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I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard

by 55555 9y ago

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge to not work, we read articles (not this one so much) that are essentially lists of ways to trick ourselves into doing things that don't matter or which will make the world a worse place. You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. At least this is often the case for me.

maldusiecle 9y ago
I don't think this is true. Occupations that have very positive social impact can have very high burnout rates--it's not as if burnout and depression are unheard of among teachers and social workers, for instance. You're confusing cause and effect, to a certain degree. The feeling that your work is meaningless can be a symptom of burnout itself. People who do work that clearly improves other people's lives can still feel that their work is meaningless.
- marsrover 9y ago
  I can imagine there are many teachers and social workers who burn out due to feeling like they're not making an impact no matter how hard they try. I don't think he's confusing cause and effect. There are instances where burnout is caused by a lack of purpose provided by the job. Just because there are instances of work feeling meaningless caused by burnout, doesn't mean the inverse cannot happen. > People who do work that clearly improves other people's lives can still feel that their work is meaningless. I can't imagine this is common. For someone to feel this way, I feel, they probably have underlying issues of existential origin. This is assuming the person is directly doing work that is improving someone else's life.
  - germinalphrase 9y ago
    They also burn out from work load. In my city, county social workers have a case load of ~60 youth they are supposed to be meeting with and providing services to every week. They are clearly being set up to fail. Consequently, the yearly turnover rate is approximately 30 percent.
  - ambicapter 9y ago
    Not really, you just have to work for completely inept management that stymies or stonewalls your every effort to improve the situation.
    - no-s 9y ago
      I often say that bad management makes good people go bad. Which covers a whole gamut of personal and career dysfunction...even when you know it's happening and try to fight it you can still be suborned into burnout and depression. After 30+ years in the biz I became acutely aware of this.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    >I can't imagine this is common. For someone to feel this way, I feel, they probably have underlying issues of existential origin. This is assuming the person is directly doing work that is improving someone else's life. Most people are employed in the course of something important and/or useful, even if it's tedious or boring. There's a strong argument that some of the least skilled jobs provide some of our most critically important functions. Those positions are low paid because there are lot of people willing and able to do them, not because they aren't needed. I think claiming "my work is meaningless" is just a broad expression of workplace dissatisfaction and not really specific enough to mean anything. The position itself likely has an important function or no one would be willing to pay for it.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  teaching itself is a noble profession, but teaching within the constraints, limitations, and structural flaws of the American public education institution can absolutely feel like "doing wrong" a lot of the time.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- mamcx 9y ago
  Also, help people is high stress, and people fight back hard against help (for example, try convince someone to quit drugs).
bspn 9y ago
>I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. I don't this is true across the board, but the challenge is finding a "job" that you love and are excited to tackle every day. This will differ for most people, but the closer you can get to doing something that you would voluntarily want to do even if you weren't being paid for it the better mental space you will be in. Personally, I'm still searching for that magic job but through trial-and-error I'm getting pretty good at identifying what I don't want to do.
- kierantie 9y ago
  > Personally, I'm still searching for that magic job but through trial-and-error I'm getting pretty good at identifying what I don't want to do. Knowing what you DON'T want to do is sometimes more important and useful than knowing what you DO want to do!
  - circlefavshape 9y ago
    I'm not so sure. I haven't found avoiding what you hate rather than pursuing what you love to be a good life strategy
- ryandrake 9y ago
  I've found there is no such magic job. That's why it's called a "job" and not a "hobby that pays", and that's why the call what you get "compensation". Your pay compensates you for the time you spend doing something you otherwise would never choose to do on your own! The key is to just accept this transaction on its face and not go and assign deep personal meaning to it or get your self-worth all wrapped up in it.
- xaa 9y ago
  > the challenge is finding a "job" that you love and are excited to tackle every day This is great and very important, but it doesn't prevent burnout necessarily. I have a job and career that I really enjoy and consider to be very meaningful (aging research), but I have been severely burned out several times. In some perverse ways, having a "meaningful" job can increase stress and propensity to burnout exactly because you know it's important. I imagine this is why doctors and lawyers have a lot of burnout, stress, and substance abuse problems. OTOH, you don't really hear about corporate accountants getting burned out. My personal theory of burnout is that it happens when you start to feel you are on a treadmill -- running hard to achieve an important goal, but getting nowhere. Then the stress and burnout symptoms increasingly make this a self-fulfilling prophecy and feedback loop.
