Ask HN: Are we all burned out?

I read a very complete account of my grandfathers early life (before he joined the military during WW2) and the kinda shit he did living of a farm is stuff of fairytales.

When someone in the 20 mile radius needed a barn built, LITERALLY EVERYONE came to help. When you were off work for the night, you would sit with your whole family and read the newspaper or play cards, or travel to your grandmas house 3 blocks away.

Now the whole world is split up. My nearest family is over 600 miles away. My friends would rather play video games on discord than go and play cards in person. Work is a 9-5 and then you forget about it.

It seems like there is no community anymore outside of online spaces, and that just isn’t the same. In my opinion, burnout is synonymous with lack of real world, in person community.

Find someone or some cause/purpose and fully surrender to this person and/or cause. Then you won't think about burnout and you will experience happiness as a side-effect of your surrender.

While we're all prone to "rosy retrospection" as indicated by one of the comments, I feel that we indeed live in tougher world than our parents (maybe others don't share this feeling).

One thing that has helped me is to take up sports. Specifically I play a racquet sport at a club. After doing my daily work, chores and Dad duties, I drive the club around 8:30 PM and play until 10:30. For those two hours, my mind is fixed on the ball. I don't check my phone or kids, regret the past or worry about the future. I look forward to these two hours.

If you play a sport, or want to take something up, it might help you get over the burnout.

But no, it's not everyone.

Get outside. Exercise. Do activities that require focus for tens-of-minutes or hours, rather than batches-of-seconds or minutes.

Look away from things you have no direct control over, no matter how much (synthetic) social-proof that some manipulative media presents suggesting "everyone" or "most people" or "good people" or "with-it people" obsess over such events.

The person who is most sullen over "the world" is not at all the most virtuous, even though large assemblages of depressive people tend to unconsciously advance that idea, and wind up in a destructive competition over who is most (fake-)caring.