I've had to slow down. This means reducing all the things that distract me. It means coming to grips with "missing out".
I've leaned into some life hacks like:
- Designating social media time to just after work but not after dinner (includes HN).
- Leaning into meditation. Not just 10min via an app but a walk to and back from my favorite cafe every morning without my phone or any headphones.
- Going to bed early and waking up early. The quietest, non-distracting moments are in the early morning.
- Using a pomodoro timer. For both work projects and personal projects.
- I try to spend some time focusing on activities that are intentionally slow like writing poetry and personal essays.
- Religiously take off the weekends
- Take several days off about six times a year (for example a long weekend, however to avoid crowds, sometimes take off during the workweek)
- And once a year for at least two weeks
- Don't do too much in the free time or have buffers of dolce far niente between work and busy free time
I think you hit the nail on the head with "dealing with missing out".
The vast majority of what happens is irrelevant and trying to keep up with, say, the latest tech drama, the latest framework, the scandal du jour, the currently popular TV show.. it feels important but it's not, and giving up is hard but not harmful.
The only thing to do is to meet it on your own timeline, not its.
I have mortgage, wife, kids also and continue to plug along, but know the difference.
What you wrote is like saying "well, I'll just work through the pain" when someone asks about avoiding heart attack. That's not how heart attacks work, and that's not how burnout works either.
I got to my goal through a combination of good luck, hard work and other life choices (eg we have no kids, no car and are frugal for co² emission reduction). I also predicted the house prices crash of 2008 (not the whole thing, but definitely within my country) and waited for years while my friends bought vault overpriced properties way out of town. Then I watched the house prices tumble to decades low prices before grabbing an absolute bargain. That was one part of the luck. The other was the startup being acquired, but I got fucked on the stock, so it only just about covered my remaining debt. So I kept working and building a nest egg.
I did switch companies after a while and I spend another 2 years helping to build another startup. But one stressful day in the middle of a fundamental disagreement with my CTO, I just blurted out "I'm sorry, but think I quit!" I talked it through over the weekend with my wife, and confirmed it on the Monday.
After 20 years of unbroken employment I took 6 months off. I had all these plans for what I'd do (mostly tech side projects that I didn't have time for) but only achieved 10% of it because I was having so much fun doing DIY, gardening, running...
Up to that point in my life I was soooo tech focused. But after realizing that I could "insta-quit" at any time and do zero tech, I did worry that I had broken myself. But strangely enough I found myself working with another startup and absolutely loving it.
I realized that I need other people to need my expertise. Even though I love what I do, I find that I can't do it simply for myself. Work is a necessary "evil" that allows me to have my tech hobby. I just approach it differently now. I'm careful about who I work with and what they're building. Oh, and I also work 3.5 days a week now, so no more burnout.
That let me pay my mortgage early, which became a multiplier on my ability to save and invest. At this point, 3.5 days per week pays me enough to live comfortably on. When I was negotiating my last offer I asked for shorter working hours instead of more money. They accepted.
It's a Buddhist concept that says that to achieve tranquility (end of suffering) you need to have what you value, what you think and what you are actually doing aligned and going in the same direction.
When you're feeling lost, ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What do you really want?
- What do you really value?
- What are you really doing with your life?
I've wrote a longer post that you can read here: https://kerkour.com/alignment
* Remember that Social Media is the place that everyone shows 'their absolute best' - even a fake version of their best. It doesn't show their times of down, their stress, and so on.
* the social media that you're using may connect thousands or hundreds of thousands of people together. There's only 365 days a year, and even if each person only has one good day a year that they show off, 273 people (out of 100k) would share each individual day. It'd look like you're going slow.
* As other people have said, life is a marathon, not a sprint. You've got a whole lot of years left and you want to be able to function in them, too. Burnout can absolutely ruin developers, and has, many times in the past.
* As other people have said, "work to live", don't "live to work". Now, I get the feeling that this is your personal project or your business you're running at. That's awesome! You still need to give yourself space between a singular project so you can recuperate from it. How often do you look at code you wrote or things you worked on when you were at a fever pace and go "wow, what was I thinking?"; or, when you couldn't solve a problem for days, go to bed and then hey, the solution is right there! Give yourself the space so that those events can happen - and they happen because you're getting away from the work, you're getting rested, you're relaxing.
