The Burnout Society is probably one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. I tried to crystalise its essence as well [1], in a chapter-structure way.
The book talks about many things that were on the edge of my eyes. I knew them, yet I hadn't realised they were there; that they were a thing. I hadn't realised it was us who introduced them. This is the definition of Castoriadis' imaginary [2][3]. I'd recommend The Burnout Society to everyone yet I hesitate because it challenges very foundational ideas, in an unpopular way as well.
Maybe the book's two things that struck out to me the most are:
* We strive for achievement so much that we tire ourselves to depression
* Burnout and depression are intrinsically connected
And the question that I ask myself after having read the book is: How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
I suspect the reviewer, and your comment, and probably the author, are wrong to broadly characterize burnout as something that we encounter as "achievement-subjects" but not as "obedience-subjects", or as you put it, because we "strive for achievement." While some may burn out working too hard with the idea they will achieve by doing so, surely many others are burned out by being over-worked at a tough job, with an unsympathetic boss, a "death march" culture promising career advancement that never comes, and what-have-you.
> And the question that I ask myself after having read the book is: How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
I always read him as saying that the valuing of achievement itself comes from the depression/burnout society he observes in his native South Korea. Ie, we only obsess over achievement in the first place because society is so stratified and the stakes are so high if you fail.
I think he overall has a distaste for what he calls the 'achievement subject', and is more aligned with people like Baudrilliard in favouring individuation through developing a contemplative and very singular personal identity.
> How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
I ask myself something quite similar but coming from a different place (so to say).
How can I practice detachment (buddhism inspired letting go) while simultaneously accomplishing goals?
I ask myself this because I see a relation between holding on (firmly grasping a goal; the opposite of detachment) and the perseverance of success at doing difficult things.
In my own experience it remains a fact that if I hold on on to something tightly, this is why I suffer (painful); there's a truth behind "no pain no gain". However this is quite close to "them who don't try don't fail"... so they don't suffer BUT do not really accomplish anything either.
Finally, I don't consider the ego to be inherently bad, it's a tool. IMO a problem with it is that one's self is not the only one capable of using one's ego (e.g. we all have been manipulated by someone else).
Cities are like a wall that block people off from viewing the true reality of life... They put huge buildings up that create "bosses" and "corporate culture" and "stores" which all feed being over worked and the ideals of constant desire for more (consumerism). You can only work in a city if you adopt the mindset, which truly is "grind till you die" to your detriment.
People need to burnout in order to fuel a world like ours, it's no different than in the past. Some would say there are simply "too many people on this earth" to escape the constant drive for workplace-related abuse, social inequality, criminal behavior, and injustice when people are tightly packed into cities unfortunately. You realize a different way of living when you escape the city and live in a less populated environment that fosters more of what really matters - Family, Health, Creativity, Communication, Mental Well Being, Nature, and Less of a Competitive/Combative Enviornment.
Once you visit other (more rural and natural) places where people live in communities, where the pace is much more slow, like farms, mountains, beaches etc, most thoughtful people pause and realize that none of the "concrete jungle" accomplishments really matter in terms of life merits. Unfortunately, the poor and working classes rarely if ever have a chance to escape on a vacation, so they are burdened most by burnout... That burnout feeds bad things like suicide, drug abuse, poverty, depression, crime, etc, while the rest of society simply remains ignorant to the root causes of those things. Not to say that those rural and natural places are perfect to live in, but they allow for less distraction from meaningful life goals in many ways over city environments.
Many (wealthier middle class) people occasionally get to take that nature vacation at points in their life, and then later return to the city grind, hoping to recapture the vibe in retirement, but they forget the true motivation as they get behind the city walls again often.
The super-wealthy buy homes in relaxed environments at their whim... And many even work in the city without leaving their super comfortable beach and mountain "vacation" houses. Some would say that's one of the major reasons they often think far beyond the constraints of their (less paid) employees who live in the city and work in the city office... Not because they are "smarter" it's possibly because they are far more often less "mentally distracted" and weighted down by finances, work commutes, and burnout culture of city living.
> How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset
At the risk of sounding pithy, "make it about the journey" set a vague goal of being successful, identify key strategies you think will get you there ("excellence"), and take pleasure in figuring it out, find reward in the incremental stages and don't sweat it when you stumble.
> How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
First, let go of this need that you have to achieve things. You try and keep up with others, to be better than others, but it's OK to be mediocre.
