20 ms·

The Tsunami of Burnout Few See

577 points by dxs 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tayo42 2y ago
Skimmed it. The constant switching from bold to not bold for some reason makes the article not feel genuine or some thing like that. Like an ad, my attention is constantly being redirected.
- ldmosquera 2y ago
  I hate this contant emphasizing with a burning passion; even some newspapers do it. It's like trying to hold a conversation with someone that shouts the important bits to your face. https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ has --ignore-emphasis which drops bold and italics and cleanses this pest.
justonceokay 2y ago
Formatting aside, I enjoyed the article and the description of the “village of happy people”. As someone who has burned out twice myself and left tech (with great personal sacrifice), it really can feel like those who are not burning out are living in a bubble. I’ve mostly let go of those feelings though. My conclusion after working outside of tech and rebuilding my life is that I just didn’t have the constitution to play the corporate game. More power to those who can though.
- Loughla 2y ago
  My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life. I do similar work in my day job and consulting. I'm very fresh and optimistic during consulting hours, but dread going into the office. I'm genuinely burnt out and just don't give a flying fuck anymore, I don't sleep, and I've been more sick in the last month than ever in my life. The only difference is that one comes with politics and one doesn't.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    > My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life Totally agree. It’s not the stress of doing something new and just trying to figure it all out that’s stressful. That’s actually fun. It’s the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed and assigns blame to the dev rather than piss poor management. No. I’m not bitter
    - sateesh 2y ago
      Isn't politics any part of human activity where number of people involved is greater than a critical mass (of say 5) ? I think even the best run, successful orgs have their share of politics. I used to think politics as a bad thing, but now I have accepted that it is an inevitable part of work life and one needs to also learn how to navigate it atleast to the extent that doesn't affect one's well-being or doesn't make one feel that they are being shortchanged, not that I am always successful with it.
      - timr 2y ago
        "Politics" are inevitable, but the stuff that the parent is describing is a particular type of politics that comes with hierarchical power (and possibly bad/immature leadership?) General pattern is that certain people in the level(s) above you are fighting for influence to impress the levels above, and critically, are willing to use the levels below in order to achieve their personal goals (organizational goals are secondary, at best). Unless leadership is unusually adept at punishing the first signs of this behavior, it quickly becomes pathological. Every level gets infected, and before long your org has all of the backstabbing drama one might associate with an imperial court. In times of growth it's painful enough, but in times of limited resources, it's pure bloodsport. There are people who can effectively detect and push back on the behavior, but they seem to be rare, and even more rarely make it into positions of influence. My theory is that it's so exhausting to be sensitive to the drama that you can only make it to the top if you combine it with a big dose of sociopathy. You also see it a lot at startups, because the founders are typically young, arrogant and have no experience managing anyone. By the time they realize they've hired a toxic exec layer, it's too late.
- ketamine 2y ago
  What are you doing now? I am considering becoming a machinist.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Please reconsider. My son just completed training and he is now working full time on getting disability instead of getting a job. I can't really blame him. You will get hurt and you will be tossed aside with great prejudice.
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      To be clear, this was a personal choice of your son and not because of an injury?
      - datavirtue 2y ago
        Personal choice but he was injured by chemical exposure that burned both of his hands and subsequently avoided other serious accidents involving high voltage in addition to witnessing 20yr employees getting booted (demoted) after injuries. Real industrial revolution, pre-workers rights shit. He was thrown out for asking for chemical labels to be reapplied to barrels and requesting PPE. Most people can't afford the luxury of making such a stink.
    - ketamine 2y ago
      Sorry to hear that. I feel tossed aside due to my burnout and depression so I can relate on that front.
- nox101 2y ago
  What's giving me burnout is work from home. I got much of my social needs met by working at work with people I liked. We'd talk. We'd go to lunch. We'd meet up after work and on weekends. We also collaborated at work. Designed things together. Now, 40% of my time is alone in isolation, working at home. Collaboration and design work happen in documents at best and not in social conversation like it used it. All of this is making work a chore, "for me". Instead of work being an opportunity to hang out with people I like it's just a list of things to do alone.
  - ta_1138 2y ago
    What gives people burnout changes per person. For me, Covid was the best thing that ever happened. My stress levels dropped like a rock. My self control went way up, and with it my ability to improve my life. I was doing the same work, but remote, and a whole lot of the things that made my life worse just instantly disappeared. If you know you were getting all your social needs met at work, and now you don't, the companies that have moved back to the office should be a godsend for you. So why don't you just change jobs?
- timewizard 2y ago
  I feel like he's just describing the natural consequences of an over monopolized technology sector. None of these things are natural and instead of facing the problem directly, ironically, this author play acts his way through the solution. I found it uncomfortable.
  - shusson 2y ago
    > this author play acts his way through the solution. I thought it was a nice bit of irony. At work there's so much play-acting but all in a serious tone.
squidproquo 2y ago
Thank you for this. It’s nice to feel not alone.
sc68cal 2y ago
This resonated with me since his description of the situation exactly matches what I have been experiencing the past few months
riffraff 2y ago
this post seems to mix some valid points and some completely bonkers unrelated things, like the assumption that somehow the US is in stagflation using a graph truncated at data from 2023. Not really explaining why stagflation would cause burnout anyway. And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know quit suddenly" (sic). The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.
- jsdwarf 2y ago
  One big trigger for burnout is if you cannot answer the question "why do I work?" any more. One of the big whys was that working hard allows you to buy a house/appartment which allows you to maintain your standard of living in retirement. But this isn't true any more due to the declining purchasing power of salaries. Why should I be stressed out in my job if this only allows me to rent an apartment that i have to give up as soon as I stop working?
  - chasd00 2y ago
    I got two kids that will be going to college in about 5 years. My wife and I haves saved as best we could all their lives but it’s still a bill ranging from 250k to maybe a half million dollars coming due on top of all the other bills and retirement savings. For many, “burnout” is just not an option.
    - xigency 2y ago
      Not to be rude, but one divorce could wipe out all that you had saved. Then burnout might be a better option for your kids when it comes time to filling out FAFSA. I'm knocking on wood. I don't want what happened to me to happen to you.
    - nickd2001 2y ago
      As another parent, that sounds like a frightening financial burden :( So, $125k-$250k for each child? Is that the going rate in USA now? for comparison , here in UK its gone up lots but 3 years at university would cost approx £30k in tuition, plus maybe £40k in living costs that could be largely avoided by staying at home and going to college locally. Which can be mostly borrowed, and paid back as an extra 9% in tax on earning above a certain amount after graduation. Even with these figures, my wife and I will still encourage our kids to look hard for decent apprenticeships, consider Open University, possibly work part-time and study part-time, to avoid having such a big debt, especially given cost of housing etc. Kinda wonder whether your figures make it worth going to college at all? 20 years ago I met an American who had 6 figure debt from law school and was doing a job at a law firm that she disliked in order to pay off the huge loan so that after that she could then do what she wanted which would pay much less....
inSenCite 2y ago
Very familiar story. I'm 9months into quitting my consulting career after 10 years. Relatively long hours, weekend work, and lots of travel. The first few years were great, lots of learning, lots of smart people to work with, smart leadership, interesting and even innovative work. But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more projects/focused more on sales. I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where I started). I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't free.
- jfil 2y ago
  Good luck. I hope whatever you do now is different enough that it won't burn you out in the same way.
methuselah_in 2y ago
I have been through the same process recently on my job.I was so much frustrated that I just wanted to quit. I didn't even knew what will happen afterwards, you keep on trying your level best and yet seems nothing is going to work out for you. By luck my health went down because of fever. I had got a week break. Then I got fine. But these words the author mentioned are right in each sense.
ncpop 2y ago
Thank you for posting this. It manages to capture how I’m feeling quite well. It has made me realize I need to make some adjustments to my work and life.
- mordae 2y ago
  Dream on. If you feel like making "same adjustments", save up for about 1 year vacation ASAP. You won't be able to do anything once it hits you.
  - sc68cal 2y ago
    The problem is, what do you do once you spend up all your savings on a 1 year vacation? You have to go back, eventually, and it will happen again. Plus, the job market is really tough (isn't it always?) and there are a lot of people out of work and looking for jobs, it doesn't always make sense to voluntarily join that cohort once all your money has been spent.
ketamine 2y ago
> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. It's an amorphous topic because it covers such a wide range of human conditions and experiences. I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in those times.
nostradumbasp 2y ago
I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now! The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt. In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings. In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc. Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.
- fullshark 2y ago
  > The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt. I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
  - nostradumbasp 2y ago
    I don't have all the answers. I don't even know your situation. For me, I am still in tech. Like everyone else, my family needs the money. Once in a while I do something that satisfies me personally as well as the company I work for. rt Alternatives? Well, I think anything you can start up on your own where you have the autonomy and can dictate your hours/balance would be your medium term goal. I'm working towards mine, but I think its different for everyone. Contract working, consultant working, small personal business with a reduced hours main stream 9-5. My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.
dzink 2y ago
It’s a feature. Less white collar workers are needed because of AI. Instead of trying to fit in where culture is designed for attrition, find out what humans need and build something you own, using AI if you have to.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  AI is the same as any other hype cycle, and creating ML algorithms is boring monotonous work. Neuromorphic computing on the other hand is very interesting, as it gets into ambiguous state resolution rather than layered weighting. The idea AI could even replace a chickens cognitive performance in laughable. =3
  - intalentive 2y ago
    >it gets into ambiguous state resolution I didn’t know that about neuromorphic computing. Do you have a link that says more?
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      It is a class of engineering that often focuses on biomimicry, neurology, and evolutionary biology in some projects. I would recommend looking around at the various approaches. Some are less ridiculous than others, and don't need a power generation plant to run the devices. Best of luck, =3
GoToRO 2y ago
And in my country you can't even take medical leave for burnout.
- lugu 2y ago
