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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
(charleshughsmith.blogspot.com)575 points by dxs 9 January 2025 | 328 comments
Comments
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this was labeled with the overused "nervous breakdown" in those times.
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
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
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-h...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/about-8-us-adults-have-e...
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.
How did we manage to lose perfectly good scrollbars in this race for colonization of mars and AI singularity?
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.
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-Defen...
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.
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.
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.