Counterpoint though, in today's economy, people are forced to achieve and push for higher wages, just to keep a roof over their head. That's another source of stress and worry, and that's down to government and international economic policy to solve.
> * We strive for achievement so much that we tire ourselves to depression
That resonates with me quite a lot, as I fell into this trap too many times, and am currently in the process of getting out once again. Being stressed out and anxious makes me depressed, which makes me unproductive, which then reinforces the stress and anxiety. While you are in it, it is also difficult to take a step back and reflect on how this isn't a very smart way of doing things.
To me what usually burns me is working on places where there's no organization, people ignore feedback. You just spend days working in a stupid, disorganized and unproductive way. Makes you feel like you're working to earn money and do whatever someone ask you to do. It feels pointless.
I wrote it before an English translation was published, so I called it "fatigue society", which I still think is a more appropriate term than burnout society.
(Knowing that the essay is more than a decade old should help explain the strong assertion right off the bat that we aren't living in a "viral" age.)
The German title of his book is "Ermüdungsgesellschaft" which literally translates to "fatigue society". Han lives and works in Berlin, as a professor of philosophy I am not sure if he writes in German or English tho.
I don't buy the distinction between the discipline-subject and the achievement-subject. Our society runs very heavily on the threat of discipline, it's just naturalized and made invisible by a bunch of intervening social structures. And it's more invisible to some people than to others; if you're working a low-wage service job, you know that you're always at risk of being made homeless, lacking reliable access to food, shelter, and medical care, and subject to being brutalized by security forces. Even people who think they're driven by achievement may well just have internalized the threats to where they can't see them as external anymore.
I know nobody actually reads Foucault, but doesn't anyone at least read the Cliff's Notes?
> Nor are we free of conflict. The traumas of the achievement-subject are not those of the Freudian age, where we repressed our desires out of a sense of social duty, compulsively washed our hands, and dreamt about our mothers. No, the manias of our age are depression, exhaustion, and burnout.
and then near the end of the article:
> I’m not really sure external coercion has gone away, so much as it has been made indirect.
The way I synthesize it myself is that at the lower levels of society the burn out is because of harsh discipline and poverty.
However people at the upper echelons of society who you would expect to be all happy and cheerful are also burning out because of what’s described in the book.
I strongly suspect one of the important reasons for burnout is because of doing work without a strong purpose. And the problem is, software is rarely created for a greater good.
You can see people who work in charity for chump change can go on for hours of work day after day for years without burning out because they gain energy from the work due to their strong alignment with the purpose, on other hand people who work without a strong alignment of purpose do work as transactional that drains energy and burns people out.
I've never read Han (hadn't even heard of him), but what this immediately reminded me of, in particular the notion of the achievement subject being reduced to basically some sort of stimulation machine, made me recall something from Baudrillard's America
"This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, bodybuilding gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession. This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being ‘into’, hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
There's also a great Nick Land piece called Meltdown from his saner CCRU days that captures the 'Burnout' notion very well: http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
Having read a few of Han's books I always liked the way he analyzed things (in a very observant way) in the first sections of his books only to be let down (or downright annoyed) by the conclusions he draws out of this analysis in the later sections.
And I say that as someone who studied Philosophy and Media science, so I am definitly not just allergic to hard theoretical jargon.
I think burnout in engineering (at least for me) is just the endless building of widget after widget to make money for someone else while racing against some arbitrary deadline. You just sit in your chair every day, endure mindless meetings where half the people have no idea whats going on and then you try and cram in development while praying that no one will ping you and force you to context switch for an hour. Repeat everyday forever, and this is made worse because now most of us work from home so its all done in isolation. Don't get me wrong I like working from home for the freedom it provides but it is isolating and you are now essentially always at work. Deadlines seem to always get shorter and requirements murkier. Stress is always ramping up and rarely resets. This is fine.
I try to remind myself every day how much rougher it was before I got a dev job. The financial hopelessness. Living in junky apartments with roommates as a married couple. Commuting 4 hours one way 2-3 days a week for part time jobs with no security or benefits. Trying to live off $20-30k a year in California. And still feeling lucky to have any work at all.
I try to remember this while sitting at zoom meetings and feeling exhausted. But the memory is fading...
This is the joy of working for a large company. I was there a number of years ago. I just started ignoring people and doing what I think is right. No one appeared to notice. I suspect this was because everyone was chasing useless metrics or doesn’t want to challenge the timesheet in case the one apparent source of truth is discovered to be universe crushingly fallible.
