12 ms·

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

466 points by ent101 3y ago

MPSimmons 3y ago
The entire 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman' book is just an incredible read.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- b8 3y ago
  Yep, I recommend that and his other book.
  - jwilk 3y ago
    What's the other book?
    - donkeyballs 3y ago
      "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
    - btilly 3y ago
      The other book is, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928 https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933... I particularly liked it for the in depth discussion of how Appendix F came to be written. https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
      - srean 3y ago
        Yeah, the Feynman in this book is more human, more vulnerable.
    - srean 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_People_Think%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_Pe...
dartos 3y ago
What an inspiring passage. I’ve been feeling the exact same way about software lately. It’s just no fun anymore. I should do something pointless like making a wayland compositor for myself or something.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  When I struggled hard with burnout, I found that hobbies were an important part of fixing that -- but it was important that the hobbies had little-to-nothing to do with computers (I had computer-related hobbies too, of course, but they didn't seem particularly effective in terms of mitigating burnout).
  - brokencode 3y ago
    Personally, I’ve found that if I get super interested in a programming project at home that I’ll get too distracted and unfocused at work, which feels pretty miserable. For that reason, I’ve mostly given up on programming at home in favor of reading and other hobbies. I do think this is a good approach at work though. There’s always something I can investigate that I’m interested in at work that I can find enjoyment from. Even if it isn’t exactly what I’m ideally supposed to be working on, I’m able to help people and provide valuable insights that are beneficial for my team and company. This is a much more satisfying situation than either spinning my wheels because I’m not interested in what I’m working on am too distracted by projects at home.
  - makapuf 3y ago
    A good thing is to remind that you have not to finish hobby projets. Dont feel any shame about putting it aside and start something more interesting, do it : it's not work and you do it to let off steam. You may even come back to it later
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yes! I think that the real difference between an activity being a hobby and it being a job is that a hobby activity is always optional. If I don't feel like working on a hobby project today (or ever again), I don't have to. On the job, I don't have that option. That makes a world of difference.
csours 3y ago
I think this is an indication of the difference between the start of project and maintenance of a product. At the start, you can imagine all the cool things it does, once it's working you have to keep it working in the real world.
- alexpetralia 3y ago
  Spot on. Everything is fun when the scale is small and the consequences don't matter, and everything is serious when the scale is large and the consequences matter.
- david422 3y ago
  Or the start of the project and completing the project. All those fun projects people start and never finish. All the fun stuff is done, it's the boilerplate that needs to be done to actually complete the project that is the "hard" part.
mikrl 3y ago
I’ve had an ‘instrumental’ mindset for as long as I can remember. Almost my entire life after being a kid. >I need to do this because I need to know that to pass my exams, get a good job to… etc I feel for a lot of 30 and under people today it’s the same. I managed to capture the ‘playing around’ feeling very fleetingly earlier in my 20s but it doesn’t last long before some little productivity demon starts gnawing at you. Even resting has its purpose: mentally recharge to work more, let muscles repair themselves to lift more.
amiga386 3y ago
I can just imagine this in his voice (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc) Feynman is my favourite physicist. Of course you could pick someone else, you could argue about the relative importance of each person's contribution to scientific knowledge, but it was his aimiability, playfulness and curiousity, combined with the fact that he _did_ break new frontiers in quantum physics that make him so inspiring for me. His famed series of lectures at Caltech were a great introduction to physics. I was hoping to see more of his time at Los Alamos in the Oppenheimer biopic, but he doesn't even seem to be in it. There's supposedly someone playing him, but I don't see it; I assume the two-second silent shot of someone from behind playing the bongos was meant to be him.
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Yeah uh I was forever hoping for Feynmann to appear. Suddenly, a man playing bongos! Finally, here he comes, I thought... but no. No Feynmann. What a disappointment.
- kitchi 3y ago
  There was the person who viewed the blast from behind glass with no protection, which I'm pretty sure is a reference to his story about the exact same thing.
- privacyisntdead 3y ago
  A favorite of mine as well. I too was hoping for more of an appearance. I wondered if Feynman’s moment was during the first test scene where there is a spectator/scientist sitting in a car with Teller sitting in a lawn chair in the foreground. Feynman says in one of his books he noticed the car windows should block the UV radiation.
  - amiga386 3y ago
    Ah, yes, that is it. So he gets a few more seconds in the movie than I thought :) [An army man is handing out welders glass to the observers. Feynman is in a car, Teller is next to him in a deckchair rubbing sun cream into his skin] TELLER [to the army man while rubbing his hands]: On the leg, please ARMY MAN: Feynman FEYNMAN: No. The glass [knocks on car windshield] stops the UV TELLER: And what stops the glass?