Your health, your life, the connections you make are of incredible value and as you get older, they get harder to train, recover, grow. Make sure you're tending to yourself like you should in ways that are completely disconnected from your work.
I don’t see the point making $150k a year if I’m literally exchanging my life for that money.
“Unemployment” is a dirty word, I think by design to keep people producing for the economy. It’s impressive how much of a stronghold this concept holds over people. How many people who already have more than enough, who could live out the rest of their lives literally doing whatever they want, instead continue to remain employed in a job they don’t like due to an irrational fear of unemployment?
I’ve been around for a while and I’ve got 10 years of networking under my belt. Someone knows someone who knows someone who needs something built, and my name comes up. When I was working full time, I turned down a lot of projects, but invited people to contact me at a later date. This worked in my favour as many of those people ended up contacting me again years later.
So just put yourself out there. Tell everyone you’re taking on random projects. Anything goes. It may lead somewhere.
For me it’s various things these days - static sites, small apps, ecommerce builds etc. Solo work, and perhaps not the most sexy or exciting. However, the flexibility is unparalleled. I pick my hours, location, and timezone. Most “remote-first” companies aren’t this flexible.
I got a lot better at life when I started studying deep and ancient history in detail and figured out that there's been multiple worlds before this one. Many systems have been exercised and they all have a life cycle and eventually collapse.
Much like living beings, societies are born, mature and wither. It is inevitable that ours will collapse eventually. It isn't good or bad. It just is.
I've since embraced the roll of researching these life cycles.
I recently learned a cognitive behavior technique where when you notice that you're demonizing something, you make an effort to find something good about it. As in, "I dislike this situation very much, but it's a nice learning opportunity", or "I miss a loved one that's died, but I sure have a lot of great memories with them". It can feel like gymnastics the first time, but then it clicks. The goal is to remember that each entity is multifaceted and complex, without putting on rose-tinted or doom-tinted glasses. Closing yourself off to that complexity that's inherent in everything is not worth it.
I was also in similar situation and I indeed complained a lot, like everyone called me the most pessimist person in existence and some of my friends intentionally avoided me.
While I got some therapy which immensely helped, it is also important to find out about why you feel helpless and if something bad or regretful happened to you that left you scarred(took the therapy to realise and distance myself from that abyss…).
Rather than complaining, I eventually came to accept that the world is not just(read about just world fallacy) and everything is the way it is and will continue to devolve into more degrades state due to constant chaos nature of everything. All that is left to do in power is to enjoy myself with my family and friends and not try to save the world to enlighten others about obvious issues of the society and everything(believe me most everyone also sees and knows this but tends to be busy with their own life and tomorrow instead of getting down about the sinister nature of the world).
Also helps to maintain pretty firm limits on work time and not-work time, or even just having a small window of your waking day where you're on Do Not Disturb.
I have been struggling with burnout for a while now, but I was unable to really put my finger on what was wrong. Maybe it was the job, maybe it was the management, the colleagues, maybe it was the lack of autonomy, maybe it was /me/, etc. I changed jobs a few times, tried my hand at another function in my line of business, became an independent contractor, etc.
Not any of it did anything to relieve the nagging feeling. The mortgage, the family, my progressing age had locked my mind in thinking that the only way out was incremental change, tweaking my career here and there.
But that line of thinking was perhaps too small, and I now believe that this business is just not for me. It has been quite cathartic to at least imagine myself going into another profession entirely, even though carrying out such a transition is anything but straightforward.
Also, some related prior discussions. Note that this is an attempt at collecting useful comments that could relate, NOT at an insinuation that the OP is lazy, a procrastinator, or other. But some comments were good, like finding balance, direction, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758 ("How do you develop internal motivation")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23072333 ("Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help (gist.github.com)")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919697 ("ask hn: how do i overcome mental laziness?")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22124489 ("Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time (bbc.com")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22096571 ("Ask HN: I don't want to be a worker any more I want to be a professional")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20930439 ("how do you keep your programming motivation up?")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18903886 "Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself to keep working on a project? "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777976 "ask hn: how do you stay disciplined in the long run?"
For what it may be worth.
