Ask HN: How to deal with burnout and its consequences?

Find some hobbies, do sports when you can, visit interesting/intriguing places, do activities you never had a chance to do before. Find a way to relax, e.g. sauna, deep sleep chambers etc. It's also possible you have some long-term nutritional deficiency leading to your brain literally shutting down some circuits making you apathetic. Try to take a NAD+ booster like Niagen (300mg/day) which is required for energy production and you might want to try 2000mg B1 Hcl and 1000mg B2/day, the first one required for each energetic reaction but depleted by long-term stress and the second one for producing FAD+ (energy production in the brain, similar to NAD+; don't expose yourself to strong sunlight though). You can also try to do some mechanical job requiring little to no thinking like resupplying stock at a supermarket or building homes etc.

Sounds like you're going through a hard time — but know that many here have been there. Burnout can be hard to spot in time, but once you step over the event horizon, it gets a lot harder to pull yourself out.

My non-medical-professional advice would first be to check out the book Feeling Good, by Dr Burns. It sort of kicked off the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy model of dealing w/ depression, anxiety, and adjacent issues like procrastination.

Second, I can say that what's always saved me in the dark times was some personal project adjacent to the work I do professionally. There were times where I couldn't even stand to look at code, but then the excitement of building something purely for fun got me back into it — and I found, "hey, I can work again too!" Just be careful to take it easy, and not let the personal project turn into a job — at least not before you're confident your burnout is truly behind you. And that's something you don't want to rush.

Third: sleep, walks, good food & water, and meditation have all consistently made a positive impact in my life. You don't need a goal for meditating other than to start even with just a minute a day — but allowing yourself to empty your mind can be really beneficial.

It's also possible your brain and body are telling you it's not the right path. You don't have to suppress that feeling — but I've also found that I'm able to change how I interact with the situations I'm given. It's good to have long term goals, but we're not always able to teleport to our "passion" immediately. We can, however, find small ways of moving the needle every day towards the type of work we really want to be doing, and it can be surprising how fast the changes ultimately come.

Good luck, take it slow — and again know that you're not alone. It can be a scary feeling, but many have been there. Every day is an adventure.

Plenty of good suggestions here, I don't have another one to add, let alone a better one. But I'll tell you this: you are not alone, this happens (a lot) and odds are it is not your fault. You asked how to deal with it, a lot of the stuff other comments said boils down to realising your professional universe is not so $negative_characterization_here like the place you are currently living in, it just seems that way probably because like a boiling frog you tried to adapt without seeing the hit coming, and came to think that's "normal" and you can't take "it" anymore. Time for a change, you'll do great in your next corner of the universe, and even if you find yourself into another bad one you'll recognise it soon enough and either fix it or leave it.

This question, posed by someone new, makes it to the front pages of this site pretty much every week nowadays. I’ve been visiting this site for years and it used to crop up once every few months or so but nothing near the frequency it does now. There is something seriously wrong with the state of the world right now.

It is of no help to OP by unfortunately I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I was reading Ray Dalio’s latest blog post on LinkedIn last night and he thinks we’re heading for civil and possibly global war in 2025. I find it hard to disagree with him.

In a way, our entire system is just abstracted violence. People used to kill each over resources so we created this abstract system of companies, money, laws, social norms and dating rules so people could still fight each other but without any direct death. But the deaths are still happening, they’re just drawn out and slow. Various people bleeding your bank accounts dry, forcing you to work to the bone until you either keel over and die, kill yourself through drugs, or accumulate enough resources to retire from the game or become one of the exploiters yourself.

Eventually we reach the point we’re at now where the abstractions can’t hold back the grim reality. Too much power and greed accumulated at the top of the pyramid means the game starts to become physically unplayable for too many people. What happens when the abstractions collapse? Back to Hobbesian savagery.

This would be bad enough if it was just internal strife but throw in conflicting super powers and climate change on top and we’re looking at WW3. Things have gotten so bad I don’t see a world in which it doesn’t happen now other than if we get some serious reform across politics, media and enterprise.

To OP, I would say take some time to rest, revisit things you used to enjoy, then find a job you can tolerate doing in a town you can afford to live. It may mean doing something you never thought of doing and moving somewhere you never saw yourself moving a few years ago. I am planning on doing the latter next year.

Ray Dalio article for anyone interested: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/changing-world-order-approach...

Burnout doesn't always have to be exhaustion-focused. I'm no expert but to me it sounds like you're disengaged/apathetic moreso than exhausted. Boreout is another common term that gets thrown around on hacker news/reddit.

I think as software engineers we don't always consider the social element much, we tend to focus on the problems we are solving day in and day out, but the people are a critical piece of the puzzle as well. I similarly had a lot of coworkers I cared for leave for other jobs, and that ended up hitting me harder than I thought it would.

Best of luck to you.