge amount of leisure time
I don't think you have much evidence for that, do you? A 40 hour work week does take up time, but still leaves enough time for other activities. Most people don't die during their working life either.
Sure, working more isn't healthy, but work is unavoidable the way society is organized. Until you're willing to give up running water and supermarkets, you're going to have to work. There's not going to be a reevaluation of the modern idea of work. All you can do is limit the excesses.
So, unionize.
How much is enough time?
> Most people don't die during their working life either.
But they do tend to have kids long before retiring.
Work is unavoidable, yes, at least until we can automate everything. But are 40 hour weeks unavoidable for our currently standard of living? I doubt it.
And then, there are all these (low-paid) jobs where 40 hours won't keep you alive, all those people that need to commute an hour each way and so on. And the , it's easily a 50-60 hours/week if you take door-to-door time.
Yes, change your life and get something better. But that's sometimes not so easy.
He just said if he could have his life over again he would work less and do more fun stuff. I take that to heart.
Now this may be a difference between US and European definitions of ‘burnout’, but this doesn’t hold true for me.
I’m dealing with (the aftermath of) a burnout since 2016 after what at the time felt like the best half year of my life.
I did everything. A 40hr/week internship that was very fulfilling to me, social engagements on almost every week night, activities every weekend, and a romantic relationship I was trying—but failed—to make work.
It all felt great until I just couldn’t even pay attention to mental junk food anymore.
Now of course this is an anecdote. But I have been told burnout is first and foremost a deregulation of the stress (i.e. adrenaline/cortisol) system). This suits much better with my experience, since I love my work, but can’t do it 40hr/w anymore.
Constantly hot and sweating, stomach muscles tight, and the feeling of an ever-present fear of something / anything happening.
Once I was able to attribute it to work, and address some of it, things started regulating themselves, but it took a long time; and still isn't complete.
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/17/lost-connectio...>
(I've not read it myself.)
More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
Being a code monkey who thinks it's their job to be responsible for the company is hard. In that case, I agree with you. Such a code monkey needs to put themselves in a position of power somehow.
> Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences.
It's perfectly fine. It can also lead to burnout.
This sounds more like manager incompetence than being a code monkey. But embracing code monkey-ism could help as I imagine it involves just doing tasks at one's own pace and putting up strong emotional boundaries to mismanagement. Can constant meetings or bikeshedding really hurt someone who's just looking to run out the clock?
P.S. I'm talking about choosing to be a code monkey as a philosophy, a choice. Not as a skill level that I'd call "beginner". Some people call beginners code monkeys, I am not a fan of that.
Or it could be two or more competent managers coming into conflict. Or incompetent ones. It is not that rare l - if you recognise the situation, you can pick a side, but if you dont know what to do, you could be viewed badly by all participants
Well, that is until the senior engineers or managers burnout from being "responsible" for keeping product from crashing, performance issues, and/or technical debt but without authority to change things! QED
Fast forward to the second year, I got a new manager who turned the office politics to 11, put people in positions that they were absolutely not fit for and in general made a huge mess out of everything, ignoring the advice and suggestions of the team while doing it while continuously reminding us engineers of our low place in the picking order. If there was a way to rank managers this guy would be in the bottom 5%, I've worked with about 30 managers (in one way or another) in my career so this was bound to happen at some point.
However, I was totally not prepared for the effect it had on me. Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping poorly and my physical health was suffering. It took an enormous amount of energy just to sit through online meetings without lashing out, the rest of the team was feeling the same so you can imagine what kind of environment it was. I was lucky to get a new job very quickly and after getting out of that toxic environment I was my old self again in mere weeks.
I can totally imagine how burnout can be modeled as learned helplessness. If, I, as young, healthy guy can be reduced to a wreck, in months, in a toxic environment, I can only start to imagine what people have to go through that don't have the luxury of switching jobs quickly (for whatever reason).
Always remember that it's jsut a job, and that your manager's opinion - outside of that org - is no more important than anyone else's opinion in the world.
In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your livelihood due to high rents, few social support structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.
There's a model of thinking taught in schools and universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or assume the burden of the imposition of value on their psyche.
Has there been a time or place where this isn't the case?
To quote Karl Marx "He who does not work does not eat."
