It seems like AI to me as well. “That’s the gap” is a familiar Claude-ism, as are the references to a “pivot” and the use of “touch” to mean “affect”.
To be fair, I’ve reached the point where most random blog posts I read on the internet seem AI written, so it could just be confirmation bias on my part.
It doesn’t sound too AI generated, and the stories flow well without much text that mean nothing. (Also, she’s a consultant, so writing this content is meant to signal some professional skill. There’s not much spam, just 1 blog article a month.)
Even if it had AI help to edit, the content still matches my lived experiences of people mgmt.
> Right now I have a mental block with reading ai written or ai enchanced text. So unless the article has a pre-2021 date... I'll ask ai to summarize it
That's uh, an interesting solution. As long as it's your LLM?
It seems enough people appreciated the story to upvote it though... but that assumes HN's algorithm is fair, it's free of bots, and the people voting are critical and honest on what they upvote.
In my opinion, it boils down to what ideas/experiences were seeded.
In this article for example, the author is clearly sharing their first-hand experience, therefore injecting observations from reality and their own reflection on top of it, and they then probably shaped/refined it with AI.
A slop, as I see it, is when you generate content from a very thin prompt and then share it as is.
If you didn’t catch on, this is an ad for coaching services. The solution it’s proposing is to start paying for coaching sessions with this person. The prose has a very AI feel to it, especially the second half where it starts breaking down into the AI-isms like “What actually shifts things” section header.
The actual “coaching” examples are about addressing the people’s self-worth and self-perceptions, which is uncomfortably dipping into territory that is better (and often cheaper, especially with insurance) served by actually therapists. A lot of burnout cases like these, especially where workloads are low and complications outside of work are major factors, are more appropriately matched to depression than typical work burnout, which is better addressed by trained therapists than career coaches.
Interesting. It would seem to me to be a piece from someone who made a role for themselves and enjoys it enough to write about it, which was the kind of “truth marketing” we thought would win out in the Age of Blogging. It absolutely functions as an ad, but it was also worth a read.
>It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you
Over the last five years ago I finally realized that is an issue for me. A combination of that plus having far too much of my (low) self-esteem bound up in needing praise from work. I chased my way to a senior role at a big SaaS that would look grand on my resume and paid quite well. After a little over two years, I simply resigned because the crippling feeling of not being useful at all was killing me. And I knew it wasn’t fixable, because my role was a “bullshit job”. So I took the summer off and that was wonderful, but when I started looking for work, for the first time in decades I had to chase it instead of it chasing me. Wound up at a startup that was a perfect fit: my chosen technology stack, still really small and needed fires put out.
It turned out they couldn’t live without the fires and thought the disaster they kept enlargening was good (VC money is a hell of a drug) and they severed me (along with a bunch of other firefighters they had hired) and finding a new gig wasn’t easier that time. Plus the one I found went under 6 days before I was to start.
I wound up taking on a QA role at a huge, old-school company and it is theoretically mind-numbing drudgery, but there was so much room for improvement that I started to dig it. Somewhere in there, two decades of depression eased all the way up. Now they’ve transitioned me into inventing their QA for AI and I am over the moon, digging into research papers, butting into high-level academic discussions and feel like I’ve found a fit. So I do think there’s something to what the author is saying.
HN needs to start prohibiting people from submitting posts when they turn up AI-generated content. They can still post comments, they just can't submit new threads. This is a site for humans and human-created writing. The article is a made-up farce.
Ultimately the common thread in most of these cases seems to be a lack of purpose and meaning in life in general, not really an issue with the specific work environment.
The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person. This is something that some combination of family, traditional social structures and religion used to provide for a lot of people.
"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way. It's no wonder people end up feeling "burnt out" - that's your brain telling you that what you're doing is ultimately pointless, and your brain is absolutely right.
Treat work first and foremost as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and generally you'll be happier. You can (and should) take pleasure from your craft and a job well done, but honestly who cares how your Series A goes.
"Work coaching" or whatever this article is advertising will probably not help you at all
In my case, my work is being devalued by AI.[0] The same effort nets smaller and smaller returns every month, even though the work is _still_ necessary, because AI does not do original investigative work. It's hard to put work into something that might vanish in a few months.
