10 ms·

Is our definition of burnout all wrong?

133 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
This article went from "everyone was stressed during the pandemic" to "everyone actually has complex PTSD now" alarmingly fast. The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom: > The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large. I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition. I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.
- dkarl 4y ago
  I also think it was somewhat appropriate not to have a concrete idea of the future early in the pandemic. We didn't know what was coming. Lots of speculation turned out to be false. One scenario that was suggested very early on was a low single-digit percentage of young healthy adults being hospitalized, which could realistically have caused interruptions in basic municipal services in some places. Other scenarios were too optimistic. We really didn't know the future and couldn't make firm plans about it. Feeling that way all the time, no matter whether it's appropriate, is a symptom. Feeling that way when it makes perfect sense is not a symptom.
- ogoparootbbo 4y ago
  > People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?
  - legitster 4y ago
    I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed. Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800. If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere. It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      I agree. In prior generations, if you survived childhood you probably went to fight in a war as a young adult (if you were male) or you had a loved one who did and you had to struggle to keep things together at home. If you survived that, you had a hard life working in fields or factories until your body was so broken you couldn't do it anymore. You didn't have time to worry about the types of things that many young people have as their big concerns today.
    - bob1029 4y ago
      In my experience, intentionally stressing yourself in controlled ways (i.e. with exercise) is an incredibly effective way to counteract this issue.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here. Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake. Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever. I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it. These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again. I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you". I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019. > expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.
- fellowniusmonk 4y ago
  This is not a rebuttal of what you are saying and I think your caution is valid, but your post prompted a musing about observations of my elders (all whom have now passed away.) All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases. This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period. I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    They're called life-changing events, right? :) The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life. Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades. But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
- rr888 4y ago
  Throw away the cell phone and get a break.
legitster 4y ago
I still think this is largely wrong. I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job. But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day. And the end of every shift felt so good. In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't even know why. Something about staring at screens all day - something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how other people think. Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a distinct feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find enjoyable. So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties of different people - both activities that humans have not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in previous eras.
- golemotron 4y ago
  It might have a lot to do with expectations too: illusory ones. If one gains meaning from their work with the idea that they are "changing the world" in some Utopian sense they might be more prone to burnout. It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support yourself.
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    In my experience this cuts both ways. Becoming emotionally invested in a product you don't have a huge amount of control over is dangerous, but on the other hand, believe that your work is unimportant is depressing when you have to do it for a few decades. For me the balance is finding some part of my work that I control, that I can also really care about. I can be proud of the quality of the code I wrote even if I don't care much about the product or the business.
breck 4y ago
Yes. Don't even need to read it. Anytime you read the sentence "our definition" it's wrong. There is no such thing as "burn out". It's a marketing term. Practice root thinking (https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html). Ignore marketing buzz words, especially if they come from social sciences like psychology, psychiatry, et cetera. Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition—it's almost always B.S.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  You need to hold in your mind two completing concepts. One is that you might have a condition, and that condition may not be fully understood by medical science, and need some self-experimentation (for example, meditation, diet, blood tests, psychotherapy, drugs). The other concept is that it might blow over with rest, time or a change in thinking patterns and there is nothing to fix. Since you can't know which is true, both need to be nurtured!
  - breck 4y ago
    Agreed. I think the problem is we have 100 "conditions" for every 1 actual physical condition.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  > All ideas are trees. All products start as ideas. Therefore all products are trees. The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
- lknfrnpt 4y ago
  "It's a marketing term" ... "Practice root thinking [1]" [1] "Term _I_ coined"
  - breck 4y ago
    Term I _coined_ but also _discovered_. There's a big difference ;)
choxi 4y ago
I’ve always thought burnout is the same thing as learned helplessness, which is a pretty well studied phenomenon in psychology. It doesn’t seem mysterious to me that if you repeatedly do a task that is unrewarding for long enough, you no longer want to do it. Then the COVID burnout can be explained by a large scale reduction in the rewards that typically keep people going.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Related to this: one thing I saw somebody here say one time is that responsibility without authority is a key to burnout. Having the responsibility to complete a large amount of work without the authority to make the decisions needed for that work can be incredibly disempowering, which can make you feel helpless. More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences. It could even be a good economic deal with a 9-to-5 minimal effort mindset. Being a code monkey who thinks it's their job to be responsible for the company is hard. In that case, I agree with you. Such a code monkey needs to put themselves in a position of power somehow.
    - Trasmatta 4y ago
      It's not about being responsible for the company. It's about having the ability to make the decisions to guide your own work without endless bikeshedding, internal politics, red tape, conflicting messages from different layers of management, and constant meetings that go nowhere. > Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences. It's perfectly fine. It can also lead to burnout.
      - clnq 4y ago
kayodelycaon 4y ago
I think what the author is seeing is the human reaction to prolonged stress. Trauma can create this, but so can many other things. Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.
jpswade 4y ago
Burnout is the loss of momentum.
- cybrox 4y ago
  This is an incredibly underrated "summary".
nonameiguess 4y ago
Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various definitions I've seen seem to disagree on whether that includes me (birth year 1980), but I was in the Army before getting into software and am definitely part of the generation that joined up post 9-11 and served in a pretty horribly-paced environment of long, repeat deployments that continued forever because of how long those wars lasted. Echoing other comments, I've definitely worked under psychopaths, including a guy who bragged about how hard his dick got blowing up hospitals in Mosul. I've seen a lot of what this guy is writing about in terms of people who become totally trapped in the present, believing they have no escape from their current predicament, and also become so accustomed to stress that they lose the ability to live without it and can never adjust back to regular civilian life. This is certainly a form of PTSD, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that anyone working a regular office job in media experiences anything like this. On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout. Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism. As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.
jongjong 4y ago
I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out. My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information. After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.
- piva00 4y ago
  > I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase. It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc. It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople. It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters. They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.
jawns 4y ago
One of the things I've spent time helping other engineering managers understand is that burnout doesn't relate only to exhaustion. Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales: 1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work. 2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work. 3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work. So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough. Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy: * I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients. * I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems. * I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-and-ethically https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I had never heard of the MBI before, thanks for that. Maybe using the word "burnout" is doing us a disservice and distracting from deeper causes.
  - pindab0ter 4y ago
    I’m increasingly noticing that the word ‘burnout’ has very different meanings in the US and in Europe (or at least the Netherlands). Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.
- fleddr 4y ago
  In the workplace, I've seen a few people crash into a burnout and it was always your list in reverse order. It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague. Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't. Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body. Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over. In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.
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notacop31337 4y ago
I recently read "Lost Connections", recommended to me after a long few years with depression. I suspect if you're commenting in this thread, you'd probably enjoy it. Anyway, the one thing that seems to always be a consistent theme in discussions of burnout, is work. I've not yet seem a conversation on burnout where an employment scenario is not brought up. One of the chapters in Lost Connections talks about meaningful work, and how a reduction or elimination of personally fulfilling work, can lead to a depression, as can a few other things. I can't help but feel at this stage after dealing with a long running depression, that our relationships with work are probably broken, and we've all been sold a lie. My issue with the term "burnout" is that it feels like it's loading the topic to be a personal issue (which it technically is), when in reality, it's a reaction to a bad external stimuli. I'd write more, but I feel like I'm waffling, I'm happy to discuss more if people want to chat about it.
- waboremo 4y ago
  We have all been sold a lie. The major regrets people give when they are near death, are all linked to work. They wish they had been a better more active parent, they wish they had spent more time with family and friends. Where do these people spend most of their time? Work. Where do they regret spending most of their time? Work. It's funny, you suggest the idea that "work" is a farce and people act as if you're recommending they stay still until they die. We cannot even fathom a life without "work" as it currently exists. To remind readers, when faced with imminent death, the biggest regret is work. Yet we prevent access to integral institutions based on whether someone is employed, we judge others based on where they are employed, the entire education system is based on funnelling people to work more, and we view homeless people as subhumans who just need to find a job. Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    >Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through. But think of the productivity hacks that are possible! We're just not telling ourselves the right thing. Cognitive worksheets. The Secret. Microdosing. We'll get it eventually! Musk and Jobs got it. We just have to hack it.
DraughtyGap 4y ago
burnout is realising your work creates elon musks
thrwawy74 4y ago
If you move the goalposts, you will never burnout.
Eleison23 4y ago
With the mental disorder(s) I suffer from, whatever names might be attached to them, my stamina is poor and I find it somewhat impossible to serve as a full-time employee. My last in-office part-time job was stressful. My supervisor criticized my obvious unwillingness to stand up and move around so much. I woke up every morning in fear and this fear propelled me to arrive on time, lest I be reprimanded and fired for tardiness. I spent 2 or so days every week in "bliss" which meant doing nothing whatsoever except Internet games in my shorts and trying to soak in the air conditioning. I was arguably burned out every week, day in day out. It was this same scene when I had fulltime jobs, I would spend Sat-Sun attempting to recuperate some energy and sanity off the clock. I couldn't budge. It was not pretty. Thankfully I have found a WFH remote job that does not burn me out whatsoever, and I'm happy to put in 20-30 hours per week and it's really somewhat energizing. I get paid good money for it so I'm thankful for the lack of burnout. I hope and pray that this job lasts me through retirement, which will be real soon now.
wnscooke 4y ago
I met our then-current chief at the band office up in Long Lac #58, and she shared with me this cool story. She said she had been chief before but near the end started feeling "burnt out", but she used terms like "disconnected", "not in touch", "something missing"; so you know what she did? She told me she packed up a few essentials and _walked for days into the bush_ until she found a spot that felt right. She set up camp. Hunted and gathered what she needed. She said she initially thought she might be out there a few day. It turned into weeks. The grounding and reconnection she was experiencing, with creation and the Creator, was too profound to leave. After a time one young lady, then another, then another came out looking for her, liked the atmosphere, and stayed too. After a time, there was a group of them, just (re)connecting. It was about a summer times length, I think. After awhile, she felt re-energized, strong, so she disbanded the camp and they all walked back. She then ran for, and was re-elected as chief (this was like 10 years ago) since she felt ready to do it again. I often think of that. Not just that she had time to do it; but that she chose to do it, and left it unstructured, allowing for more time. I often think I need to do that, as I face the next (last) 25 years of my life. I need to be able to do it well, with strength, and grounding.
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133 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

