alt Hacker NewsYou’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
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The article started well until it changed from "you" to "I". After that, it felt like a mix of bragging and trying to sell a book.
I think its OK if some people don't get to live their dream jobs, some dreams have no equivalent in real life, and some people need to do the mundane, boring underground jobs that keep things together.
Please note that depression != burn-out. If you really can't get out of bed on a Monday morning, can't face the day, or muster any enthusiasm for anything, then you might not need a purpose, you might need medical assistance.
Be kind to yourselves, people.
Weird ad for a self-help book with an intersection in politics that almost read like you're just hustling the wrong way, you just need to hustle right, and he's going to teach you all about it. The yellow highlighting did not help build credibility.
This resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
I agree with the premise but take issue with the measure for "success": do you feel excited to get up and work on Monday?
We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill.
To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).
One thing that I always try to bring up in these discussions is that “burnout” and “overwork” are two different problems, and I think this author would agree with me.
If your problem could be fixed with a raise or a nice vacation, that’s overwork. 996 schedules, crunch time, and a high cost of living make overwork.
Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia. Closer to a career-induced bout of major depression.
I'm burned out because I have to raise two young children, work a full time job in a demanding career, and then in the hour or two a day of time that isn't accounted for in those two tasks, I need to maintain a household and try to care for myself. I feel a strong sense of purpose caring for my family, but don't have enough time to meet life's demands. Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
I like the overall message of this since I can deeply relate.
I have been looking for meaningful work since I was 18, started in sales went on to marketing and ended up in engineering as a data scientist.
Even though I feel closer than ever I still feel that I am not where I am suppose to be. One of my biggest problem is having to many options, to many callings. And they constantly keep changing, and perhaps that’s normal.
It’s easy and dangerous to get stuck in the idea or quest of finding the ultimate purpose and try to translate that into actual work.
As an aside, I really don't like these kinds of titles. They presume a lot about the (potential) reader without knowing anything about them. And it sounds like it's stating some kind of a fact but it really isn't. Different people are afflicted by different problems, you can't just make such a blanket statement about everyone.
This first half of this definitely struck a chord. I spent the first three quarters of this year taking care of a terminally ill parent, then seeing them through hospice. If that sort of experience doesn't make a person step back from their life and question what they're doing nothing will.
I decided to step away from my job as an engineering VP and try something I actually wanted to do. It's terrifying, especially in this economy, but I wake up and feel excitement in the morning instead of dread for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Yeah no, that's not it. Not everyone has to chase the highest purpose. A lot of existential dread would go away if: 1/ People had hopes of buying a house in their lifetime 2/ They were not afraid of being let go at any point 3/ Social media did not create a hedonistic treadmill
The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
probably doesnt help that we spend 1/3rd to 1/2 of our lives making some other asshole rich
I like John Vervaeke's meaning-in-life questions (potentially mildly paraphrasing, because it has been a while since I came across them):
- what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone?
- what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it?
From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.
I think a lot of people work on their career kind of "on credit", assuming it'll pay back in lifestyle improvements somehow. If this isn't forthcoming, the credit runs out.
No, trust me, it is burnout and working too much for too little gain.
I think the described problem is real, but I'm astonished at the "went into politics" solution. I would expect that the lab work was a much more concrete, achievable, and lasting good than anything that will come of engaging with zero-sum or negative-sum games.
I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap.
Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.
I don't know if this article is for me:
>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.
I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.
I gotta say even though not having kids seems like the most economically sane thing to me, it often makes me wonder, what will be the point of life after retirement. I have no wife, g/f or kids. Right now my only 'why' is to not disappoint my family and cause a couple of them could use my help financially. Other than that, I don't see a long term 'why'. My only compelling short term 'why' is that I don't want to be homeless. But that's pretty much a working to live and living to work type of reason to exist.
Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.
the number of comments indicates that MANY OF US crave for some wise words about burnout... but the text we are presented with feels strangely empty of substance -- as if the author just wants to make some money with a book on a hot topic...