I'm starting to feel something a lot like how people describe burnout. I need to do a bunch of different things to stay afloat, but I ain't got any gas left in the tank.
I find pleasure in other aspects of my life, but I still need to put a roof over my head.
I'm feeling the same way, and when I brought it up to some friends in tech it turned out in our group of 8 I was the least depressed.
The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.
I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.
I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).
Thanks for writing this. This is how support groups start, when people find out that they're not the only ones going through this.
When I opened up to friends (and wrote that post), it encouraged a whole lot of people to also open up. We shared tricks, talked it out, and just felt a little bit more seen.
> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person
That maybe your own opinion. The older I get the more I realize that the ignorance is bliss - the less I know the better, nothing drains my energy more than human connections and I don't have to be better or worse, I'm just perfect the way I am and if anyone doesn't like that, it's their problem and not mine.
Yeah, I'm not sure I find either your or the parent comment's experience totally reflective of my own, but I definitely agree that I don't think the "purpose of life" is a very well-agreed upon thing. People have debated it for pretty much all of human history, and I'm not sure how anyone can reach any sort of conclusion that isn't fully personal to their own experience (I guess I lean towards existentialism)
Ironicly, in these cases more work can help the burnout. When you work 80 hours per week you are so busy you never notice you are not making meaningful human connections. When you only work 30 that leaves plenty of time to look at your own life and realize it isn't meaningful.
That shouldn't be taken as a sign that working more is good. It is a sign you need to fix your personal life which isn't easy. Work can be a useful part of making and keeping personal connections, but it shouldn't be the only part of it.
same logic applies to using drugs to self-soothe. if you're high all the time, you have no time to realistically engage with the material realities of your socio-emotional life and health. instead of taking the time to reflect on past actions and develop insight on how you're relating with others or living your life, you just work instead. and, in the meantime, dissonance compounds as background radiation
eventually that just leads to an even bigger crashout, burnout, break. Sinclair Lewis parodied this as early as 1922 in Babbitt [0], depicting a man who is economically satisfied and fits perfectly the mold of the white picket life and yet is devoid of meaning and satisfaction. he then spends his years in the wilderness crashing out before stumbling back into conformity because he knows nothing else
you can find meaning outside of work in so many ways. joining a small organizing group, help run mutual aid efforts, even dipping a toe into civic engagement. disentangle achieving goals that signify success from living your values and you'll be on your way to a better regulated life [1]
There is no singular “purpose of life”, different people are built differently and experience the world in their own way.
Some are lucky enough to get meaning from the default path of those around them, some have trouble finding a way that works for them.
Every person should consider what their own purpose is (and why, and what “purpose” even means for them) or they will be held in thrall to the social forces around them. If they don’t fundamentally align with those forces, they will have a bad time, and they may blame themselves rather than recognizing that they should seek a different path.
> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person.
These are nice things. But let's be honest, there is no objective purpose in life beyond the biological imperative. Purpose is subjective, and people will find that on their own. Or not.
"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way.
I would add a little nuance. One thing is your job isn't advancing Humanity Progress in a very direct and unambiguous way, say you work for some Very Important Organization that Does Good All the Time. Another thing is your job is totally useless or even harmful to society.
Maybe most of us are in between?
I've worked at dysfunctional companies that made me personally unhappy (busyworks, company politics, waste, bad bosses, bad teammates...) that somehow made some good things in the grand scheme of things, other that made me very happy with more neutral results.
Someone has to do mundane things, even to raise children and give a chance to the next generation to improve the world.
I don't believe putting too much thought in purpose is healthy.
Oftentimes it's undiagnosed health issues, such as vitamin deficiencies and/or malabsorption conditions such as gluten intolerance preventing proper vitamin levels, that can present much like "inexplicable" burnout, imho.
Do you think it could be a combination of things? Like, in order to avoid burnout you need some degree of meaning but also some degree of success and positive work environment.
