I didn’t leave, I’m still in it. But I dropped a day of work and took a salary sacrifice. Really bad burnout made me hate work, stopped me from enjoying codin

I didn’t leave, I’m still in it. But I dropped a day of work and took a salary sacrifice. Really bad burnout made me hate work, stopped me from enjoying coding, made me lose my confidence in tech, and made me feel like a slave to working without an external life. Dropping just 1 day has been the largest mental health benefit I have ever had, and I don’t think I will ever work a second over 32 hours a week. Nor will I ever work 5 days a week. But I made major life changes at the same time. I deleted my last remaining bastion of social media - Reddit, due to extreme political new, and toxicity. I switched to hackernews as my only form on “social” media. I also blocked global and local news sites on all my devices. That has been incredibly relieving. I moved out of my expensive house. I got back into gaming, realising that giving it up removed a powerful way for me to relieve stress. Now I’m passionately working on side projects again on weekends, and the extra day is awesome. And I’m generally happy. My phone screen time has dropped from an average 5-6hours on average over the last year, to under 2 hours a day average the past month. Also one other thing about the elephant in the room - “AI”, I’ve changed my views on it quite some. It truly is overhyped, I’ve stopped using GitHub CoPilot completely, and mostly just use LLMs as a shallow surface search engine. Try not to worry about your job, I don’t think it’s going to take it anytime soon, and it’s also not going to make anyone a 10X Engineer. Maybe clever people will become 1.5X developers, and people the rely on LLMs too much will become 0.5X developers, so it balances out