  Which country is that? Is that common among countries?
  - GoToRO 2y ago
    .ro
    - JPLeRouzic 2y ago
      In France expect at least one year before getting adult disabilities (AAH), and you can only ask after getting a medical diagnostic which can take as long. But if you get AAH, you are reimbursed for the time between when you asked for it and the first payment. Yet that means probably living without any resources for one year or so.
knallfrosch 2y ago
First, I think mental problems discussed more than ever: Anxiety, autism, inability to focus and yes, burnout. The "only few see" simply isn't true. Second, the article mixes in some adjacent topics, such as purchasing power. Why? I don't know, but it blows the amount of stuff the article would have to supplement way out of proportion, before even the core message (burnout) was discussed. Third, I'm always amazed how many people think they are different. You're not. If you care for a family member (children, elderly, disabled..), commute 2400 miles and work 7 days a week, you will burn out. But it won't be a surprise to anyone but you. What you need is sleep, friends and sports, same as any social animal inhabiting a very real, very physical body. Fourth, I'm not sure what you want others to do. Instead of complaining about the suggestions, write down what you would have wanted.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Yeah, if this guy was working in the 1970s I'm not sure why he thinks he is supposed to miss the falling side of the wage parabola.
- noirbot 2y ago
  As other people have posted elsewhere in this, purchasing power and the economy is linked to the incentives that cause people to burn out. You keep pushing against the tide because you want that promotion or raise because costs go up over time. Or because you want to do something costly that you think will improve your life, such as having a child or moving somewhere or fixing an annoyance in your life. Some people surely burn out because they're just obsessive, but many people, myself included, slide into it because "just 4 more months of this and I can afford X".
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    The opposite can also be true, you know it is a bad work situation and you are going to burn out but you can't afford to leave. Not that you want to stay, you don't even want that promotion anymore but that you can't go elsewhere. Besides, if alternative employers are equally bad anyway, you may as well burn out in a familiar place and not take on the extra stress of onboarding in a new role. I burn out at a 6 figures flexible job, while my friends burn out at minimum wage jobs where they have to report bathroom breaks by the minute. How can I complain about my burnout-inducing work conditions?
steve_adams_86 2y ago
A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I loved a lot, called The Burnout Society. > The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great. > We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly. He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in. There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final destination. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society
- dfee 2y ago
  Better link https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-soci...
  - patcon 2y ago
    Best link? Maybe :) https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-society-9780804795098 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-...
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    Thank you. I was short on time and didn’t see a good result quickly enough
- bbor 2y ago
  A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han. B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"
CaptainFever 2y ago
I am hesitant to believe anything I see from this website. The author shows no related qualifications (e.g. economics), and the economics here are heterodox. This post feels like mostly conspiracy theories ("the system is against us, the system is broken, they are controlling the narratives!"), which is all well and fine if it makes you feel better, but should not be taken as factual nor credible information.
- altairprime 2y ago
  By definition, they’re right, Madroeconomics and Unemployment calculations in particular specifically exclude quality of life concerns, centering around mathematical equations that are defined to promote cancerous growth (“in a rational economy, everyone tries to maximize their earnings”) while excluding concerns such as burnout. The author’s point is that it is forbidden to discuss these two concepts in the same breath, macroeconomics and burnout, even though they are intrinsically linked. The author’s point is well-demonstrated by various comments in our discussion: rather than considering the author’s lens and reinterpreting one’s worldview through it experimentally, I see several comments saying ‘don’t listen to anything they say’, ‘how can they make such an incomplete argument without a masters thesis of proof backing it’, and so on. Point to the author for that; “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.” is mysteriously and glaringly absent here, and they rather called it.
  - EtCepeyd 2y ago
    Thank you.
  - palmfacehn 2y ago
    In fairness, economics is often ideological. Some of the most mainstream economists are controversial political figures. Krugman famously wrote opinion pieces for the NYT.
bkazez 2y ago
> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. Check Wikipedia: “Staff Burnout: Job Stress in the Human Services” was published in 1980, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory was published in 1982. > We don't bother collecting data on why people quit, or why people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them. A quick search of academic literature shows this is not true.
- scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
  And yet, the stakes feel so much higher and the problem more immediate
- vrosas 2y ago
  Maybe in academia, but I've never seen any kind of reflection or study in the workplace. Twice in my career I've witnessed an entire team rage quit on a manager at once. Twice! And I did not see management bother to investigate or reflect on what the problem was. In both cases the manager continued to not only be employed but rebuild their team as they saw fit.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Academia is where research happens. Employers have no incentive to do research that would force them to spend more on employee wellness. I worked on enough team health surveys to know leadership has no interest in collecting feedback about the big known complaints that they aren't interested in addressing. They only want to hear about the small unimportant things that could help morale to cope with the big issues (unless they are forced to investigate serious workplace injuries, unsustainable churn/absenteeism or productivity issues) That said employers/HR publish a lot of blog spam about how burnout is really due to employe's lack of self care.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
The concept of Ikigai is not well known in North America: https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c70f58f https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c... Where idealism and economics often change the balance of priorities over time for individuals. The fungible nature of the modern workforce has lead to a churn and burn culture for skilled labor at the board level. People may land a position they worked for years structuring the opportunity, and only discover they fooled themselves into a career that makes them miserable. People need to accept they will change careers around 5 times in the modern workforce. Also, the age of the middle class union factory worker having a 30 year career became a rarity in the 1980s. My advice is to ensure one balances their own needs with the company needs, and abandon the illusion there is a perfect version of oneself in the future. The "not caring" part is easy, as most projects get annoying after awhile. =3
steve_adams_86 2y ago
> Those who haven't burned out / been broken have no way to understand the experience. They want to help, and suggest listening to soothing music, or taking a vacation to "recharge." They can't understand that to the person in the final stages of burnout, music is a distraction, and they have no more energy for a vacation than they have for work. Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating." This is one of the most salient points to me. When I was burnt out, I was a husk of a human being. I appeared to be a high-functioning, successful, positive-trajectory sort of guy. Inside I was quite literally dying. Things that used to be fun, and I knew I liked, were almost painful. The energy it took to play with my kids and be happy with them was mentally and physically painful to spend. Activities like free diving which used to fill me with passion, wonder, energy, and joy became chores I actively avoided. I had endless excuses to do nothing but the absolute essentials. Keep the job, pay the bills, try to sleep, try to wake up, keep going. I'm quite a bit better now. I opted for work which pays a lot less, but allows me to feel much more aligned with what I do, why I'm doing, who I do it with, etc. Had I not found that I think I'd still be better, but getting out of the work I was doing was a good way to expedite recovery. Good luck to all of you experiencing this. You might have normalized it and begun to feel trapped, but I promise there's a real life you can enjoy on the other side of it.
ocimbote 2y ago
> The Tsunami of Burnout Few See Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic. I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.
- altairprime 2y ago
  Employers generally refuse to openly discuss it with anyone who isn’t a retention risk, which made interviews unattended very weird when I would give perfectly honest answers to the candidate about “why is this position open?” (a question that most candidates don’t ask because they’re desperate for employment).
peterldowns 2y ago
This reminds me of the immense NPR story "Unfit for Work", from back in 2013ish, about the increasing number of Americans opting out of the workforce and instead relying on disability: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ Has there ever been a followup to this reporting? I'd be really interested to understand if this trend is still happening, and if so, why.
sssilver 2y ago
Vulgarly unrelated to the subject — is anyone able to get a scrollbar to appear on this page on mobile? I kept reading and was completely unable to tell how long of a time commitment this read will be and whether I should continue or read it later. How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race for colonization of mars and AI singularity?
matt3210 2y ago
This seems like the inevitable result of optimizing for GDP instead of happiness index.
- franktankbank 2y ago
  GDP is mega gamed anyway.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Both those indexes are complete frauds. Believe your eyes and your soul instead of some fake numbers from the rulers. Or at least believe your wallet, if you are more cynical than emotional.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  Happiness is also problematic as it tends toward the shallow and unsatisfying.
ok_dad 2y ago
I got burnt out at my last job working hard for them and my reward was being laid off and the whole team replaced. Fuck the rat race, we’re all killings ourselves and giving our lives so the rich can get richer.
tuyguntn 2y ago
This is what I learned in my career with couple of burnouts: Look at the leadership - do they brag about everything? Be a story teller, hard work and caring about product doesn't matter in such company. Try to get promoted faster by boasting your work publicly. Remember, in such companies people usually don't care about "fake" metrics you have created. - do they try to dig deeper into problems and solve them? Enjoy working there, because if you can show them problems and offer your solutions, they will do their best to figure out which problem is most urgent to solve and help you. middle managers will inherit this behavior from upper management
weitendorf 2y ago
> We're experiencing stagflation, and it may well just be getting started. If history is any guide, costs can continue to rise for quite some time as the purchasing power of wages erodes and asset bubbles deflate. As noted in a previous post, depending on financial fentanyl to keep everything glued together is risky, because we can't tell if the dose is fatal until it's too late. This is giving me permabear vibes. The US is not experiencing stagflation. Real (inflation adjusted) gdp per capita is growing at 2%. Inflation over the last year was 2.7% and gdp growth and the economy grew substantially faster than that. > That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells. There it is. For what it's worth this probably is true to an extent (eg for certain kinds of goods and services), just like the growth of economy, but that's because relative incomes and relative costs have changed substantially since then. Some jobs' wages (software engineer) grew faster than inflation, others (a lot of entry level blue collar ones) didn't. Some costs (rent, healthcare) rose faster than average inflation, others (eg televisions) didn't. FWIW the nominal topic of burnout is intriguing to me but I think this kind of perma-recession/perma-bear pop-econ, "what happened in 1971" stuff is really overplayed and crackpotty. There is no "narrative control machinery". I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole, and you see it all the time on the Internet, but most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does.
