Surviving Burnout (2015)

I am not entirely sure that I have. And often wonder if I ever will feel it is truly, once and for all, all behind me.

A few things have been helpful though.

• First, the obvious

Quitting the jobs that burned me out.

Avoiding, like the plague, hyper-political or hypocritical work environments. I’ve got better things to than play Game of Thrones or The Young and the Restless.

• The usual

Finding a good therapist. Most will be utterly useless. Competency aside, one that works for one person will be completely unhelpful to someone else. But one that works for you will help you identify and change patterns, in both your everyday life and your "macro" life. They won’t do the work for you, but they will be of tremendous help.

Started doing what I wanted to do as a kid but never did, or not enough. In my case it was surfing and skating. As a child I used to watch those people surfing and skating in movies and wanting to do it too. Turns out, it’s quite fun. Tedious (surfing), and sometimes painful (skating), but really pleasant. It won’t change your life, but in the moment it might just make going through the rest feel like it was worth it.

I went back to activities I used to like but had stopped. For me, it was snorkelling, hiking, and scuba diving. I had entirely forgotten the sense of wonder and excitement that came with it. Scuba diving with a stubborn one year old otitis wasn’t the best of ideas, but we didn’t go below 6m, so it was fine.

• The less obvious and slightly unrelated:

Letting go of high-maintenance friendships and relationships, and letting them die off. It’s incredible how much cognitive and emotional bandwidth these things can take.

• Others

But what has really stuck with me is experimenting. Freeing up some time to experiment with new things. Trying out new things, making new things. Seeing what gets me excited, what sticks, what tickles my brain, and getting back that sense of play in my day to day life.

Lately for me, it’s been stable diffusion and LLM applications, but it can really be anything. The important part is that it should feel more like play than work. The kind of thing that makes you feel so excited you genuinely want to tell everybody about it.

Which unexpectedly reminds me of two people.

The first, a pilot. I wanted to be one at the time, and had somehow gotten a job at the airport so I could see planes all day, meet some pilots, and ask them everything that came to my mind. One of them told that most people didn’t understand that when they (the pilots) went to work, they weren’t going to work. They were going to play. It stuck with me. I obviously didn’t become a pilot, but it stuck.

And the second is Feynman, or more accurately his autobiography ("Surely you’re joking M. Feynman", which I can only wholeheartedly recommend), when he somehow grew bored with physics.

It’s a rather long excerpt, but having looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making it up, here you go:

> Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

> So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

> Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

> I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?”

> I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance… I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.

> He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”

> “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

> It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

All that being said, I don’t really know wether I am truly out of depression, for good, or if it’s just an exceptionally long relief. While it feels okay now, I can regularly see patterns that I wish were long gone creeping back. And I honestly can’t tell wether it’s just me just overreacting, or if it means it will be a life-long struggle.

But it does seem to get easier with time. It takes some effort, every day. But it gets easier

I want to thank you for sharing and to return the favor by sharing some of myself. Don't feel like you have to respond or even read it. I just feel bad for asking you to share without providing you with anything back. I'm a afraid I'm going through something similar myself, and it's incredibly valuable for me to read what you've gone though and relate that to myself. I honestly have no idea how I'll handle this or what I'll do.

I'm working on somehow getting a new job (although the self-doubt, fear, and guilt is making is really difficult), and I'm hoping that getting a whiff of something new will at least provide some hope for something worth living for. I don't know if I even like software anymore. I don't know if I was ever good at it, if I'm even good at anything, but I have to believe, because what's the alternative?

Meanwhile I just keep showing up, attending meetings with people yelling at me. Blaming me for the technical problems they didn't want to allocate resources to fix. Even then I can't convince myself that It's not actually MY fault. Maybe i truly didn't communicate how poor the technical state was. Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at. Maybe I'm just fucking useless. What's more likely, a whole layer of middle managers being wrong, or that I'm just fucking useless? Wisdom of the crowds and such.

At least I know that my struggle is actually a struggle, and not just me being a weak baby about it, So thank you for that comfort.

PS: It's also quite a coincidence that you started skating. I too recalled how "cool" i thought the skaters looked when I was young, the happy days of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and how I longed to be cool like that. After riding an electric long board for a year I decided that maybe skating an acoustic skateboard would be fun, and it is. When skating I feel like I'm doing something. I don't feel like i need to be good. I feel cool. Maybe you don't have to be good at your job, maybe you can just be cool.

A therapist?! Good lord. Call me old fashioned but everything you've described, I would normally expect to be the responsibility of a line manager. If you need a therapist to extract that information then doesn't that indicate a dysfunctional relationship? Why can't a manager just sit down and chat with an employee about what they're looking for, like two adults diacussing someone's career aspirations? Why does it require weekly therapy sessions unless something is badly wrong?

When I hit burnout I had a therapist for awhile, and that was very helpful.

But I certainly wouldn't want my therapist to be owned by and reporting to my employer, nor would I want to lose my therapist if I switched jobs. It's likely when you do lose or quit your job that you need your therapist most.

This is generally administrative tasks that nobody will ever look at again in the future.