14 ms·

5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stress

5 years ago I hit a burnout point and took a year off work. It was a huge perspective shift. I realized that my day-to-day of a rushed commute to work, a stressful and distracting office, thimble-deep coworker relationships and a life completely orientated around doing the above was an insane waste of my short time on Planet Earth. I reoriented my life around family, remote work, flexibility and balance. My quality of life has hugely improved and there is no turning back the clock. When I saw what the pandemic was doing to nearly every professional office worker, I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in. Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.

suketk 5y ago
I had the same experience [0]. The tunnel vision from work is so strong, that you forget about what's really important. Now, the office feels like a past life - I do not miss the commute, unnecessary meetings or facade of comradery. Ideally I don't have ever to go back to work, but even if I do the perspective shift has made sure I'll do it in a more balanced way next time. [0] https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google
- kaycebasques 5y ago
  I wrote a similar blog post [1] about why I'm taking a sabbatical and it's really fascinating to compare motivations. > My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow. I wrote: > I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways? [1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
  - carlgreene 5y ago
    Im interested to hear how that goal worked out
bamboozled 5y ago
Nice you have the option
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what, and even its worst places - its prison cells - compare favorably to the finest hotels of other countries. You have so many options you feel constantly overwhelmed, stressing about making bad choices because everything your primitive heart could ever desire is not merely available, but plentiful and cheap. And it'll recruit you if you're not careful. Money fails to motivate when you have enough of it regardless. Life wants meaning. Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life. What would you do?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what Realistic UBI proposals wouldn’t exactly provide a comfortable wage. They’d provide just enough to get by on the basics, if that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful, but it does mean that it won’t be an attractive alternative to work for anyone who isn’t comfortable staying poor forever. UBI would still be a safety net, not an attractive alternative to working. The idea that UBI would enable people to become free of work and follow their dreams for free has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just not possible to tax enough to pay everyone high UBI wages. Safety net wages, maybe, but it won’t be a fun living situation to depend entirely on UBI.
    - modulusshift 5y ago
      Personally I think that even if UBI wouldn’t provide a living wage in today’s economy, that it will fundamentally change market dynamics in interesting ways. Companies constantly adjust prices up in the US because of increased buying power, aka “they can afford to give us more profit”. There’s an entire industry of cheap smartphones that don’t release in the US, only in India, China, and third world countries, and they’re plenty profitable, but they deliberately only release even more profitable models in the US. I think creating a significant class of people with reduced buying power in the US will actually lower prices here, as at least some companies decide they don’t want to miss out on that portion of the market just to soak the rest of the Americans for even more money. Of course that’s expressing a lot of faith in capitalism so it’s entirely possible, even likely, that it would somehow make the entire situation even worse.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals. It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs. To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.
- haswell 5y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary. 2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months. Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
  - changingtalk 5y ago
