Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recovering from Burnout and Depression

kierantie.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 266 posts

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#61

Post by taway_1212 »

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #59
ge96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking mysel…

I spent 2 hours getting a python environment properly setup last night. It's not pathetic.

Can cofirm. Programming IRL (esp. on a team) is mostly tedious crap like that. I'm glad it pays so well though.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#63

Post by taway_1212 »

crush-n-spread wrote: post #19
55555 wrote: post #15

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge t…

I submit that the working person greatly benefits from having a strongly held, over-arching life goal. Then even if he or she is working a soul-draining job for, say, a social media company, they will be content knowing it is a necessary step towards their goal.

Most people are not driven really, so this advice won't work for them.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#64

Post by jly »

55555 wrote: post #15

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge t…

I think this is more true than many would like to admit. Maybe 'most work' as meaningless isn't the way I would phrase it, but I know many including myself that are often creatively and technically challenged, work an average number of hours, but feel the mental stress of burnout purely because of the guilt and resentment of spending so much time on the specific job function, itself.

To put it a little more abstract than 'kicking the dog', much of the work we do is in service purely of the bottom line - for products no one demands or needs, that solve no real human needs (of which there are MANY unmet needs), but generate maximum profit often at the expense of others or our collective future. Some work that centers purely around controlling capital serves virtually no real human function and has no actual output except profit (think banking, real estate, etc). Maybe I'm in the minority but these thoughts weigh heavily on me and make it much hard to make myself 'work', regardless of compensation. We keep at it because it's not feasible or enjoyable to be low-income in the world we live in, but we feel the urge that we should be doing something else. I call that a form of burnout.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#65

Post by neuromantik8086 »

tutufan wrote: post #55
a3n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left a job last year that was the most meaningful job I've ever had. Despite the benefit to society, and my appreciation of that fact, I left because of an indignity. I essentially gave someone else power over how I felt about myself. Jobs are not just jobs, they're people too. You don't go to work and save the world every day, you mostly work with other people, which can be great, or it can be hell.

I've been through this as well, and it sucks. Sadly, even organizations doing societally important work can be incapable of policing their internal politics and professionalism in even a basic way. I'm still working on accepting this.

Relatedly, it took me a while to pick up on the fact that "non-profit" does not necessarily equate to "beneficial for society". Many non-profits out there have noble purported goals, but when you actually gain some experience at them you start to realize that they are vanity projects for the wealthy.

[edit]: To clarify, I'm not making the claim that all non-profits are vanity projects, just that there are many out there that are. If you ever do want to work in the non-profit sector, doing some due diligence before applying for a job is a must (I recommend obtaining the publicly reported financial records for a non-profit in Form 990; what a non-profit's founder pays him/herself relative to the average employee speaks volumes about their moral character).

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#67

Post by ge96 »

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #59
ge96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking mysel…

I spent 2 hours getting a python environment properly setup last night. It's not pathetic.

I could see that.

I briefly worked for a company and it took 7 hours or so to configure a working local copy of their site pulled from GitHub. Ran into problems with PHP versions, MySQL datetime stuff... that was nuts though they used bower, npm, twig, composer (all related) but yeah.

It's a complicated code/company creating charts/maps from data so it's not "just a website".

crazy too how many years things take to develop. You hear some "popular thing" or something advertised even like "Zip Recruiter" for example, started in 2010.

Oh well the little dopamine hit from making something work is a good feeling.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#68

Post by watwut »

ge96 wrote: post #56
55555 wrote: post #15

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge t…

random unconnected thought I'm working on a "may eventually make me money" thing and I do pretty much 100% of the work as far as technical aspect goes (coding) and I'm set to have 30% of this "thing"... 13 hours of coding today, I feel like I achieved nothing. And it's like there is no return, I didn't get paid "someday you'll make money maybe" and I'm not sure I like the idea itself. I don't know I keep asking mysel…

You achieved that jquery is not there anymore and that is us faster. That is quite a lot, objectively. It is gonna look that way after you get rest too.

And yes, people tend to have naive ideas about what is possible and people like to give brag suggestions.

Re: Recovering from Burnout and Depression

#70

Post by Arizhel »

55555 wrote: post #15

I think a big factor in burnout is that most work is ultimately meaningless, or even morally wrong, and on a deep level, we're aware of that. Why is it so hard to make yourself work? Probably because you actually should be doing something else with your life. If someone paid you money to kick a dog, you'd feel a strong urge to do something else. That's because you shouldn't kick dogs. But when we feel the same urge t…

>You may have an idea that you know will make you a millionaire and which you could build, but you just can't force yourself to because fundamentally money won't make you happy and the idea is meaningless at best. At least this is often the case for me.

Not me; I can't say I've had any big money-making ideas which are morally wrong and the ideas "meaningless". However, I've had lots of ideas for things which are small money-makers (i.e., probably won't make me a millionaire, but can provide a small-to-decent income maybe) but require time and effort to develop. Since I have to pay rent and bills, and I want to have a social life, I have limited extra time to pursue side ideas like this. My ideas/projects may seem "meaningless" to others, but to me they're fun and interesting and would probably make some money, but definitely won't be the next Apple. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be happy to spend my time working on these projects instead, because they would be more fulfilling than my day job.

Post reply on HN