[themacguffinman]

Agreed, this matches my own experience with burnout and pressure. I've worked two different jobs with totally different amounts of pressure (one lower pressure and one higher pressure) but I've experienced burnout in both. It's not the level of pressure & optimization that leads to burnout, in fact the best periods of my career were at my high pressure job working pretty hard.

FWIW there's a comment quote that I think really nails burnout perfectly [1]:

> Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

> My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.

> That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.

My 2c is that if you're interested in working out & solving your own burnout, this is how you need to understand burnout. There are so many bad and weirdly political interpretations on burnout that basically sell "the solution is to work less" or "the solution is for society to work less". I want to save you the trouble of discovering that working less doesn't actually help you feel more fulfilled and will probably make you even more miserable if you have even a little bit of passion & curiosity & ambition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618

[lambdatronics]

This fits my experience. It doesn't even need to be 'failure' per se. I got burned out as a post-doc because I found the publication process really draining & ultimately being published didn't feel very rewarding/meaningful. So, it was technically success, but it felt like a waste.