vasco 3y ago
I'm not a mental health connoisseur or anything, but removing your own pressure to perform seems like good advice regardless of your circumstances. If you're tired or stressed or whatever, labeling yourself as "a burned out person" seems to me like the only good thing it does is add more pressure. Because how can you do well if you're "damaged" in some way? It's important to not just do old style sweep it under the rug when it's serious, but I do think the current zeitgeist over indexes on being a good person equating to being hyper aware of all your struggles and anxieties and so on, and I don't see how all that extra pressure will help, specially for young people. Most times "it's not that big of a deal" is really the best thing I can tell myself. That being said, asking for help from someone that knows what they are talking about also seems like a good idea, if you can't overcome it on your own. The universe doesn't give you any extra points for doing it alone.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  I view burnout as a psychic wound. You should be aware of it to treat and not let it fester. At the same time, if you are always messing with it then it won’t heal. I agree there is probably a balance, and we are currently focusing too hard on it. I’ve had the same thought about the obsession about childhood trauma from people with average upbringings. But both parents and work have heavy influences on how we live our lives, so who else are you going to blame? Yourself? Don’t be silly.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  Makes sense, we are taught that being “mindful” of our mental state is key to mental health, but it also means everyone walks around with a handful of self diagnosed mental deficits.
  - olyjohn 3y ago
    Being mindful of what you are doing, what you are thinking, how you are feeling, and how you are reacting to things is not diagnosing. You should probably leave the diagnosing part to a professional if you feel that you really need help with your mental health.
tnecniv 3y ago
As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue. Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.
- fnord77 3y ago
  burnout = depression
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?
    - chrisweekly 3y ago
      I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
    - bhaney 3y ago
      I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
  - kbf 3y ago
    I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…
- 3y ago
skadamat 3y ago
Jonathan Blow has a great talk on long projects (The Witness was like 8 years in development?) here which I watch once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ Some highlights: - He takes a week long vacation every now and then to hack on a completely different game idea for fun, with the focus on it being short and fun - Time for relaxation and unstructured thinking - Walks / showers can produce amazing ideas
hathawsh 3y ago
While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to: 1. Get good at something 2. Get paid for doing it 3. Get burned out by doing it 4. Return to the fun way of doing it 5. ??? 6. Win a Nobel prize or similar How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we encourage people to follow a path like his?
- metalrain 3y ago
  Pattern like that isn't repeatable, but idea of letting go of expectations to recover the joy of doing whatever you are doing is.
  - b8 3y ago
    I heavily agree. I got in to security and programming by doing fund video game hacking stuff. Then I got paid to do it, lost the joy and got fired, then started to do it recreationally again and the dopamine rush/addiction is back.
- MissingAFew 3y ago
  I think the takeaway from the anecdote is that you should have fun with the simple things if you have "writers block" or are tired. Try to get a new perspective on something.
- smugglerFlynn 3y ago
  Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list. I read it that way: - Things become taxing when they stop being fun - Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing - Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this.
  - hathawsh 3y ago
    To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
BubbleRings 3y ago
For a really cool video from the International Space Station about a phenomenon related to the spinning plate stuff, see here: Dancing T-handle in zero-g, HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM
- phkahler 3y ago
  That is really interesting. I know it's not correct to simulate rigid body dynamics as constant unless an outside force is applied, but what to do differently is not obvious to me. That looks like the object changes orientation while it's world-coordinates momentum vector remains unchanged. Got any references for why that happens? I mean orientation changes regarding the flip, not the obvious spinning motion.
  - BubbleRings 3y ago
    Not me. I only understand half your post, to tell you the truth. But Derek Muller on the youtube channel Veritasium has a good video on this, where he mentions how, when asked one time, Feynman couldn't think of a simple way to describe how it works, and then Muller goes on to explain it in a way that I could see. Great stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU
primitivesuave 3y ago
I was severely burned out two years ago after I left the last startup I cofounded. I had a good bit of cash saved up, so I traveled around the world to get better at rock climbing. I could barely write more than a few lines of code before closing my laptop. I would rather sit on the beach and stare at the waves than do anything productive back then. When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state. Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was hardly worth solving. I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product to address them. My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.
