Hey folks! Daily social media is part of my routine to spread the word about what I'm working on. It's awesome to see everyone's wins—it lights a fire under me. But then I hit overdrive and burn out. Takes me weeks to feel normal again. Does this happen to you? How do you keep up your energy?
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I've had to slow down. This means reducing all the things that distract me. It means coming to grips with "missing out".
I've leaned into some life hacks like:
- Designating social media time to just after work but not after dinner (includes HN).
- Leaning into meditation. Not just 10min via an app but a walk to and back from my favorite cafe every morning without my phone or any headphones.
- Going to bed early and waking up early. The quietest, non-distracting moments are in the early morning.
- Using a pomodoro timer. For both work projects and personal projects.
- I try to spend some time focusing on activities that are intentionally slow like writing poetry and personal essays.
- Religiously take off the weekends
- Take several days off about six times a year (for example a long weekend, however to avoid crowds, sometimes take off during the workweek)
- And once a year for at least two weeks
- Don't do too much in the free time or have buffers of dolce far niente between work and busy free time
I think you hit the nail on the head with "dealing with missing out".
The vast majority of what happens is irrelevant and trying to keep up with, say, the latest tech drama, the latest framework, the scandal du jour, the currently popular TV show.. it feels important but it's not, and giving up is hard but not harmful.
The only thing to do is to meet it on your own timeline, not its.
What you wrote is like saying "well, I'll just work through the pain" when someone asks about avoiding heart attack. That's not how heart attacks work, and that's not how burnout works either.
I have mortgage, wife, kids also and continue to plug along, but know the difference.
I got to my goal through a combination of good luck, hard work and other life choices (eg we have no kids, no car and are frugal for co² emission reduction). I also predicted the house prices crash of 2008 (not the whole thing, but definitely within my country) and waited for years while my friends bought vault overpriced properties way out of town. Then I watched the house prices tumble to decades low prices before grabbing an absolute bargain. That was one part of the luck. The other was the startup being acquired, but I got fucked on the stock, so it only just about covered my remaining debt. So I kept working and building a nest egg.
I did switch companies after a while and I spend another 2 years helping to build another startup. But one stressful day in the middle of a fundamental disagreement with my CTO, I just blurted out "I'm sorry, but think I quit!" I talked it through over the weekend with my wife, and confirmed it on the Monday.
After 20 years of unbroken employment I took 6 months off. I had all these plans for what I'd do (mostly tech side projects that I didn't have time for) but only achieved 10% of it because I was having so much fun doing DIY, gardening, running...
Up to that point in my life I was soooo tech focused. But after realizing that I could "insta-quit" at any time and do zero tech, I did worry that I had broken myself. But strangely enough I found myself working with another startup and absolutely loving it.
I realized that I need other people to need my expertise. Even though I love what I do, I find that I can't do it simply for myself. Work is a necessary "evil" that allows me to have my tech hobby. I just approach it differently now. I'm careful about who I work with and what they're building. Oh, and I also work 3.5 days a week now, so no more burnout.
It's a Buddhist concept that says that to achieve tranquility (end of suffering) you need to have what you value, what you think and what you are actually doing aligned and going in the same direction.
When you're feeling lost, ask yourself these 3 questions:
- What do you really want?
- What do you really value?
- What are you really doing with your life?
I've wrote a longer post that you can read here: https://kerkour.com/alignment
* Remember that Social Media is the place that everyone shows 'their absolute best' - even a fake version of their best. It doesn't show their times of down, their stress, and so on.
* the social media that you're using may connect thousands or hundreds of thousands of people together. There's only 365 days a year, and even if each person only has one good day a year that they show off, 273 people (out of 100k) would share each individual day. It'd look like you're going slow.
* As other people have said, life is a marathon, not a sprint. You've got a whole lot of years left and you want to be able to function in them, too. Burnout can absolutely ruin developers, and has, many times in the past.
* As other people have said, "work to live", don't "live to work". Now, I get the feeling that this is your personal project or your business you're running at. That's awesome! You still need to give yourself space between a singular project so you can recuperate from it. How often do you look at code you wrote or things you worked on when you were at a fever pace and go "wow, what was I thinking?"; or, when you couldn't solve a problem for days, go to bed and then hey, the solution is right there! Give yourself the space so that those events can happen - and they happen because you're getting away from the work, you're getting rested, you're relaxing.
Your health, your life, the connections you make are of incredible value and as you get older, they get harder to train, recover, grow. Make sure you're tending to yourself like you should in ways that are completely disconnected from your work.
I don’t see the point making $150k a year if I’m literally exchanging my life for that money.
“Unemployment” is a dirty word, I think by design to keep people producing for the economy. It’s impressive how much of a stronghold this concept holds over people. How many people who already have more than enough, who could live out the rest of their lives literally doing whatever they want, instead continue to remain employed in a job they don’t like due to an irrational fear of unemployment?
I was also in similar situation and I indeed complained a lot, like everyone called me the most pessimist person in existence and some of my friends intentionally avoided me.
While I got some therapy which immensely helped, it is also important to find out about why you feel helpless and if something bad or regretful happened to you that left you scarred(took the therapy to realise and distance myself from that abyss…).
Rather than complaining, I eventually came to accept that the world is not just(read about just world fallacy) and everything is the way it is and will continue to devolve into more degrades state due to constant chaos nature of everything. All that is left to do in power is to enjoy myself with my family and friends and not try to save the world to enlighten others about obvious issues of the society and everything(believe me most everyone also sees and knows this but tends to be busy with their own life and tomorrow instead of getting down about the sinister nature of the world).
I recently learned a cognitive behavior technique where when you notice that you're demonizing something, you make an effort to find something good about it. As in, "I dislike this situation very much, but it's a nice learning opportunity", or "I miss a loved one that's died, but I sure have a lot of great memories with them". It can feel like gymnastics the first time, but then it clicks. The goal is to remember that each entity is multifaceted and complex, without putting on rose-tinted or doom-tinted glasses. Closing yourself off to that complexity that's inherent in everything is not worth it.
I got a lot better at life when I started studying deep and ancient history in detail and figured out that there's been multiple worlds before this one. Many systems have been exercised and they all have a life cycle and eventually collapse.
Much like living beings, societies are born, mature and wither. It is inevitable that ours will collapse eventually. It isn't good or bad. It just is.
I've since embraced the roll of researching these life cycles.
Also helps to maintain pretty firm limits on work time and not-work time, or even just having a small window of your waking day where you're on Do Not Disturb.