    > I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. I also am noticing this around me. Years ago I did the startup thing for 5 years, grinding really hard for someone else (mainly investors) to make a ton of money. Burned myself out, quit with no plans, and ended up consulting as a freelance dev from then on. Realized I'm much happier with this arrangement, with the ability to take months off and travel if I want. I could make more money at a large corporation, or if I didn't take so much time off, but honestly I'm much happier. That's all to say, today I have two separate coffee dates with engineers at my client's company, both wanting to ask me about how they can do the same thing as me. One is a senior engineer that leads a department. The other is a very talented engineer. These are not the only people that have approached me wanting to setup time to talk about the same thing. This is at an SF based company that seems to really respect their engineer's time, provides high salaries, interesting work, etc. I get the sense that at least for this niche of highly skilled, highly paid, in demand roles people are wanting to trade for more free time in their lives. I totally don't blame them, as it's what I found myself moving to 7 or so years ago.
umanwizard 5y ago
Cool, so how do you pay for food and rent?
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > remote work
Terretta 5y ago
> Everyone As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers. Weight our in(group)sights accordingly.
- Agenttin 5y ago
  We are probably the people this article applies best to. I know I'm reading it in my boxers.
srackey 5y ago
And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I’m seeing similar sentiment among my peers. Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds. We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings. I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    1. Depends if the large companies who have committed to indefinite remote work will stay true to that policy. Then you'll still have a great deal of remote positions. 2. Those peers and their companies usually have had remote work forced upon them. See what it's like in a less traumatic time when people can work out of cafes and public spaces, maskless.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  That's baffling, haven't people got friends?
  - phobosanomaly 5y ago
    Apparently not. As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults. In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-teens-loneliness-mental-health-coronavirus-covid-pandemic/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-... I'm excited to go back to work in-person. Working with my colleagues gives me a great deal of joy throughout the day.
fullstackchris 5y ago
Hearing stuff like this a lot recently, I always think about the often repeated vision that Keynes had, saying that we (his grandchildren) would be working 15 hour work weeks. I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea. Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea. Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
  - Agenttin 5y ago
    The issue is that pay hasn't kept up with productivity. As things become more efficient employers are having to pay far less for the same amount of work.
    - kansface 5y ago
      It has in tech - in fact I’d wager approximately 100% of productivity gains since the 80s have been in the tech sector which in turn has probably captured nearly all of those gains for itself.
  - 5y ago
Aboh33 5y ago
Similar story. I left tech for about 5 months back in early Spring to refocus after delivery of a huge project (contract). Now looking at re-entering with a product/company I actually want to contribute to.
deegles 5y ago
“Is your life organized around your goals?” What a powerful question and distillation of what society is facing. I will think about this.
Buttons840 5y ago
Commutes: heat, stress, grey, pavement, dirt and chemicals, danger, frustration, noise; all things that come to mind with commutes. Never again, I hope.
munificent 5y ago
> Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people. There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds. I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability. I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer. I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.
- u678u 5y ago
  Right, I'm from a small town myself and moved to a big city. Small towns are very convenient but life is more about having a convenient commute, easy parking and a big back yard.
DarknessFalls 5y ago
I agree with everything you said, but 'orientated'.