I banked the experience and learnings and moved to a company which wasn’t in the fatal decline stage of development.
> I think burnout in engineering (at least for me) is just the endless building of widget after widget to make money for someone else while racing against some arbitrary deadline.
I could not have said this better myself. Yes, we are paid extremely well, but the soul-crushing grind of building stupid web apps for companies that don't even need them really takes a toll eventually.
I suppose it's easier said than done, but the healthiest thing I did for myself in the transition to WFH during the pandemic was to set up and maintain appropriate boundaries between myself and work.
I'm done at 3:30. If you contact me after 3:30 I'm either ignoring the message until I'm "at work" the next morning, or I'm writing my time up as billable hours.
I've never been questioned on it, and the idea of muting my phone or leaving it in another room provides a mental break that helps with everything
Turn off that chat thing when you need to focus. Skip meetings where you neither will learn nor can contribute a unique perspectives. Turn the machine off when the workday is over to deal with the WFH blurriness. Push back on murky requirements.
Yes, it's hard, and it's scary. And I fully ack that in some companies, this would be career-limiting moves. If that's the case, you need to decide how much you want to work for them vs. going somewhere that actually lets you work as a dev.
As someone who considers myself lazy, it baffles me that so many people are encouraging others to do the same. It seems like someone discovers that work-life balance is a thing, and then concludes that everyone else has yet to do the same and that we should all relax more. On a personal level, working less may be beneficial because society has more than enough hard workers to make a difference. However, if everyone loses ambition, the goods are services we all take of granted would get more scarce and we would all be worse off as a result.
I'll clarify that I do think post-industrial areas of Asia are actually "burnout societies." In the US, I don't get that sense at all.
This article looks a bit rambling and unfocused to me. I'm not really sure where it wants to go.
But there is a pretty easy explanation for why people are burned out. All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on.
People are being pushed to do things that evolution really hasn't equipped them to do - sustained periods of low physical activity, high mental activity guided by willpower rather than instinct. That is pretty tiring.
Software is a great example. All engineering fields. Anything involving computers. Anything involving investment. Most creative work. Any customer service work (not mentally stimulating, but very demanding of continuous social engagement & othen in tense situations). Mechanical work.
It used to be everyone was a farm labourer. We don't have much work like that any more. Most of us have to plan out how we'll get physically tired out because it doesn't happen by accident any more.
>People are being pushed to do things that evolution really hasn't equipped them to do - sustained periods of low physical activity, high mental activity guided by willpower rather than instinct. That is pretty tiring.
I don't think it's a mental vs. physical thing at all.
I've had jobs where I had certainty about what I was doing every day, I witnessed the fruits of my labor and I had certainty about where I stood in the organization. I never suffered burnout from them.
I've also had jobs where I was always uncertain about what I ought to be doing, where the fruits of my labor often didn't seem to amount to much (e.g. perpetual project cancellations/always changing requirements/sudden architectural direction changes) and I was really uncertain about where I stood the whole time.
I tried dealing with it with sustained periods of heavy physical activity (e.g. jogging between tasks), meditation, etc. It only helped a little.
This perpetual miasma of uncertainty and consequent stress built up over time and when it became too much - that's when I burned out.
I don't doubt that working on a farm doing heavy physical labor under similar conditions would burn me out too. My parents used to sometimes give me vague gardening tasks when I was a teenager and I absolutely hated that.
> All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on.
Exactly. The problem is that more and more of the "easy tasks" that high-skilled jobs are automated/moved to computers. 30-50 years ago, an Engineer still would find to make some copies, sharpen a pencil or get fresh paper from storage, check his mailbox etc. So even high-skilled jobs had a lot of repetetive, simple work parts that gave the brain room to relax. Nowadays the easy tasks are removed, and we mostly deal with hard problemes 8h+ a day.
> But there is a pretty easy explanation for why people are burned out. All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on.
That resonates with me. As a developer, I feel an intense desire to either contribute to open source, or go into a more "creative" field. And it's not the "good" kind of desire that gives me energy or pushes me to do things, but it's the kind of "bad" desire that feels like it's eating me alive sometimes. I have a master's degree, and a nice job with very good people. But somehow it doesn't feel enough for me.
