[dawhizkid]

I think there's two types of work-induced burnout. "White collar" burnout is generally self-inflicted, and to me less about working oneself to exhaustion and more about working any amount of hours on something that you subconsciously believe is fundamentally misaligned with your core principles/true self. My hypothesis on why this seems to be happening at higher rates is because without a focus on raising a family and/or participation in organized religion, our careers/workplace have become the "things" that we now try to put all this meaning behind, and what was once separated from our "life" (e.g. work/life balance) has become our life, and the psychological burden of being forced to be 100% emotionally invested/devoted to our work has consequences.

"Blue collar" burnout, to me, is the archetypal fast food worker making minimum wage working paycheck to paycheck, who not only has to deal with financial insecurity that comes with the job but the physical (actual manual "work") and psychological (rude customers) burdens that come with those types of jobs.

[westoncb]

> more about working any amount of hours on something that you subconsciously believe is fundamentally misaligned with your core principles/true self.

That rings true to me. My speculation as to why: at the most general level, our 'work' in life resembles a hierarchical optimization process--goals and sub-goals (and so on) forming a structure defined by nested utility functions.

Our professional goals (and their day-to-day sub-goals), may be pretty significant, but they're still subservient to more fundamental goals implied by fundamental values.

I think burnout is working extensively on some sub-goal (that may be large enough to appear as a top-level goal in itself), that is fundamentally misaligned with some ancestor goal(s): working on it makes no progress or even regression on more significant goals.

I think a common source of this misalignment for tech people of my generation (I'm 33) is being taught as kids that we can do "anything we put our minds to" and that fundamentally we should be aiming to "change the world". Then we grow up and find ourselves faced with the practical reality of the large scale professional world where not everyone gets to run things and the vast majority of folks end up working on insignificant little corners of someone else's probably anti-altruistic money making scheme--just consider the opposition between the early-formed life goals/values and the day-to-day goals of your typical tech worker.

(And perhaps what makes it extra bad is that contemporary perception of how evil/exploitative etc. tech is, is quite high: our culture is steeped in the likes of Black Mirror and other sources of tech paranoia [or maybe just tech cautionaries--who knows].)

[alexashka]

Most people aren't interested in changing the world, just their lifestyle, to be what they've been sold as high status.

Facebook as one example is not filled with people who want to change the world, they can go work somewhere that's not cancer for 1/3 the pay any day of the week. Do they? No.

From personal experience - most burn-out is just a personality type. Some people only want to play at 9/10 intensity or not at all. Every professional athlete retires because they've 'burnt out'. Every professional athlete is willing to destroy their body to win. We love self destructive people. We love sacrifice. We love it when someone else does it, for our benefit.

When they're asking you to up your intensity from 4/10 to 6, we call them genius assholes and write blogs about avoiding them at all costs. They're asking you to sacrifice along with them, that is not acceptable. On Sunday, on TV, so that you can drink beer and cheer for your team, acceptable. When it involves you, 'burn out' :)

[cityzen]

What would you tell your kids today? I have 2 boys, 7 and 10, and I don't want to lead them into the same trap. We are already dealing with the fear that the schools put into kids about tests. The pressure on kids to be in "performance" mode all the time is really disappointing to me.

[alexashka]

Tell them they can work at Starbucks and lead a happy life. If you genuinely believe it, you won't have to tell your kids anything.

There is no pressure on kids, other than their idiot parents. School should be seen as trivial and boring, because grades don't matter. Grades don't matter because if you're not an idiot, you can flunk school and do well in life with minimal effort. Just try many things to see what you like and then do it for 10 years.

If it's athletics, you can go work a physically demanding job that pays well. If it's an intellectual pursuit, you'll be well suited for university and a high paying job. If it's creative, the admiration you get for your art will matter far more than living in a basement. If it's just being a nice, easy-going, kind human being, quality relationships will matter more than living in a basement.

