from Hacker News

Burnout

by talmir on 3/17/14, 1:16 PM with 131 comments

• by agentultra on 3/17/14, 3:13 PM

  My theory is that "burnout" is a symptom of the endemic "hero" meme of our culture. Think about all the movies you've seen since the 1980s, the shows you've watched, the books you've read. Embedded in the majority of them is the simple idea that there's something special inside you that can set you apart from everyone else. It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique passes through our scrutiny without a second thought. We want to believe it's true even as we examine our motivations for doing so because it's hard wired into our brains.

  The problem is that this weakness is easily exploited. Writers, motivational speakers, game designers, poets... they're all in the business of hacking our brains. We've been doing such a good job of it since the sixties that our popular culture is unconsciously driven by it.

  And it manifests as burnout when it clashes with other popular memes like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you just put in a little elbow grease and work harder you will stand out. If you write that amazing library to make programmers' lives easier they will shower you with praise on the Internet and invite you to speak at conferences so that you may shower the masses with your brilliant message. Burnout happens when all of the rewards of those fantasies fail to materialize despite all of the effort and hard work you've put into chasing them.

  Worked 60 - 80 hour weeks for the last six months and still got overlooked for that promotion? Burnout.

  Put off investing time with your family in order to work on that semi-popular open source library and pimp it out at every conference you can submit a proposal to... and you STILL aren't getting the accolades and recognition you deserve? Burnout.

  My advice for avoiding burnout? Figure out where your desires and ambitions are coming from. Why do you want to work so hard for recognition? Why do you feel you need to be recognized? What's so important about it? Start from there.

• by quaffapint on 3/17/14, 2:53 PM

  I've got a crappy dev job that I've been in for over a decade that only gets worse with less pay. I don't bring home enough money and have my family living paycheck to paycheck. I stress over it and keep trying side stuff to bring in more, which mostly fail. I'm working hard right now trying to get this next side project out the door in the next month.

  I'm in my 40s and no one in the area has raised their dev salaries since the 2008 drop. Given my age, it's only going to be harder to find jobs if it comes to that. I'm stuck. It's stressful and it sucks.

  But, I still make time for the family. I go to their school functions, and help with their homework. I play games and watch movies. I'm doing it for them. I just wish I could do more. Someone once said they were jealous of me because I seem so content. My poker face must be pretty awesome.

• by jscheel on 3/17/14, 2:11 PM

  I am finding that it's better to just leave the stupid computer off when I get home. It gives me more time with my wife and daughter, and I feel more rested and ready for the next day. For example, last Saturday was filled with bike rides, walks, and playing outside. That's it. Yes, I have a list of about 10,000 different things I'm interesting in learning and doing, and another list that size of things that actually need to get done, but none of that will ever relax me or come close to the quality time I spend decompressing with my family and friends.

• by daGrevis on 3/17/14, 2:19 PM

  Here's a theory — an ideal job is a job that fulfills your desire to code to a level in which you don't want to do any coding after work hours. There's so much challenging tasks and new things you learn right away by doing things you are paid for that you don't need to search for something new after work.

• by snarfy on 3/17/14, 2:17 PM

  Burnout is a syndrome that happens from a series of failures, resulting in your brain automatically associating work with failure.

  The cure for burnout is a series of successes. You need to retrain your brain to associate work with success. Start small. Don't take on more than you can handle. Quit trying to make the uber server app and write a few simple command line utilities that work and work well.

• by sdegutis on 3/17/14, 2:38 PM

  > For the first time in years I had time to do silly stuff like playing video games, going out for a walk or watch movies. For the first time in years I didnt grit my teeth and churn out that little bit of code that would help me develop my skills further.

  > It feels great.

  I can totally relate. A few months ago, I started giving up on my open source projects, as a side-effect of burnout. Admittedly part of the solution was working hard to give up the hubris inside me that made me think my code and my ideas were vital to the world. But now that it's given up, I really do have a lot more free time. Last night, I was under a blanket on the couch, reading two full Sherlock Holmes[1] stories to my wife and children, who were just drawing or cuddling on the couch or whatever. We just kicked back and relaxed, and we all enjoyed it.