I know this is a mental health problem, and I know that this may be a "real" calling instead of just a kind of FOMO. But a few people around me suffer from the same thing, so I wonder if there's not some kind of mechanism at play here. While I don't spend much time with "regular" people on social media, I spend time looking at open source developers, and creative people. When I was younger I felt kind of immune to the social media trap (showing your perfect life and all of that). Now, I realise that I may have fallen from it, just with different values.
There is something really satisfying about manual labor that knowledge doesn't come close to IMHO. And I am not talking about physical exhaustion, but rather about the fact you can see and touch the results of your work, it is tangible. Whereas a lot of the office jobs I held basically just produced a lot of digital paper. And those operational ones, well, they moved numbers from one column in an ERP or warehouse management system to another. The physical labor part of that would fall under the unfulfilling, boring and exhausting category so.
"But there is a pretty easy explanation for why people are burned out."
You name one reason. And it's a true reason but there are many others. Your explanation doesn't cover them all.
There are only two reason people get burned out: long periods of mental or physical stress. A dancer can burnout when asking too much of the body. A fit person can burnout when the lie of an affair is going on for too long. And of course your explanation is also a very valid one.
A burnout is 100% physical (the body is exhausted), but the cause can be mental or physical (or both).
Unfortunately I have experience with being burned-out. So I can give my best advice to others who are struggling with a burnout: the key to recovery is acceptance. A burnout is potentially life threatening so you really need to step on the brakes and accept that you can't go on like you do. Also accept that it might take at least a year to fully recover. And accept that you will experience very strange thoughts and feelings because everything in your body is messed up. If you don't accept that you are burned-out you will really struggle to get better. Get help!
If you ever find youself typing a sentence that starts with this, please stop and hit the backspace button until it's gone. You are most likely going to to say something that is completely wrong or misses 90% of the actual reasons something happens.
I agree although I would add that many of the creative jobs although technically challenging have useless or even destructive goals. Just look at the attention economy and the surveillance industry.
We try not to contemplate this fact by occupying our lives to the limit and by focusing on the "how" instead of the "why". We engineers are probably the ones who do this the most.
Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)
I think it escapes the domain of work. It's widely propagated in a variety of different mediums. I don't operate under the pretense that me and my direct friends and kin are a good representation of the world at large, but to give an example:
You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.
I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.
All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.
It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.
This is one of my favorite read in a while. I love how it frames the question of burnout and addresses the ills of modern life. As far as my personal experience goes, I am unhappy when I do the same thing for too long. I believe that we aren’t creatures designed to repeat the same tasks over and over. People talking about the grass always being greener on the other side are right in the sense that we enjoy a change of scenery. I have to admit that I am a fan of capitalism and I believe it’s the best socio-economic model we have. However, my main critique is that it’s a theft of joy for the artisans in us. The introduction of the assembly line and the fact that workers do not feel the same pride in the final product is a sad conclusion. I get so much pride and joy out of making things. I wouldn’t be able to be the one inserting a bearing into the wheel of the car because I wouldn’t get the same pride.
> I get so much pride and joy out of making things. I wouldn’t be able to be the one inserting a bearing into the wheel of the car because I wouldn’t get the same pride.
What you're describing sounds a bit like alienation, where workers are alienated from the products of their labor.
Agile/Scrum <==== Cause of Burnout lol... How would you like to be put in a place everyday where you estimate a vague tasks and then be held responsible for your rough 30s estimate. Why can't we hire people?
It's remarkable to compare this to buddha's early teachings, modern psychology, economics, cancel culture, and the woes of social media. Such a huge subject that nobody can seem to see or understand in whole.
The deep boredom that wasn't. We must throw people to the lions in a colosseum. People are suffering because they desire to solve this deep boredom. They will constantly escalate the risk or thrill to satisfy this desire but the cure to the boredom is impermanent. Pleasure must be fleeting and therefore the cure for the deep boredom is to not desire.
This isn't to say you cannot live life. You must give up control, give up greed, hatred, and ignorance.
[+] [-] sirodoht|4 years ago|reply
The book talks about many things that were on the edge of my eyes. I knew them, yet I hadn't realised they were there; that they were a thing. I hadn't realised it was us who introduced them. This is the definition of Castoriadis' imaginary [2][3]. I'd recommend The Burnout Society to everyone yet I hesitate because it challenges very foundational ideas, in an unpopular way as well.