Overall I think there’s a decent compromise to be found there. I am happy for the society to ensure that as many people as possible have a guaranteed bare minimum to survive, which provides opportunities to find better. If some people are content with surviving, well. More power to them. They are not in big enough numbers to matter anyway (the sums involved are dwarfed by companies’ tax fraud).
your survival being predicated upon engaging in state-enforced financial exploitation by a capitalist and being separated from the value of your own labor
isnt quite the same as
engaging in activities deaigned to produced a beneficial outcome to the self and society at a point in the future
Some countries (Germany, Switzerland, maybe others) will pay employment insurance even if you quit of your own accord and lower the elimination period if you had reasons to do so (as certified by a MD)
That was Lenin who wrote that, although it was originally from the Bible.
There's nothing worse than a clueless political manager.
I had this happen too - this is so important to understand - your performance is hugely affected by the environment. This is super depressing, causes so much self hatw and angst
If you find yourself in that position, you have to chabge team or company asap
If a manager find thia has happened, I dont know what you do
In my opinion burnout is actually more of a natural phenomenon, which is the mind simply needing to do something totally different and perhaps more meaningful. I believe it is also due to the unnatural tendency for people to work in the same or similar field of expertise for far too long, which is simply not natural especially for highly intellectual fields.
Like you said, "Burnout is like when you don't want to do something anymore". Isn't that what learned helplessness is, with a 'something' that's life-scoped instead of work-scoped?
Strong disagree. Scientists burn out harder than programmers and what they do is arguably more "meaningful", at least to the individual scientist. Actually I think burnout is often triggered by moral injury, which starts by having a personal investment in the narrative of your objective
The book "Lab Rats" explains this phenomenon very well. In fact, apparently, the way you make a rat depressed in a lab study is to constantly change small aspects of its environment, preventing it from ever feeling stable and comfortable. I wonder if the upheaval in modern social life resulting from things like the rapid changes brought on by capitalism and information technology are a contributor to this widespread feeling.
I will never buy a Tesla, with that big screen controlling everything, which the true owners of the vehicle keep on reprogramming from afar! At least you can count on an older car to keep on functioning in the same way you're used to, from one day to the next.
In other words, you can burn out at a job that's 12 hours a week and not burn out at a job that's 60 hours a week. It depends heavily on the nature of the work. Whenever people talk about feeling 'burnt out' purely due to how many hours they work I am always sceptical and suspect the root cause is actually different (note that I actually think our work week is too long even at 40 hours, I think too many hours of work are unhealthy for other reasons). In this sense I'd distinguish 'exhaustion' from 'burnout'. The former can turn into the latter but often does not but the root cause of exhaustion is exertion whereas this is not the case for burnout. They can converge, of course, the ultimate result may be severe depression in either case, but it's still worth distinguishing.
Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales:
1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work.
2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work.
3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work.
So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough.
Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy:
* I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients.
* I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems.
* I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work
For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...
Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.
It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague.
Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't.
Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body.
Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over.
In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.
That's provoked me into thinking why. Assuming it's true and not a trope, some possibilities:
- They're more plugged into social media and online communities which provide validation of some of the items we're discussing here.
- They're more skeptical and cynical broadly-speaking, maybe due to some political or some Zeitgeist unique to the moment.
Again this assumes it is true that they're really more cynical about work, and we've controlled for the weird economic circumstances of the last few years. Anyone without a high salary or who's tried and failed to purchase a property is probably somewhat skeeved at the moment.
The narrative of their lifetime is 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Trump and deep polarization, COVID, another war, cost of living crisis, and a middle class existence increasingly out of reach.
The future: climate crisis, multi-polar world (China, Russia), more job instability, AI wrecking everything.
Western civilization peaked in the 90s, it's all downhill since then. The millennial generation has only known downhill.
The 50's and 60's may have been a uniquely optimistic time for Americans (less so for Europeans after WWII). The country came out ahead, growing, rich and dominant. The 1960's was a unique decade seemingly of optimism and change. However there were certainly massive challenges, you can find enough evidence of terrible injustices being committed against minority groups standing up for themselves.
We work backwards and find tragedies in all of them.
Fast-forward again, we have incredible technology - we have maps, video conferencing and infinity encyclopedias in our pockets; people are getting bodypart transplants and plasma injections; we have consumer devices that monitor our health. None of us have fear of draft. There's no rational fear of rockets raining on us. We're incredibly lucky.
I can see the downhill feeling though. There's a deep pessimism.
There's reason to be pessimistic, mind you - but the pessimism is very monetizable, making it difficult to tell how much of it is being fed to us for profit.
The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out.
My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information.
After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.
Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase.
It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc.
It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople.