I'm coming at this from the perspective that I've been struggling with a lot of burn out and I'm mostly proud of who I am and what I do but I'm stressed because I constantly have to compensate for society's failure to reward people's contributions.
That could just be me though. I definitely agree that I think that meaning and purpose is a big thing that people are missing now.
I don't think you're unusual at all. The modern world is almost designed to make you crazy in some ways and makes it harder than it ideally would be to achieve these ideals (which is what they are, we're all human and none of us can achieve this all the time).
Unfortunately largely it is what it is and can't be changed, the only thing we can change is how we choose to respond to it
> not really an issue with the specific work environment.
I’ve contributed some time in a mentoring group. Many of the cases people would call “burnout” had little to do with their work. Once they started talking details about their life situation it would become obvious that their problems ran deeper, but blaming work was an easy way to externalize it and place the blame on easy villains: Corporations, capitalism, managers, coworkers.
There were a lot of situations like this where someone would get a new job, take fewer hours, or even some people requested demotions and took a pay cut. Then when nothing changed about their well-being, they’d shift to blaming something new at work. I talked to people who could seemingly find ways to “burnout” in every situation they’ve encountered from high school through job hopping. It’s really hard to get someone to accept that maybe the problem is running deeper than their environment, and maybe something they’re doing (unintentionally, I’m not trying to place blame) is actually leading to this outcome over and over again.
I agree that work coaching is not the solution. It presumes the diagnosis and anchors blame to work, which starts obscuring possibilities outside of that pre-chosen explanation. Regular old therapy from a trained therapist is probably a better place to start. Might be cheaper, too, especially if insurance is involved.
Burnout isn't about the number of hours. Burnout occurs because you are actively doing something that you fundamentally don't believe is worth the time.
I can work 80 hour weeks if it is a project that I am invested in or find interesting and feel zero burnout. I am working on a project currently I don't believe in and often I work maybe 6 to 10 hours of a 35 hour week and find it difficult to care about the work.
It's not as easy as that though; most people I know that ended up burnt out were the opposite, where they were actively doing everything that they fundamentally did believe was worth the time. Saying "yes" to every new responsibility, getting really enthousiastic and excited for every new opportunity, wanting to be involved and engaged with everything that comes in their path. Burnout starts (for these people) when they start to take work home, when they do extra in their free time, when they keep busy with work or something work related right up to the point where they go to bed.
This is where employers fail them. I get that employers actually want dedicated, committed, enthusiastic employees, and that these employers (and managers) do the same thing, taking their job home, living for the job, etc. But it's their job to protect their employees and themselves. If a manager finds out one of their employees is taking their job home, they should intervene.
But this is the double edged thing that managers - and lawmakers - have to deal with.
I write a newsletter every two weeks (more or less). My primary income comes from consulting, not coaching.
Most of the coaching work I do has nothing to do with burnout and it isn't my specialty. If that's the primary thing you were struggling with I'd probably point you to a different person. That being said, it comes up with most of my clients at some point or another because feeling super worn down seems to be a staple of our current existence (as the debate on this thread shows).
As for how I wrote it, these are real stories of real people that I anonymized. I outlined and drafted everything and I usually dictate my first draft within that outline. I then work with AI to clean it up and help me finesse some things where I get stuck. I already changed that final header which I agree with you was neither the point I was making and sounded like off-the-shelf AI. I always struggle the most with headers and the title. I stand by the ideas as 100% my own.
Ultimately, I've gotten a few folks reaching out saying it provided some useful frameworks and perspectives for them, and I'm glad for the reflection it inspired here around what the purpose of work is and various stories of how you've found satisfaction in your employment. So from that sense I'm quite proud of this one because it's mostly had the desired effect of self-reflection.
I’ve found “burnout” is often shorthand for a feeling that something broke and there’s no complete fix. It’s a scenario where we can’t just get some sleep or take some vacation and be good as new. Even if we go back to the job and look normal-ish to colleagues, there’s a weakened seam where we did the repair, and going back into the environment where the break happened puts stress on that same spot.
So the solution tends to be learning how to avoid injury (boundaries, mental health), and/or a bigger change in the conditions. I think this post is mostly about the latter.
