I'm still working it out myself, so this is all work in progress.
I have a teenage stepdaughter doing online schooling. I had been working remote for years now. It took a long time to work out how things work with my wife -- she is a stay-at-home mom. Work and family life intrude on each other, and even more so this year with the pandemic.
I used to burn out big time, and then, I burn out in smaller doses. In the last burnout cycle, my wife miscarried, and that spent both my wife spinning. So I am not entire sure at this point how much of this is like when I functioned at peak.
The things that I have been doing:
- I try to have a few tasks I think I can accomplish and try to do them. But because the family life can be so disruptive, I've learned that I'm not really going to be as productive as I am at the peak, and just be ok with it.
- I try not to be a blocker for either my teammates or for my family.
- I have a garden. I enjoy it. I mainly do work with it in the morning and evening. Sometimes I am exhausted (especially in Phoenix summer hell season). In general, though, it recharging.
- I practice neigong, and I finally got to the point where I can reliably cycle something (which I will not get into technical details about unless you're also a practitioner. It is a rabbit hole). But suffice it to say, it rebalances the vital energy being distributed among my physical, emotional, and mental states. Part of the burnout was exhausting everything mentally, repeatedly, until there is just nothing left.
- When I push through something, it is for small things. Those small things might chain together. Past a certain point, it is better to go for a walk.
- I can tell when my brain is just exhausted. It is better to take a nap. I'll warn my wife that I'm not really present during grocery shopping. She doesn't always like that (it is one of the times we go out to do something together that is not in the house). I might take MCT with some mixed nuts.
- I don't use caffeine -- no coffee or tea. The closest I get is with roiboos, and even its 1mg caffeine can affect me. Fortunately, the caffiene content of chocolate does not affect me as much.
The part I am working out is how to live in a way that follows the permaculture ethics -- care of earth, care of people, and fair share. It is the last of these that has made me realize that the ambition of unbounded growth, whether for society, or for myself, is simply impractical. It may be strange to say it on a forum that was created for people who were or are interested in doing a Ycombinator startup and getting rich from winning the startup lottery ... but I've come to realize that it is not how I want to live or relate to the world.
I used to practice minimalism ... but now I realize that is just a stepping stone. It's investing in regenerative and resilient systems. The garden is part of my long-term effort to create a perennial food forest on my property. There is a lot of tech and "shiny" that I realize I don't really need to get.
And while I know that recently, I would keep comparing other people's cars as status / wealth symbols, it is ultimately meaningless. And fortunately, I know what I need to do to get my mind to cease doing that.
This is a very unusual way for me to approach this subject. I usually start out with a radical position: inequality and the wealth gap is _intrinsic_ to modern civilizations, and it rests upon the notion that wealth is something to be extracted from the earth, and access controlled. "Efficiency" is how you maximize profit, as if that is the only way to optimize things. Therefore, there will never be any system of economics and free market (or command economy) that will ever take the well-being of the earth and the people into account.
From this perspective, I think it is insanity. Why would anyone want to participate in a system where there will be guaranteed losers? (Because the few exceptions give the false hope that you might be the exception).
It therefore follows that, if I want to participate in a different kind of a "game", then I will have to live my life by those other principles. And so, I'm trying that with my current work. To give an receive my fair share. To reinvest capital gained from extractive wealth and convert it to regenerative wealth. To not tie my personal sense of self-worth into status or wealth symbols.