It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters.
They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.
This rings true to me. And I think it extends beyond that to being dehumanised. In a work environment you are made to feel powerless to stop bad things from happening. That breaks us.
Yes, I have to hard agree on that. It made me feel as a cog in a very dysfunctional and broken machine, being ground while watching the whole machine work, shaking and losing parts. When I opened up about my feelings (after starting therapy) I got so many messages from people wanting to share similar feelings... Being powerless while raising every flag possible about possible improvements was exhausting.
I think the only thing that kept my sanity for 4 quarters was that I stopped caring and fixed all low-hanging fruits I could find. Until I got passive-aggressively berated for not delivering something on a timeline I didn't agree to at all, that triggered a kind of despair I haven't felt professionally and finally made me jump from the sinking ship.
Cherry on top was getting a veiled threat during my exit interview to not talk about and share my experience with the larger org to "not hurt the ones I loved working with" there. Fuck. That.
Could you share the strategy you used to 1. Look for your next job and ensuring a healthier environment and 2. Talking about that previous job in interviews without lying but also without raising red flags for the recruiter?
Unfortunately I don't think I will have much to help here as I simply moved from the child-org to the larger parent-org (that had acquired said child-org, I was actually hired by parent-org to work on improving the codebase of the acquisition) with the help of some amazing people, the larger org is much much healthier (actually one of the best places I've worked at) so I didn't have to hide anything I went through. The people that helped me had experienced the issues with me and lent me a hand to get out after they did, we still commiserate to this day on it...
> I still don’t feel like I’ll be able to be an employee ever again as a result.
Yeah, it's been taking me a year but I'm slowly getting back to my former self. Still I check out sometimes when things look harder than they should due to some politicking, I got an extreme aversion to any of it, even to the point where I don't try to sell my product or tech ideas because I feel exhausted just by the thought of it. It sucks for my career for now but I'm much healthier than a year ago... There's hope!
In my case, it was the exact opposite. It came after striving for a particular goal for several years, achieving it, and then realizing I had no gas left in the tank to do it all over again (product manager at a big SaaS/PaaS launching products within that platform).
The part that's more interesting is why the tank was empty, and it was for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments:
- Gaslighting by middle management about solving problems / addressing issues
- Responsibility (loads of it) without authority
- Lack of focus by execs (leading to massive churn)
I do think that constantly striving for something and not achieving it can also be a cause of burnout, but I think it's just one of many possible causes / factors.
Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.
I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job. But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day. And the end of every shift felt so good.
In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't even know why. Something about staring at screens all day - something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how other people think.
Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a distinct feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find enjoyable.
So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties of different people - both activities that humans have not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in previous eras.
It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support yourself.
For me the balance is finding some part of my work that I control, that I can also really care about. I can be proud of the quality of the code I wrote even if I don't care much about the product or the business.
"In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads."
For me, I feel the most intense burnout when I see stupidly wasted opportunities. For instance, if a startup has a great idea and plenty of funding, but the leadership is hopelessly stupid and engages in self-sabotage (and perhaps I try to save the situation but I'm ignored) and millions of dollars are wasted, then I get burnout. I felt burnout in 2016, after witnessing the insanely self-destructive leadership at "Celelot" destroy a brilliant idea, which I wrote about here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
<s>Testosterone</s>
I’ve worked cutting trees under a literal psychopath (just out of jail for murder), a guy had died of dehydration on that job the previous year. It was strenuous and I mourned/cried the loss of my girlfriend while sawing branches like a madman.
It was also the best time of my life.
See, using my body, requiring agility, quick varied microdecisions and physical strength, it makes use of the body I was given by mother nature. Compare that to working in front of a computer all day, using only the logical part of my brain, no emotions, gray screens everywhere: As much as I love being an entrepreneur and I love using my IQ 136, well, it uses 8% of the body’s capabilities - the brain and the fingers, period. It’s unnatural.
So I suspect hard physical work with actual people and emotions, triggers hormones (testosterone being the caricature of it) that regulates everything including motivation, a clean mind, and happiness. Of course I wouldn’t wish to work on a field all my life, but programming or Excel spreadsheeting may have a negative impact on the mind.
Socrates was right! There’s no mind without a strong body! (for a man at least).
For somebody proudly touting their Mensa membership, you seem to have fallen into the same transcendalist trap that everyone does who waxes poetic for natural and "Mother Earth".
