| speaking as someone who has dealt with burnout twice, done a bunch of research on it, and just gave a talk about it: While you may have legit issues working with others, it's not really what causes burnout. The environment of your tasks, and possibly the fallout of your limited / poor collaboration skills would be. But You can be an a-hole who hates other humans and still relish the rest of your job and not get burnt out. The more i think about burnout the more it comes back to the ideas of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose that Dan Pink put forth, but maybe not in the way he meant. If you don't have tasks where you can exercise autonomy (make uncoerced decisions about it) feel like you're doing something meaningful (have purpose), and the ability to actually get better at the thing you're working at (mastery) you're pretty much going to get burnt out. If you can't find those things in your job you need to find them in your personal time. I've read a bunch of articles about this and the ones that are by people who actually know what they're talking about seem to basically boil down to those 3 ideas. Re. quitting IT: It won't help. it's very common for people who are burnt out to think they can't continue with their profession, that the profession is the problem, but it's not true. You'll find the same situations in other professions. Switching careers with just kick the problem down the road. You may be better for a little while because you'll be a newb in the new profession and things will be more interesting, but eventually you'll be right back in the same place. Working for yourself instead of others might make a difference, but really you need to find autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Outside of that: eat healthy, get exercise, meditate (100% serious about those). And, of course a healthy work/life balance. Also, learning how to find good things about dealing with other humans would probably go a long ways towards improving the non-burnout related aspects of your life. Maybe if you get along with them better you'll get more meaningful tasks that you enjoy... THAT would actually help prevent burnout. |