This article went from "everyone was stressed during the pandemic" to "everyone actually has complex PTSD now" alarmingly fast. The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom: > The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large. I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these terms such that everyone has the same condition. I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're getting to the point that merely existing through the pandemic is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely lies in one's inability to handle stress and unplug from the 24/7 news cycle.

dkarl 4y ago
I also think it was somewhat appropriate not to have a concrete idea of the future early in the pandemic. We didn't know what was coming. Lots of speculation turned out to be false. One scenario that was suggested very early on was a low single-digit percentage of young healthy adults being hospitalized, which could realistically have caused interruptions in basic municipal services in some places. Other scenarios were too optimistic. We really didn't know the future and couldn't make firm plans about it. Feeling that way all the time, no matter whether it's appropriate, is a symptom. Feeling that way when it makes perfect sense is not a symptom.
ogoparootbbo 4y ago
> People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and doom The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said joe. Or is it something else?
- legitster 4y ago
  I tend think the problem is that the world is under-stressed. Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the year 1800. If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach adulthood you are probably much, much more sensitive to any sort of negative emotion anywhere. It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I agree. In prior generations, if you survived childhood you probably went to fight in a war as a young adult (if you were male) or you had a loved one who did and you had to struggle to keep things together at home. If you survived that, you had a hard life working in fields or factories until your body was so broken you couldn't do it anymore. You didn't have time to worry about the types of things that many young people have as their big concerns today.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    In my experience, intentionally stressing yourself in controlled ways (i.e. with exercise) is an incredibly effective way to counteract this issue.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
throwaway22032 4y ago
I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here. Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake. Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever. I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it. These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again. I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you". I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019. > expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.
fellowniusmonk 4y ago
This is not a rebuttal of what you are saying and I think your caution is valid, but your post prompted a musing about observations of my elders (all whom have now passed away.) All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases. This was true even though none of them were financially ruined, forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either period. I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things exacerbate it for sure.)
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  They're called life-changing events, right? :) The daily experience you have today of being able to walk into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means that you have a certain level of confidence in life. Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out, not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a period in which you could go to the store and not find anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life. Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain, like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff over the next few decades. But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
rr888 4y ago
Throw away the cell phone and get a break.