Hey Claude - The information in this essay is fine, but you have got to stop leaning on correctio as a rhetorical device. The whole essay is built on it. We've talked about this before and it's grating because you use it in every piece of writing you produce. It's just not how people write.
I had worked 25 hard years to LeanFIRE which ag the end burned me out but I knew why. Less than two years later divorce happened. This forced me back into the workforce. I chose a job that fit my values. I have no reason or understanding of why I matter anymore and that has led to significant and severe burnout.
Find a purpose in life and protect it. In the end you can only rely only on yourself.
over my long career, i have had the (dis)pleasure of working with many of these career/organization/employment consultant/coach types. if i can pass on a piece of advice for younger folk: avoid them. dont waste your money.
especially now, if you want coach-style advice, just put your thoughts/problems into chatgpt or whatever. that's probably all the coach is going to do anyway.
I would never advise anyone to get mental health advice from a computer, but if you're contemplating using the service of those 'life coach', yeah, consider using an AI. Even Emacs' therapist.
That "just" is doing a lot of work though; the jobs market is... challenging right now. Cost of living has exploded, demand for software developers is unstable due to the advent of AI assisted coding. (for the latter I'm sure the market will correct itself over time but still, short term it's an issue)
Weird, I’m usually sensitive to telltales, but I didn’t read it as AI generated enough that I stopped reading, and I found it relevant. I felt like it had a pretty substantial human input behind it, maybe because I related to the stories.
Expecting life satisfaction to spring forth from work is irrational new age nonsense. You need to pay the rent. You need food on the table. Get paid, and go home. You can work hard and work late if need be, but make time for fulfillment elsewhere. People are unsatisfied because they're looking for self realization in a cubicle and it's usually not going to happen.
I did read some actually until the cheap output quality started showing.
I have a hypothesis which has solved burn out for me, it’s contrarian to most health advice out there. “Just follow the sun and cut stimulation after it’s down”. You can use a tracker or my app sunsignal.app to help track it. As long as you: a) take a big break in the middle of the day b) cut stimulation after sunset (blue light, food, etc) and c) place most of your work between the daylight and otherwise let you body do what it pleases you will cure most of your health ailments. Fuck everyone else who tries to over complicate it and get you to resign into thinking you should accept the industrial age’s noise pollution and pretend you can override a broken environment’s poison with wearables, supplements, etc. you are being told to buy expensive solutions to symptoms rather than addressing the root cause.the industry has no problem selling you solutions to a problem it created.
Can you expand on this? Your current message could be interpreted either to mean that Gen Z is prone to complaining or it could mean that Gen Z is particularly screwed.
Reads like an AI generated ad for coaching. Someone please chime in if you feel otherwise but IMO this one is not worth the read.
It seems like AI to me as well. “That’s the gap” is a familiar Claude-ism, as are the references to a “pivot” and the use of “touch” to mean “affect”.
To be fair, I’ve reached the point where most random blog posts I read on the internet seem AI written, so it could just be confirmation bias on my part.
Hard disagree on “not worth the read”.
It doesn’t sound too AI generated, and the stories flow well without much text that mean nothing. (Also, she’s a consultant, so writing this content is meant to signal some professional skill. There’s not much spam, just 1 blog article a month.)
Even if it had AI help to edit, the content still matches my lived experiences of people mgmt.
That means we are crossing the line and people can't tell anymore.
Most likely this is the author's story enhanced with AI and then edited. That is the future I think.
I think you're probably right
Right now I have a mental block with reading ai written or ai enchanced text. So unless the article has a pre-2021 date... I'll ask ai to summarize it
I think I'll eventually have to get over that bias
> Right now I have a mental block with reading ai written or ai enchanced text. So unless the article has a pre-2021 date... I'll ask ai to summarize it
That's uh, an interesting solution. As long as it's your LLM?
But then you are reading an AI generated text as well?
Slop is slop, whether you edit it in or whether you generate it de novo.
It seems enough people appreciated the story to upvote it though... but that assumes HN's algorithm is fair, it's free of bots, and the people voting are critical and honest on what they upvote.