suketk 5y ago

I had the same experience [0]. The tunnel vision from work is so strong, that you forget about what's really important. Now, the office feels like a past life - I do not miss the commute, unnecessary meetings or facade of comradery. Ideally I don't have ever to go back to work, but even if I do the perspective shift has made sure I'll do it in a more balanced way next time. [0] https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google https://suketk.com/why-i-quit-google

kaycebasques 5y ago
I wrote a similar blog post [1] about why I'm taking a sabbatical and it's really fascinating to compare motivations. > My thesis is that if I focus on enjoying the journey, everything else will follow. I wrote: > I don't have a single big project in mind for my sabbatical... I do have a single overarching theme, however: joie de vivre. Everything that I do, even the mundane stuff (especially the mundane stuff), I'm going to focus on enjoying it fully. How you do anything is how you do everything, as the Buddhists say. I have come to believe that the person who can enjoy whatever they're doing and make that joy contagious will actually end up accomplishing the most. Yet even if I don't accomplish anything, I'll still be joyful, so what would it matter anyways? [1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue
- carlgreene 5y ago
  Im interested to hear how that goal worked out

bamboozled 5y ago

Nice you have the option

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what, and even its worst places - its prison cells - compare favorably to the finest hotels of other countries. You have so many options you feel constantly overwhelmed, stressing about making bad choices because everything your primitive heart could ever desire is not merely available, but plentiful and cheap. And it'll recruit you if you're not careful. Money fails to motivate when you have enough of it regardless. Life wants meaning. Imagine having all the time in the world, just thinking about everything. Your whole life. What would you do?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Imagine living in a society where basic income is guaranteed no matter what Realistic UBI proposals wouldn’t exactly provide a comfortable wage. They’d provide just enough to get by on the basics, if that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful, but it does mean that it won’t be an attractive alternative to work for anyone who isn’t comfortable staying poor forever. UBI would still be a safety net, not an attractive alternative to working. The idea that UBI would enable people to become free of work and follow their dreams for free has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just not possible to tax enough to pay everyone high UBI wages. Safety net wages, maybe, but it won’t be a fun living situation to depend entirely on UBI.
  - modulusshift 5y ago
    Personally I think that even if UBI wouldn’t provide a living wage in today’s economy, that it will fundamentally change market dynamics in interesting ways. Companies constantly adjust prices up in the US because of increased buying power, aka “they can afford to give us more profit”. There’s an entire industry of cheap smartphones that don’t release in the US, only in India, China, and third world countries, and they’re plenty profitable, but they deliberately only release even more profitable models in the US. I think creating a significant class of people with reduced buying power in the US will actually lower prices here, as at least some companies decide they don’t want to miss out on that portion of the market just to soak the rest of the Americans for even more money. Of course that’s expressing a lot of faith in capitalism so it’s entirely possible, even likely, that it would somehow make the entire situation even worse.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I figured it was just a matter of time before the resignations started flooding in The headline and the anecdote in the opening paragraph of the article are somewhat misleading. The statistics about millions of people resigning aren’t from people choosing to leave the workforce or take sabbaticals. It’s mostly people who are simply changing jobs due to the booming economy creating new opportunities and hiring pressure. Millions sounds like a big number, but in a country with hundreds of millions of people it’s only a couple percent of the workforce. Even during normal times, a million or more people resign according to these statistics, again mostly to change jobs. To put it in perspective: The normal turnover rate is in the 1-2% range (monthly) and the current post-COVID spike is in the 2-3% range, which is consistent with a booming economy. That means only about an additional 1% of workers are choosing to change jobs each month, which isn’t exactly the upheaval this article makes it sound like.

haswell 5y ago
Two thoughts: 1. Even though the economy may be booming, that doesn't have to mean job changes aren't also driven by re-evaluation of priorities. The two may be complementary. 2. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. People that I would not have expected to leave - "heart of the team" kinds of people. This is after 4-5 devs (in a department of ~60) already made the choice to leave for other opportunities in the past few months. Some relevant details: large SV-based SaaS with excellent financials, regarded as a good place to work, etc.
- changingtalk 5y ago
  > I work with multiple people all in the process of looking for new roles. I also am noticing this around me. Years ago I did the startup thing for 5 years, grinding really hard for someone else (mainly investors) to make a ton of money. Burned myself out, quit with no plans, and ended up consulting as a freelance dev from then on. Realized I'm much happier with this arrangement, with the ability to take months off and travel if I want. I could make more money at a large corporation, or if I didn't take so much time off, but honestly I'm much happier. That's all to say, today I have two separate coffee dates with engineers at my client's company, both wanting to ask me about how they can do the same thing as me. One is a senior engineer that leads a department. The other is a very talented engineer. These are not the only people that have approached me wanting to setup time to talk about the same thing. This is at an SF based company that seems to really respect their engineer's time, provides high salaries, interesting work, etc. I get the sense that at least for this niche of highly skilled, highly paid, in demand roles people are wanting to trade for more free time in their lives. I totally don't blame them, as it's what I found myself moving to 7 or so years ago.

umanwizard 5y ago

Cool, so how do you pay for food and rent?

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> remote work

Terretta 5y ago

> Everyone As we subconsciously blend anecdata from HN into our mental models, remember that we self-selecting to visit here commenting are already extreme outliers. Weight our in(group)sights accordingly.

