burnout sucks

I wrote this on December 6th, 2024 when I felt, in retrospect, that I was feeling nearly at-my-worst (in a 1st-world “you still have a super well paying job; buck up and shut up” level of “worst). After taking my own advice and taking several weeks off, I feel a whole lot better, and my new job is already looking very promising. Despite this, I would’ve taken even more time off if I wasn’t buying a house this year.

Without ado, here’s my contribution to the decentralized burned-out developer blog post pool. Thanks for reading; you are amazing, and I appreciate you!

yes, another screed from a random about how burnout is the absolute worst and isn’t something that should be fucked with.

i’m not a wordsmith or eloquent with words, and i only have a little under two hours to go on this flight i’m on, so i’ll keep this short. hopefully.

i struggle to find words to things on most days. forming sentences are a challenge on more stressful ones. conversation is 10x harder than it used to be as a result. i can often feel the neurons in my brain running into walls while coming up with things to say on the fly. that’s assuming i want to talk to people at all, which is more exhausting and unsatisfying than it’s ever been. finding problems to work on at work and throwing myself at them used to just happen. lately, i’ve been grappling with both feeling completely unmotivated to do anything and feeling deeply uneasy when I do nothing.¹

maybe this isn’t burnout. maybe i’m missing vitamins in my diet. or maybe i’m depressed and don’t know it yet. what I do know is that I haven’t taken a real break from work since i’ve started working in 2007 (Stevens has an amazing co-op program) and that going 1000% from job to job without so much as a week off in between is a common pattern in the articles or posts i’ve read from others dealing with my situation.

this is where i think my contribution to the “avoid burnout at all costs” mountain of words differs a little bit. hitting burnout is bad, and I agree with the majority that hitting it should be avoided no matter what. however, i actually think it’s okay to get close to burnout if you’re working towards a big goal.

i’ve been lifting weights for a long time. amongst other things, it’s one of things i’m doing to try and make sure I can be somewhat active and useful at 90. one of the things you start flirting with once you start lifting really really heavy is overtraining.

stick with me here. i’m not going to sell you supplements, i promise.

overtraining at heavy weights is really easy to do. the current school of thought on this is that the human body requires more time to adapt to heavy loads as they approach the body’s maximum potential. a.k.a rest. this is why you’ll see the big powerlifting folks at your favorite gym do nothing but squats for their entire workout with ten minute rests between absolutely monstrous sets of three.

one might think that shorter rest times forces the body to stress itself harder, which encourages faster adaptations and, subsequently, bigger muscles. this is what leads people to doing ten sets of ten of something really heavy many days per week with only a few minutes of rest in between. folks chasing big muscles employ this strategy. it’s time-tested and works well.

the problem with this is the really heavy part. a heavily stressed body, i.e. a body that hasn’t rested enough to adjust to the stress, is like an overloaded bridge: you don’t know when or how the bridge will collapse, but eventually it will, and the collapse will be catastrophic and expensive.

this is what overtraining does. eventually, you’ll tear a hamstring or a pec or impinge your shoulder and be forced to stop lifting for many weeks. you’ll then have to lift really light for weeks after that, and because our bodies are so good at adapting to stress, you won’t be able to move as much weight when you’re healed and will have to climb the mountain again.

however, if you train smart and rest correctly, you can be near overtraining without hitting hit for a long time and hit goals.²

I’ve come to realize that burnout is just like overtraining. going all in from job to job for years and years without accounting for rest won’t feel like a big deal, especially when you’re just out of college and can go full throttle on nothing but coffee and dreams. however, just like that overloaded bridge, eventually, out of nowhere, you’ll turn into a richer, but increasingly-reclusive, mess that spends five minutes trying to describe everyday things during conversation without knowing how you got there.

dealing with this sucks, but I don’t regret the journey that brought me here at all. i went from student loans and suboptimal apartments to financially stable with a proper nest-egg and a very high quality of life before 40. i didn’t have outside help to depend on, so spending nights and weekends deep in RFCs, writing mountains of PowerShell, Bash and $INSERT_LANGUAGE_HERE and generally doing whatever i could to get my compensation up without having to move to the Bay was the life for me.

while i didn’t hit the $5M-in-my-savings-account-before-35 goal I originally planned for, i’m very happy with our station in life these days.

i would absolutely make the decisions i made again if i had to start over…with one change. REST.

i would’ve taken way more vacation, especially after going after really hard problems. not just a day off here and there; a full “i don’t fucking exist as far as you’re concerned” week. maybe two. i would’ve also taken a week or two off between jobs to purge the old job and make room for the new one.

i.e. i would’ve worked smart and hard.

all that said, it’s a shame that work culture (at least in the US; not sure about other countries) is so obviously designed to work people well beyond their limits at all class levels. but that’s another post for another time.

until then, i’m taking many weeks off when i switch jobs again. i can’t wait to veg out on Hacker News and $INSERT_REDDIT_FRONTEND_ALTERNATIVE until I get bored enough to code again.

footnotes