| A short list of things worth thinking about trying, listed in no specific order: 1. Find a project at work that you are interested in, and move over to that. 2. Join a completely different team/org at work. 3. Join a completely different company, doing different types of work. 4. Join a socially responsible company, doing charity work. 5. Quit your job, and take a 6 month break. Don't think about work during that break. 6. Go see a therapist for at least a couple of months. 7. Improve your diet and exercise routines, potentially with professional help from a trainer or a nutritionist. 8. Begin a treatment plan using drugs w/ the approval of a psychiatrist. 9. Begin a treatment plan using drugs without the approval of a psychiatrist, YOLO mushrooms time. 10. Leave your job, and move into an entirely different industry. Go start a farm. 11. Take a trip to a country with a radically different way of life, to gather some perspective. 12. Take some daily time to do something away from a computer - like join a pottery club. 13. Read some philosophy books on the meaning of life. Do some introspection based on what you read. 14. Pick a goal at work, like getting a promotion, and figure out what you need to do that. I want to also offer a quick theory of burnout. Burnout is caused by 3 different sources: 1. Plain old overwork. Too much on-call is not good for your soul. 2. Mission doubt. If you begin to doubt the reason why you are doing something, you will get burned out. 3. Broken steering. If you feel that nothing you do actually is changing the situation, that you're unable to make meaningful progress in your work. What I want to stress about this theory is that you don't need all three to have burnout. Some people think that taking an extended vacation is the cure to all burnout, because their theory only accounts for source 1, when you can have burnout from a job where you only work 20 hours a week. You might wish to first try and figure out which of these 3 sources seem like the cause for your burnout, and then which of the 14 options seem most appealing to you. |