oregontechninja 9y ago
This seems very case specific. I will admit the reason I quit being a real estate broker, and Realtor, was that it was just taking money from people. They're just smooth talkers who provide very little real value to people. Their clients are treated like prey, and its the broker's fault if somebody doesn't want to sell or buy a home, not the users.
jakobegger 9y ago
I'd love to hear your meaningless idea that you know will make you a millionaire.
- aerodeck 9y ago
  Disrupt masturbation via the gig-economy model.
crush-n-spread 9y ago
I submit that the working person greatly benefits from having a strongly held, over-arching life goal. Then even if he or she is working a soul-draining job for, say, a social media company, they will be content knowing it is a necessary step towards their goal.
- losteric 9y ago
  What do you mean by "goals"? I've met too many people hopelessly throwing themselves against a wall trying to "achieve their dreams"... they see themselves as a Hollywood-esque main character, either aiming unrealistically high or shooting for mundane gimmes. Without a broader vision, those that pick reasonably scoped goals may still end up depressed by their small wins that add up to nothing. Modern mss media and image culture certainly hasn't helped manage realistic expectations or self-perception. I think it's more important to have a strong life stance - a broader collective vision that adds context to the individual - and a stoic understanding of limitations. That metaheuristic provides deeper meaning while facilitating rational evaluation of our achievements/goals. Drawing an analogy to software projects, the life stance defines a person's mission and tenets while goals act as milestones or stories. Executing without the broader vision simply doesn't work for humans... our limited and unknown budget of time is constantly burning away.
  - crush-n-spread 9y ago
    Yes, I concur that resistance to burnout depends on having a broader context to your life and humanity as a whole. If you understand your own life within the perspective of the billions of humans that have lived and died before you, and that will live after you, it adds a very resilient drive and resistance to small setbacks. Personally, I was able to achieve this using the recursive why, or chained why, which is a thinking pattern I'll describe here: 1. Come up with a random statement about anything at all. 2. Ask "Why?" about that statement. 3. When you come up with a reasonable answer, ask "Why?" to your stated answer. 4. Repeat step three until you arrive at the meaning of life This really works. I did this riding the bus for hours when I was a kid because I had no friends. Now it's like I live on another planet compared to people who have not done this. Stoic, content, and driven is the result
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
In broad sense, loss of control is useful, since it credibly closes off options you don't want to take. You don't want to to take the option of putting up with slights and insults and loss of social standing, so you get mad and lose control, and people don't want to play that game with you any more. You don't want to take the option of abandoning your spouse and offspring, so you love them so deeply that you'd never consider it - and your public displays of affection prove it. I think burnout fills the same sort of role. When people are constantly called to take on risky, stressful, and high effort activities - essentially, those that raise your cortisol levels - they burn out. Not just one-off ones, but repeatedly over long periods of time. So long-term high cortisol levels paint a picture of a certain narrative/social situation, where it's very much in your interest to "shirk" but you haven't been able to manage doing so because of narratives or social pressure. So your body "helpfully" removes the option of yielding to social pressure to rise to the occasion by making you unable to rise to the occasion in a way that cannot yield to the demands of others.
a3n 9y ago
I left a job last year that was the most meaningful job I've ever had. Despite the benefit to society, and my appreciation of that fact, I left because of an indignity. I essentially gave someone else power over how I felt about myself. Jobs are not just jobs, they're people too. You don't go to work and save the world every day, you mostly work with other people, which can be great, or it can be hell.
- tutufan 9y ago
  I've been through this as well, and it sucks. Sadly, even organizations doing societally important work can be incapable of policing their internal politics and professionalism in even a basic way. I'm still working on accepting this.
  - neuromantik8086 9y ago
    Relatedly, it took me a while to pick up on the fact that "non-profit" does not necessarily equate to "beneficial for society". Many non-profits out there have noble purported goals, but when you actually gain some experience at them you start to realize that they are vanity projects for the wealthy. [edit]: To clarify, I'm not making the claim that all non-profits are vanity projects, just that there are many out there that are. If you ever do want to work in the non-profit sector, doing some due diligence before applying for a job is a must (I recommend obtaining the publicly reported financial records for a non-profit in Form 990; what a non-profit's founder pays him/herself relative to the average employee speaks volumes about their moral character).
    - seanp2k2 9y ago
      Vanity projects or ways for rich people to defer more money they should be paying as tax to orgs run by / made up of their friends & family.
      - neuromantik8086 9y ago
        True, although using non-profits for tax evasion doesn't really work out that well if you die. iirc, HHMI was originally supposed to be a tax evasion vehicle, but started becoming a serious research venture after Howard Hughes expired.
p0nce 9y ago