Maybe this hits for millennials and older but as a gen-z I think it's safe to say we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive, our degrees are useless, dating and relationships have become damaged because of the apps, and we are inheriting a world that is broken and continues to shatter.
The older generations have everything and still feel burnt out and unhappy? Cool. Cool cool cool. That will certainly help with the nihilism.
For the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.
I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.
In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.
Feelsgoodman.
The bold and highlighting all over the place is really annoying. I get why it’s formatted that way but it’s a bit too much information and I find it hard to focus.
Damn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better.
What worked is:
- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.
- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.
Overcomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.
If you come from immense privilege (growing up in an 8 figure household), have good health, and rich relationships and that isn't enough to curb your existentialism that's ok, but I find it hard to take this piece seriously as this is written like it's targeting the average financially stable worker. It strikes me as out of touch at best.
I am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism.
You work to earn, you earn to buy.
But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.
When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.
Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.
Etc etc
Politics are marketing tools for frameworks and candidates, they don’t provide the frameworks, or any deeper meaning to life itself. What a shallow and dangerous approach.
No,trust me, it is burnout.
I'm burned out because:
1. I'm intelligent enough to raise questions about the point of life.
2. I've always been an outcast, having it extremely difficult to build meaningful relationships, which are number one predictor of quality of life.
3. I live in a dirty, noisy, overcrowded city full of people who don't share my culture and work for a company that has no morality.
There is nothing for me to look forward to, and no straightforward way to build anything. I'll never have a group of friends to do things with, I'll never feel loved, and I'll never be important in any sense of this word. I'm an autistic ant in an anthill.
I am existentially starving AND burned out.
I haven't been lucky enough that startups I got in on early panned out so I don't have the ability to take a sabbatical.
Good stuff. You will enjoy my short essay, I want to give a lot of fucks! [1], which argues against the typical conclusion reached by people working at big corp long enough: "Stop caring. Stop giving a fuck. Focus on things outside of work".
The core insight it, if you start to feel the need to stop caring, instead of changing your character and values, treat it as a strong signal to change your environment.
[1]: https://anandprashant.com/posts/i-want-to-give-a-lot-of-fuck...
Gonna try to be charitable, but this really feels like gaslighting. There's a lot more to the story of how much someone is thriving than "Nice place to live. More than enough stuff. Family and friends who love you." I'm burnt out because my fancy job requires me to live in an area with a cost of living so high that it's a genuine family crisis when the washing machine breaks because we don't have enough disposable income to replace it. It's not just a meaning problem out there.
Stepping on my soapbox: Treat your mind, body, and present moment as if they're sacred. As if you could live a thousand lives and they would be sacred every time. All the other stuff, it's just this once.
Cleaning a mind of random grievances and addictions is good. Letting a body be weird, dance wrong, move in funny ways, sing poorly: this is good too.
The whole "purpose" thing is a side-effect. It can't be sought directly, I think.
TFW you understand Marx's theory of alienation, but are desperate for an alternate explanation that puts the blame on workers and doesn't threaten capital.
Maybe unfair, but I can't read a title with this cadence anymore without assuming it's AI.
I built a measurement framework for this called a cohesion matrix. You can rate your integration/coherence/cohesion based on this rubric:
The purpose of life is not only to be happy. It's not a useless metric but don't over-index on it
> It feels like you’re stuck in the ordinary when all you want to do is chase greatness.
Gave up on greatness a long time ago, I'd settle for an "ordinary", where people just kind of try to NOT make bad things worse, or good things less enjoyable.
Am I the only one who is overwhelmed in my capacity to parse across the various means of emphasis that colour this page?
Seems like self-help slop with a flawed argument.
This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible.
Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way.
And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.
Kind of a strange pivot to talk about meaning and connect it to capitalism
I find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting.
I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold.
The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.
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This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
The "You're not x. You're y." format reads as AI generated to me. I know that seeing AI syntax behind every corner is a problem that is only going to get worse and that I need to shift my mindset; nevertheless, it tinged how I reacted to the entire article.
The premise is interesting but feels incomplete. The "Monday morning excitement test" doesn't account for the hedonic treadmill - even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.
That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.
The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.