Maybe the book's two things that struck out to me the most are:
* We strive for achievement so much that we tire ourselves to depression
* Burnout and depression are intrinsically connected
And the question that I ask myself after having read the book is: How can we achieve things with no burnout or ego-driven mindset?
[1] https://nutcroft.com/blog/book-the-burnout-society-by-byung-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)
[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/imaginary-institution-society
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33tbro|4 years ago|reply
I always read him as saying that the valuing of achievement itself comes from the depression/burnout society he observes in his native South Korea. Ie, we only obsess over achievement in the first place because society is so stratified and the stakes are so high if you fail.
I think he overall has a distaste for what he calls the 'achievement subject', and is more aligned with people like Baudrilliard in favouring individuation through developing a contemplative and very singular personal identity.
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
I ask myself something quite similar but coming from a different place (so to say).
How can I practice detachment (buddhism inspired letting go) while simultaneously accomplishing goals?
I ask myself this because I see a relation between holding on (firmly grasping a goal; the opposite of detachment) and the perseverance of success at doing difficult things.
In my own experience it remains a fact that if I hold on on to something tightly, this is why I suffer (painful); there's a truth behind "no pain no gain". However this is quite close to "them who don't try don't fail"... so they don't suffer BUT do not really accomplish anything either.
Finally, I don't consider the ego to be inherently bad, it's a tool. IMO a problem with it is that one's self is not the only one capable of using one's ego (e.g. we all have been manipulated by someone else).
[+] [-] opx9|4 years ago|reply
"We" dont strive for achievement. There is a small group with certain specific biological and psychological traits that does.
Their energy and drive gets the whole chimp troupe stampeding in one direction or another.
These biological, personality traits aren't going to be stripped out of the human population any time soon.
So you just have to recognize who you are and who you choose to deal with so you dont get stuck in traps.
Learning takes Time.
[+] [-] winternett|4 years ago|reply
People need to burnout in order to fuel a world like ours, it's no different than in the past. Some would say there are simply "too many people on this earth" to escape the constant drive for workplace-related abuse, social inequality, criminal behavior, and injustice when people are tightly packed into cities unfortunately. You realize a different way of living when you escape the city and live in a less populated environment that fosters more of what really matters - Family, Health, Creativity, Communication, Mental Well Being, Nature, and Less of a Competitive/Combative Enviornment.
Once you visit other (more rural and natural) places where people live in communities, where the pace is much more slow, like farms, mountains, beaches etc, most thoughtful people pause and realize that none of the "concrete jungle" accomplishments really matter in terms of life merits. Unfortunately, the poor and working classes rarely if ever have a chance to escape on a vacation, so they are burdened most by burnout... That burnout feeds bad things like suicide, drug abuse, poverty, depression, crime, etc, while the rest of society simply remains ignorant to the root causes of those things. Not to say that those rural and natural places are perfect to live in, but they allow for less distraction from meaningful life goals in many ways over city environments.
Many (wealthier middle class) people occasionally get to take that nature vacation at points in their life, and then later return to the city grind, hoping to recapture the vibe in retirement, but they forget the true motivation as they get behind the city walls again often.
The super-wealthy buy homes in relaxed environments at their whim... And many even work in the city without leaving their super comfortable beach and mountain "vacation" houses. Some would say that's one of the major reasons they often think far beyond the constraints of their (less paid) employees who live in the city and work in the city office... Not because they are "smarter" it's possibly because they are far more often less "mentally distracted" and weighted down by finances, work commutes, and burnout culture of city living.
[+] [-] dnautics|4 years ago|reply
At the risk of sounding pithy, "make it about the journey" set a vague goal of being successful, identify key strategies you think will get you there ("excellence"), and take pleasure in figuring it out, find reward in the incremental stages and don't sweat it when you stumble.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|4 years ago|reply
First, let go of this need that you have to achieve things. You try and keep up with others, to be better than others, but it's OK to be mediocre.
Counterpoint though, in today's economy, people are forced to achieve and push for higher wages, just to keep a roof over their head. That's another source of stress and worry, and that's down to government and international economic policy to solve.
[+] [-] jseban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bakuninsbart|4 years ago|reply
That resonates with me quite a lot, as I fell into this trap too many times, and am currently in the process of getting out once again. Being stressed out and anxious makes me depressed, which makes me unproductive, which then reinforces the stress and anxiety. While you are in it, it is also difficult to take a step back and reflect on how this isn't a very smart way of doing things.