edu_do_cerrado 3y ago
Very inspiring passage. I had this feeling of playing around with stuff (Programming in my case) in the beginning of my studies, but it faded away over time because of work. Even though I work in a wonderful project, I feel burned out a lot nowadays. Might lookout for that initial feeling again now, I probably won't achieve as much as Feynman, but I hope that removing the pressure and enjoying what I'm doing might be good for mental health
smugglerFlynn 3y ago
There is a highly relevant and resent research on the state of play, nicely summarised on Huberman Lab Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyZIWeBpRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyZIWeBpRw
cs702 3y ago
A classic. Any and all administrators tasked with evaluating research-funding proposals should be required to read this short passage before making any funding decisions, so they can be reminded that groundbreaking research is driven mainly by intellectual curiosity, not by metrics that seek to quantify "relevance" or "importance."
ryandv 3y ago
The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play and artistic expression. I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters or deployment pipelines. String together everything with a smattering of bash because nothing is really at stake. It's easy to get started since the tech is as simple as it gets, and there's nothing actually on the line. You can practice using obscure languages never seen in industry. Do things because they make you laugh, not to build a portfolio or a product. At the least, I can still crank out a modest amount of code and actually enjoy the process, without tearing my hair out over whatever asinine enterprise-scale clusterfuck needs to be untangled now. Still waiting for whatever is next.
- oldandboring 3y ago
  This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable) time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a developer, the idea of writing configurations instead of code just makes my hair stand on end.
  - mbm 3y ago
    The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.
    - phone8675309 3y ago
      If anything, it's regressed. All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".
- smugglerFlynn 3y ago
juris 3y ago
The other day I had remarked to an old gal (the proprietor) of a local strip mall toy store that I walked into on a whim that "really this is where it all started". Round hole, square block diagonally (almost anyway); oh that can's label so perfectly lines up with the tiling of this table when it's rolled across it; oh that soap dispenser pump has the -same threading- as this vodka bottle and screws on just easy...and so on. It would turn out that that old gal wrote a bunch of code for some local military contractors waaay back when and had quite the reputation for connecting the unlikeliest of systems together. The corporate types would naysay whether a thing could be done, and she'd have it back on their desk within 3 hours. And now she runs a toy store, and loves it!!! Feeling burned out myself, I took from that conversation some modicum of hope that looking at problems as //play// is what I need personally-- and prospects look better for it! Happy to hear that Feynman would agree.
arisAlexis 3y ago
Greatest book I've ever read
danjc 3y ago
I see a parallel to short vs long term thinking here that applies to R&D. When quarterly results are the priority, innovation is stifled but what's insidious is that this only becomes evident over a long time span.
dang 3y ago
Related: Feynman's Nobel Ambition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 - May 2022 (1 comment) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 - April 2021 (276 comments) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments)
systems_glitch 3y ago
I feel like Bell Labs was the biggest loss of "play at it, see if something important comes out" possible. Never worked there, but a lot of friends did, from the 50s thru the Lucent transition right up to the end.
RationalDino 3y ago
Based on his biographies, I think that Feynman had ADHD. He never demonstrated an ability to do things because he thought he should do them. And, as this story shows, trying just resulted in a demotivated and unproductive Feynman. On the other hand he accomplished great results when pulled by desire. Especially in the form of play. Surely You Must Be Joking does a great job of showing how he kept coming back to play throughout his life. Everything from lock picking at Los Alamos, to playing the bongo drums. What Do You Care What Other People Think has an extended description of the creation of Appendix F about the shuttle disaster. See https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm for that. As someone who has been in the state, it is clear that he was in a state of hyperfocus. I've never matched what Feynman could do, but it comes as no surprise to me that he'd realize that he could get away with learning about a topic others didn't want him to learn, because he could do so quickly enough that they wouldn't believe that he'd possibly have learned it. I highly recommend both books, Appendix F, and of course, https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. (If psychologists had followed up what he said 50 years ago, the Replication Crisis would have been discovered 40 years earlier than it was. Oh well, missed opportunities.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
asadalt 3y ago
I have a similar approach to side projects. I have a day job (that is fun btw) and then I spend nights and weekends "playing" with code with no expectations. This has worked well for me and I LOVE this setup! The alternative would be to raise VC and work full-time on a half-baked idea. :cringe:
buescher 3y ago
Incidentally, the faucet problem is neat! You can solve it with high-school level physics and analytical geometry ("pre-calculus").