Burnout is a physical problem first and foremost, albeit caused by prolonged stress. (very interesting link: http://www.arltma.com/Articles/BurnoutDoc.htm http://www.arltma.com/Articles/BurnoutDoc.htm)
ge96 9y ago
random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking myself why am I doing this. It may happen. edit: the thing I did today was un-jQuery the entire "codebase", oh my god so much broke. Also to make the scripts load async, bumped the dom loading from 6 sec to 1.5-2. Developing a site to deploy in a place where network speed on average is around 500Kbps Also it's funny when people don't know coding, I'm not an expert, I'm pretty sub-par but people are like "Why don't you just do this..." "Do that..." if Facebook can do it why can't you? hahaha, I don't know, pathetic edit: nothing really against jQuery just that a 1KB file takes almost 1 second to download, requiring jQuery (even min) big file. It's so easy to work with though especially multiple-selectors like selecting by class. the cross browser support... man. something I depended on and take for granted... sorry rambling pointless comment on my part.
- d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
  I spent 2 hours getting a python environment properly setup last night. It's not pathetic.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    Can cofirm. Programming IRL (esp. on a team) is mostly tedious crap like that. I'm glad it pays so well though.
  - ge96 9y ago
    I could see that. I briefly worked for a company and it took 7 hours or so to configure a working local copy of their site pulled from GitHub. Ran into problems with PHP versions, MySQL datetime stuff... that was nuts though they used bower, npm, twig, composer (all related) but yeah. It's a complicated code/company creating charts/maps from data so it's not "just a website". crazy too how many years things take to develop. You hear some "popular thing" or something advertised even like "Zip Recruiter" for example, started in 2010. Oh well the little dopamine hit from making something work is a good feeling.
jly 9y ago
I think this is more true than many would like to admit. Maybe 'most work' as meaningless isn't the way I would phrase it, but I know many including myself that are often creatively and technically challenged, work an average number of hours, but feel the mental stress of burnout purely because of the guilt and resentment of spending so much time on the specific job function, itself. To put it a little more abstract than 'kicking the dog', much of the work we do is in service purely of the bottom line - for products no one demands or needs, that solve no real human needs (of which there are MANY unmet needs), but generate maximum profit often at the expense of others or our collective future. Some work that centers purely around controlling capital serves virtually no real human function and has no actual output except profit (think banking, real estate, etc). Maybe I'm in the minority but these thoughts weigh heavily on me and make it much hard to make myself 'work', regardless of compensation. We keep at it because it's not feasible or enjoyable to be low-income in the world we live in, but we feel the urge that we should be doing something else. I call that a form of burnout.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  This is one of my big problems with the idea of money being so separated from actual good these days. It also creates huge wealth gaps, and I have no idea what could be done to re-align it. Basically, I believe that the concept of money as it exists today is deeply broken and should be aligned with something which benefits humans vs something which is required in small to moderate quantities to not suffer yet which people obsess over, collect, and seek to increase with an unrelenting fervor, despite any damage it does to society or individuals.
  - Clownshoesms 9y ago
    I think we're showing our evolutionary background, in particular greed. Having our monetary system essentially controlled by powerful private interests is a disaster too.
  - tim333 9y ago
    It's a tricky problem. I guess to an extent government can tax wealth accumulation that doesn't do good and fund good stuff that doesn't make money but it's hard to judge/implement.
Arizhel 9y ago
>You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. At least this is often the case for me. Not me; I can't say I've had any big money-making ideas which are morally wrong and the ideas "meaningless". However, I've had lots of ideas for things which are small money-makers (i.e., probably won't make me a millionaire, but can provide a small-to-decent income maybe) but require time and effort to develop. Since I have to pay rent and bills, and I want to have a social life, I have limited extra time to pursue side ideas like this. My ideas/projects may seem "meaningless" to others, but to me they're fun and interesting and would probably make some money, but definitely won't be the next Apple. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be happy to spend my time working on these projects instead, because they would be more fulfilling than my day job.
projektir 9y ago
Yeah, I think most people become highly motivated when the work they're assigned is actually meaningful and important. But most people don't get such work, so big surprise that people have "gotten" lazy...
pasbesoin 9y ago
You know that feeling when half your mind is filling up the spare moments with the thought/feeling, "I'm screwing myself, here." Yeah. Whether you're "doing the right thing", "paying your dues", or just fighting your instincts and hoping that eventually, he/she will come to like you the same way. One of my greatest challenges in life, has been to fight the messaging that put me on that track -- or the delusion I initiated. And, figuring out which it is and to what extent.
wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -Buckminster Fuller
amelius 9y ago
> I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Wouldn't this mean that people who work e.g. in the advertisement industry are overall more depressed or burnt-out than people who work, say, in medicine?
