The Burnout Machine

Some tangential thoughts and rambles on this to try to get at the deeper issues, first from Jeff Schmidt about his book "Disciplined Minds" which encourages solidarity of intellectual workers: https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "Who are you going to be? That is the question. In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

An even deeper point though from "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702023453/http://www.whywor... "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. ..."

Or, from a different direction, from "Buddhist Economics" by EF Schumacher: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-econ... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

And also from an even different direction by Marshall Sahlins' "The Original Affluent Society": https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/298-june-19-1979/the-ori... "For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that “urgent goods” become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living. ... The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo. ..."

Or from an even different direction as a cautionary tale (spoilers if you read the Wikipedia article beyond what I quoted): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_... ""With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette[1] by American writer Jack Williamson (1908–2006). In writing it, Willamson was influenced by the aftermath of World War II, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[2] ... Despite the humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. ..."

Or also touching on that theme, "The Skills of Xanadu" story by Theodore Sturgeon that helped create Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" and hypertext and so indirectly the world wide web: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 https://ia601205.us.archive.org/22/items/theodore-sturgeon-/...

Or also on re-envisioning work and status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The Mayflower II has brought with it thousands of settlers, all the trappings of the authoritarian regime along with bureaucracy, religion, fascism and a military presence to keep the population in line. However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. In an attempt to crush this anarchist adhocracy, the Mayflower II government employs every available method of control; however, in the absence of conditioning the Chironians are not even capable of comprehending the methods, let alone bowing to them. The Chironians simply use methods similar to Gandhi's satyagraha and other forms of nonviolent resistance to win over most of the Mayflower II crew members, who had never previously experienced true freedom, and isolate the die-hard authoritarians."

Or more down-to-Earth by Doug Engelbart (creator of the 1960s Mother of All Demos showing interactive collaborative computing and teleconferencing and the mouse): https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/191/ "In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability or condition. Some examples include a professional association, a community of practice, consortium, humanitarian initiative, initiatives to reform education, healthcare, government, corporate initiatives, a medical research community seeking to cure a specific disease. An improvement community that also puts focused attention on improving how it engages, and how it improves, by employing better and better practices and tools, is a networked improvement community (NIC)."

Where a "networked improvement community" also connects with Brian Eno's idea of "Scenius": https://medium.com/salvo-faraday/what-is-the-scenius-15409eb... "There’s a common myth that genius is only produced and achieved in isolation. This is commonly referred to as the “Great Man Theory”, that innovation in art and culture only comes from great men working in solitude. Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes. ..."

And by Howard Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": https://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "The new conditions of technology, economics, and war, in the atomic age, make it less and less possible for the guards of the system-the intellectuals, the home owners, the taxpayers, the skilled workers, the professionals, the servants of government-to remain immune from the violence (physical and psychic) inflicted on the black, the poor, the criminal, the enemy overseas."

Other stuff I have collected on improving organizations (and ourselves): https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Anyway, people can debate on whether unions will improve the day-to-day experience of software developers including regarding "burnout", but that is just scratching the surface of social change related to work compared to ideas like above.

You mean the risk of not wanting to return to work after such a break?

That's not the narrative you should be looking to draw from this.

There should be a union for YC startups, to prevent them from being exploited so badly. By the time the startup meat grinder eventually peters out, the founders own almost nothing of a fairly worthless company and the employees even less. Meanwhile YC pimps the myth of the startup and cashes the winning lottery tickets.

It does no such thing. It shifts power from the employer to the union bosses.