goethes_kind 3y ago
Interesting anecdote. But I don't envy Fenyman. I would rather be like the guys I know you can just sit down and get to work conscientiously without any such intrusive thoughts whatsoever. Those guys have a superpower they don't appreciate.
zackmorris 3y ago
Macro-scale example of magnetic locking by a spinning magnet analogous to bound states in subatomic particles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state It reminds me of Feynman's wobble in the article. Which may relate to spin 1/2 particles and/or radioactive decay. The strong force is empirically measured and I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation of its fundamental mechanism. But nucleons moving near the speed of light are held inside the nucleus by a force of several pounds! So the nuclear force acts like a gravity well but comes from electroweak effects somehow. Loosely that means that there's a centripetal force so strong that if we measure it over years, the odds of seeing a stable nucleus often approach or meet 100%. I only bring this up because currently there's no way to modulate decay, electron capture, fission or fusion via simple means like temperature or charge. Ideally we should be able to add/remove electromagnetic energy and transmute elements by generating electron/positron pairs from photons (for example). Until we really understand how the strong force works, all the cool sci fi and Iron Man stuff will be confined to research labs. I've spent my whole life working to make rent instead of working on important problems. What a waste for society to invest education dollars in me so I could subsist on what is largely custodial work. So I think the most important thing we can manifest is getting more leisure time, money and resources into the hands of dreamers. The second most important thing we can do is pay our success forward. So I don't want to hear about any more billionaires and their pet projects. I want to see visionary goals, labor-saving devices to reduce suffering, automation, UBI, and most importantly people paying it forward by paying their fair share of taxes into democratic societies and having enough faith in the higher power of love to give the people the dignity and means to solve their problems and self-actualize. I mean, that's what the USA used to be until I watched it all fall apart after 9/11 to leave us with whatever all this is.
max_ 3y ago
There is a Richard Feynman documentary I saw where he talked about his darkest episode of depression (another depression episode). It was after them testing one of the Atomic bombs when it had been developed. He described it as follows, he would for example watch see someone building a bridge or doing maintainance, and he would think to himself, "Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know that he is wasting his time, that all this work he is doing is useless?"
Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]
xdavidliu 3y ago
"1985" in the title is misleading. The sentence is an excerpt from a biography published in 1985, describing Feynman's experience as a young Assistant Prof at Cornell shortly after WWII.
giantg2 3y ago
I'd probably get fired for playing around at work. Burnout is just the standard state for most workers in today's world. We just have to live with it.
juancn 3y ago
It's the quintessential hard problem solving strategy. It works on many hard disciplines, and it boils down to two steps: 1- Obsess 2- Let Go Step two is the hardest one, but it's the most fruitful one and you really have to let go, no cheating. Once you do, for some reason your mind will use everything from step one in the background to find the solution, in a weird moment, in an effortless manner. But if you don't let go, it will never happen.
- rochak 3y ago
  Happened to me today. Always works but can never be controlled :)
7thaccount 3y ago
It's aggravating as there is a lot of value I could provide to my organization if they set me loose and gave me full autonomy. I'd also be a lot happier. But that is pretty hard to come by.
vehementi 3y ago
Kind of a miss on the title. The quote is: "Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position...". The title is slightly taking the quote out of context and isn't the title of the article
danielvaughn 3y ago
Much of the work I'm truly proud of, I did when I was playing. It's an absolute mystery why I can't intentionally put myself into that mindset no matter how hard I try.
chankstein38 3y ago
This is me with writing code. I do it professionally and have for almost 15 years. I'm so burnt out on the day to day, forced work. But show me something interesting or hackable, a game I like that I can mod, a cool script, a cool concept that might make a neat image or sound. Whatever it might be, suddenly I'm playing again and having fun, burnout or not. Just wish I could find a way to make that my paycheck...
sirsinsalot 3y ago
I'm so burned out that the idea of even sitting at a desk with a screen in front of it, never mind coding or thinking or doing anything worthwhile, makes me feel sick to the stomach. I'll always love coding. Stress can kill anything.
dshpala 3y ago
I remember I used to kick-start myself into flow by doing "useless" things like rearranging code around, doing small renames for consistency, etc. I need to return that that practice, as I find it harder and harder to interest myself in what I'm doing...
kromem 3y ago
I used to include a bit about it into most of my presentations, and I recommend everyone read up on the over-justification effect. One of the least widely known psychological effects relative to its impact on people's lives. A nefarious little bugger that's hard to evade too.
zubairq 3y ago
Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman was such an influential book for me! It was so readable and I believe it helped alot of people become interested in science, which was usually portrayed as a very boring topic