Whichever way you go, you win, unless you have idiot parents who teach you to be unhappy and insecure, like them.

[westoncb]

I don't know that there's any particular message I would substitute those with. I think I'd mostly just avoid setting unreasonable expectations. My guess is that the common phrases/sentiments echoed as a I was growing up were so prevalent because some ideas then vogue about how it would develop a child's drive/ambition, or prevent them from artificially limiting themselves (it's a nice idea). My personal view is that honesty is better and that sort of manipulation is a kind of 'technical debt' that will come back to bite later.

Another aspect of it I was reminded of today by a good twitter post (I went back looking for it but it has disappeared from my feed!) has to do with sources of value. It was basically theorizing that lot of people who end up running into issues with generalized anxiety and depression as (young) adults, do so because they place all their self-value in their work and accomplishments (socially defined). He was cautioning people against viewing themselves exclusively as creators of products (in a general sense), and only valuing themselves as such. It's a common trap for folks sort of over-embracing capitalist ethos.

Maybe just making it known that it's _okay_ if they are 'merely' an ordinary person. I bet a lot of this isn't even verbal, but just comes down to whether parents actually are or are not okay with their kids being less than extraordinary.

If you're aware of the issue you're probably already fine though--the rest will follow from that.

(Of course I'm not a professional of any kind on this matter, so, you know--generous grain of salt!)

[kd5bjo]

First, I should note that I’m speculating without any basis at all here: I don’t have kids nor have I had any relevant formal training. It’s entirely possible this is a wrong approach or simply too nuanced for their ages.

I’d try to frame test as purely information-gathering. There should be neither penalties for low grades nor accolades for high grades (those are for dangerous things and showing initiative). Instead, use the grades to adjust study strategies- are their high grades because of a natural affinity or spending too much time on the subject? Are their low grades from not putting in enough time/effort, not understanding the fundamentals, not finding interest in the subject, etc.

[lanstin]

Make sure they have a regular time when they are in charge of their time and tasks.

[blinkingled]

> because without a focus on raising a family and/or participation in organized religion, our careers/workplace have become the "things" that we now try to put all this meaning behind, and what was once separated from our "life" (e.g. work/life balance) has become our life, and the psychological burden of being forced to be 100% emotionally invested/devoted to our work has consequences.

This resonates with me a 100%. We forgot that we aren't machines and our mind and soul needs variations - clutching on to something, letting go/resting and moving on to something else is necessary physically and psychologically.

Absence of that we have sustained stress and resulting bad consequences.

[lanstin]

Even within a purely work perspective, we arent machines. My productivity (as perceived by the impact of my work not Lines of Code) gies up and down. I will have a good year and save millions of dollars or make a platform that ends up employing dozen software engineers for many products and then you know have years where I make some python framework used by five people have 10 percent better latency. There is a certain tendency by management to reward me in the up years and punish me in the down years but for me as a human they aren't two things. Stuff just goes in cycles. I don't get the big years without the fallow years. I focus on learning stuff each year and trying to get people to always improve things a bit, and it all works out. At least i have learned a lot of cool stuff. And management still hasn't come up with floating promotions where you are a Senior blah blah blah for 24 months then can ebb back.

[high_5]

We don't only need variation, we need rhythm. We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday, where weeks whoosh by like days, rattled with the constant flurry of calls, messages, notifications and whatnot. There is no pace if one does not set it by himself.

[blinkingled]

> We live in an a-rhythmic world where in the evening the morning events feel like yesterday

I seriously think this is causing mental dysfunction - depression for instance. Of course I don't know of any way to prove this other than experience - we react to same situations in the same way and we feel stuck/frustrated when we experience repeat cycles of the same thing - that has got to have some negative impact.

I think we can do some things to make it work better but ultimately lot of things are determined by your workplace culture.

[davidjnelson]

Disabling most notifications is a great way to deal with this. Then you can check stuff when you want/need to.