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  > This is giving me permabear vibes. I’ve been reading Charles High Smith for at least 15 years. He’s definitely a permabear. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
  - weitendorf 2y ago
    Permabears do sometimes make good points but being permanent bears they're almost always wrong in aggregate, because they only ever have the same economic perspective, which happens to be the opposite of how things have played out (at least in the US) for almost one hundred years now. To square that circle usually they have to turn to conspiracy theories, or dabble in economics just deep enough to skew it as unsustainable but not so deep that they understand how it actually works (see quantitative easing, FRB, "petrodollar", etc.). Maybe (definitely) I've just spent too much time on the Internet because to me the whole "secret recession" stuff is just tired and wrong at this point. It's been over 15 years since the GFC. This kind of perspective feels stuck in the 2012 "ugh I got a college degree and now I work in a restaurant" Internet, when there have actually been several employment/growth booms since then.
dbcurtis 2y ago
My own conclusion about burnout is that it fundamentally comes down to who controls the agenda, and how much you invest in that agenda. I've been burned out. Many years ago, early in my career. My cure: I was in the lucky position that it was a good time to spend a year and half going back to school to knock off a graduate degree that simultaneously moved my career forward, gave me a total change of scenery, and gave me some break time between leaving the job and starting classes, time that I devoted 100% to hobbies and home improvement projects. And of course, an easy-to-tell story when reentering the job market. So on the topic of agenda... if what you are working on is your own agenda, you don't burn out. You might change the agenda by redefining goals, but in the end, you are sailing your own ship. Not only do you not burn out, it is curative. It is when you absorb someone else's agenda and make it your own to an unhealthy extent that you burn out. Always be computing that dot product between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector. Don't over-invest beyond that dot-product.
- EtCepeyd 2y ago
  > Always be computing that dot product between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector. haha, great metaphor! I'll steal it! :)
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  This aligns with my experience. There's this GDC talk that really resinated with me about how side projects can help avoid burnout in the games industry: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfJ9LLZQ9jo https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfJ9LLZQ9jo It is counter intuitive that doing more unpaid work helps cope with doing paid work, but the whole premise iirc is that it is work you are in control of and that helps battle the lack of meaning and agency at work. Of course this assumes you're not already too burnt out to even think about a side project.
404mm 2y ago
The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really matter to those creating it? We’re actively moving towards cheaper labor markets and replacing jobs with automation. It seems that the only way to get your piece of the pie in this market is if you find something that you can solve or do cheaper. Cheaper often means replacing and displacing current workers. Great benefit to the company and stockholders, not so much to society. Everything is driven by profit for those who already have more than they need.
- t3chm4nager 2y ago
  >> The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really matter to those creating it? Companies used to be at the mercy of workers, we no longer are. The moment employees get out of line, work starts to shift to H1B workers who are too afraid to complain. If they start complaining, work then shifts to offshore resources. You can pay 1/3 of the wage and have 2 offshore workers and have contingencies. The onshore workers see this and fall into line, especially H1Bs. Work is sufficiently granular and microservice-ififed that you can swap people in and out. The vice keeps tightening.
  - 404mm 2y ago
    You speak the truth. I work for a 100k employee multinational company and “we” just started entered the third phase- replacing US based employees with offshore alternatives. India and Brazil. I’m still waiting what’s coming next.
  - yarg 2y ago
    That only works in scenarios where competency is superfluous.
akomtu 2y ago
> quitting is a last-ditch effort at self-preservation. Can you imagine a red cross nurse suffering from burn out? She may work for food and her life may be hard by most standards, but what she does is in harmony with her true self, and this gives her energy and inner peace. A highly paid corporate worker, on the other hand, may do something that's against his principles, something that doesn't harmonize with his true self, and he has to forcefully take bits of energy from his soul and sell it. This is what drains him and leads to burnout.
- sseagull 2y ago
  While not usually applied to everyday white collar workers, you seem to be hinting at what is called "moral injury" Typically associated with the military and with healthcare professionals who go into their fields with good intentions, but then have to sacrifice on those for various (typically capitalistic or even arbitrary) reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
  - akomtu 2y ago
    My view on this is more metaphysical. We have that inner self in us, that is the source of all life, meaning and happiness, and there's our persona in which our inner self is only dimly manifested. The right cause makes our inner self manifest a bit more fully and that feels like an uplifting influx of energy in our persona. On the other hand, when our persona does something wrong or meaningless, it stops receiving that energy as our inner self withdraws attention awaiting better opportunities to invest itself.
cess11 2y ago
It's terribly sad to see people in the thread rationalising 'giving work all' and so on. My advice is to start meeting other people and take up some activity that is more fun than work. If your local jurisdiction allows exploitation that makes this hard or impossible then you ought to flee this tyranny.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Could you link 3 the comments of people in this thread who are rationalizing “giving work all”?
  - cess11 2y ago
    Here's a few. "What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of." "I tottaly agree with this sentiment. Still looking for the right balance, but half assing things for me doesn't result in feeling better. "Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them." "My takeaway from your comment is that you should not be an employee; you should be a business owner. That way you can give your all and feel great about it because it will also (hopefully) lead to better and directly measurable outcomes." "But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself."
MPSimmons 2y ago
I've personally burned out a couple of times. First was a Fintech startup back in 2011 or so. Second was at an aerospace startup that you've heard of. In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of work that the business relied upon for day to day operations, which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived constantly on call and in the critical path. I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been performing.
- Panoramix 2y ago
  I've burned out once, but that was enough. I am working again but it's been more than 7 years and I'm not fully recovered. I'm very careful now not to paint myself into a corner (or let some manager do it for me) as I know I wouldn't survive the next time it happens. Also my ability to put crazy hours or handle stress has been permanently impaired. While I function normally, if stress is a glass that can take water until it starts to spill, my glass has permanently shrunk in size. I keep less vital, less exciting positions and compliment the missing excitement or fulfillment with things from my personal life. I do miss those times when I had the complete overview and agency but it wasn't worth this.
  - onemoresoop 2y ago
    Im just like that more than 10 years after my last burnout and I think I found a ballance to not let it ever wreck my life again. But it’s a very fragile ballance and there’s this everpresent subtext that it could happen again at any time. Im lucky that im paid hourly and overtime requires approval and is rareley approved.
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      Avoiding overtime helps but if the work conditions are conducive to burnout it can happen even to part time workers. How much work it takes to protect the balance to avoid burnout can itself also contribute to burnout, say if you constantly have to fight getting overstaffed or repeatedly having to push back on being on call...
kayo_20211030 2y ago
I believe that burnout exists because of the dissonance between doing-what-you-want and doing-what-you-can. If you can't do what you want, then do what you can and come to some sensible accommodation between the two. If that's not possible, perhaps you can want something else, and do whatever that is. It is a conscious decision, and it's positive, at least in the sense that it's your decision. If you can't square the circle, you must pick either a square or a circle. It's just not possible to have both when they're so out of harmony. Don't be afraid to hit the eject button and reset your want/can compass.
Temporary_31337 2y ago
Lots of comments here not even bothering to read the OP article on the true sources of burnout. Cute advice on how to cope with it but no thought on what systemic causes were. It’s like helping fellow miners cope with lung disease rather than think if there’s a better power source than hand mined coal.
davedx 2y ago
Meanwhile I saw this on HN jobs last week: > The Culture: What It Means to Be a Thoughtful Warrior > Working Norms: The Warrior’s Code of Conduct We don’t approach our work as just a job; we approach it as a mission. Delivering excellence at the highest level requires commitment, resilience, and an unshakable work ethic. To achieve this, we embrace working norms that ensure clarity, accountability, and growth—for both the individual and the team. > 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks: Our mission demands intensity. This isn’t about clocking hours; it’s about pursuing excellence with discipline and focus. We operate at high intensity to transform healthcare. Warriors are prepared to dedicate 60 to 80 hours per week to pushing boundaries https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful-ai-a-manifesto-for-excellence https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful...
- honkycat 2y ago
  they just want cheap h1b workers they can treat like slaves, that is all any of these capitalists want
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  .ai at their domain name emphasizes the grift factor IMO
- trollbridge 2y ago
  > Join leading healthcare providers and: >>Collect more money, faster >>Higher capacity, less headcount >>Acquire and retain more patients Yikes. Doctors like primary care providers are already considered by the experts who study these things to have too many patients. So… this platform makes it possible to make that problem _even worse_?
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  And people wonder why nobody (myself included) wants to work in healthcare anymore...
- isodev 2y ago
  > 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks This is ridiculous, 34-39 hours (tops) is at the limit of a healthy work-life balance.
gdubs 2y ago
My theory on burnout is that it arises when the effort you put in doesn't have a meaningful impact because of misalignment or a lack of autonomy. It's like pushing on a lever but the gears are jammed. You're asked to push and push harder, but nobody in a position of power is willing to fix the damn gears. I've worked harder than imaginable in my life on projects without burning out, because the work was incredibly fulfilling — and it fit well with my core beliefs, interests, values. And then I've burnt out from putting tons of unrecognized effort into projects where I lacked adequate leverage to change things. People won't always look after you and burnout can be hard to recover from — harder than you might think. So take care of yourself — and never stop looking for work that aligns with your core values, interests, and the kind of life you want to build.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  I’ve done some volunteering mentoring over the years. Burnout is on the rise, but not in the way I expected. The definition of burnout continues to expand as it becomes further embedded in common vernacular. It was tough for us doing the mentoring because someone telling us they were experiencing burnout could have meant anything from a severe condition resulting from years of extreme effort against personal and professional headwinds, to the person who was simply bored at work and needed a long weekend with friends to recover. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but rather point out that there is no longer a single definition of burnout. There are parallels to how conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder are now being diagnosed in alarmingly high numbers, but when you look closer you realize that the common definition has been stretch far from the original narrow definition. This creates some difficulty for people experiencing the deepest burnout. When their peers think “burnout” is just a word that means you’re kind of tired and bored in a way that can be easily fixed with a good vacation. I’ve also noticed a growing trend of people with clear signs of depression mistaking it for burnout. These situations are very concerning for me because by now I’ve seen a lot of people quit their jobs due to “burnout” and then their symptoms get progressively worse, not better, because their real problems were not primarily the result of their job. This problem is becoming more common as “burnout” trends on social media and news headlines with empty advice. Your advice about being actively engaged in directing your own career toward something interesting is much better than the drivel that passes for burnout advice on social media and cheap news articles these days.