466 points by ent101 3y ago

MPSimmons 3y ago

The entire 'Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman' book is just an incredible read.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
b8 3y ago
Yep, I recommend that and his other book.
- jwilk 3y ago
  What's the other book?
  - donkeyballs 3y ago
    "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
  - btilly 3y ago
    The other book is, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/0393320928 https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933... I particularly liked it for the in depth discussion of how Appendix F came to be written. https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
    - srean 3y ago
      Yeah, the Feynman in this book is more human, more vulnerable.
  - srean 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_People_Think%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_Pe...

dartos 3y ago

What an inspiring passage. I’ve been feeling the exact same way about software lately. It’s just no fun anymore. I should do something pointless like making a wayland compositor for myself or something.

JohnFen 3y ago
When I struggled hard with burnout, I found that hobbies were an important part of fixing that -- but it was important that the hobbies had little-to-nothing to do with computers (I had computer-related hobbies too, of course, but they didn't seem particularly effective in terms of mitigating burnout).
- brokencode 3y ago
  Personally, I’ve found that if I get super interested in a programming project at home that I’ll get too distracted and unfocused at work, which feels pretty miserable. For that reason, I’ve mostly given up on programming at home in favor of reading and other hobbies. I do think this is a good approach at work though. There’s always something I can investigate that I’m interested in at work that I can find enjoyment from. Even if it isn’t exactly what I’m ideally supposed to be working on, I’m able to help people and provide valuable insights that are beneficial for my team and company. This is a much more satisfying situation than either spinning my wheels because I’m not interested in what I’m working on am too distracted by projects at home.
- makapuf 3y ago
  A good thing is to remind that you have not to finish hobby projets. Dont feel any shame about putting it aside and start something more interesting, do it : it's not work and you do it to let off steam. You may even come back to it later
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes! I think that the real difference between an activity being a hobby and it being a job is that a hobby activity is always optional. If I don't feel like working on a hobby project today (or ever again), I don't have to. On the job, I don't have that option. That makes a world of difference.

csours 3y ago

I think this is an indication of the difference between the start of project and maintenance of a product. At the start, you can imagine all the cool things it does, once it's working you have to keep it working in the real world.

alexpetralia 3y ago
Spot on. Everything is fun when the scale is small and the consequences don't matter, and everything is serious when the scale is large and the consequences matter.
david422 3y ago
Or the start of the project and completing the project. All those fun projects people start and never finish. All the fun stuff is done, it's the boilerplate that needs to be done to actually complete the project that is the "hard" part.

mikrl 3y ago

I’ve had an ‘instrumental’ mindset for as long as I can remember. Almost my entire life after being a kid. >I need to do this because I need to know that to pass my exams, get a good job to… etc I feel for a lot of 30 and under people today it’s the same. I managed to capture the ‘playing around’ feeling very fleetingly earlier in my 20s but it doesn’t last long before some little productivity demon starts gnawing at you. Even resting has its purpose: mentally recharge to work more, let muscles repair themselves to lift more.

amiga386 3y ago

I can just imagine this in his voice (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc) Feynman is my favourite physicist. Of course you could pick someone else, you could argue about the relative importance of each person's contribution to scientific knowledge, but it was his aimiability, playfulness and curiousity, combined with the fact that he _did_ break new frontiers in quantum physics that make him so inspiring for me. His famed series of lectures at Caltech were a great introduction to physics. I was hoping to see more of his time at Los Alamos in the Oppenheimer biopic, but he doesn't even seem to be in it. There's supposedly someone playing him, but I don't see it; I assume the two-second silent shot of someone from behind playing the bongos was meant to be him.

isoprophlex 3y ago
Yeah uh I was forever hoping for Feynmann to appear. Suddenly, a man playing bongos! Finally, here he comes, I thought... but no. No Feynmann. What a disappointment.
kitchi 3y ago
There was the person who viewed the blast from behind glass with no protection, which I'm pretty sure is a reference to his story about the exact same thing.
privacyisntdead 3y ago
A favorite of mine as well. I too was hoping for more of an appearance. I wondered if Feynman’s moment was during the first test scene where there is a spectator/scientist sitting in a car with Teller sitting in a lawn chair in the foreground. Feynman says in one of his books he noticed the car windows should block the UV radiation.
- amiga386 3y ago
  Ah, yes, that is it. So he gets a few more seconds in the movie than I thought :) [An army man is handing out welders glass to the observers. Feynman is in a car, Teller is next to him in a deckchair rubbing sun cream into his skin] TELLER [to the army man while rubbing his hands]: On the leg, please ARMY MAN: Feynman FEYNMAN: No. The glass [knocks on car windshield] stops the UV TELLER: And what stops the glass?

vasco 3y ago

I'm not a mental health connoisseur or anything, but removing your own pressure to perform seems like good advice regardless of your circumstances. If you're tired or stressed or whatever, labeling yourself as "a burned out person" seems to me like the only good thing it does is add more pressure. Because how can you do well if you're "damaged" in some way? It's important to not just do old style sweep it under the rug when it's serious, but I do think the current zeitgeist over indexes on being a good person equating to being hyper aware of all your struggles and anxieties and so on, and I don't see how all that extra pressure will help, specially for young people. Most times "it's not that big of a deal" is really the best thing I can tell myself. That being said, asking for help from someone that knows what they are talking about also seems like a good idea, if you can't overcome it on your own. The universe doesn't give you any extra points for doing it alone.