  The downside is that I now have a hard time keeping the motivating excitement going for new ideas I have. Just the other week I had an idea for a node-webkit-like idea based on JSCocoa, but it involved rewriting major parts of JSCocoa to get it to work properly. I've gotten pretty far[2] but I'm losing steam quickly and falling back into the "meh" state of life in which I'm now more interested in playing Starcraft 2 for an hour or two, or drawing some doodles. So it's a weird balance that I can't figure just yet.

  [1]: Later that night I read The Purloined Letter to my wife as she painted some walls, and we both enjoyed it but thought it was a little bit long-winded for what it had to say.

  [2]: http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos

• by dkhenry on 3/17/14, 3:10 PM

  I am not happy doing nothing. I don't understand how you can be do content just "chilling". Now don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with recreation and spending time with your family, there isn't even anything wrong with doing nothing, if its for a purpose, but just wasting time because you can is a waste of time. You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it.

  Maybe I am just odd, but I would much rather be hacking on my side projects then playing games and watching movies. I guess that the difference between your vocation being your passion and it just being something to pay the bills. Perhaps the author needs to find a different career that provides some fulfillment to him so he doesn't feel the need to waste his life decompressing from his job.

• by shadowmint on 3/17/14, 1:50 PM

  That's true... but there's also the flip side to the coin.

  Finishing things is good; but if you have a project you want to finish, you'll never finish it if you halfheartedly look at it once a week for an hour.

  If you spend more than certain amount of time not looking at something or not working on it, you forget how it works and it takes all of that available time you have to get into 'the zone' where you're actually making progress on the task.

  So, I guess if you have an amazing forfulling job that is exactly what you're interested in, and you spend your days working on your interesting projects... sure.

  I'll be over here with my cup of 10pm coffee and a pile of rust code; blissfully hacking (and reading hacker news while head compiles :).

• by JamesBaxter on 3/17/14, 2:05 PM

  I'm nearly two years into my programming career and I'm really struggling with this balance. Every day at work I face a new programming challenge. Every night I feel guilty about not being able to motivate myself to work on either of the two side projects I've started.

  Video games work well as something mindless that clears my head at the end of the day. The problem is stopping playing before I've wasted my whole evening and the pain I get in my fingers/wrists after a whole day of repetitive movement.

  I need to find something less addictive that doesn't require much dexterity. I'm considering chess.

• by dceddia on 3/17/14, 11:09 PM

  This post really got me thinking, because I feel exactly the same way. The sequence of events described mirrors my own life so closely it borders on creepy.

  I've been falling further and further into the trap of "optimizing" lots of little things. Spending 5 hours reading Amazon reviews to buy an $11 guitar tuner. Trying to leave the house at exactly the right time to arrive at my destination on the dot. And then, becoming very frustrated when traffic does not cooperate or someone on the road is being less efficient than I want them to be.

  This post made me realize that thinking this way is almost like an addiction. The more I worry about how to squeeze productivity into a day or which tasks to work on to provide the most benefit (80/20!), the more anxious I feel. And it compounds. Because the next thought through my mind is "I can fix this anxious feeling by planning things out better!"

  I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way off this train is to stop trying to optimize and control for variables entirely. It's not enough to pick-and-choose, because then you're just meta-optimizing ("I'll just figure out which of these to-do items is the MOST important!") Much akin to an alcoholic having just one drink, I think any sort of optimization thinking might be enough to get the cycle started again. Maybe the only way to tame it is to avoid it entirely.

• by beebs93 on 3/17/14, 2:18 PM

  Good post - short, sweet and to the point.

  It's important to find that balance between what you love and what keeps you healthy. Some people here may go on the defensive and read it as "I don't work every waking hour and you shouldn't either", but hopefully they'll take a deep breath, release the kung fu grip on their copy of "Design Patterns" and remember to just grab a decent night's sleep every so often.

• by thu on 3/17/14, 2:16 PM

  What do you do if chilling out is not an option ? If your day job is maddening (and you feel like any other job would probably be maddening too) and the only alternative you have is to start your own company ? What do you do if you need to keep the day job to pay bills and work on your own product in the evening and the week-end until it can bring money ? When it seems that you can either burn out or succeed ?