Natural is one in three women dying in childbirth, natural is contracting rabies by being bitten by a rabid animal and having 100% mortality rate, natural is dying at age 50 to 60.
I see this a lot on HN, but never forget that sitting for eight hours a day has long term negative health consequences too, some that are very very serious.
And yet when I sat down to write code, I couldn’t do it. It’s difficult to describe - I was completely paralysed. The simplest of tasks required insurmountable effort. And trying to deal with that, day in day out, is the “burnout”.
Burnout may be likely or common in bad environments, but it isn’t the sole cause. In my case I can’t blame the company or the environment. It was about as far away from toxic as you can get.
I’m planning to take about a year off work, because that’s what the internet says I should do. But I really don’t understand what caused this to happen, or what I could do in the future to prevent it.
One theory is that I became less physically active over time. Exercise is well known to have a protective effect against burnout, and physical labor jobs are a lot of exercise all day. I was also going to the gym much more when I was younger.
Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and fight against dirty office politics.
Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them. Something about being in a socially consistent environment makes everything easier to stomach. On the contrary, being in weird office politics situations where Bob in management gets to insult your work and upend your priorities every week just because he's got a certain title leads to burnout. It's like the burnout is a response to dampen your expectations and efforts in response to situations where more engagement will only produce more stress and frustration.
Physical labor jobs, on the other hand, have a property that more input will usually result in at least some tangible forward progress.
> Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather than worsening them.
This coincides with my experience. If the job. is meaningless, then burnout is highest.
And the amount of peolle who say they job. is bullshit is increasing
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2015/08...
[Edit] The job, where I almost got a burnout. The job was empty and they asked me for it, because the person before left with a bad burnout. The person now in this job is now also close to a burnout.
Perhaps oddly, I absolutely thrive on those challenges. Constant adaptation, analysis and overcoming, all forms of mental soldiering (even against the odds) feed my addiction to "dare and win". So long as I have agency.
There's something else going on. Seems to me there's a lot of people exhibiting a torpor/apathy that's at odds with their good physical fitness, high mental energy levels, and general enthusiasm. Something demoralising that saps our souls.
For me I think it is the level of perfection that is required to actually have development proceed smoothly. It is extreme particularly when coupled with peers who frequently break things or put together solutions that are overly complex or bug riddled.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a perfect programmer by any stretch of the imagination but it is my desire to reach perfection that causes severe emotional drain I think.
The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom:
> The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large.
I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition.
I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.
The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?
Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800.
If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere.
It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
While the troughs of that sorrow are undoubtedly deeper, childhood deaths in your family weren't a 24/7 stressor.
I think the issue is that people can log in to Reddit, Twitter, or even any news website and receive a constant stream of tragedy, bad news, and worry. It's no longer an exception, it's the everyday experience available on demand.
I see this come up in extremely online young people I work with: They're always invested in a new tragedy or catastrophe or drama or concern somewhere in the world, but those worries disappear and get replaced with a new one as soon as the news cycles shift. They weren't actually invested in it, they were just reacting to what they put in front of their eyes for hours per day.
I'd say that it isn't the world that's under-stressed, it's upper-middle class NYC/London feature writers. Other people still suffer plenty.
I have heard these described as gravity problems; problems that might be worth solving, if they are solvable at all, but which are almost certainly not the problems you should be concerning yourself with. Instead finding the right sized problems and solving them can be very satisfying.
Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake.
Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever.
I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it.
These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again.
I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you".
I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019.
> expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist
I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.
All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases.
This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period.
I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)
The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life.
Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades.
But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout.
Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism.
As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.
My last in-office part-time job was stressful. My supervisor criticized my obvious unwillingness to stand up and move around so much. I woke up every morning in fear and this fear propelled me to arrive on time, lest I be reprimanded and fired for tardiness. I spent 2 or so days every week in "bliss" which meant doing nothing whatsoever except Internet games in my shorts and trying to soak in the air conditioning. I was arguably burned out every week, day in day out.
It was this same scene when I had fulltime jobs, I would spend Sat-Sun attempting to recuperate some energy and sanity off the clock. I couldn't budge. It was not pretty.
Thankfully I have found a WFH remote job that does not burn me out whatsoever, and I'm happy to put in 20-30 hours per week and it's really somewhat energizing. I get paid good money for it so I'm thankful for the lack of burnout. I hope and pray that this job lasts me through retirement, which will be real soon now.
Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition—it's almost always B.S.
The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
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"Practice root thinking [1]"
[1] "Term _I_ coined"