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
There’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while, and I think I haven’t acknowledged it due to shame. I believe that many people will relate, though. As technology continues to automate more and more “mindless” work, knowledge workers are forced to actively think for a larger and larger portion of our work days, and with increasing intensity—and this is highly stressful. Of course, doing some thinking at work is enjoyable and fulfilling, but most people can’t put in 6+ hours of concentrated thinking five days a week for extended periods of time without burning out. In the past, the educations we received were like investments in an autopilot mode that we could turn on for large portions of the work day. Some thinking has always been required for professionals, but there were also many situations which could be handled with minimal effortful thought, thanks to education. These situations are disappearing, and it’s literally tiring us out.
- AznHisoka 2y ago
  After reading your comment, my first instinct was to disagree but I think there is actually some truth to it. I find so much satisfaction in just doing rote work sometimes. Not all time, mind you but there’s a certain peaceful state when your’re mindfully and even effortlessly doing something over and over. Sort of like grinding in RPG games
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    Right, it’s a break. Actual thinking is like a physical activity, and we need breaks. In the past we had more frequent and longer breaks even if we were diligent, because we could leverage our knowledge. Increasingly we have to leverage our knowledge and actively think for almost the entire workday. I’m not sure that we can adapt to that the same way we’d adapt to jogging all day.
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      I think the difference is that knowledge + actively thinking is more akin to sprinting all day, jogging being more akin to just relying on knowledge.
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treprinum 2y ago
I would suspect the physiological base of burnout is the depletion of mainly B vitamins in the brain. When you look at the Krebs cycle, the main energetic reaction in every cell, B vitamins play crucial role whether they act as catalysts of enzymes (B1, B2), provide electron transport (B2/B3 to FAD/NAD+) or are required by sub-processes of the cycle (B5, B7, B12). Being under constant stress is known to deplete B vitamins and at some point their lowered availability starts inhibiting higher cognitive tasks in favor of just survival. Diagnosing this is problematic as serum levels don't tell much about tissue levels.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  Yes, it looks like he did miss out on the physiological parts of what might contribute to a burnout.
smj-edison 2y ago
Is it possible that some of the reported cases of burn-out are actually long covid? 2.3% of U.S. adults have "activity-limiting long COVID" as of 2024.[1] It could certainly explain part of the uptick in applications for disability. [1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-ever-had-long-covid-survey-finds https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-e...
- jari_mustonen 2y ago
  It is due to vaccine injuries. This has been studied and is known, but the topic is that people in "polite society" do not want to talk about it. For more information, please see "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 [1] by Ed Dowd. It argued convincingly. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defense/dp/1510776397 https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defen...
monkeydreams 2y ago
I have found that the psycho-social hazards model (popular in Australian workplaces) has had a real impact on my understanding of my own burnout. There are a range of risk factors which, if realised in the workplace, result in an exponentially increased risk of harm to an employee. From my understanding, any workplace in which employees are routinely subjected to 2 of these hazards are required to develop and execute a plan to reduce the risks where practical. The details of these risk factors may be found here: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-health-and-safety/mental-health/psychosocial-hazards https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-h...
mangomountain 2y ago
Looking at the hacker news posts from this source is making my blood pump
- palmfacehn 2y ago
  Even if we disagree, his takes offer decent fodder for discussion.
chuckadams 2y ago
This really resonated with me: > Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating." You can't poison yourself 50 weeks out of the year then expect things to be fine because you took a two-week break.
econ 2y ago
The system rewards those who support it regardless what the system is. It does so by whatever means available. Our system does measure useful deeds and rewards them ( which is great) but measurements have become the goal rather than that what we attempt to measure.
jongjong 2y ago
I'm burned out currently so I chose a remote job for lower pay to allow me to reflect and recover... But unfortunately this job isn't as 'low stress' as I hoped and I don't seem to be getting out of this burned out state... I need to believe that the system has been fixed before I can recover from burnout. I'm not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel so AFAIK, my industry (Tech) is just a deep, dark cave... I don't want to go deeper in there only to end up meeting the beast at the bottom! I'm thinking of changing industry away from tech sector but I wonder if every industry is like this or will become the same by the time I finish reskilling? The only solution I see right now is to just not care about jobs or career. Just coast along, do the bare minimum to get paid, play internal politics... I hate the way I'm turning out and wasting all my skills and energy doing BS but it's the most efficient use of my time given the current state of things. Based on the current situation, if I can preserve my sanity until retirement, that would be an achievement. That's what I'm aiming for at the moment... And the only way to achieve that is to be totally detached and apathetic towards anything career-related.
- jfil 2y ago
  Working remote (especially if this is your first time) comes with its own set of stresses and challenges. It took me 1-2 years to adapt when I started. Some of the challenges may occur in any wfh position. >>I wonder if every industry is like this You can find out by asking people in other industries. Either ask your friends, or people at a general networking event. They'll be happy to talk about themselves and their challenges. No need to reskill in order to find out firsthand. You're on the right path, despite it feeling bad. Good luck.
  - jongjong 2y ago
    Thanks. I'm considering getting into cyber-security. It's disappointing because I much prefer building stuff than trying to break stuff but the way the tech industry is going, I think there is a lot more money to be made in finding problems than coming up with solutions. Nobody seems to be interested in preventing problems but everyone will gladly pay up to compensate for their neglect.
palmfacehn 2y ago
>the narrative control Happy Story is: it's your problem, not the system's problem This is where I got off the bus. Yes, I agree there are problems. Yes, I agree that individuals are not problematic or wrong for finding institutions intolerable. However, it is a hard no from me on the conclusion. Personifying the "system" is misleading. >We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." This is the core cheerleader narrative of the Village of Happy People: we can all overcome any obstacle if we just try harder. That the end-game of trying harder is collapse is taboo. It is still a problem for individuals to solve. We all have to find our own solutions. Broken institutions need to be fixed by individuals or individuals need to find ways to work outside of the existing institutions. As changing larger institutions is a problem beyond my direct control, I've focused on doing my own thing. The hard work of being an entrepreneur is one option. You don't have to frame it within the grandiose expectations of becoming fabulously wealthy. Simply living on your own terms and thriving outside of the institutions you dislike is a victory unto itself. There's no magic bullet for the process. Hard work, creative approaches and dogged iteration will not fit into some, "one weird trick to get rich quick" paradigm. The expectation is misplaced. Get rich or be a "wage slave" are both false alternatives. You are sure to burnout if you frame your expectations around them. Sure, we all burn-out, but if you want results, you have to pick yourself back up and go again. I'm not equipped to judge if this is "fair", but what are the alternatives? Quitting is a guaranteed way to fail. Necessity is the mother of invention.
probably_wrong 2y ago
> All these experiences are viewed through the lens of the mental health industry which is blind to the systemic nature of stress and pressure, and so the "fixes" are medications (...), in other words, the symptoms, not the cause. Oh, they know, but what else are they going to do? Therapists know that "you should quit your job" is useless advice for 90% of their patients. And so they'll treat the symptoms first to keep their patients from jumping off a bridge while working slowly towards fixing the root cause. Not everyone is out to get you.
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muzani 2y ago
Likely one of the earthquakes in this tsunami is Twitter firing 80% of employees and then coming out of it financially better. If Jason Fried did it, people would laugh it off as an outlier, but the richest man in the world did, and so he's a genius and every other CEO will try out the same magic idea and hope for the same improvement. This is... going to lead to a tsunami of some kind.
- x86x87 2y ago
  financially better? source?
WOnderFullGOnzo 2y ago
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mdnahas 2y ago
What I learned from my burnout: “Hope is a zero-calorie meal”. You can keep going on hope and belief for a while, but eventually you need sustenance. And that’s physical and social: good food, natural settings, daylight, being part of a caring group and family/friends, social standing, etc.. I had a belief that I could work for hours in an unnatural room based on pure willpower. And I could for a while. But eventually, without real positive feedback, you collapse. And then your “willpower muscle” is exhausted. You can’t use it. It takes a long time, from small steps, to build that back.
perpetualchange 2y ago
Burnout is partially a 'new' thing because we have the luxury of actually feeling it. I imagine in older times people definitely were burnt out, but they didn't have the privilege of walking off that job, leaving during lunch, quitting spontaneously etc.
- jfil 2y ago
  I'd like to throw an alternative perspective in here: in olden times it was a clearer us-vs-them. The peasants knew that the lord sucked and would support each other against him. The miners knew that management was awful. There would be that group support. Plus, they'd have more sources of meaning outside their jobs. Today, everything is set up for workers to pretend like they're company owners (without real Shares or protection from the downsides of being an employee). Today, the boss has less control over the physical body, but more control over the story that workers tell themselves.
black_13 2y ago
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jari_mustonen 2y ago
The massive uptick in disabilities is due to vaccine injuries. This has been studied and is known, but the topic is such that people in "polite society" do not want to discuss it. For more information, please see "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 [1] by Ed Dowd. It is argued convincingly. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defense/dp/1510776397 https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defen...

