I'd say, from my armchair theory, there are a lot of factors that lead to burnout and most all of them I think stem from some underlying pressure to work more.

I'd say, from my armchair theory, there are a lot of factors that lead to burnout and most all of them I think stem from some underlying pressure to work more. It may he some culturally seeded external pressure of your peers or workplace saying you need to continually push the bar, it may be your own internal goals that create such conditions, but I think it almost always stems from setting and then continously trying to attain unrealistic goals in work. If you can set realistic goals in realistic time increments that create a situation you can attain with a reasonable work life balance, you no longer need to push 10 hour days, you can take the evening off and relax. You don't need to take your evening and spend it learning some new tech or prepping for interviews to make your need career step. The issue is that while the pressure can be internal, much of it is becoming external and out of people's control. The way interviews have shifted in the past 20 years is a pretty obvious case of this in my opinion, the bar has been pushed higher and higher due to external pressure pushing the bar up through competition. Many workplaces adopt ridiculous slave driving time management techniques that push people beyond comfortable levels, continously. For those who want to grow you do need to push your boundaries but even then, you need to do so realistically and not continously--people need time to stagnate and be comfortable before they grow a bit. People sometimes get bored at a job because it's not challenging, they feel they aren't growing, the tech is old, whatever but I've rarely heard anyone complain in these situations that they feel burnt out. They may feel bored or stagnant but I find those situations far more bareable than burnout conditions. My opinion is that burnout stems largely from Taylorism gone off the rails focusing on pushing human efficiency beyond its breaking point without caring about the humans involved. Technology is pretty bad because tech is a very efficiency focused industry with lots of creative engineers ready to figure out a new way to optimize every aspect they can without often without considering side effects. I don't think it's isolated to tech by any means but I think tech is uniquely positioned to create abusive pressuring situations more than many sectors.