dexwiz 3y ago
I view burnout as a psychic wound. You should be aware of it to treat and not let it fester. At the same time, if you are always messing with it then it won’t heal. I agree there is probably a balance, and we are currently focusing too hard on it. I’ve had the same thought about the obsession about childhood trauma from people with average upbringings. But both parents and work have heavy influences on how we live our lives, so who else are you going to blame? Yourself? Don’t be silly.
ericmcer 3y ago
Makes sense, we are taught that being “mindful” of our mental state is key to mental health, but it also means everyone walks around with a handful of self diagnosed mental deficits.
- olyjohn 3y ago
  Being mindful of what you are doing, what you are thinking, how you are feeling, and how you are reacting to things is not diagnosing. You should probably leave the diagnosing part to a professional if you feel that you really need help with your mental health.

tnecniv 3y ago

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue. Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.

fnord77 3y ago
burnout = depression
- tnecniv 3y ago
  You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?
  - chrisweekly 3y ago
    I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
  - bhaney 3y ago
    I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
- kbf 3y ago
  I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…
3y ago

skadamat 3y ago

Jonathan Blow has a great talk on long projects (The Witness was like 8 years in development?) here which I watch once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ Some highlights: - He takes a week long vacation every now and then to hack on a completely different game idea for fun, with the focus on it being short and fun - Time for relaxation and unstructured thinking - Walks / showers can produce amazing ideas

hathawsh 3y ago

While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to: 1. Get good at something 2. Get paid for doing it 3. Get burned out by doing it 4. Return to the fun way of doing it 5. ??? 6. Win a Nobel prize or similar How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we encourage people to follow a path like his?

metalrain 3y ago
Pattern like that isn't repeatable, but idea of letting go of expectations to recover the joy of doing whatever you are doing is.
- b8 3y ago
  I heavily agree. I got in to security and programming by doing fund video game hacking stuff. Then I got paid to do it, lost the joy and got fired, then started to do it recreationally again and the dopamine rush/addiction is back.
MissingAFew 3y ago
I think the takeaway from the anecdote is that you should have fun with the simple things if you have "writers block" or are tired. Try to get a new perspective on something.
smugglerFlynn 3y ago
Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list. I read it that way: - Things become taxing when they stop being fun - Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing - Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this.
- hathawsh 3y ago
  To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

BubbleRings 3y ago

For a really cool video from the International Space Station about a phenomenon related to the spinning plate stuff, see here: Dancing T-handle in zero-g, HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-HMSCDYtM

phkahler 3y ago
That is really interesting. I know it's not correct to simulate rigid body dynamics as constant unless an outside force is applied, but what to do differently is not obvious to me. That looks like the object changes orientation while it's world-coordinates momentum vector remains unchanged. Got any references for why that happens? I mean orientation changes regarding the flip, not the obvious spinning motion.
- BubbleRings 3y ago
  Not me. I only understand half your post, to tell you the truth. But Derek Muller on the youtube channel Veritasium has a good video on this, where he mentions how, when asked one time, Feynman couldn't think of a simple way to describe how it works, and then Muller goes on to explain it in a way that I could see. Great stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU

primitivesuave 3y ago

I was severely burned out two years ago after I left the last startup I cofounded. I had a good bit of cash saved up, so I traveled around the world to get better at rock climbing. I could barely write more than a few lines of code before closing my laptop. I would rather sit on the beach and stare at the waves than do anything productive back then. When I got home from my trip around the world, I struggled to build anything meaningful - I'd get intensely bored after starting a new project, and move on to something else. The first project that I took to completion was reprogramming my Lifx smart bulbs. There was a noticeable delay between turning a light on/off in the iOS app, and the light actually changing its state. Sometimes the app and lightbulb would get their states out of sync, and I didn't like the idea of some light bulb company knowing my schedule. Even for first-world problems though, it was hardly worth solving. I discovered there is a binary protocol to control the lights directly over the local network, so I developed an extensive TypeScript library to control the lights and build custom web interfaces to serve as light switches. I found a guy on the Lifx forums who built his own crude solution with Python scripts, and he became my first consulting client. That client's referral led me to a variety of interesting work opportunities over the past year. Noticing similarities across a variety of these projects led me to start a new company a few months ago to build a product to address them. My point being, sometimes you just have to sit down and play.

edu_do_cerrado 3y ago

Very inspiring passage. I had this feeling of playing around with stuff (Programming in my case) in the beginning of my studies, but it faded away over time because of work. Even though I work in a wonderful project, I feel burned out a lot nowadays. Might lookout for that initial feeling again now, I probably won't achieve as much as Feynman, but I hope that removing the pressure and enjoying what I'm doing might be good for mental health

smugglerFlynn 3y ago

There is a highly relevant and resent research on the state of play, nicely summarised on Huberman Lab Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyZIWeBpRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwyZIWeBpRw

cs702 3y ago

A classic. Any and all administrators tasked with evaluating research-funding proposals should be required to read this short passage before making any funding decisions, so they can be reminded that groundbreaking research is driven mainly by intellectual curiosity, not by metrics that seek to quantify "relevance" or "importance."