577 points by dxs 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Skimmed it. The constant switching from bold to not bold for some reason makes the article not feel genuine or some thing like that. Like an ad, my attention is constantly being redirected.

ldmosquera 2y ago
I hate this contant emphasizing with a burning passion; even some newspapers do it. It's like trying to hold a conversation with someone that shouts the important bits to your face. https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ https://pypi.org/project/html2text/ has --ignore-emphasis which drops bold and italics and cleanses this pest.

justonceokay 2y ago

Formatting aside, I enjoyed the article and the description of the “village of happy people”. As someone who has burned out twice myself and left tech (with great personal sacrifice), it really can feel like those who are not burning out are living in a bubble. I’ve mostly let go of those feelings though. My conclusion after working outside of tech and rebuilding my life is that I just didn’t have the constitution to play the corporate game. More power to those who can though.

Loughla 2y ago
My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life. I do similar work in my day job and consulting. I'm very fresh and optimistic during consulting hours, but dread going into the office. I'm genuinely burnt out and just don't give a flying fuck anymore, I don't sleep, and I've been more sick in the last month than ever in my life. The only difference is that one comes with politics and one doesn't.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life Totally agree. It’s not the stress of doing something new and just trying to figure it all out that’s stressful. That’s actually fun. It’s the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed and assigns blame to the dev rather than piss poor management. No. I’m not bitter
  - sateesh 2y ago
    Isn't politics any part of human activity where number of people involved is greater than a critical mass (of say 5) ? I think even the best run, successful orgs have their share of politics. I used to think politics as a bad thing, but now I have accepted that it is an inevitable part of work life and one needs to also learn how to navigate it atleast to the extent that doesn't affect one's well-being or doesn't make one feel that they are being shortchanged, not that I am always successful with it.
    - timr 2y ago
      "Politics" are inevitable, but the stuff that the parent is describing is a particular type of politics that comes with hierarchical power (and possibly bad/immature leadership?) General pattern is that certain people in the level(s) above you are fighting for influence to impress the levels above, and critically, are willing to use the levels below in order to achieve their personal goals (organizational goals are secondary, at best). Unless leadership is unusually adept at punishing the first signs of this behavior, it quickly becomes pathological. Every level gets infected, and before long your org has all of the backstabbing drama one might associate with an imperial court. In times of growth it's painful enough, but in times of limited resources, it's pure bloodsport. There are people who can effectively detect and push back on the behavior, but they seem to be rare, and even more rarely make it into positions of influence. My theory is that it's so exhausting to be sensitive to the drama that you can only make it to the top if you combine it with a big dose of sociopathy. You also see it a lot at startups, because the founders are typically young, arrogant and have no experience managing anyone. By the time they realize they've hired a toxic exec layer, it's too late.
ketamine 2y ago
What are you doing now? I am considering becoming a machinist.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Please reconsider. My son just completed training and he is now working full time on getting disability instead of getting a job. I can't really blame him. You will get hurt and you will be tossed aside with great prejudice.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    To be clear, this was a personal choice of your son and not because of an injury?
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      Personal choice but he was injured by chemical exposure that burned both of his hands and subsequently avoided other serious accidents involving high voltage in addition to witnessing 20yr employees getting booted (demoted) after injuries. Real industrial revolution, pre-workers rights shit. He was thrown out for asking for chemical labels to be reapplied to barrels and requesting PPE. Most people can't afford the luxury of making such a stink.
  - ketamine 2y ago
    Sorry to hear that. I feel tossed aside due to my burnout and depression so I can relate on that front.
nox101 2y ago
What's giving me burnout is work from home. I got much of my social needs met by working at work with people I liked. We'd talk. We'd go to lunch. We'd meet up after work and on weekends. We also collaborated at work. Designed things together. Now, 40% of my time is alone in isolation, working at home. Collaboration and design work happen in documents at best and not in social conversation like it used it. All of this is making work a chore, "for me". Instead of work being an opportunity to hang out with people I like it's just a list of things to do alone.
- ta_1138 2y ago
  What gives people burnout changes per person. For me, Covid was the best thing that ever happened. My stress levels dropped like a rock. My self control went way up, and with it my ability to improve my life. I was doing the same work, but remote, and a whole lot of the things that made my life worse just instantly disappeared. If you know you were getting all your social needs met at work, and now you don't, the companies that have moved back to the office should be a godsend for you. So why don't you just change jobs?
timewizard 2y ago
I feel like he's just describing the natural consequences of an over monopolized technology sector. None of these things are natural and instead of facing the problem directly, ironically, this author play acts his way through the solution. I found it uncomfortable.
- shusson 2y ago
  > this author play acts his way through the solution. I thought it was a nice bit of irony. At work there's so much play-acting but all in a serious tone.

squidproquo 2y ago

Thank you for this. It’s nice to feel not alone.

sc68cal 2y ago

This resonated with me since his description of the situation exactly matches what I have been experiencing the past few months

riffraff 2y ago

this post seems to mix some valid points and some completely bonkers unrelated things, like the assumption that somehow the US is in stagflation using a graph truncated at data from 2023. Not really explaining why stagflation would cause burnout anyway. And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know quit suddenly" (sic). The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.

jsdwarf 2y ago
One big trigger for burnout is if you cannot answer the question "why do I work?" any more. One of the big whys was that working hard allows you to buy a house/appartment which allows you to maintain your standard of living in retirement. But this isn't true any more due to the declining purchasing power of salaries. Why should I be stressed out in my job if this only allows me to rent an apartment that i have to give up as soon as I stop working?
- chasd00 2y ago
  I got two kids that will be going to college in about 5 years. My wife and I haves saved as best we could all their lives but it’s still a bill ranging from 250k to maybe a half million dollars coming due on top of all the other bills and retirement savings. For many, “burnout” is just not an option.
  - xigency 2y ago
    Not to be rude, but one divorce could wipe out all that you had saved. Then burnout might be a better option for your kids when it comes time to filling out FAFSA. I'm knocking on wood. I don't want what happened to me to happen to you.
  - nickd2001 2y ago
    As another parent, that sounds like a frightening financial burden :( So, $125k-$250k for each child? Is that the going rate in USA now? for comparison , here in UK its gone up lots but 3 years at university would cost approx £30k in tuition, plus maybe £40k in living costs that could be largely avoided by staying at home and going to college locally. Which can be mostly borrowed, and paid back as an extra 9% in tax on earning above a certain amount after graduation. Even with these figures, my wife and I will still encourage our kids to look hard for decent apprenticeships, consider Open University, possibly work part-time and study part-time, to avoid having such a big debt, especially given cost of housing etc. Kinda wonder whether your figures make it worth going to college at all? 20 years ago I met an American who had 6 figure debt from law school and was doing a job at a law firm that she disliked in order to pay off the huge loan so that after that she could then do what she wanted which would pay much less....

inSenCite 2y ago

Very familiar story. I'm 9months into quitting my consulting career after 10 years. Relatively long hours, weekend work, and lots of travel. The first few years were great, lots of learning, lots of smart people to work with, smart leadership, interesting and even innovative work. But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more projects/focused more on sales. I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where I started). I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't free.

jfil 2y ago
Good luck. I hope whatever you do now is different enough that it won't burn you out in the same way.

methuselah_in 2y ago

I have been through the same process recently on my job.I was so much frustrated that I just wanted to quit. I didn't even knew what will happen afterwards, you keep on trying your level best and yet seems nothing is going to work out for you. By luck my health went down because of fever. I had got a week break. Then I got fine. But these words the author mentioned are right in each sense.

ncpop 2y ago

Thank you for posting this. It manages to capture how I’m feeling quite well. It has made me realize I need to make some adjustments to my work and life.

mordae 2y ago
Dream on. If you feel like making "same adjustments", save up for about 1 year vacation ASAP. You won't be able to do anything once it hits you.
- sc68cal 2y ago
  The problem is, what do you do once you spend up all your savings on a 1 year vacation? You have to go back, eventually, and it will happen again. Plus, the job market is really tough (isn't it always?) and there are a lot of people out of work and looking for jobs, it doesn't always make sense to voluntarily join that cohort once all your money has been spent.

ketamine 2y ago

> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. It's an amorphous topic because it covers such a wide range of human conditions and experiences. I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in those times.

nostradumbasp 2y ago

I've burnt out. It was horrible. I am doing much better now! The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt. In many places if you get hurt/burnt out on the job the upper seats are looking for any reason to curb stomp you. There's no reason to give a company your all unless you have an actual stake in it or they are there to hold you up when you're dragging. I've worked at multiple places where influential people died, yes dead, below average life expectancy, - on the job - and corporate did everything they could to not even pay out on their legal obligations (life insurance, D&D). In some cases employees joked or snickered about the person who died later on - in meetings. In tech. I've found that you're not on your own but you are at the mercy of who is in charge of your schedule and rates your performance. If you lose trust in that person your best option is to leave as quickly as possible. Otherwise they will do what they can to destroy you for as much 'profit' as they can claim. Being clear. It is not about realized gains, it could even be at great detriment to a company. It is about short-term line item claimable gains. "We got 4 good months out of her...", "they were terminal and now they will be working somewhere better for them...", "he really wasn't closing as many tickets as the rest of the team...", "they weren't helping as many team members as the rest of the team...", "we never needed someone with an advanced degree...", etc. Check in with yourself regularly. Know the signs of burn out. The company you work for does not depend on any person caring about you in the slightest.

fullshark 2y ago
> The trick is to not care enough about your job to get hurt but not care so little that you could short-term be hurt. I'm here, but it just seems like a temporary fix. I can't imagine doing this for the rest of my life, but I need money and health insurance. What's the alternative, what did you end up doing?
- nostradumbasp 2y ago
  I don't have all the answers. I don't even know your situation. For me, I am still in tech. Like everyone else, my family needs the money. Once in a while I do something that satisfies me personally as well as the company I work for. rt Alternatives? Well, I think anything you can start up on your own where you have the autonomy and can dictate your hours/balance would be your medium term goal. I'm working towards mine, but I think its different for everyone. Contract working, consultant working, small personal business with a reduced hours main stream 9-5. My assumption is people like us, we care a lot, we are smart, we are capable, and when we get stuck in corporate swamps our inner candle starts to go out. We just need to find ways to spend less time in the swamp.

dzink 2y ago

It’s a feature. Less white collar workers are needed because of AI. Instead of trying to fit in where culture is designed for attrition, find out what humans need and build something you own, using AI if you have to.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago
AI is the same as any other hype cycle, and creating ML algorithms is boring monotonous work. Neuromorphic computing on the other hand is very interesting, as it gets into ambiguous state resolution rather than layered weighting. The idea AI could even replace a chickens cognitive performance in laughable. =3
- intalentive 2y ago
  >it gets into ambiguous state resolution I didn’t know that about neuromorphic computing. Do you have a link that says more?
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    It is a class of engineering that often focuses on biomimicry, neurology, and evolutionary biology in some projects. I would recommend looking around at the various approaches. Some are less ridiculous than others, and don't need a power generation plant to run the devices. Best of luck, =3

GoToRO 2y ago

And in my country you can't even take medical leave for burnout.

lugu 2y ago
Which country is that? Is that common among countries?
- GoToRO 2y ago
  .ro
  - JPLeRouzic 2y ago
    In France expect at least one year before getting adult disabilities (AAH), and you can only ask after getting a medical diagnostic which can take as long. But if you get AAH, you are reimbursed for the time between when you asked for it and the first payment. Yet that means probably living without any resources for one year or so.

knallfrosch 2y ago

First, I think mental problems discussed more than ever: Anxiety, autism, inability to focus and yes, burnout. The "only few see" simply isn't true. Second, the article mixes in some adjacent topics, such as purchasing power. Why? I don't know, but it blows the amount of stuff the article would have to supplement way out of proportion, before even the core message (burnout) was discussed. Third, I'm always amazed how many people think they are different. You're not. If you care for a family member (children, elderly, disabled..), commute 2400 miles and work 7 days a week, you will burn out. But it won't be a surprise to anyone but you. What you need is sleep, friends and sports, same as any social animal inhabiting a very real, very physical body. Fourth, I'm not sure what you want others to do. Instead of complaining about the suggestions, write down what you would have wanted.