I disagree, I think this is too black and white.
In my opinion, it boils down to what ideas/experiences were seeded.
In this article for example, the author is clearly sharing their first-hand experience, therefore injecting observations from reality and their own reflection on top of it, and they then probably shaped/refined it with AI.
A slop, as I see it, is when you generate content from a very thin prompt and then share it as is.
Not hard data: ChatGPT and Gemini both say that the article sounds like written by a human most likely with AI assistance.
Doesn’t mean it’s not an ad for coaching. I share your sentiment. (So do ChatGPT and Gemini, they also agree that the article sounds like an ad)
If you didn’t catch on, this is an ad for coaching services. The solution it’s proposing is to start paying for coaching sessions with this person. The prose has a very AI feel to it, especially the second half where it starts breaking down into the AI-isms like “What actually shifts things” section header.
The actual “coaching” examples are about addressing the people’s self-worth and self-perceptions, which is uncomfortably dipping into territory that is better (and often cheaper, especially with insurance) served by actually therapists. A lot of burnout cases like these, especially where workloads are low and complications outside of work are major factors, are more appropriately matched to depression than typical work burnout, which is better addressed by trained therapists than career coaches.
Interesting. It would seem to me to be a piece from someone who made a role for themselves and enjoys it enough to write about it, which was the kind of “truth marketing” we thought would win out in the Age of Blogging. It absolutely functions as an ad, but it was also worth a read.
>It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you
Over the last five years ago I finally realized that is an issue for me. A combination of that plus having far too much of my (low) self-esteem bound up in needing praise from work. I chased my way to a senior role at a big SaaS that would look grand on my resume and paid quite well. After a little over two years, I simply resigned because the crippling feeling of not being useful at all was killing me. And I knew it wasn’t fixable, because my role was a “bullshit job”. So I took the summer off and that was wonderful, but when I started looking for work, for the first time in decades I had to chase it instead of it chasing me. Wound up at a startup that was a perfect fit: my chosen technology stack, still really small and needed fires put out.
It turned out they couldn’t live without the fires and thought the disaster they kept enlargening was good (VC money is a hell of a drug) and they severed me (along with a bunch of other firefighters they had hired) and finding a new gig wasn’t easier that time. Plus the one I found went under 6 days before I was to start.
I wound up taking on a QA role at a huge, old-school company and it is theoretically mind-numbing drudgery, but there was so much room for improvement that I started to dig it. Somewhere in there, two decades of depression eased all the way up. Now they’ve transitioned me into inventing their QA for AI and I am over the moon, digging into research papers, butting into high-level academic discussions and feel like I’ve found a fit. So I do think there’s something to what the author is saying.
Also, if it were an ad, wouldn’t the author have posted it? Someone found value in it.
Started reading, got about halfway through the first sentence and a subscription nag popped up. You blocked the content, so I bounced.
HN needs to start prohibiting people from submitting posts when they turn up AI-generated content. They can still post comments, they just can't submit new threads. This is a site for humans and human-created writing. The article is a made-up farce.
Ultimately the common thread in most of these cases seems to be a lack of purpose and meaning in life in general, not really an issue with the specific work environment.
The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person. This is something that some combination of family, traditional social structures and religion used to provide for a lot of people.
"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way. It's no wonder people end up feeling "burnt out" - that's your brain telling you that what you're doing is ultimately pointless, and your brain is absolutely right.
Treat work first and foremost as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and generally you'll be happier. You can (and should) take pleasure from your craft and a job well done, but honestly who cares how your Series A goes.
"Work coaching" or whatever this article is advertising will probably not help you at all
In my case, my work is being devalued by AI.[0] The same effort nets smaller and smaller returns every month, even though the work is _still_ necessary, because AI does not do original investigative work. It's hard to put work into something that might vanish in a few months.
I'm starting to feel something a lot like how people describe burnout. I need to do a bunch of different things to stay afloat, but I ain't got any gas left in the tank.
I find pleasure in other aspects of my life, but I still need to put a roof over my head.
[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
I'm feeling the same way, and when I brought it up to some friends in tech it turned out in our group of 8 I was the least depressed.