• by pfortuny on 3/17/14, 2:52 PM

  Yes, try and look for happiness, which means a life you have control over, for a meaning of life much richer than 'the one with the greatest income to be had with my skills.'

  One needs a definition of happiness which

  a) Is appealing

  b) Is a long-term (lifelong) project

  c) Is valuable (in the sense of 'personal values')

  Usually, this means sharing your 'life' with other people first and foremost.

  And yes, burnout should not be a dirty word ever.

• by jwmoz on 3/17/14, 2:59 PM

  I got burnt out on a contract a few years ago, was a horrible feeling, continually tired and falling asleep, no enthusiasm for the role. Switched to a different contract and halved my commuting time and turned into a different person.

  Now when I finish work I'm out of here, no more coding or hacking at home, instead, I train at the gym or go out for food or more recently chill a lot.

• by freebs on 3/17/14, 1:38 PM

  As someone that has always found many things interesting, boiling it down to only a few things is very hard. Over the past year I've been slowly doing the same. I'm down to spending time with my family, web dev, marketing, and gaming. Choosing between web dev and marketing will be one of the hardest choices I make yet.

• by Bahamut on 3/17/14, 4:03 PM

  As much as I'd like to constantly be productive, I know that it's not healthy for my mental balance. If I want to be sharp in the long term, I find it ok to take a break every once in a while and chill out from being laser-focused & super-productive.

  YMMV

• by dubeye on 3/17/14, 4:04 PM

  In my mind, the term burnout is incorrectly used as a synonym for 'overworked and stressed to the point of collapse'. Whilst for me burnout means an expiry of enthusiasm and motivation which is a subtle difference perhaps.

• by stevenkovar on 3/17/14, 2:17 PM

  No matter how sharp your blade, your steel must be tempered.

  Life is about balance. You will break if you don't give your mind and body the rest it deserves. Often, great ideas find me when I am cooling down.

• by SDGT on 3/17/14, 1:50 PM

  > I might not be as good today as I would have been if I had kept grinding away.

  That is my overriding problem. If I stop, it means possible stagnation. There is no greater fear than becoming irrelevant.

• by EC1 on 3/17/14, 1:40 PM

  >A few years ago I wanted to know everything. I spent the day at work thinking about what I would do when I got home and then spend the evening studying various things as hard as I could. I would stress over how there werent enought hours in the day to do what I wanted to do. There was rarely an hour in the day where I wasnt productive in some way.

  Oou, this resonates with me. For the past year I've been trying to optimize my life as best I could. This meant cutting out time for food + commuting which were my biggest factors in sucking away time, as well as distractions. I moved about 10 meters from my place of work, and I cook all 7 days worth of food on Sunday nights. Now I can work 7am - 4pm at my day job, then 4:10pm - 11pm I can work on my own side projects. Been doing this for a year now and it's working out great, the revenue I make from my side company is almost level with my salary, then I can quit and truly be free, working entirely under my own vision.

  I don't feel like I will ever burn out. I have a list of topics I want to know before I die, and they're sorted by priority. Any time I am distracted, I read a bit from the top item of my list. Now when I'm working and become distracted, my "distraction" is reading material based around the project I'm working on. If I don't want to get back to that material, I choose something else and drag it to the top of my list, I prioritize pretty much my entire life with the "Clear" app.

  It's been going great, I'm thinking of writing a very in depth blog post about the way I've optimized my life and how it has helped me out. I've read more than 30 books this year, I have 6 developers working for me full-time, I have learned SO MUCH. I hope to keep going like this for the rest of my natural life.

  I rather sacrifice my 20's to live it up in my 30's. I cannot stand wasting any minutes on anything, I don't know when the switch flipped, but at some point, it did. I used to love spending hours on video games or jerking around, now, there is absolutely nothing in this world that I wouldn't give just to buy me some more time. This mentality has engrained itself in my brain now.

  I find myself ecstatic if I can make a new hour or free up some time somewhere just so I can read or learn more.

  People often compliment me on how motivated and ambitious I am, but honestly, it's just how I am, I don't wake up every morning saying "okay you're going to be motivated today". It just is.