datavirtue 2y ago
Yeah, if this guy was working in the 1970s I'm not sure why he thinks he is supposed to miss the falling side of the wage parabola.
noirbot 2y ago
As other people have posted elsewhere in this, purchasing power and the economy is linked to the incentives that cause people to burn out. You keep pushing against the tide because you want that promotion or raise because costs go up over time. Or because you want to do something costly that you think will improve your life, such as having a child or moving somewhere or fixing an annoyance in your life. Some people surely burn out because they're just obsessive, but many people, myself included, slide into it because "just 4 more months of this and I can afford X".
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  The opposite can also be true, you know it is a bad work situation and you are going to burn out but you can't afford to leave. Not that you want to stay, you don't even want that promotion anymore but that you can't go elsewhere. Besides, if alternative employers are equally bad anyway, you may as well burn out in a familiar place and not take on the extra stress of onboarding in a new role. I burn out at a 6 figures flexible job, while my friends burn out at minimum wage jobs where they have to report bathroom breaks by the minute. How can I complain about my burnout-inducing work conditions?

steve_adams_86 2y ago

A few points in here reminded me of an essay on burnout that I loved a lot, called The Burnout Society. > The core narrative control is straightforward: 1) everything's great, and 2) if it's not great, it's going to be great. > We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." The author of The Burnout Society frames this as a sort of self-slavery, in which we are our own slave-drivers. His logic is actually quite compelling. Yet reassuring, perhaps surprisingly. He doesn't blame the individual, but the culture they live in. There are paths to salvation, and burnout isn't a final destination. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society https://www.google.com/search?q=the+burnout+society

dfee 2y ago
Better link https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-soci...
- patcon 2y ago
  Best link? Maybe :) https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-society-9780804795098 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-burnout-...
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Thank you. I was short on time and didn’t see a good result quickly enough
bbor 2y ago
A) Totally agree. This is a great, very short book -- I highly recommend for anyone in this industry, regardless of philosophy experience. The author is Byung-Chul Han. B) This is a great point to call out the author for a bit of a myopic view in the bits about "Burnout isn't well-studied or understood." Beyond the philosophy above, there's pages and pages of empirical articles, conferences, even books on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=burnout This just comes across as a fallacy I see quite often in intellectual circles, and have surely been guilty of myself: "The problems in the world are caused because the people in charge are too dumb to see everything as clearly as I do; if I was in charge, it would be easy to decide what to focus our resources on!"

CaptainFever 2y ago

I am hesitant to believe anything I see from this website. The author shows no related qualifications (e.g. economics), and the economics here are heterodox. This post feels like mostly conspiracy theories ("the system is against us, the system is broken, they are controlling the narratives!"), which is all well and fine if it makes you feel better, but should not be taken as factual nor credible information.

altairprime 2y ago
By definition, they’re right, Madroeconomics and Unemployment calculations in particular specifically exclude quality of life concerns, centering around mathematical equations that are defined to promote cancerous growth (“in a rational economy, everyone tries to maximize their earnings”) while excluding concerns such as burnout. The author’s point is that it is forbidden to discuss these two concepts in the same breath, macroeconomics and burnout, even though they are intrinsically linked. The author’s point is well-demonstrated by various comments in our discussion: rather than considering the author’s lens and reinterpreting one’s worldview through it experimentally, I see several comments saying ‘don’t listen to anything they say’, ‘how can they make such an incomplete argument without a masters thesis of proof backing it’, and so on. Point to the author for that; “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.” is mysteriously and glaringly absent here, and they rather called it.
- EtCepeyd 2y ago
  Thank you.
- palmfacehn 2y ago
  In fairness, economics is often ideological. Some of the most mainstream economists are controversial political figures. Krugman famously wrote opinion pieces for the NYT.

bkazez 2y ago

> Burnout isn't well-studied or understood. It didn't even have a name when I first burned out in the 1980s. Check Wikipedia: “Staff Burnout: Job Stress in the Human Services” was published in 1980, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory was published in 1982. > We don't bother collecting data on why people quit, or why people burn out, or what conditions eventually break them. A quick search of academic literature shows this is not true.

scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
And yet, the stakes feel so much higher and the problem more immediate
vrosas 2y ago
Maybe in academia, but I've never seen any kind of reflection or study in the workplace. Twice in my career I've witnessed an entire team rage quit on a manager at once. Twice! And I did not see management bother to investigate or reflect on what the problem was. In both cases the manager continued to not only be employed but rebuild their team as they saw fit.
- BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
  Academia is where research happens. Employers have no incentive to do research that would force them to spend more on employee wellness. I worked on enough team health surveys to know leadership has no interest in collecting feedback about the big known complaints that they aren't interested in addressing. They only want to hear about the small unimportant things that could help morale to cope with the big issues (unless they are forced to investigate serious workplace injuries, unsustainable churn/absenteeism or productivity issues) That said employers/HR publish a lot of blog spam about how burnout is really due to employe's lack of self care.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

The concept of Ikigai is not well known in North America: https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c70f58f https://medium.com/@ikigai.consultancy/finding-ikigai-c1fc4c... Where idealism and economics often change the balance of priorities over time for individuals. The fungible nature of the modern workforce has lead to a churn and burn culture for skilled labor at the board level. People may land a position they worked for years structuring the opportunity, and only discover they fooled themselves into a career that makes them miserable. People need to accept they will change careers around 5 times in the modern workforce. Also, the age of the middle class union factory worker having a 30 year career became a rarity in the 1980s. My advice is to ensure one balances their own needs with the company needs, and abandon the illusion there is a perfect version of oneself in the future. The "not caring" part is easy, as most projects get annoying after awhile. =3

steve_adams_86 2y ago

> Those who haven't burned out / been broken have no way to understand the experience. They want to help, and suggest listening to soothing music, or taking a vacation to "recharge." They can't understand that to the person in the final stages of burnout, music is a distraction, and they have no more energy for a vacation than they have for work. Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating." This is one of the most salient points to me. When I was burnt out, I was a husk of a human being. I appeared to be a high-functioning, successful, positive-trajectory sort of guy. Inside I was quite literally dying. Things that used to be fun, and I knew I liked, were almost painful. The energy it took to play with my kids and be happy with them was mentally and physically painful to spend. Activities like free diving which used to fill me with passion, wonder, energy, and joy became chores I actively avoided. I had endless excuses to do nothing but the absolute essentials. Keep the job, pay the bills, try to sleep, try to wake up, keep going. I'm quite a bit better now. I opted for work which pays a lot less, but allows me to feel much more aligned with what I do, why I'm doing, who I do it with, etc. Had I not found that I think I'd still be better, but getting out of the work I was doing was a good way to expedite recovery. Good luck to all of you experiencing this. You might have normalized it and begun to feel trapped, but I promise there's a real life you can enjoy on the other side of it.

ocimbote 2y ago

> The Tsunami of Burnout Few See Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic. I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.

altairprime 2y ago
Employers generally refuse to openly discuss it with anyone who isn’t a retention risk, which made interviews unattended very weird when I would give perfectly honest answers to the candidate about “why is this position open?” (a question that most candidates don’t ask because they’re desperate for employment).

peterldowns 2y ago

This reminds me of the immense NPR story "Unfit for Work", from back in 2013ish, about the increasing number of Americans opting out of the workforce and instead relying on disability: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ Has there ever been a followup to this reporting? I'd be really interested to understand if this trend is still happening, and if so, why.

sssilver 2y ago

Vulgarly unrelated to the subject — is anyone able to get a scrollbar to appear on this page on mobile? I kept reading and was completely unable to tell how long of a time commitment this read will be and whether I should continue or read it later. How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race for colonization of mars and AI singularity?

matt3210 2y ago

This seems like the inevitable result of optimizing for GDP instead of happiness index.

franktankbank 2y ago
GDP is mega gamed anyway.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Both those indexes are complete frauds. Believe your eyes and your soul instead of some fake numbers from the rulers. Or at least believe your wallet, if you are more cynical than emotional.
m0llusk 2y ago
Happiness is also problematic as it tends toward the shallow and unsatisfying.

ok_dad 2y ago

I got burnt out at my last job working hard for them and my reward was being laid off and the whole team replaced. Fuck the rat race, we’re all killings ourselves and giving our lives so the rich can get richer.

tuyguntn 2y ago

This is what I learned in my career with couple of burnouts: Look at the leadership - do they brag about everything? Be a story teller, hard work and caring about product doesn't matter in such company. Try to get promoted faster by boasting your work publicly. Remember, in such companies people usually don't care about "fake" metrics you have created. - do they try to dig deeper into problems and solve them? Enjoy working there, because if you can show them problems and offer your solutions, they will do their best to figure out which problem is most urgent to solve and help you. middle managers will inherit this behavior from upper management

weitendorf 2y ago

> We're experiencing stagflation, and it may well just be getting started. If history is any guide, costs can continue to rise for quite some time as the purchasing power of wages erodes and asset bubbles deflate. As noted in a previous post, depending on financial fentanyl to keep everything glued together is risky, because we can't tell if the dose is fatal until it's too late. This is giving me permabear vibes. The US is not experiencing stagflation. Real (inflation adjusted) gdp per capita is growing at 2%. Inflation over the last year was 2.7% and gdp growth and the economy grew substantially faster than that. > That the purchasing power of my wages in the 1970s as an apprentice carpenter exceeded almost all the rest of my decades of labor should ring alarm bells. There it is. For what it's worth this probably is true to an extent (eg for certain kinds of goods and services), just like the growth of economy, but that's because relative incomes and relative costs have changed substantially since then. Some jobs' wages (software engineer) grew faster than inflation, others (a lot of entry level blue collar ones) didn't. Some costs (rent, healthcare) rose faster than average inflation, others (eg televisions) didn't. FWIW the nominal topic of burnout is intriguing to me but I think this kind of perma-recession/perma-bear pop-econ, "what happened in 1971" stuff is really overplayed and crackpotty. There is no "narrative control machinery". I think it's very human to extrapolate individual malaise to society as a whole, and you see it all the time on the Internet, but most people don't perceive society the same way a deeply depressed or burnt out person does.