legitster 4y ago

I still think this is largely wrong. I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job. But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day. And the end of every shift felt so good. In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't even know why. Something about staring at screens all day - something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how other people think. Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a distinct feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find enjoyable. So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large varieties of different people - both activities that humans have not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in previous eras.

golemotron 4y ago
It might have a lot to do with expectations too: illusory ones. If one gains meaning from their work with the idea that they are "changing the world" in some Utopian sense they might be more prone to burnout. It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support yourself.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  In my experience this cuts both ways. Becoming emotionally invested in a product you don't have a huge amount of control over is dangerous, but on the other hand, believe that your work is unimportant is depressing when you have to do it for a few decades. For me the balance is finding some part of my work that I control, that I can also really care about. I can be proud of the quality of the code I wrote even if I don't care much about the product or the business.

breck 4y ago

Yes. Don't even need to read it. Anytime you read the sentence "our definition" it's wrong. There is no such thing as "burn out". It's a marketing term. Practice root thinking (https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html). Ignore marketing buzz words, especially if they come from social sciences like psychology, psychiatry, et cetera. Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition—it's almost always B.S.

quickthrower2 4y ago
You need to hold in your mind two completing concepts. One is that you might have a condition, and that condition may not be fully understood by medical science, and need some self-experimentation (for example, meditation, diet, blood tests, psychotherapy, drugs). The other concept is that it might blow over with rest, time or a change in thinking patterns and there is nothing to fix. Since you can't know which is true, both need to be nurtured!
- breck 4y ago
  Agreed. I think the problem is we have 100 "conditions" for every 1 actual physical condition.
rzzzt 4y ago
> All ideas are trees. All products start as ideas. Therefore all products are trees. The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
lknfrnpt 4y ago
"It's a marketing term" ... "Practice root thinking [1]" [1] "Term _I_ coined"
- breck 4y ago
  Term I _coined_ but also _discovered_. There's a big difference ;)

choxi 4y ago

I’ve always thought burnout is the same thing as learned helplessness, which is a pretty well studied phenomenon in psychology. It doesn’t seem mysterious to me that if you repeatedly do a task that is unrewarding for long enough, you no longer want to do it. Then the COVID burnout can be explained by a large scale reduction in the rewards that typically keep people going.

Trasmatta 4y ago
Related to this: one thing I saw somebody here say one time is that responsibility without authority is a key to burnout. Having the responsibility to complete a large amount of work without the authority to make the decisions needed for that work can be incredibly disempowering, which can make you feel helpless. More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management, hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
- clnq 4y ago
  Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences. It could even be a good economic deal with a 9-to-5 minimal effort mindset. Being a code monkey who thinks it's their job to be responsible for the company is hard. In that case, I agree with you. Such a code monkey needs to put themselves in a position of power somehow.
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    It's not about being responsible for the company. It's about having the ability to make the decisions to guide your own work without endless bikeshedding, internal politics, red tape, conflicting messages from different layers of management, and constant meetings that go nowhere. > Being a code monkey is fine if one embraces that position with its economic and ambition consequences. It's perfectly fine. It can also lead to burnout.
    - clnq 4y ago

kayodelycaon 4y ago

I think what the author is seeing is the human reaction to prolonged stress. Trauma can create this, but so can many other things. Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.

jpswade 4y ago

Burnout is the loss of momentum.