cortesoft 9y ago
I feel like this is more about how you see life in general than about your job and work. Quite simply, I love life. I know this isn't true for everyone, but it is for me. I find a lot of things meaningful and exciting. I love watching people on youtube excel at their random hobbies, I love seeing people compete in sports, I love talking about random things with friends and coworkers. I love the feeling I get when I stretch my legs out, I love walking outside and feeling the breeze on my face. I love watching my daughter learn to walk, I love cuddling with my wife. I love fiddling with computers and getting them to do stuff. Yes, maybe my job isn't 'meaningful' in some abstract, deep and profound, sense (I work for a large CDN owned by a giant corporation), but I think it makes the world a little bit better for people to be able to stream silly videos, watch live sports, and surf the web faster. I enjoy my coworkers, and look forward to going into work every day to see them and talk about random things we see in the world. Even the horrible things that go on in the world don't get me too down. Yes, suffering is awful and I want to do everything I can to alleviate it where ever I can; at the same time, it is amazing that we do as good a job as we do. I am always gratified when I think about how many people live together in this world, and we get along remarkably well when you think about how we are really just randomly evolved animals. I mean, look at the complex society we have built! When I drive down the freeway, I can't help but be amazed at the things humans are able to build. In short, things are fucking amazing. Life is pretty awesome, if you choose to focus on the awesome things.
- Thrillington 9y ago
  In short, things are fucking amazing. Life is pretty awesome, if you choose to focus on the awesome things. That only works when you have the luxury of making that choice. I recently rejoined the workforce after taking about 18 months off due to burnout. I had the luxury to do so. During that downtime I gained a roommate who is doing facilities work at a gym. She does not have the luxury to focus on the good things in life.
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    I think everyone has the luxury to focus on the good things. I have known VERY poor people who are happy. I have known very sick people who are happy. I have known people who have suffered horrific loss, and are happy. Everyone can make the most out of their own current situation. Sure, it is easier when your situation is objectively better, but there is no cutoff where you HAVE to focus on the negative.
colordrops 9y ago
As I've grown older (and hopefully wiser) I've taken a position that is a lot more meaningful but with a lot less compensation. I do often think about finances and worry about my retirement, as I have children. But I will say that making a lot of money and wishing you were doing something more with your life is a lot more painful and damaging that doing something worthwhile and wishing you had more money.
- Bakary 9y ago
  Most people never get either of the two situations you describe.
envoked 9y ago
Most your points resonate with me but in my experience a large part of it has to do with perspective. I [believe] I'm in the latter stages of burnout and while very anxiety-inducing, it's been a great learning and worthwhile experience so far. For context, I started coding when I was 13 (I'm 29), studied CS, and never had any job outside of software engineering – got started undercutting outsourcers on Elance as a teenager, making below minimum wage with my poor estimation skills. I was 4+ years into working at a successful company, in a lucrative position, surrounded by interesting people. At first, my enthusiasm started waning and I became more distracted. Then followed a lack of fulfillment punctuated by shame; a shame that I wasn't appreciating my situation. Eventually, I was honest with myself (and my team) and decided to leave. It was definitely scary to lose interest in one of my oldest passions, but it gave me the mind space for some valuable introspection. Over the last five months I've been moving around (about one city a month), pursuing other passions outside of software. Most recently, I decided to spend the summer living on a farm, with some part time contracting. Through this process of stepping outside my usual sphere of influence, I've regained an excitement for technology and the meaningful impact it can have on peoples' lives. I've also become more aware of just how truly fortunate we are as engineers around Silicon Valley, when compared to the rest of the world; it's given me a new perspective. So (as simplistic as it might sound) if you think you're experiencing burnout because your work is "meaningless", stop (budget, adjust your lifestyle, etc.) and try something else; you'll either start missing it and get reinvigorated, or you might find a better way to spend your time.
- abledon 9y ago
  Did you throw your stuff in store before you started moving around to other cities? Or did you sell everything and say 'Tabula Rasa! clean slate!'.
  - envoked 9y ago
    I didn't own that much to begin with but I sold what I didn't need, and put everything else in a friend's garage. Oddly (but in line with what most digital nomads seem to experience) after living out of a backpack for a few months, I don't miss most of it (exceptions being things like my snowboard, sharp kitchen knives, quality pots, etc.)
taneq 9y ago
> You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. You can't force yourself to build the thing which will make you a millionaire, not because of nihilism, but because subconsciously it's much easier and more rewarding to have an idea that you hope will make you rich than it is to build the idea and know it doesn't work. It's the same reason there are so many aspiring artists and rock stars compared with the number of failed artists and rock stars.
Tomminn 9y ago
"If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else." Truth.

