Wow, this is a long read but hits extremely close to home. I think anyone who has experienced this kind of burnout can relate - I can relate to so much of it, m

Wow, this is a long read but hits extremely close to home. I think anyone who has experienced this kind of burnout can relate - I can relate to so much of it, more than I'd like to write publicly. I'm lucky to have a job where although my main value is tolerating a lot of disrespect and pointless abuse, I value my colleagues a lot and enjoy working with them, and my job/product/company is doing something meaningful, which offsets it quite a lot. I've also been in roles where that hasn't been true and the oppressiveness after a while is hard to put into words - particularly people like the unsympathetic bad-advice relative that thinks anyone that makes what you make shouldn't be miserable at all. The first time I noticed I was burning out like this, at an old miserable job, was there was a part of my commute I'd been taking for 10+ years where a few weeks in February, the morning sunrise will shine in a particular way at an intersection I noticed. Then, one year, I noticed this again and in my head I was like "oh, it's February again" and kind of uneasily noted that it had only felt like a few months, not an entire year - and then the next year it happened, was even more unsettling - huge chunks of time I couldn't really piece together clearly in between the two years. The year after I got a little bit better of a job and had recovered from burnout, the "February sunlight" phenomenon stopped. It now feels like a full year in between noticing this, if I notice at all, and I'm grateful for that very small and weird win.