ryandv 3y ago

The pandemic burned me out pretty hard after a lifelong obsession with computers, tinkering around with technology back when it was more of a hobby than a commercial pursuit. It was nice to be able to parley my passion into a career, but contact with the world of business tends to corrupt what I always viewed as a form of play and artistic expression. I like simple technologies like IRC. You don't need K8s clusters or deployment pipelines. String together everything with a smattering of bash because nothing is really at stake. It's easy to get started since the tech is as simple as it gets, and there's nothing actually on the line. You can practice using obscure languages never seen in industry. Do things because they make you laugh, not to build a portfolio or a product. At the least, I can still crank out a modest amount of code and actually enjoy the process, without tearing my hair out over whatever asinine enterprise-scale clusterfuck needs to be untangled now. Still waiting for whatever is next.

oldandboring 3y ago
This is the closest comment I could find to how I experience my burnout. Nothing makes me more anxious than realizing that I fall further behind every day I'm not spending (unbillable) time becoming an expert in all the dev/ops tooling that somehow became indispensable the past 5-10 years. It's funny because I used to LOVE computers as a teenager because I loved setting up and configuring Unix systems. Now, as a developer, the idea of writing configurations instead of code just makes my hair stand on end.
- mbm 3y ago
  The complexity has increased exponentially, but the user experience has not.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    If anything, it's regressed. All of this complex tooling gives devops the ability to say "sorry, no capacity, see you in two quarters".
smugglerFlynn 3y ago

juris 3y ago

The other day I had remarked to an old gal (the proprietor) of a local strip mall toy store that I walked into on a whim that "really this is where it all started". Round hole, square block diagonally (almost anyway); oh that can's label so perfectly lines up with the tiling of this table when it's rolled across it; oh that soap dispenser pump has the -same threading- as this vodka bottle and screws on just easy...and so on. It would turn out that that old gal wrote a bunch of code for some local military contractors waaay back when and had quite the reputation for connecting the unlikeliest of systems together. The corporate types would naysay whether a thing could be done, and she'd have it back on their desk within 3 hours. And now she runs a toy store, and loves it!!! Feeling burned out myself, I took from that conversation some modicum of hope that looking at problems as //play// is what I need personally-- and prospects look better for it! Happy to hear that Feynman would agree.

arisAlexis 3y ago

Greatest book I've ever read

danjc 3y ago

I see a parallel to short vs long term thinking here that applies to R&D. When quarterly results are the priority, innovation is stifled but what's insidious is that this only becomes evident over a long time span.

dang 3y ago

Related: Feynman's Nobel Ambition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31236758 - May 2022 (1 comment) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 - April 2021 (276 comments) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments)

systems_glitch 3y ago

I feel like Bell Labs was the biggest loss of "play at it, see if something important comes out" possible. Never worked there, but a lot of friends did, from the 50s thru the Lucent transition right up to the end.

RationalDino 3y ago

Based on his biographies, I think that Feynman had ADHD. He never demonstrated an ability to do things because he thought he should do them. And, as this story shows, trying just resulted in a demotivated and unproductive Feynman. On the other hand he accomplished great results when pulled by desire. Especially in the form of play. Surely You Must Be Joking does a great job of showing how he kept coming back to play throughout his life. Everything from lock picking at Los Alamos, to playing the bongo drums. What Do You Care What Other People Think has an extended description of the creation of Appendix F about the shuttle disaster. See https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm for that. As someone who has been in the state, it is clear that he was in a state of hyperfocus. I've never matched what Feynman could do, but it comes as no surprise to me that he'd realize that he could get away with learning about a topic others didn't want him to learn, because he could do so quickly enough that they wouldn't believe that he'd possibly have learned it. I highly recommend both books, Appendix F, and of course, https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. (If psychologists had followed up what he said 50 years ago, the Replication Crisis would have been discovered 40 years earlier than it was. Oh well, missed opportunities.)

deleted 3y ago
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asadalt 3y ago

I have a similar approach to side projects. I have a day job (that is fun btw) and then I spend nights and weekends "playing" with code with no expectations. This has worked well for me and I LOVE this setup! The alternative would be to raise VC and work full-time on a half-baked idea. :cringe:

buescher 3y ago

Incidentally, the faucet problem is neat! You can solve it with high-school level physics and analytical geometry ("pre-calculus").