by 55555 9y ago

maldusiecle 9y ago

I don't think this is true. Occupations that have very positive social impact can have very high burnout rates--it's not as if burnout and depression are unheard of among teachers and social workers, for instance. You're confusing cause and effect, to a certain degree. The feeling that your work is meaningless can be a symptom of burnout itself. People who do work that clearly improves other people's lives can still feel that their work is meaningless.

marsrover 9y ago
I can imagine there are many teachers and social workers who burn out due to feeling like they're not making an impact no matter how hard they try. I don't think he's confusing cause and effect. There are instances where burnout is caused by a lack of purpose provided by the job. Just because there are instances of work feeling meaningless caused by burnout, doesn't mean the inverse cannot happen. > People who do work that clearly improves other people's lives can still feel that their work is meaningless. I can't imagine this is common. For someone to feel this way, I feel, they probably have underlying issues of existential origin. This is assuming the person is directly doing work that is improving someone else's life.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  They also burn out from work load. In my city, county social workers have a case load of ~60 youth they are supposed to be meeting with and providing services to every week. They are clearly being set up to fail. Consequently, the yearly turnover rate is approximately 30 percent.
- ambicapter 9y ago
  Not really, you just have to work for completely inept management that stymies or stonewalls your every effort to improve the situation.
  - no-s 9y ago
    I often say that bad management makes good people go bad. Which covers a whole gamut of personal and career dysfunction...even when you know it's happening and try to fight it you can still be suborned into burnout and depression. After 30+ years in the biz I became acutely aware of this.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  >I can't imagine this is common. For someone to feel this way, I feel, they probably have underlying issues of existential origin. This is assuming the person is directly doing work that is improving someone else's life. Most people are employed in the course of something important and/or useful, even if it's tedious or boring. There's a strong argument that some of the least skilled jobs provide some of our most critically important functions. Those positions are low paid because there are lot of people willing and able to do them, not because they aren't needed. I think claiming "my work is meaningless" is just a broad expression of workplace dissatisfaction and not really specific enough to mean anything. The position itself likely has an important function or no one would be willing to pay for it.
metaphorm 9y ago
teaching itself is a noble profession, but teaching within the constraints, limitations, and structural flaws of the American public education institution can absolutely feel like "doing wrong" a lot of the time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mamcx 9y ago
Also, help people is high stress, and people fight back hard against help (for example, try convince someone to quit drugs).

bspn 9y ago

>I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. I don't this is true across the board, but the challenge is finding a "job" that you love and are excited to tackle every day. This will differ for most people, but the closer you can get to doing something that you would voluntarily want to do even if you weren't being paid for it the better mental space you will be in. Personally, I'm still searching for that magic job but through trial-and-error I'm getting pretty good at identifying what I don't want to do.

kierantie 9y ago
> Personally, I'm still searching for that magic job but through trial-and-error I'm getting pretty good at identifying what I don't want to do. Knowing what you DON'T want to do is sometimes more important and useful than knowing what you DO want to do!
- circlefavshape 9y ago
  I'm not so sure. I haven't found avoiding what you hate rather than pursuing what you love to be a good life strategy
ryandrake 9y ago
I've found there is no such magic job. That's why it's called a "job" and not a "hobby that pays", and that's why the call what you get "compensation". Your pay compensates you for the time you spend doing something you otherwise would never choose to do on your own! The key is to just accept this transaction on its face and not go and assign deep personal meaning to it or get your self-worth all wrapped up in it.
xaa 9y ago
> the challenge is finding a "job" that you love and are excited to tackle every day This is great and very important, but it doesn't prevent burnout necessarily. I have a job and career that I really enjoy and consider to be very meaningful (aging research), but I have been severely burned out several times. In some perverse ways, having a "meaningful" job can increase stress and propensity to burnout exactly because you know it's important. I imagine this is why doctors and lawyers have a lot of burnout, stress, and substance abuse problems. OTOH, you don't really hear about corporate accountants getting burned out. My personal theory of burnout is that it happens when you start to feel you are on a treadmill -- running hard to achieve an important goal, but getting nowhere. Then the stress and burnout symptoms increasingly make this a self-fulfilling prophecy and feedback loop.

oregontechninja 9y ago

This seems very case specific. I will admit the reason I quit being a real estate broker, and Realtor, was that it was just taking money from people. They're just smooth talkers who provide very little real value to people. Their clients are treated like prey, and its the broker's fault if somebody doesn't want to sell or buy a home, not the users.