I only work on my side project on rainy days, never when the suns out
Are you actually money driven? I’m not, I’m passion driven, so I work on passion projects. Money is just a part of the picture, it’s not the main driver.
Work less hours if you can too, if your finances allow it
I worked very hard on many jobs, I always get praise, until I get tired and suddenly it doesn't matter how good I did in the past: I am shown the door or get mistreated so bad that I find the door myself.
So my best solution so far has been to move into freelance/part-time. It is a different world, with different challenges, but nothing beats being able to keep a sane mind.
This might be a hard pill to swallow, but no amount of “life hacks” will fix an issue with the ownership of your time.
“So, I seems to kick ass at work, doesn’t it?”
Best. Investment. Ever. At least people have news from me, I used to work in the dark, now people know what I’m doing.
I have to keep on the positive side of the scale - Hacker News, some great YouTube channels about things that really interest me. Sometimes, I can venture to the slightly negative side, like "funny" videos about people farting in public and cute dogs... but this is like diving - it is fun for a short while, but if you stay too long, you run out of air and die. And I know from experience there are depths of the negative side where I cannot go - TikTok, Twitter, those crush my soul (subjective thing, I'm sure some find those inspiring).
Also, like with everything else, moderation is key. Even with things on the positive side.
The main things I've found that burn me out is boring work, working too long and no end to the work. Usually it's enough to just leave or stop after my normal hours and do something else.
Being able to choose to do other things (even if it's stare at a wall) helped me a lot
Sometimes you can go a long way by addressing external factors like matching control over outcomes with responsibility (high responsibility paired with low control is bad).
But, my two cents is look at cognitive behavior therapy with a specialist. Especially, if you've been experiencing some degree of burnout for years.
How it might go: you learn to observe your thoughts when you're in burnout; you notice that they're unhealthy; you learn to notice them earlier and earlier; you start to detect increasingly more fundamental behaviors and thoughts that lead to burnout; then you start implementing various strategies to change those behaviors/thoughts/habits.
That said, I still struggle with burnout, so do weigh what I say accordingly.
It helped me a lot to know what type I am. Now I know what my strength and weaknesses are. It's surprising how accurate this simple theory seems to be in my case.
Apart from that
- I have clear priorities (family first, health second, work third)
- I always have something that I look forward to. If nothing is on my schedule, I schedule an activity that I can look forward to.
This is probably one of those things like weight loss where you know the "simple" answer (burn more calories than you eat, reduce stimulation and practice good sleep hygiene) but the actual problem is lack of will to do these things, which can be reinforced by the apparent problem itself, leading to a spiral.
The trick, I assume, is to put what energy you have into setting up structures (ideally involving other people) that make it easier to do the things you know you need to do.
Then there are much bigger benefits of meditation (depending on which type one practices). But the stress processing benefit alone is already fantastic.
The times I’ve burned myself out, it usually happened after I started to compromise on my daily meditation minutes.
If social media is pressuring you, unfollow people or quit it altogether. You don't need that in your life. You just need to keep your job and cover your bills. Everything else is extra.
Pay attention to the work culture around you. Heroics are not rewarded where I live, and neither is being married to your job. There's a lot less pressure to reach burnout conditions. That's how it ought to be.
For most of us, it's not realistic to maintain maximum creative energy for an extended period of time, just as it's not realistic to maintain maximum happiness for an extended period of time. Sometimes you'll feel sad, sometimes you'll feel tired, and, every now and then, you'll feel like you can take on the world.
For now, embrace the pain, let it wash over you, and trust that your energy will return again one day soon.
It isn't the difficulties of the task, the working time of the task, or the working pressure of the task.
It is the complete lack of support from Senior Management, Direct Management or colleagues
People quit or burn out not because of they dont like the job, it is either because of pay or management. And in many cases both.
And from my long years of working life, 99% of manager dont have a clue how to manage. Most are only good at delivering ( at the expenses of others ).
Strongly recommend everyone organize themselves around some community of faith.
When I’m im at the peak, I will start pursuing another field that is foreign to me and, again, grind to the top.
A cycle like this takes me about two years depending on the sub topic.
I have no interest in being the top 100 protein language model scientist in the world and stay there forever. I want to be a polymath.
Could you notice it/them and stop yourself?
Would that solve the issue?