'I Am So Tired': YouTuber Tom Scott Ends Things You Might Not Know
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I have been thinking about burn out a lot and why do we get burn out. More often than not the discussions is always we have been working way too hard. And on the surface that seems to be the case. However I dont recall my parents or grand parents getting burn out on anything. And I have my life 10 - 100x better compared to what they suffered, world war, famine etc. They just keep working.
Modern Day Chef could keep doing their job in Hot Kitchen for decades. Farmers, Fireman, Policeman, dont have it easy either. Or any Blue Collar jobs.
It then occurs to me burn out is happening much more often with people on solving difficult problems and creative thinking. That doesn't mean other jobs dont have problems to solve. But they are on a different spectrum.
My point being, I think burn out can come from a number of different sources.
My point is more against the hypothesis of burn out being caused by cognitive demanding tasks.
https://commoncog.com/g/burnout/#the-development-of-work-bur...
In the 1800s as many as 90% of the people were farmers. And they only could feed 3-5 people on a single farmers output. Horribly inefficient. No wonder large families were so common. They were needed.
The stakes were much higher. You don’t have the luxury of finding yourself or becoming the towns artist or studying Shakespeare.
You could be the smartest person in the community but doesn’t matter. You’re on a farm. Prepare or perish.
I think previous generations absolutely experienced burnout in levels equivalent to what we see now, but it just wasn't always called that, or acceptable to admit.
I think in general humans have a much lower capacity for thought output than they do physical output. With exceptions of course.
Another issue I believe is that there is no shameless lulls in thought work, at least for me personally it is 100% all day. Whereas in all the physical jobs I've done you have to wait for things to happen, people to do things, stuff to get unloaded etc. Not true of all physical jobs of course. But there can be a lot of idle time that you don't feel guilty for.
Was recently listening to Mr.Beast talk about his success and how he is happiest when he is locked in his warehouse. He can't go anywhere without being swarmed. You can tell the guy is at the point where it's becoming overwhelming with 227 million subs and more views on his videos than the Super Bowls gets. He had to turn to marketing his own products to make enough to keep going since sponsors couldn't pay enough to cover his costs and he was sometimes losing 1 million $$ on some of his videos.
Well, welcome to the future, I guess.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38847086 Tom Scott, and the formidable power of escalating streaks