jakobegger 9y ago

I'd love to hear your meaningless idea that you know will make you a millionaire.

aerodeck 9y ago
Disrupt masturbation via the gig-economy model.

crush-n-spread 9y ago

I submit that the working person greatly benefits from having a strongly held, over-arching life goal. Then even if he or she is working a soul-draining job for, say, a social media company, they will be content knowing it is a necessary step towards their goal.

losteric 9y ago
What do you mean by "goals"? I've met too many people hopelessly throwing themselves against a wall trying to "achieve their dreams"... they see themselves as a Hollywood-esque main character, either aiming unrealistically high or shooting for mundane gimmes. Without a broader vision, those that pick reasonably scoped goals may still end up depressed by their small wins that add up to nothing. Modern mss media and image culture certainly hasn't helped manage realistic expectations or self-perception. I think it's more important to have a strong life stance - a broader collective vision that adds context to the individual - and a stoic understanding of limitations. That metaheuristic provides deeper meaning while facilitating rational evaluation of our achievements/goals. Drawing an analogy to software projects, the life stance defines a person's mission and tenets while goals act as milestones or stories. Executing without the broader vision simply doesn't work for humans... our limited and unknown budget of time is constantly burning away.
- crush-n-spread 9y ago
  Yes, I concur that resistance to burnout depends on having a broader context to your life and humanity as a whole. If you understand your own life within the perspective of the billions of humans that have lived and died before you, and that will live after you, it adds a very resilient drive and resistance to small setbacks. Personally, I was able to achieve this using the recursive why, or chained why, which is a thinking pattern I'll describe here: 1. Come up with a random statement about anything at all. 2. Ask "Why?" about that statement. 3. When you come up with a reasonable answer, ask "Why?" to your stated answer. 4. Repeat step three until you arrive at the meaning of life This really works. I did this riding the bus for hours when I was a kid because I had no friends. Now it's like I live on another planet compared to people who have not done this. Stoic, content, and driven is the result

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

In broad sense, loss of control is useful, since it credibly closes off options you don't want to take. You don't want to to take the option of putting up with slights and insults and loss of social standing, so you get mad and lose control, and people don't want to play that game with you any more. You don't want to take the option of abandoning your spouse and offspring, so you love them so deeply that you'd never consider it - and your public displays of affection prove it. I think burnout fills the same sort of role. When people are constantly called to take on risky, stressful, and high effort activities - essentially, those that raise your cortisol levels - they burn out. Not just one-off ones, but repeatedly over long periods of time. So long-term high cortisol levels paint a picture of a certain narrative/social situation, where it's very much in your interest to "shirk" but you haven't been able to manage doing so because of narratives or social pressure. So your body "helpfully" removes the option of yielding to social pressure to rise to the occasion by making you unable to rise to the occasion in a way that cannot yield to the demands of others.

a3n 9y ago

I left a job last year that was the most meaningful job I've ever had. Despite the benefit to society, and my appreciation of that fact, I left because of an indignity. I essentially gave someone else power over how I felt about myself. Jobs are not just jobs, they're people too. You don't go to work and save the world every day, you mostly work with other people, which can be great, or it can be hell.

tutufan 9y ago
I've been through this as well, and it sucks. Sadly, even organizations doing societally important work can be incapable of policing their internal politics and professionalism in even a basic way. I'm still working on accepting this.
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  Relatedly, it took me a while to pick up on the fact that "non-profit" does not necessarily equate to "beneficial for society". Many non-profits out there have noble purported goals, but when you actually gain some experience at them you start to realize that they are vanity projects for the wealthy. [edit]: To clarify, I'm not making the claim that all non-profits are vanity projects, just that there are many out there that are. If you ever do want to work in the non-profit sector, doing some due diligence before applying for a job is a must (I recommend obtaining the publicly reported financial records for a non-profit in Form 990; what a non-profit's founder pays him/herself relative to the average employee speaks volumes about their moral character).
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    Vanity projects or ways for rich people to defer more money they should be paying as tax to orgs run by / made up of their friends & family.
    - neuromantik8086 9y ago
      True, although using non-profits for tax evasion doesn't really work out that well if you die. iirc, HHMI was originally supposed to be a tax evasion vehicle, but started becoming a serious research venture after Howard Hughes expired.