The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.
I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.
I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).
Thanks for writing this. This is how support groups start, when people find out that they're not the only ones going through this.
When I opened up to friends (and wrote that post), it encouraged a whole lot of people to also open up. We shared tricks, talked it out, and just felt a little bit more seen.
That goes along way.
Couple that with the climate crisis and political breakdown, and you've got a stew going.
Ready to join the revolution, comrades?
> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person
That maybe your own opinion. The older I get the more I realize that the ignorance is bliss - the less I know the better, nothing drains my energy more than human connections and I don't have to be better or worse, I'm just perfect the way I am and if anyone doesn't like that, it's their problem and not mine.
Yeah, I'm not sure I find either your or the parent comment's experience totally reflective of my own, but I definitely agree that I don't think the "purpose of life" is a very well-agreed upon thing. People have debated it for pretty much all of human history, and I'm not sure how anyone can reach any sort of conclusion that isn't fully personal to their own experience (I guess I lean towards existentialism)
[dead]
You forgot the /s
I mean it, not being sarcastic
Ironicly, in these cases more work can help the burnout. When you work 80 hours per week you are so busy you never notice you are not making meaningful human connections. When you only work 30 that leaves plenty of time to look at your own life and realize it isn't meaningful.
That shouldn't be taken as a sign that working more is good. It is a sign you need to fix your personal life which isn't easy. Work can be a useful part of making and keeping personal connections, but it shouldn't be the only part of it.
same logic applies to using drugs to self-soothe. if you're high all the time, you have no time to realistically engage with the material realities of your socio-emotional life and health. instead of taking the time to reflect on past actions and develop insight on how you're relating with others or living your life, you just work instead. and, in the meantime, dissonance compounds as background radiation
eventually that just leads to an even bigger crashout, burnout, break. Sinclair Lewis parodied this as early as 1922 in Babbitt [0], depicting a man who is economically satisfied and fits perfectly the mold of the white picket life and yet is devoid of meaning and satisfaction. he then spends his years in the wilderness crashing out before stumbling back into conformity because he knows nothing else
you can find meaning outside of work in so many ways. joining a small organizing group, help run mutual aid efforts, even dipping a toe into civic engagement. disentangle achieving goals that signify success from living your values and you'll be on your way to a better regulated life [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)
[1] https://psychwire.com/free-resources/expert-insights/resourc...
> you are so busy you never notice you are not making meaningful human connections
Until you slow down because you are sick, or you just get a slow day at work, and get time to do a bit of reflection.
Burnout is learned and/or imposed helplessness. When your agency is missing it's like part of you is dying.
Can you expand on that? I’m not sure I agree, and at the same time I think you might be saying something profound that I haven’t understood.
There is no singular “purpose of life”, different people are built differently and experience the world in their own way.
Some are lucky enough to get meaning from the default path of those around them, some have trouble finding a way that works for them.
Every person should consider what their own purpose is (and why, and what “purpose” even means for them) or they will be held in thrall to the social forces around them. If they don’t fundamentally align with those forces, they will have a bad time, and they may blame themselves rather than recognizing that they should seek a different path.
> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person.
These are nice things. But let's be honest, there is no objective purpose in life beyond the biological imperative. Purpose is subjective, and people will find that on their own. Or not.
The purpose of life is to make more life (children). Life forms that do not do that die out. Having children give you so much fulfillment and purpose.
There is a good book on this topic "Selfish reasons to have more kids" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...
"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way.
I would add a little nuance. One thing is your job isn't advancing Humanity Progress in a very direct and unambiguous way, say you work for some Very Important Organization that Does Good All the Time. Another thing is your job is totally useless or even harmful to society.
Maybe most of us are in between?
I've worked at dysfunctional companies that made me personally unhappy (busyworks, company politics, waste, bad bosses, bad teammates...) that somehow made some good things in the grand scheme of things, other that made me very happy with more neutral results.
Someone has to do mundane things, even to raise children and give a chance to the next generation to improve the world.
I don't believe putting too much thought in purpose is healthy.