cybrox 4y ago
This is an incredibly underrated "summary".

nonameiguess 4y ago

Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this. He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various definitions I've seen seem to disagree on whether that includes me (birth year 1980), but I was in the Army before getting into software and am definitely part of the generation that joined up post 9-11 and served in a pretty horribly-paced environment of long, repeat deployments that continued forever because of how long those wars lasted. Echoing other comments, I've definitely worked under psychopaths, including a guy who bragged about how hard his dick got blowing up hospitals in Mosul. I've seen a lot of what this guy is writing about in terms of people who become totally trapped in the present, believing they have no escape from their current predicament, and also become so accustomed to stress that they lose the ability to live without it and can never adjust back to regular civilian life. This is certainly a form of PTSD, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that anyone working a regular office job in media experiences anything like this. On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the difference between this and what I would personally call burnout. Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout. Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where every decision has a magnified importance because the difference between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism. As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate, which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop producing it, but because our entire economic system is predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks, and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.

jongjong 4y ago

I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. The way I've protected myself from it is that I never had singular focus on just one goal. I always had a dual goal of 1. Financial success and 2. Learning/self-improvement. This has worked out pretty well so far because I've learned a lot from financial failures so I get some satisfaction even when things don't work out. My problem now is that I've failed so much and learned so much that I'm starting to doubt that I can improve any more (it's not what I know, it's who I know which counts at this stage). It's like a machine learning model; it's possible to over-train it; beyond a certain amount, it becomes over-fitted to the training data and its performance starts to degrade. A lot of events which look like important lessons are in fact just random flukes and carry little useful information. After 15 years, I'm getting to the point that I feel like I'm done on the learning side and my focus is shifting more and more towards the financial side of the equation.

piva00 4y ago
> I suspect that burnout happens when you strive to achieve something for many years with singular focus on that thing and it fails to materialize no matter what you do. Not necessarily, at least not in my case. Burnout came from multiple layers of management slightly gaslighting the dev team by acknowledging the issues we brought up, acknowledging these issues were making us slow, that the product which came from the startup phase was full of bugs that got even worse when scaling up, and then just not listening to our suggestions on how to align the business plan with a technical health plan. Worse than that: fake listening and then just ignoring those suggestions on the next quarter planning as if they were never brought up, shoving down our throats their demands for features without regards to our technical notes on why it wouldn't be feasible for the next year with the current state of the codebase. It was extremely demoralising and demotivating, we were not chasing a complete refactoring, we weren't suggesting a 2nd system, we worked pretty hard to come up with a feasible plan for how we could achieve X business goal while needing to do Y technical aspect to properly scale and remove toil. We tracked how much time was spent on toil, how much that cost the company and how much we expected to save in the next 1-5 years depending on what suggestions and pace they bought into. It was a lot of effort to have hard data and facts, tracking code flows that were extremely convoluted and massively increased cognitive overload, etc. It never worked, every quarter the demands were to implement new features on top of the ball of mud while having to do constant firefights when, inevitably, the shit parts would break and our B2B customers would be ringing all alarms with the salespeople. It didn't come from years trying to achieve a goal, it came fast, in 2-3 quarters. They simply never listened to the people they hired as experts, I burned out and had to change jobs and it took more than a year to recover from it.

jawns 4y ago

One of the things I've spent time helping other engineering managers understand is that burnout doesn't relate only to exhaustion. Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales: 1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work. 2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work. 3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work. So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough. Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy: * I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients. * I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems. * I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-and-ethically https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I had never heard of the MBI before, thanks for that. Maybe using the word "burnout" is doing us a disservice and distracting from deeper causes.
- pindab0ter 4y ago
  I’m increasingly noticing that the word ‘burnout’ has very different meanings in the US and in Europe (or at least the Netherlands). Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.
fleddr 4y ago
In the workplace, I've seen a few people crash into a burnout and it was always your list in reverse order. It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague. Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't. Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body. Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over. In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.