p0nce 9y ago

Burnout is a physical problem first and foremost, albeit caused by prolonged stress. (very interesting link: http://www.arltma.com/Articles/BurnoutDoc.htm http://www.arltma.com/Articles/BurnoutDoc.htm)

ge96 9y ago

random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking myself why am I doing this. It may happen. edit: the thing I did today was un-jQuery the entire "codebase", oh my god so much broke. Also to make the scripts load async, bumped the dom loading from 6 sec to 1.5-2. Developing a site to deploy in a place where network speed on average is around 500Kbps Also it's funny when people don't know coding, I'm not an expert, I'm pretty sub-par but people are like "Why don't you just do this..." "Do that..." if Facebook can do it why can't you? hahaha, I don't know, pathetic edit: nothing really against jQuery just that a 1KB file takes almost 1 second to download, requiring jQuery (even min) big file. It's so easy to work with though especially multiple-selectors like selecting by class. the cross browser support... man. something I depended on and take for granted... sorry rambling pointless comment on my part.

d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
I spent 2 hours getting a python environment properly setup last night. It's not pathetic.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  Can cofirm. Programming IRL (esp. on a team) is mostly tedious crap like that. I'm glad it pays so well though.
- ge96 9y ago
  I could see that. I briefly worked for a company and it took 7 hours or so to configure a working local copy of their site pulled from GitHub. Ran into problems with PHP versions, MySQL datetime stuff... that was nuts though they used bower, npm, twig, composer (all related) but yeah. It's a complicated code/company creating charts/maps from data so it's not "just a website". crazy too how many years things take to develop. You hear some "popular thing" or something advertised even like "Zip Recruiter" for example, started in 2010. Oh well the little dopamine hit from making something work is a good feeling.

jly 9y ago

I think this is more true than many would like to admit. Maybe 'most work' as meaningless isn't the way I would phrase it, but I know many including myself that are often creatively and technically challenged, work an average number of hours, but feel the mental stress of burnout purely because of the guilt and resentment of spending so much time on the specific job function, itself. To put it a little more abstract than 'kicking the dog', much of the work we do is in service purely of the bottom line - for products no one demands or needs, that solve no real human needs (of which there are MANY unmet needs), but generate maximum profit often at the expense of others or our collective future. Some work that centers purely around controlling capital serves virtually no real human function and has no actual output except profit (think banking, real estate, etc). Maybe I'm in the minority but these thoughts weigh heavily on me and make it much hard to make myself 'work', regardless of compensation. We keep at it because it's not feasible or enjoyable to be low-income in the world we live in, but we feel the urge that we should be doing something else. I call that a form of burnout.

seanp2k2 9y ago
This is one of my big problems with the idea of money being so separated from actual good these days. It also creates huge wealth gaps, and I have no idea what could be done to re-align it. Basically, I believe that the concept of money as it exists today is deeply broken and should be aligned with something which benefits humans vs something which is required in small to moderate quantities to not suffer yet which people obsess over, collect, and seek to increase with an unrelenting fervor, despite any damage it does to society or individuals.
- Clownshoesms 9y ago
  I think we're showing our evolutionary background, in particular greed. Having our monetary system essentially controlled by powerful private interests is a disaster too.
- tim333 9y ago
  It's a tricky problem. I guess to an extent government can tax wealth accumulation that doesn't do good and fund good stuff that doesn't make money but it's hard to judge/implement.

Arizhel 9y ago

>You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. At least this is often the case for me. Not me; I can't say I've had any big money-making ideas which are morally wrong and the ideas "meaningless". However, I've had lots of ideas for things which are small money-makers (i.e., probably won't make me a millionaire, but can provide a small-to-decent income maybe) but require time and effort to develop. Since I have to pay rent and bills, and I want to have a social life, I have limited extra time to pursue side ideas like this. My ideas/projects may seem "meaningless" to others, but to me they're fun and interesting and would probably make some money, but definitely won't be the next Apple. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be happy to spend my time working on these projects instead, because they would be more fulfilling than my day job.

projektir 9y ago

Yeah, I think most people become highly motivated when the work they're assigned is actually meaningful and important. But most people don't get such work, so big surprise that people have "gotten" lazy...

pasbesoin 9y ago

You know that feeling when half your mind is filling up the spare moments with the thought/feeling, "I'm screwing myself, here." Yeah. Whether you're "doing the right thing", "paying your dues", or just fighting your instincts and hoping that eventually, he/she will come to like you the same way. One of my greatest challenges in life, has been to fight the messaging that put me on that track -- or the delusion I initiated. And, figuring out which it is and to what extent.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago

>"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -Buckminster Fuller

amelius 9y ago

> I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Wouldn't this mean that people who work e.g. in the advertisement industry are overall more depressed or burnt-out than people who work, say, in medicine?