[+] [-] alexpetralia|4 years ago|reply
"Stop trying to control everything, and just let go."
[+] [-] calferreira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jboynyc|4 years ago|reply
https://axyl.us/post/3048516084/waking-up-to-fatigue-society
I wrote it before an English translation was published, so I called it "fatigue society", which I still think is a more appropriate term than burnout society.
(Knowing that the essay is more than a decade old should help explain the strong assertion right off the bat that we aren't living in a "viral" age.)
[+] [-] atoav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|4 years ago|reply
I know nobody actually reads Foucault, but doesn't anyone at least read the Cliff's Notes?
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
and then near the end of the article:
> I’m not really sure external coercion has gone away, so much as it has been made indirect.
[+] [-] thewarrior|4 years ago|reply
However people at the upper echelons of society who you would expect to be all happy and cheerful are also burning out because of what’s described in the book.
[+] [-] wanderingmind|4 years ago|reply
You can see people who work in charity for chump change can go on for hours of work day after day for years without burning out because they gain energy from the work due to their strong alignment with the purpose, on other hand people who work without a strong alignment of purpose do work as transactional that drains energy and burns people out.
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
"This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’: the body is a scenario and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable fitness centres, bodybuilding gyms, stimulation and simulation studios that stretch from Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession. This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being ‘into’, hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
There's also a great Nick Land piece called Meltdown from his saner CCRU days that captures the 'Burnout' notion very well: http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
[+] [-] atoav|4 years ago|reply
And I say that as someone who studied Philosophy and Media science, so I am definitly not just allergic to hard theoretical jargon.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkdpic|4 years ago|reply
I try to remind myself every day how much rougher it was before I got a dev job. The financial hopelessness. Living in junky apartments with roommates as a married couple. Commuting 4 hours one way 2-3 days a week for part time jobs with no security or benefits. Trying to live off $20-30k a year in California. And still feeling lucky to have any work at all.
I try to remember this while sitting at zoom meetings and feeling exhausted. But the memory is fading...
[+] [-] hmrr|4 years ago|reply
I banked the experience and learnings and moved to a company which wasn’t in the fatal decline stage of development.
[+] [-] salt-thrower|4 years ago|reply
I could not have said this better myself. Yes, we are paid extremely well, but the soul-crushing grind of building stupid web apps for companies that don't even need them really takes a toll eventually.
[+] [-] TheCapn|4 years ago|reply
I suppose it's easier said than done, but the healthiest thing I did for myself in the transition to WFH during the pandemic was to set up and maintain appropriate boundaries between myself and work.
I'm done at 3:30. If you contact me after 3:30 I'm either ignoring the message until I'm "at work" the next morning, or I'm writing my time up as billable hours.
I've never been questioned on it, and the idea of muting my phone or leaving it in another room provides a mental break that helps with everything
[+] [-] groby_b|4 years ago|reply
Turn off that chat thing when you need to focus. Skip meetings where you neither will learn nor can contribute a unique perspectives. Turn the machine off when the workday is over to deal with the WFH blurriness. Push back on murky requirements.
Yes, it's hard, and it's scary. And I fully ack that in some companies, this would be career-limiting moves. If that's the case, you need to decide how much you want to work for them vs. going somewhere that actually lets you work as a dev.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] herbst|4 years ago|reply
The thing about working home alone is difficult. I highly believe that hard deadlines and fixed meeting times destroy the whole concept.
I wake up when I feel to, and do whatever needs to be done and I feel more often motivated to actually do work then I did ever before.
[+] [-] smashem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aunche|4 years ago|reply
I'll clarify that I do think post-industrial areas of Asia are actually "burnout societies." In the US, I don't get that sense at all.
[+] [-] dymk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
But there is a pretty easy explanation for why people are burned out. All the really manual jobs are being slowly automated away or are low-status, so everyone is chasing creative, thoughtful or social jobs. And those jobs are getting more full on.
People are being pushed to do things that evolution really hasn't equipped them to do - sustained periods of low physical activity, high mental activity guided by willpower rather than instinct. That is pretty tiring.
Software is a great example. All engineering fields. Anything involving computers. Anything involving investment. Most creative work. Any customer service work (not mentally stimulating, but very demanding of continuous social engagement & othen in tense situations). Mechanical work.
