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I wish I could upvote this 100x. I gave a lot of myself to a job, of my own free will. It felt like a mission at the time. Then I lost several people in my lif

I wish I could upvote this 100x. I gave a lot of myself to a job, of my own free will. It felt like a mission at the time. Then I lost several people in my life who were my world, and discovered the harsh reality that it didn’t matter at all, and I never really stopped to be honest about what I wanted in life. I’ll never get the time back that I gave away for nothing. While I was dealing with my personal life exploding, there was a political change at work (unrelated to me directly) that made most of what I had sweat over for a few years nearly irrelevant. It reinforced the lesson and like yours, the importance of boundaries and knowledge of self.

JustExAWS 1y ago
So I guess I should be completely honest and hopefully this will provide a life lesson for someone. While it’s true I’ve never experienced burnout because of work, I did experience burn out because of my personal life. I wasn’t willing to walk away from a toxic marriage soon enough and in hindsight, the signs were clear. The marriage was short - only four years. But the mental and financial repercussions lasted a lot longer. I stayed at my second job 6 years too long (for a total of nine) because my personal life wrecked my self confidence. I left that job in 2008 (and got remarried in 2012). But I didn’t fully rebuild my career to be competitive as you’d standard “senior” [sic] enterprise dev until 2014 at 40 year old and didn’t get into any company of note until 46.