cortesoft 9y ago

I feel like this is more about how you see life in general than about your job and work. Quite simply, I love life. I know this isn't true for everyone, but it is for me. I find a lot of things meaningful and exciting. I love watching people on youtube excel at their random hobbies, I love seeing people compete in sports, I love talking about random things with friends and coworkers. I love the feeling I get when I stretch my legs out, I love walking outside and feeling the breeze on my face. I love watching my daughter learn to walk, I love cuddling with my wife. I love fiddling with computers and getting them to do stuff. Yes, maybe my job isn't 'meaningful' in some abstract, deep and profound, sense (I work for a large CDN owned by a giant corporation), but I think it makes the world a little bit better for people to be able to stream silly videos, watch live sports, and surf the web faster. I enjoy my coworkers, and look forward to going into work every day to see them and talk about random things we see in the world. Even the horrible things that go on in the world don't get me too down. Yes, suffering is awful and I want to do everything I can to alleviate it where ever I can; at the same time, it is amazing that we do as good a job as we do. I am always gratified when I think about how many people live together in this world, and we get along remarkably well when you think about how we are really just randomly evolved animals. I mean, look at the complex society we have built! When I drive down the freeway, I can't help but be amazed at the things humans are able to build. In short, things are fucking amazing. Life is pretty awesome, if you choose to focus on the awesome things.

Thrillington 9y ago
In short, things are fucking amazing. Life is pretty awesome, if you choose to focus on the awesome things. That only works when you have the luxury of making that choice. I recently rejoined the workforce after taking about 18 months off due to burnout. I had the luxury to do so. During that downtime I gained a roommate who is doing facilities work at a gym. She does not have the luxury to focus on the good things in life.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  I think everyone has the luxury to focus on the good things. I have known VERY poor people who are happy. I have known very sick people who are happy. I have known people who have suffered horrific loss, and are happy. Everyone can make the most out of their own current situation. Sure, it is easier when your situation is objectively better, but there is no cutoff where you HAVE to focus on the negative.

colordrops 9y ago

As I've grown older (and hopefully wiser) I've taken a position that is a lot more meaningful but with a lot less compensation. I do often think about finances and worry about my retirement, as I have children. But I will say that making a lot of money and wishing you were doing something more with your life is a lot more painful and damaging that doing something worthwhile and wishing you had more money.

Bakary 9y ago
Most people never get either of the two situations you describe.

envoked 9y ago

Most your points resonate with me but in my experience a large part of it has to do with perspective. I [believe] I'm in the latter stages of burnout and while very anxiety-inducing, it's been a great learning and worthwhile experience so far. For context, I started coding when I was 13 (I'm 29), studied CS, and never had any job outside of software engineering – got started undercutting outsourcers on Elance as a teenager, making below minimum wage with my poor estimation skills. I was 4+ years into working at a successful company, in a lucrative position, surrounded by interesting people. At first, my enthusiasm started waning and I became more distracted. Then followed a lack of fulfillment punctuated by shame; a shame that I wasn't appreciating my situation. Eventually, I was honest with myself (and my team) and decided to leave. It was definitely scary to lose interest in one of my oldest passions, but it gave me the mind space for some valuable introspection. Over the last five months I've been moving around (about one city a month), pursuing other passions outside of software. Most recently, I decided to spend the summer living on a farm, with some part time contracting. Through this process of stepping outside my usual sphere of influence, I've regained an excitement for technology and the meaningful impact it can have on peoples' lives. I've also become more aware of just how truly fortunate we are as engineers around Silicon Valley, when compared to the rest of the world; it's given me a new perspective. So (as simplistic as it might sound) if you think you're experiencing burnout because your work is "meaningless", stop (budget, adjust your lifestyle, etc.) and try something else; you'll either start missing it and get reinvigorated, or you might find a better way to spend your time.

abledon 9y ago
Did you throw your stuff in store before you started moving around to other cities? Or did you sell everything and say 'Tabula Rasa! clean slate!'.
- envoked 9y ago
  I didn't own that much to begin with but I sold what I didn't need, and put everything else in a friend's garage. Oddly (but in line with what most digital nomads seem to experience) after living out of a backpack for a few months, I don't miss most of it (exceptions being things like my snowboard, sharp kitchen knives, quality pots, etc.)

taneq 9y ago

> You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. You can't force yourself to build the thing which will make you a millionaire, not because of nihilism, but because subconsciously it's much easier and more rewarding to have an idea that you hope will make you rich than it is to build the idea and know it doesn't work. It's the same reason there are so many aspiring artists and rock stars compared with the number of failed artists and rock stars.

Tomminn 9y ago

"If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else." Truth.