Oftentimes it's undiagnosed health issues, such as vitamin deficiencies and/or malabsorption conditions such as gluten intolerance preventing proper vitamin levels, that can present much like "inexplicable" burnout, imho.
Do you think it could be a combination of things? Like, in order to avoid burnout you need some degree of meaning but also some degree of success and positive work environment.
I'm coming at this from the perspective that I've been struggling with a lot of burn out and I'm mostly proud of who I am and what I do but I'm stressed because I constantly have to compensate for society's failure to reward people's contributions.
That could just be me though. I definitely agree that I think that meaning and purpose is a big thing that people are missing now.
I don't think you're unusual at all. The modern world is almost designed to make you crazy in some ways and makes it harder than it ideally would be to achieve these ideals (which is what they are, we're all human and none of us can achieve this all the time).
Unfortunately largely it is what it is and can't be changed, the only thing we can change is how we choose to respond to it
> not really an issue with the specific work environment.
I’ve contributed some time in a mentoring group. Many of the cases people would call “burnout” had little to do with their work. Once they started talking details about their life situation it would become obvious that their problems ran deeper, but blaming work was an easy way to externalize it and place the blame on easy villains: Corporations, capitalism, managers, coworkers.
There were a lot of situations like this where someone would get a new job, take fewer hours, or even some people requested demotions and took a pay cut. Then when nothing changed about their well-being, they’d shift to blaming something new at work. I talked to people who could seemingly find ways to “burnout” in every situation they’ve encountered from high school through job hopping. It’s really hard to get someone to accept that maybe the problem is running deeper than their environment, and maybe something they’re doing (unintentionally, I’m not trying to place blame) is actually leading to this outcome over and over again.
I agree that work coaching is not the solution. It presumes the diagnosis and anchors blame to work, which starts obscuring possibilities outside of that pre-chosen explanation. Regular old therapy from a trained therapist is probably a better place to start. Might be cheaper, too, especially if insurance is involved.
[dead]
Burnout isn't about the number of hours. Burnout occurs because you are actively doing something that you fundamentally don't believe is worth the time.
I can work 80 hour weeks if it is a project that I am invested in or find interesting and feel zero burnout. I am working on a project currently I don't believe in and often I work maybe 6 to 10 hours of a 35 hour week and find it difficult to care about the work.
It's not as easy as that though; most people I know that ended up burnt out were the opposite, where they were actively doing everything that they fundamentally did believe was worth the time. Saying "yes" to every new responsibility, getting really enthousiastic and excited for every new opportunity, wanting to be involved and engaged with everything that comes in their path. Burnout starts (for these people) when they start to take work home, when they do extra in their free time, when they keep busy with work or something work related right up to the point where they go to bed.
This is where employers fail them. I get that employers actually want dedicated, committed, enthusiastic employees, and that these employers (and managers) do the same thing, taking their job home, living for the job, etc. But it's their job to protect their employees and themselves. If a manager finds out one of their employees is taking their job home, they should intervene.
But this is the double edged thing that managers - and lawmakers - have to deal with.
Jenny (the author) here --
I write a newsletter every two weeks (more or less). My primary income comes from consulting, not coaching.
Most of the coaching work I do has nothing to do with burnout and it isn't my specialty. If that's the primary thing you were struggling with I'd probably point you to a different person. That being said, it comes up with most of my clients at some point or another because feeling super worn down seems to be a staple of our current existence (as the debate on this thread shows).
As for how I wrote it, these are real stories of real people that I anonymized. I outlined and drafted everything and I usually dictate my first draft within that outline. I then work with AI to clean it up and help me finesse some things where I get stuck. I already changed that final header which I agree with you was neither the point I was making and sounded like off-the-shelf AI. I always struggle the most with headers and the title. I stand by the ideas as 100% my own.
Ultimately, I've gotten a few folks reaching out saying it provided some useful frameworks and perspectives for them, and I'm glad for the reflection it inspired here around what the purpose of work is and various stories of how you've found satisfaction in your employment. So from that sense I'm quite proud of this one because it's mostly had the desired effect of self-reflection.