marcus0x62 2y ago
> This is giving me permabear vibes. I’ve been reading Charles High Smith for at least 15 years. He’s definitely a permabear. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
- weitendorf 2y ago
  Permabears do sometimes make good points but being permanent bears they're almost always wrong in aggregate, because they only ever have the same economic perspective, which happens to be the opposite of how things have played out (at least in the US) for almost one hundred years now. To square that circle usually they have to turn to conspiracy theories, or dabble in economics just deep enough to skew it as unsustainable but not so deep that they understand how it actually works (see quantitative easing, FRB, "petrodollar", etc.). Maybe (definitely) I've just spent too much time on the Internet because to me the whole "secret recession" stuff is just tired and wrong at this point. It's been over 15 years since the GFC. This kind of perspective feels stuck in the 2012 "ugh I got a college degree and now I work in a restaurant" Internet, when there have actually been several employment/growth booms since then.

dbcurtis 2y ago

My own conclusion about burnout is that it fundamentally comes down to who controls the agenda, and how much you invest in that agenda. I've been burned out. Many years ago, early in my career. My cure: I was in the lucky position that it was a good time to spend a year and half going back to school to knock off a graduate degree that simultaneously moved my career forward, gave me a total change of scenery, and gave me some break time between leaving the job and starting classes, time that I devoted 100% to hobbies and home improvement projects. And of course, an easy-to-tell story when reentering the job market. So on the topic of agenda... if what you are working on is your own agenda, you don't burn out. You might change the agenda by redefining goals, but in the end, you are sailing your own ship. Not only do you not burn out, it is curative. It is when you absorb someone else's agenda and make it your own to an unhealthy extent that you burn out. Always be computing that dot product between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector. Don't over-invest beyond that dot-product.

EtCepeyd 2y ago
> Always be computing that dot product between your employer's agenda vector and your own agenda vector. haha, great metaphor! I'll steal it! :)
BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
This aligns with my experience. There's this GDC talk that really resinated with me about how side projects can help avoid burnout in the games industry: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfJ9LLZQ9jo https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfJ9LLZQ9jo It is counter intuitive that doing more unpaid work helps cope with doing paid work, but the whole premise iirc is that it is work you are in control of and that helps battle the lack of meaning and agency at work. Of course this assumes you're not already too burnt out to even think about a side project.

404mm 2y ago

The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really matter to those creating it? We’re actively moving towards cheaper labor markets and replacing jobs with automation. It seems that the only way to get your piece of the pie in this market is if you find something that you can solve or do cheaper. Cheaper often means replacing and displacing current workers. Great benefit to the company and stockholders, not so much to society. Everything is driven by profit for those who already have more than they need.

t3chm4nager 2y ago
>> The tsunami of burnout may be coming - but will it really matter to those creating it? Companies used to be at the mercy of workers, we no longer are. The moment employees get out of line, work starts to shift to H1B workers who are too afraid to complain. If they start complaining, work then shifts to offshore resources. You can pay 1/3 of the wage and have 2 offshore workers and have contingencies. The onshore workers see this and fall into line, especially H1Bs. Work is sufficiently granular and microservice-ififed that you can swap people in and out. The vice keeps tightening.
- 404mm 2y ago
  You speak the truth. I work for a 100k employee multinational company and “we” just started entered the third phase- replacing US based employees with offshore alternatives. India and Brazil. I’m still waiting what’s coming next.
- yarg 2y ago
  That only works in scenarios where competency is superfluous.

akomtu 2y ago

> quitting is a last-ditch effort at self-preservation. Can you imagine a red cross nurse suffering from burn out? She may work for food and her life may be hard by most standards, but what she does is in harmony with her true self, and this gives her energy and inner peace. A highly paid corporate worker, on the other hand, may do something that's against his principles, something that doesn't harmonize with his true self, and he has to forcefully take bits of energy from his soul and sell it. This is what drains him and leads to burnout.

sseagull 2y ago
While not usually applied to everyday white collar workers, you seem to be hinting at what is called "moral injury" Typically associated with the military and with healthcare professionals who go into their fields with good intentions, but then have to sacrifice on those for various (typically capitalistic or even arbitrary) reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
- akomtu 2y ago
  My view on this is more metaphysical. We have that inner self in us, that is the source of all life, meaning and happiness, and there's our persona in which our inner self is only dimly manifested. The right cause makes our inner self manifest a bit more fully and that feels like an uplifting influx of energy in our persona. On the other hand, when our persona does something wrong or meaningless, it stops receiving that energy as our inner self withdraws attention awaiting better opportunities to invest itself.

cess11 2y ago

It's terribly sad to see people in the thread rationalising 'giving work all' and so on. My advice is to start meeting other people and take up some activity that is more fun than work. If your local jurisdiction allows exploitation that makes this hard or impossible then you ought to flee this tyranny.

paulcole 2y ago
Could you link 3 the comments of people in this thread who are rationalizing “giving work all”?
- cess11 2y ago
  Here's a few. "What helped was finding a work situation where I could give my all and not feel taken advantage of." "I tottaly agree with this sentiment. Still looking for the right balance, but half assing things for me doesn't result in feeling better. "Finding the unicorn job isn't the right thing to predicate your happiness on. One thing I like the idea of and am just starting to try is reminding myself why I'm doing the job. What are my bigger goals that it is contributing towards? I know we all know this at some level, but I think it can help to remind ourselves there is a purpose/meaning to why we do our jobs, even if we don't intrinsically get meaning from them." "My takeaway from your comment is that you should not be an employee; you should be a business owner. That way you can give your all and feel great about it because it will also (hopefully) lead to better and directly measurable outcomes." "But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself."

MPSimmons 2y ago

I've personally burned out a couple of times. First was a Fintech startup back in 2011 or so. Second was at an aerospace startup that you've heard of. In both cases, the unique factor was an extended period of time where I was the sole person who could some considerable piece of work that the business relied upon for day to day operations, which meant that I couldn't take effective breaks and I lived constantly on call and in the critical path. I had to quit both jobs in order to both grant myself the space to not feel captive and also to show management that more than a single person was necessary to perform the tasks that I had been performing.

Panoramix 2y ago
I've burned out once, but that was enough. I am working again but it's been more than 7 years and I'm not fully recovered. I'm very careful now not to paint myself into a corner (or let some manager do it for me) as I know I wouldn't survive the next time it happens. Also my ability to put crazy hours or handle stress has been permanently impaired. While I function normally, if stress is a glass that can take water until it starts to spill, my glass has permanently shrunk in size. I keep less vital, less exciting positions and compliment the missing excitement or fulfillment with things from my personal life. I do miss those times when I had the complete overview and agency but it wasn't worth this.
- onemoresoop 2y ago
  Im just like that more than 10 years after my last burnout and I think I found a ballance to not let it ever wreck my life again. But it’s a very fragile ballance and there’s this everpresent subtext that it could happen again at any time. Im lucky that im paid hourly and overtime requires approval and is rareley approved.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Avoiding overtime helps but if the work conditions are conducive to burnout it can happen even to part time workers. How much work it takes to protect the balance to avoid burnout can itself also contribute to burnout, say if you constantly have to fight getting overstaffed or repeatedly having to push back on being on call...

kayo_20211030 2y ago

I believe that burnout exists because of the dissonance between doing-what-you-want and doing-what-you-can. If you can't do what you want, then do what you can and come to some sensible accommodation between the two. If that's not possible, perhaps you can want something else, and do whatever that is. It is a conscious decision, and it's positive, at least in the sense that it's your decision. If you can't square the circle, you must pick either a square or a circle. It's just not possible to have both when they're so out of harmony. Don't be afraid to hit the eject button and reset your want/can compass.

Temporary_31337 2y ago

Lots of comments here not even bothering to read the OP article on the true sources of burnout. Cute advice on how to cope with it but no thought on what systemic causes were. It’s like helping fellow miners cope with lung disease rather than think if there’s a better power source than hand mined coal.

davedx 2y ago

Meanwhile I saw this on HN jobs last week: > The Culture: What It Means to Be a Thoughtful Warrior > Working Norms: The Warrior’s Code of Conduct We don’t approach our work as just a job; we approach it as a mission. Delivering excellence at the highest level requires commitment, resilience, and an unshakable work ethic. To achieve this, we embrace working norms that ensure clarity, accountability, and growth—for both the individual and the team. > 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks: Our mission demands intensity. This isn’t about clocking hours; it’s about pursuing excellence with discipline and focus. We operate at high intensity to transform healthcare. Warriors are prepared to dedicate 60 to 80 hours per week to pushing boundaries https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful-ai-a-manifesto-for-excellence https://www.thoughtful.ai/blog/being-a-warrior-at-thoughtful...

honkycat 2y ago
they just want cheap h1b workers they can treat like slaves, that is all any of these capitalists want
onemoresoop 2y ago
.ai at their domain name emphasizes the grift factor IMO
trollbridge 2y ago
> Join leading healthcare providers and: >>Collect more money, faster >>Higher capacity, less headcount >>Acquire and retain more patients Yikes. Doctors like primary care providers are already considered by the experts who study these things to have too many patients. So… this platform makes it possible to make that problem _even worse_?
nubinetwork 2y ago
And people wonder why nobody (myself included) wants to work in healthcare anymore...
isodev 2y ago
> 60 to 80-Hour Work Weeks This is ridiculous, 34-39 hours (tops) is at the limit of a healthy work-life balance.

gdubs 2y ago

My theory on burnout is that it arises when the effort you put in doesn't have a meaningful impact because of misalignment or a lack of autonomy. It's like pushing on a lever but the gears are jammed. You're asked to push and push harder, but nobody in a position of power is willing to fix the damn gears. I've worked harder than imaginable in my life on projects without burning out, because the work was incredibly fulfilling — and it fit well with my core beliefs, interests, values. And then I've burnt out from putting tons of unrecognized effort into projects where I lacked adequate leverage to change things. People won't always look after you and burnout can be hard to recover from — harder than you might think. So take care of yourself — and never stop looking for work that aligns with your core values, interests, and the kind of life you want to build.

