Ask HN: Mid-Career Boreout, family, et al.

[midburnanon]

Throwaway for all the obvious reasons.

I'm in my late 30's/early 40's. I'm bored out. I feel like I've done the rise and fall in tech. I've startupped, I've run (and sold, low 6 figs) my own company. I've helped others get started. I've mentored, I've been mentored. Honestly.. I've had a career.

In an attempt to get back into caring - I've taken a lower on the totem (senior foo) job. The reality is that.. I'm bored out. The problems needing solving seem repetitive, take their time, and just aren't interesting. In fact, in 2021 we seem to be in the exact same area place as we were in 2001, just with different technologies - but the same problems.

How do others deal with this? At this point I'm basically just trying to get the mental space in to deal with getting to retirement. I can hopefully retire with my full quality of life within 3-8 years... but how do you get there without frankly going nuts. What can I do to improve my working situation?

Please, before people suggest therapy, religion, mindfulness, health, yoga, family connections, friends, charity, etc.. I have all that. I'm thankful (nay grateful) for everything we have. I'm just...done, and I don't know how to function anymore.

Help wanted - even if it's just to hear from others with the same thoughts. Thank you so much for reading, and considering.

[paraiuspau]

I am in exactly (from what I understand from your summary) the same position, and I think I feel your pain. I've been/was a UNIX sysadmin from mid 90s to a few years ago, when DevOps took over. Somehow, I just feel like the "good old days" are long-gone, the "identity" of hacker too, and I see many young (I am 42) engineers starting out and really relishing their work. I wish I could have that hunger again, but I am just more interested in sitting idle and "mourning" the past. I also have a counselor, have been a practitioner of mindfulness/meditation for years, etc; I have the tools to apparently cope with this situation, but something fundamental has fled, I fear.

[midburnanon]

I can agree with part of that. I'm lucky - I'm solidly up-to-date, I keep working on new, fun kit (in theory). But the reality.. I find these iterations on problems we solidly solved. I'd like to do something new, not iterate on things I've already done - just with a new company name attached.

[dfraser992]

What are you going to do in retirement? I read an article recently about how people tend not to really change their life or behaviors once they 'retire', i.e. those plans to completely reinvent yourself are not entirely realized.

For example, me - I kept pushing off my impulses to ditch IT to work on the novel/play/screenplay... a compulsion kept me focused on the job despite going thru what you are a few times. It was that creative drive, I guess and I could never redirect it. And "responsibility", getting money for my hobby, etc. So what am I doing now, now that I've "officially" mostly retired (aka not looking for a job because interviews suck and why aren't in management and you're too old / can't code like leet 20 year olds...)

Am I working on that novel? No, I'm chasing down a bug in scikit right now so I can finish this ML research paper. Christ... And I don't even have to write this paper, I'm doing it for the hell of it. Maybe someday someone will read this paper (or the next couple) and get something useful out of it.

I guess what I'd say is figure really figure out "why" you did all the things you did and what motivated you despite all the headaches. For me, it was the idea of "service" (once I got past the ego trip of being in my 20s/early 30s) - my role was to create some bit of order in the universe for people or whatever that needed it in the way of IT stuff. That has what carried me along despite working (unknowingly) for sociopaths with actual criminal records a few times (don't ask...) Businesspeople, capitalism... don't get me started.

If you can't afford to quit now, then find some sort of external motivator like "service" to keep you going. Or perhaps a completely different tech to deal with - have you experienced the full scope of all of it?

Or perhaps this is a roundabout way of saying "get a hobby". IT has always been fundamentally a hobby for me. Actual coding isn't so much anymore, but now that I've been exposed to academia the last few years, I am sliding into research-y stuff, writing papers no one else is going to bother to. It is still tech, but parallel to my other impulses - the fundamental impulse of creating something out of pure ideas.

When I REALLY retire, I'll write that novel!

[midburnanon]

Filling my non-work time is the easy part, on so many levels. There's skateboarding, horseback riding, volunteering, religious services, mentoring, teaching, contributing (more) to OSS should I want (literally my current day job). Maybe a second novel, or another textbook. Sure, it's a first world problem - but I've had all of those successes, I just don't have a motivator for continuing in any way - and currently (for a few years) need to.

Filling retirement time is insanely easy. It's the what the hell do I do until then part that's beyond a problem.

[kilodeca]

Prepare.