It used to be everyone was a farm labourer. We don't have much work like that any more. Most of us have to plan out how we'll get physically tired out because it doesn't happen by accident any more.
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
I don't think it's a mental vs. physical thing at all.
I've had jobs where I had certainty about what I was doing every day, I witnessed the fruits of my labor and I had certainty about where I stood in the organization. I never suffered burnout from them.
I've also had jobs where I was always uncertain about what I ought to be doing, where the fruits of my labor often didn't seem to amount to much (e.g. perpetual project cancellations/always changing requirements/sudden architectural direction changes) and I was really uncertain about where I stood the whole time.
I tried dealing with it with sustained periods of heavy physical activity (e.g. jogging between tasks), meditation, etc. It only helped a little.
This perpetual miasma of uncertainty and consequent stress built up over time and when it became too much - that's when I burned out.
I don't doubt that working on a farm doing heavy physical labor under similar conditions would burn me out too. My parents used to sometimes give me vague gardening tasks when I was a teenager and I absolutely hated that.
[+] [-] littlecranky67|4 years ago|reply
Exactly. The problem is that more and more of the "easy tasks" that high-skilled jobs are automated/moved to computers. 30-50 years ago, an Engineer still would find to make some copies, sharpen a pencil or get fresh paper from storage, check his mailbox etc. So even high-skilled jobs had a lot of repetetive, simple work parts that gave the brain room to relax. Nowadays the easy tasks are removed, and we mostly deal with hard problemes 8h+ a day.
[+] [-] Zababa|4 years ago|reply
That resonates with me. As a developer, I feel an intense desire to either contribute to open source, or go into a more "creative" field. And it's not the "good" kind of desire that gives me energy or pushes me to do things, but it's the kind of "bad" desire that feels like it's eating me alive sometimes. I have a master's degree, and a nice job with very good people. But somehow it doesn't feel enough for me.
I know this is a mental health problem, and I know that this may be a "real" calling instead of just a kind of FOMO. But a few people around me suffer from the same thing, so I wonder if there's not some kind of mechanism at play here. While I don't spend much time with "regular" people on social media, I spend time looking at open source developers, and creative people. When I was younger I felt kind of immune to the social media trap (showing your perfect life and all of that). Now, I realise that I may have fallen from it, just with different values.
[+] [-] hef19898|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdrdt|4 years ago|reply
You name one reason. And it's a true reason but there are many others. Your explanation doesn't cover them all.
There are only two reason people get burned out: long periods of mental or physical stress. A dancer can burnout when asking too much of the body. A fit person can burnout when the lie of an affair is going on for too long. And of course your explanation is also a very valid one.
A burnout is 100% physical (the body is exhausted), but the cause can be mental or physical (or both).
Unfortunately I have experience with being burned-out. So I can give my best advice to others who are struggling with a burnout: the key to recovery is acceptance. A burnout is potentially life threatening so you really need to step on the brakes and accept that you can't go on like you do. Also accept that it might take at least a year to fully recover. And accept that you will experience very strange thoughts and feelings because everything in your body is messed up. If you don't accept that you are burned-out you will really struggle to get better. Get help!
[+] [-] FranzFerdiNaN|4 years ago|reply
If you ever find youself typing a sentence that starts with this, please stop and hit the backspace button until it's gone. You are most likely going to to say something that is completely wrong or misses 90% of the actual reasons something happens.
[+] [-] lcam84|4 years ago|reply
Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)
[+] [-] Burnafter186|4 years ago|reply
You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.
I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.
All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.
It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.
[+] [-] LightG|4 years ago|reply
"High mental activity guided by will power" sounds like a fantastic foundation for any role and my ideal.
There is a place for manual labour (been there, done that), and both can work.
People are burned out due to understaffing and/or misallocation of resources.
This is intensely acute for some right now due to the chips falling back down to earth while people adjust to pre-post-pandemic.
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] human|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachrdan|4 years ago|reply
What you're describing sounds a bit like alienation, where workers are alienated from the products of their labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
[+] [-] techsin101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
The deep boredom that wasn't. We must throw people to the lions in a colosseum. People are suffering because they desire to solve this deep boredom. They will constantly escalate the risk or thrill to satisfy this desire but the cure to the boredom is impermanent. Pleasure must be fleeting and therefore the cure for the deep boredom is to not desire.
This isn't to say you cannot live life. You must give up control, give up greed, hatred, and ignorance.
[+] [-] known|4 years ago|reply
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