goethes_kind 3y ago

Interesting anecdote. But I don't envy Fenyman. I would rather be like the guys I know you can just sit down and get to work conscientiously without any such intrusive thoughts whatsoever. Those guys have a superpower they don't appreciate.

zackmorris 3y ago

Macro-scale example of magnetic locking by a spinning magnet analogous to bound states in subatomic particles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5FyFvgxUhE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_state It reminds me of Feynman's wobble in the article. Which may relate to spin 1/2 particles and/or radioactive decay. The strong force is empirically measured and I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation of its fundamental mechanism. But nucleons moving near the speed of light are held inside the nucleus by a force of several pounds! So the nuclear force acts like a gravity well but comes from electroweak effects somehow. Loosely that means that there's a centripetal force so strong that if we measure it over years, the odds of seeing a stable nucleus often approach or meet 100%. I only bring this up because currently there's no way to modulate decay, electron capture, fission or fusion via simple means like temperature or charge. Ideally we should be able to add/remove electromagnetic energy and transmute elements by generating electron/positron pairs from photons (for example). Until we really understand how the strong force works, all the cool sci fi and Iron Man stuff will be confined to research labs. I've spent my whole life working to make rent instead of working on important problems. What a waste for society to invest education dollars in me so I could subsist on what is largely custodial work. So I think the most important thing we can manifest is getting more leisure time, money and resources into the hands of dreamers. The second most important thing we can do is pay our success forward. So I don't want to hear about any more billionaires and their pet projects. I want to see visionary goals, labor-saving devices to reduce suffering, automation, UBI, and most importantly people paying it forward by paying their fair share of taxes into democratic societies and having enough faith in the higher power of love to give the people the dignity and means to solve their problems and self-actualize. I mean, that's what the USA used to be until I watched it all fall apart after 9/11 to leave us with whatever all this is.

max_ 3y ago

There is a Richard Feynman documentary I saw where he talked about his darkest episode of depression (another depression episode). It was after them testing one of the Atomic bombs when it had been developed. He described it as follows, he would for example watch see someone building a bridge or doing maintainance, and he would think to himself, "Why is he doing this? Doesn't he know that he is wasting his time, that all this work he is doing is useless?"

Vicinity9635 3y ago

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xdavidliu 3y ago

"1985" in the title is misleading. The sentence is an excerpt from a biography published in 1985, describing Feynman's experience as a young Assistant Prof at Cornell shortly after WWII.

giantg2 3y ago

I'd probably get fired for playing around at work. Burnout is just the standard state for most workers in today's world. We just have to live with it.

juancn 3y ago

It's the quintessential hard problem solving strategy. It works on many hard disciplines, and it boils down to two steps: 1- Obsess 2- Let Go Step two is the hardest one, but it's the most fruitful one and you really have to let go, no cheating. Once you do, for some reason your mind will use everything from step one in the background to find the solution, in a weird moment, in an effortless manner. But if you don't let go, it will never happen.

rochak 3y ago
Happened to me today. Always works but can never be controlled :)

7thaccount 3y ago

It's aggravating as there is a lot of value I could provide to my organization if they set me loose and gave me full autonomy. I'd also be a lot happier. But that is pretty hard to come by.

vehementi 3y ago

Kind of a miss on the title. The quote is: "Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position...". The title is slightly taking the quote out of context and isn't the title of the article

danielvaughn 3y ago

Much of the work I'm truly proud of, I did when I was playing. It's an absolute mystery why I can't intentionally put myself into that mindset no matter how hard I try.

chankstein38 3y ago

This is me with writing code. I do it professionally and have for almost 15 years. I'm so burnt out on the day to day, forced work. But show me something interesting or hackable, a game I like that I can mod, a cool script, a cool concept that might make a neat image or sound. Whatever it might be, suddenly I'm playing again and having fun, burnout or not. Just wish I could find a way to make that my paycheck...

sirsinsalot 3y ago

I'm so burned out that the idea of even sitting at a desk with a screen in front of it, never mind coding or thinking or doing anything worthwhile, makes me feel sick to the stomach. I'll always love coding. Stress can kill anything.

dshpala 3y ago

I remember I used to kick-start myself into flow by doing "useless" things like rearranging code around, doing small renames for consistency, etc. I need to return that that practice, as I find it harder and harder to interest myself in what I'm doing...

kromem 3y ago

I used to include a bit about it into most of my presentations, and I recommend everyone read up on the over-justification effect. One of the least widely known psychological effects relative to its impact on people's lives. A nefarious little bugger that's hard to evade too.

zubairq 3y ago

Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman was such an influential book for me! It was so readable and I believe it helped alot of people become interested in science, which was usually portrayed as a very boring topic