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notacop31337 4y ago

I recently read "Lost Connections", recommended to me after a long few years with depression. I suspect if you're commenting in this thread, you'd probably enjoy it. Anyway, the one thing that seems to always be a consistent theme in discussions of burnout, is work. I've not yet seem a conversation on burnout where an employment scenario is not brought up. One of the chapters in Lost Connections talks about meaningful work, and how a reduction or elimination of personally fulfilling work, can lead to a depression, as can a few other things. I can't help but feel at this stage after dealing with a long running depression, that our relationships with work are probably broken, and we've all been sold a lie. My issue with the term "burnout" is that it feels like it's loading the topic to be a personal issue (which it technically is), when in reality, it's a reaction to a bad external stimuli. I'd write more, but I feel like I'm waffling, I'm happy to discuss more if people want to chat about it.

waboremo 4y ago
We have all been sold a lie. The major regrets people give when they are near death, are all linked to work. They wish they had been a better more active parent, they wish they had spent more time with family and friends. Where do these people spend most of their time? Work. Where do they regret spending most of their time? Work. It's funny, you suggest the idea that "work" is a farce and people act as if you're recommending they stay still until they die. We cannot even fathom a life without "work" as it currently exists. To remind readers, when faced with imminent death, the biggest regret is work. Yet we prevent access to integral institutions based on whether someone is employed, we judge others based on where they are employed, the entire education system is based on funnelling people to work more, and we view homeless people as subhumans who just need to find a job. Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  >Until we reevaluate the entire modern idea of "work", the discussion of "burnout" will continue being fruitless. There will only be yet another temporary solution to sell you on, another form of therapy to attempt and then feel guilt over, another career change you don't want to drag your family through. But think of the productivity hacks that are possible! We're just not telling ourselves the right thing. Cognitive worksheets. The Secret. Microdosing. We'll get it eventually! Musk and Jobs got it. We just have to hack it.

DraughtyGap 4y ago

burnout is realising your work creates elon musks

thrwawy74 4y ago

If you move the goalposts, you will never burnout.

Eleison23 4y ago

With the mental disorder(s) I suffer from, whatever names might be attached to them, my stamina is poor and I find it somewhat impossible to serve as a full-time employee. My last in-office part-time job was stressful. My supervisor criticized my obvious unwillingness to stand up and move around so much. I woke up every morning in fear and this fear propelled me to arrive on time, lest I be reprimanded and fired for tardiness. I spent 2 or so days every week in "bliss" which meant doing nothing whatsoever except Internet games in my shorts and trying to soak in the air conditioning. I was arguably burned out every week, day in day out. It was this same scene when I had fulltime jobs, I would spend Sat-Sun attempting to recuperate some energy and sanity off the clock. I couldn't budge. It was not pretty. Thankfully I have found a WFH remote job that does not burn me out whatsoever, and I'm happy to put in 20-30 hours per week and it's really somewhat energizing. I get paid good money for it so I'm thankful for the lack of burnout. I hope and pray that this job lasts me through retirement, which will be real soon now.

wnscooke 4y ago

I met our then-current chief at the band office up in Long Lac #58, and she shared with me this cool story. She said she had been chief before but near the end started feeling "burnt out", but she used terms like "disconnected", "not in touch", "something missing"; so you know what she did? She told me she packed up a few essentials and _walked for days into the bush_ until she found a spot that felt right. She set up camp. Hunted and gathered what she needed. She said she initially thought she might be out there a few day. It turned into weeks. The grounding and reconnection she was experiencing, with creation and the Creator, was too profound to leave. After a time one young lady, then another, then another came out looking for her, liked the atmosphere, and stayed too. After a time, there was a group of them, just (re)connecting. It was about a summer times length, I think. After awhile, she felt re-energized, strong, so she disbanded the camp and they all walked back. She then ran for, and was re-elected as chief (this was like 10 years ago) since she felt ready to do it again. I often think of that. Not just that she had time to do it; but that she chose to do it, and left it unstructured, allowing for more time. I often think I need to do that, as I face the next (last) 25 years of my life. I need to be able to do it well, with strength, and grounding.

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