I’ve found “burnout” is often shorthand for a feeling that something broke and there’s no complete fix. It’s a scenario where we can’t just get some sleep or take some vacation and be good as new. Even if we go back to the job and look normal-ish to colleagues, there’s a weakened seam where we did the repair, and going back into the environment where the break happened puts stress on that same spot.
So the solution tends to be learning how to avoid injury (boundaries, mental health), and/or a bigger change in the conditions. I think this post is mostly about the latter.
Hey Claude - The information in this essay is fine, but you have got to stop leaning on correctio as a rhetorical device. The whole essay is built on it. We've talked about this before and it's grating because you use it in every piece of writing you produce. It's just not how people write.
two new words / terms learned today, correctio and epanorthosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanorthosis) - thanks, it's worth millions⸻no, morbillions!
[dead]
Sharing my small bit of wisdom about burn out:
Burn out isn’t caused by putting in too many hours at work. It’s a symptom of forcing yourself to do work you don’t align with.
Forcing yourself to care about KPI’s and goals you don’t give a hoot about will usually result in collapse.
I'm burnt out reading "What actually fixes things"
Burnout happened to me because I lost my way.
I had worked 25 hard years to LeanFIRE which ag the end burned me out but I knew why. Less than two years later divorce happened. This forced me back into the workforce. I chose a job that fit my values. I have no reason or understanding of why I matter anymore and that has led to significant and severe burnout.
Find a purpose in life and protect it. In the end you can only rely only on yourself.
Sounds like a mis-alignment in purpose, and meaning.
Also, potentially chronic sleep deprivation. (Sleep apnea, disrupted circadian rhythm, possible artificial light, news/social scrolling)
Humans need alignment there, then we thrive.
over my long career, i have had the (dis)pleasure of working with many of these career/organization/employment consultant/coach types. if i can pass on a piece of advice for younger folk: avoid them. dont waste your money.
especially now, if you want coach-style advice, just put your thoughts/problems into chatgpt or whatever. that's probably all the coach is going to do anyway.
I would never advise anyone to get mental health advice from a computer, but if you're contemplating using the service of those 'life coach', yeah, consider using an AI. Even Emacs' therapist.
>I would never advise anyone to get mental health advice from a computer,
yes, sorry, to be abundantly clear i am not suggesting to replace a licensed therapist with ai.
i am suggesting to replace "life coach", "job coach", etc.
If you hate your job, an hour feels like hell. But it's your responsability, and if you don't like it, you just got to move.
That "just" is doing a lot of work though; the jobs market is... challenging right now. Cost of living has exploded, demand for software developers is unstable due to the advent of AI assisted coding. (for the latter I'm sure the market will correct itself over time but still, short term it's an issue)
Weird, I’m usually sensitive to telltales, but I didn’t read it as AI generated enough that I stopped reading, and I found it relevant. I felt like it had a pretty substantial human input behind it, maybe because I related to the stories.
Expecting life satisfaction to spring forth from work is irrational new age nonsense. You need to pay the rent. You need food on the table. Get paid, and go home. You can work hard and work late if need be, but make time for fulfillment elsewhere. People are unsatisfied because they're looking for self realization in a cubicle and it's usually not going to happen.
AI;DR
I did read some actually until the cheap output quality started showing.
I have a hypothesis which has solved burn out for me, it’s contrarian to most health advice out there. “Just follow the sun and cut stimulation after it’s down”. You can use a tracker or my app sunsignal.app to help track it. As long as you: a) take a big break in the middle of the day b) cut stimulation after sunset (blue light, food, etc) and c) place most of your work between the daylight and otherwise let you body do what it pleases you will cure most of your health ailments. Fuck everyone else who tries to over complicate it and get you to resign into thinking you should accept the industrial age’s noise pollution and pretend you can override a broken environment’s poison with wearables, supplements, etc. you are being told to buy expensive solutions to symptoms rather than addressing the root cause.the industry has no problem selling you solutions to a problem it created.
[flagged]
Can you expand on this? Your current message could be interpreted either to mean that Gen Z is prone to complaining or it could mean that Gen Z is particularly screwed.
[flagged]