alt Hacker NewsPlease 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.
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Burn out is the second or third year of non-stop fires and you are the one to solve all of the problems. Meanwhile the company is busy creating more fires because they haven’t finished burning that sweet sweet engineer candle.
For sure! I've written a lot about depression too! But I do think a lot of what people otherwise blame on burnout or depression is really this existential hunger to make more positive impact. Finding that highest purpose can change lives!
And the money to pay for it. So better get to work.
I don't think it's quite that binary. Depression can cause burn out and burn out can cause depression. They're inextricably linked.
Medical assistance is not going to help when the thing that is making you depressed is the non negotiable 9-5 you have to do 5 days a week.
You’re not in the right field you say? Then you’ll be depressed from the poverty that comes from abysmal wages and the complete lack of job security.
Be unkind to yourselves, people. I find the best way to prevent depression and burn-out is to be brutally, ruthlessly frank with myself. There's nothing positive in accepting weakness and failure. I always feel better when I hold myself to the highest standards and don't make excuses. Of course, I don't always manage to fully do that but it's something to aspire to.
I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.
I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.
Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.
Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.