Agenttin 5y ago
We are probably the people this article applies best to. I know I'm reading it in my boxers.

srackey 5y ago

And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’m seeing similar sentiment among my peers. Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds. We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings. I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  1. Depends if the large companies who have committed to indefinite remote work will stay true to that policy. Then you'll still have a great deal of remote positions. 2. Those peers and their companies usually have had remote work forced upon them. See what it's like in a less traumatic time when people can work out of cafes and public spaces, maskless.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
That's baffling, haven't people got friends?
- phobosanomaly 5y ago
  Apparently not. As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults. In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-teens-loneliness-mental-health-coronavirus-covid-pandemic/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-... I'm excited to go back to work in-person. Working with my colleagues gives me a great deal of joy throughout the day.

fullstackchris 5y ago

Hearing stuff like this a lot recently, I always think about the often repeated vision that Keynes had, saying that we (his grandchildren) would be working 15 hour work weeks. I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea. Before I'm barraged with "what about people in the service industry!?" I do confess, I'm not sure what the argument would be - indeed, some people are perhaps only working part time at those positions, perhaps maybe around that 15 hour figure. But for those who work full time in the service industry, I guess I'm not sure what there leverage could be - raising the minimum wage perhaps? But that argument is age old and I've heard pros and cons both for and against. Also, in a country like the US where are social programs are far behind most of places like the EU for example, it's especially hard to argue or expect anything to actually become a reality for some of those service jobs. I guess only time will tell.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
> I think our economy is so rich and efficient now, that scenario could actually exist, but everyone is still duped by the workaday culture infinitely persisting the 40 hour work week idea. Not sure we're duped by the 40 hr / week idea so much as we're slaves to our desire for consumer goods. That and housing is very expensive now which means more work to pay for it.
- Agenttin 5y ago
  The issue is that pay hasn't kept up with productivity. As things become more efficient employers are having to pay far less for the same amount of work.
  - kansface 5y ago
    It has in tech - in fact I’d wager approximately 100% of productivity gains since the 80s have been in the tech sector which in turn has probably captured nearly all of those gains for itself.
- 5y ago

Aboh33 5y ago

Similar story. I left tech for about 5 months back in early Spring to refocus after delivery of a huge project (contract). Now looking at re-entering with a product/company I actually want to contribute to.

deegles 5y ago

“Is your life organized around your goals?” What a powerful question and distillation of what society is facing. I will think about this.

Buttons840 5y ago

Commutes: heat, stress, grey, pavement, dirt and chemicals, danger, frustration, noise; all things that come to mind with commutes. Never again, I hope.

munificent 5y ago

> Everyone had a whole year "pause" to reevaluate if their lives were organized around their goals, and for millions, the answer was no. It's important to remember that everyone also had a one year traumatic experience. Physically confined for a year with the threat or reality of unpredictable agonizing death to you or loved ones in the middle of an absolutely insane US political situation is going to take a toll on people. There's this media narrative that the past year gave everyone this beautiful moment of clarity about how to live their lives. There is some truth to that. But it's also true that it's given people a whole shit load of psychological damage to work through and I wouldn't be certain that all of these people making radical life changes are 100% in their right minds. I think we're going to see a lot of lifestyle churn over the next few years as people deal with what they went through but any one who claims that the current rapid velocity of any particular pendulum is somehow a straight linear projection is lying to themselves. I look forward to articles a year from now about this "unexpected movement" of people going back to in-office jobs, or working longer hours at shit jobs because they burned through all of their savings, or just wanting more financial stability. I don't think we can make many reliable extrapolations today based on the aggregate behavior of a huge number of psychologically traumatized people, while the trauma is still not even over. Articles like this read to me like someone during the Blitz seeing victory gardens and confidently predicting that after WII every Londoner is going to become a farmer. I'm not saying that things will return to any pre-COVID state, just that after the shock we've been through, the entire interconnected spring-mass system of our lives has in no way settled down into a stable state yet. Shit is still chaotic.

u678u 5y ago
Right, I'm from a small town myself and moved to a big city. Small towns are very convenient but life is more about having a convenient commute, easy parking and a big back yard.

DarknessFalls 5y ago

I agree with everything you said, but 'orientated'.