Aurornis 2y ago
I’ve done some volunteering mentoring over the years. Burnout is on the rise, but not in the way I expected. The definition of burnout continues to expand as it becomes further embedded in common vernacular. It was tough for us doing the mentoring because someone telling us they were experiencing burnout could have meant anything from a severe condition resulting from years of extreme effort against personal and professional headwinds, to the person who was simply bored at work and needed a long weekend with friends to recover. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but rather point out that there is no longer a single definition of burnout. There are parallels to how conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder are now being diagnosed in alarmingly high numbers, but when you look closer you realize that the common definition has been stretch far from the original narrow definition. This creates some difficulty for people experiencing the deepest burnout. When their peers think “burnout” is just a word that means you’re kind of tired and bored in a way that can be easily fixed with a good vacation. I’ve also noticed a growing trend of people with clear signs of depression mistaking it for burnout. These situations are very concerning for me because by now I’ve seen a lot of people quit their jobs due to “burnout” and then their symptoms get progressively worse, not better, because their real problems were not primarily the result of their job. This problem is becoming more common as “burnout” trends on social media and news headlines with empty advice. Your advice about being actively engaged in directing your own career toward something interesting is much better than the drivel that passes for burnout advice on social media and cheap news articles these days.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago

There’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while, and I think I haven’t acknowledged it due to shame. I believe that many people will relate, though. As technology continues to automate more and more “mindless” work, knowledge workers are forced to actively think for a larger and larger portion of our work days, and with increasing intensity—and this is highly stressful. Of course, doing some thinking at work is enjoyable and fulfilling, but most people can’t put in 6+ hours of concentrated thinking five days a week for extended periods of time without burning out. In the past, the educations we received were like investments in an autopilot mode that we could turn on for large portions of the work day. Some thinking has always been required for professionals, but there were also many situations which could be handled with minimal effortful thought, thanks to education. These situations are disappearing, and it’s literally tiring us out.

AznHisoka 2y ago
After reading your comment, my first instinct was to disagree but I think there is actually some truth to it. I find so much satisfaction in just doing rote work sometimes. Not all time, mind you but there’s a certain peaceful state when your’re mindfully and even effortlessly doing something over and over. Sort of like grinding in RPG games
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  Right, it’s a break. Actual thinking is like a physical activity, and we need breaks. In the past we had more frequent and longer breaks even if we were diligent, because we could leverage our knowledge. Increasingly we have to leverage our knowledge and actively think for almost the entire workday. I’m not sure that we can adapt to that the same way we’d adapt to jogging all day.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    I think the difference is that knowledge + actively thinking is more akin to sprinting all day, jogging being more akin to just relying on knowledge.

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treprinum 2y ago

I would suspect the physiological base of burnout is the depletion of mainly B vitamins in the brain. When you look at the Krebs cycle, the main energetic reaction in every cell, B vitamins play crucial role whether they act as catalysts of enzymes (B1, B2), provide electron transport (B2/B3 to FAD/NAD+) or are required by sub-processes of the cycle (B5, B7, B12). Being under constant stress is known to deplete B vitamins and at some point their lowered availability starts inhibiting higher cognitive tasks in favor of just survival. Diagnosing this is problematic as serum levels don't tell much about tissue levels.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
Yes, it looks like he did miss out on the physiological parts of what might contribute to a burnout.

smj-edison 2y ago

Is it possible that some of the reported cases of burn-out are actually long covid? 2.3% of U.S. adults have "activity-limiting long COVID" as of 2024.[1] It could certainly explain part of the uptick in applications for disability. [1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-ever-had-long-covid-survey-finds https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-e...

jari_mustonen 2y ago
It is due to vaccine injuries. This has been studied and is known, but the topic is that people in "polite society" do not want to talk about it. For more information, please see "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 [1] by Ed Dowd. It argued convincingly. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defense/dp/1510776397 https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defen...

monkeydreams 2y ago

I have found that the psycho-social hazards model (popular in Australian workplaces) has had a real impact on my understanding of my own burnout. There are a range of risk factors which, if realised in the workplace, result in an exponentially increased risk of harm to an employee. From my understanding, any workplace in which employees are routinely subjected to 2 of these hazards are required to develop and execute a plan to reduce the risks where practical. The details of these risk factors may be found here: https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-health-and-safety/mental-health/psychosocial-hazards https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/safety-topic/managing-h...

mangomountain 2y ago

Looking at the hacker news posts from this source is making my blood pump

palmfacehn 2y ago
Even if we disagree, his takes offer decent fodder for discussion.

chuckadams 2y ago

This really resonated with me: > Even planning a vacation is beyond their grasp, much less grinding through travel. They're too drained to enjoy anything that's proposed as "rejuvenating." You can't poison yourself 50 weeks out of the year then expect things to be fine because you took a two-week break.

econ 2y ago

The system rewards those who support it regardless what the system is. It does so by whatever means available. Our system does measure useful deeds and rewards them ( which is great) but measurements have become the goal rather than that what we attempt to measure.

jongjong 2y ago

I'm burned out currently so I chose a remote job for lower pay to allow me to reflect and recover... But unfortunately this job isn't as 'low stress' as I hoped and I don't seem to be getting out of this burned out state... I need to believe that the system has been fixed before I can recover from burnout. I'm not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel so AFAIK, my industry (Tech) is just a deep, dark cave... I don't want to go deeper in there only to end up meeting the beast at the bottom! I'm thinking of changing industry away from tech sector but I wonder if every industry is like this or will become the same by the time I finish reskilling? The only solution I see right now is to just not care about jobs or career. Just coast along, do the bare minimum to get paid, play internal politics... I hate the way I'm turning out and wasting all my skills and energy doing BS but it's the most efficient use of my time given the current state of things. Based on the current situation, if I can preserve my sanity until retirement, that would be an achievement. That's what I'm aiming for at the moment... And the only way to achieve that is to be totally detached and apathetic towards anything career-related.

jfil 2y ago
Working remote (especially if this is your first time) comes with its own set of stresses and challenges. It took me 1-2 years to adapt when I started. Some of the challenges may occur in any wfh position. >>I wonder if every industry is like this You can find out by asking people in other industries. Either ask your friends, or people at a general networking event. They'll be happy to talk about themselves and their challenges. No need to reskill in order to find out firsthand. You're on the right path, despite it feeling bad. Good luck.
- jongjong 2y ago
  Thanks. I'm considering getting into cyber-security. It's disappointing because I much prefer building stuff than trying to break stuff but the way the tech industry is going, I think there is a lot more money to be made in finding problems than coming up with solutions. Nobody seems to be interested in preventing problems but everyone will gladly pay up to compensate for their neglect.

palmfacehn 2y ago

>the narrative control Happy Story is: it's your problem, not the system's problem This is where I got off the bus. Yes, I agree there are problems. Yes, I agree that individuals are not problematic or wrong for finding institutions intolerable. However, it is a hard no from me on the conclusion. Personifying the "system" is misleading. >We're trained to tell ourselves we can do it, that sustained super-human effort is within everyone's reach, "just do it." This is the core cheerleader narrative of the Village of Happy People: we can all overcome any obstacle if we just try harder. That the end-game of trying harder is collapse is taboo. It is still a problem for individuals to solve. We all have to find our own solutions. Broken institutions need to be fixed by individuals or individuals need to find ways to work outside of the existing institutions. As changing larger institutions is a problem beyond my direct control, I've focused on doing my own thing. The hard work of being an entrepreneur is one option. You don't have to frame it within the grandiose expectations of becoming fabulously wealthy. Simply living on your own terms and thriving outside of the institutions you dislike is a victory unto itself. There's no magic bullet for the process. Hard work, creative approaches and dogged iteration will not fit into some, "one weird trick to get rich quick" paradigm. The expectation is misplaced. Get rich or be a "wage slave" are both false alternatives. You are sure to burnout if you frame your expectations around them. Sure, we all burn-out, but if you want results, you have to pick yourself back up and go again. I'm not equipped to judge if this is "fair", but what are the alternatives? Quitting is a guaranteed way to fail. Necessity is the mother of invention.

probably_wrong 2y ago

> All these experiences are viewed through the lens of the mental health industry which is blind to the systemic nature of stress and pressure, and so the "fixes" are medications (...), in other words, the symptoms, not the cause. Oh, they know, but what else are they going to do? Therapists know that "you should quit your job" is useless advice for 90% of their patients. And so they'll treat the symptoms first to keep their patients from jumping off a bridge while working slowly towards fixing the root cause. Not everyone is out to get you.

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muzani 2y ago

Likely one of the earthquakes in this tsunami is Twitter firing 80% of employees and then coming out of it financially better. If Jason Fried did it, people would laugh it off as an outlier, but the richest man in the world did, and so he's a genius and every other CEO will try out the same magic idea and hope for the same improvement. This is... going to lead to a tsunami of some kind.

x86x87 2y ago
financially better? source?

WOnderFullGOnzo 2y ago

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mdnahas 2y ago

What I learned from my burnout: “Hope is a zero-calorie meal”. You can keep going on hope and belief for a while, but eventually you need sustenance. And that’s physical and social: good food, natural settings, daylight, being part of a caring group and family/friends, social standing, etc.. I had a belief that I could work for hours in an unnatural room based on pure willpower. And I could for a while. But eventually, without real positive feedback, you collapse. And then your “willpower muscle” is exhausted. You can’t use it. It takes a long time, from small steps, to build that back.

perpetualchange 2y ago

Burnout is partially a 'new' thing because we have the luxury of actually feeling it. I imagine in older times people definitely were burnt out, but they didn't have the privilege of walking off that job, leaving during lunch, quitting spontaneously etc.

jfil 2y ago
I'd like to throw an alternative perspective in here: in olden times it was a clearer us-vs-them. The peasants knew that the lord sucked and would support each other against him. The miners knew that management was awful. There would be that group support. Plus, they'd have more sources of meaning outside their jobs. Today, everything is set up for workers to pretend like they're company owners (without real Shares or protection from the downsides of being an employee). Today, the boss has less control over the physical body, but more control over the story that workers tell themselves.

black_13 2y ago

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jari_mustonen 2y ago

The massive uptick in disabilities is due to vaccine injuries. This has been studied and is known, but the topic is such that people in "polite society" do not want to discuss it. For more information, please see "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 [1] by Ed Dowd. It is argued convincingly. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defense/dp/1510776397 https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Epidemic-Sudden-Childrens-Defen...