I don't feel comfortable saying what "you" should do since these situations are so personal/unique, but here's some of what helped me: Was there any specific e

I don't feel comfortable saying what "you" should do since these situations are so personal/unique, but here's some of what helped me: Was there any specific event at work which you think may have contributed to feeling burned out? Or more of a long slow grind of unfulfilling work? AFAICT good therapy is supposed to lead one to self-realization of these triggers, but for me it always felt like it was doing the opposite. Luck of the draw I guess, but I tried three different times with different therapists over several years and it always just made me feel worse and less understood than when I walked in. The biggest thing that made me feel better was developing goals and an identity outside of the economic system to avoid the effects of work negativity. For me there was a huge project I delivered on at work that flew totally under the radar and was not rewarded. Of course there was more I could have done to promote myself blah blah blah, but getting the worst performance review in years for the work I was proudest of in years was a huge trigger for me. IMO (don't feel obligated to agree!) anything money touches will feel at least a little inhuman, and it can only get worse once it takes root (like the current direction of "open source" where lots of people treat it like a way to pivot into a corporate job (I did this too lol)). I can't tell anyone what their beliefs and goals should be, and I'm not going to share mine since they are personal and not really relevant, but give them space and time and they will come. It doesn't even need to include technology. That's what I'm good at, so that's the expression I tend to gravitate toward, but the important part for me was to decouple my self-worth from my income. I can handle soul-crushing corporate work a lot better now that I've stopped taking it so seriously. My self-worth comes from ideas that cost zero dollars, and selling my labor is a resource to accomplish things that truly make me happy. To figure all that out, I took a year off of work at a pretty significant hit to my finances and just went places. It was necessary for me to get out of any familiar environments, including home, just to sever those negative mental links and get some untainted thoughts going. I had never taken more than a couple of weeks off at a time since becoming a working adult, so there was never a time where I was simultaneously old enough to have some experience with the world, old enough to have some money, but not be thinking about what I "needed to do" when I got back. Have a car. Ignore all the "DAE cars bad???" people — the most interesting places are places transit will never go. My Prius does back roads and gets 60MPG doing it, so it doesn't even have to break the bank. Pick a direction and drive in it for as far as you can stand in a single day. Get a motel room and spend a couple days just "living" in the area. It doesn't have to be touristy stuff. I get the most enjoyment out of things like just driving around, sitting in a park or on a beach, or taking a walk, since the point is to have a clean mental canvas. Unstructured activities are better for this than activities where I have to be in a certain place at a certain time and pay attention to a thing. Be offline while traveling, and I mean zero contact. Airplane mode, and stash the phone somewhere. All attention parasites must go. I set up Musicolet on my old Note 4 with an SD card full of MP3s so I don't need connectivity for music. OSMAnd provides offline maps, and Torque logs my trip via OBD2. I carry a mirrorless camera (Micro Four Thirds) for photos, and it's way better than anything my phone takes anyway. Regaining a happy relationship with computers/technology was possible too once I had some time away from them. Things that help me include having a language/ecosystem for personal stuff that I absolutely refuse to ever touch professionally (Ruby for me) and having projects that are intentionally "Free Software, but not open source". Patches are not welcome. My code isn't just "mine" — my code is me!