[throwaway42668]

I'm a VC-backed founder who's definitely burned out. I know for certain what caused it, and I know for certain when it became unrecoverable, and I know for certain that I charged ahead deeper into it anyway because I had little other choice at the time. There's also a very strong sort of sunk-cost/devil-you-know thing with burnout that sucks you down the rabbit hole.

You simultaneously feel like you're too burned out to be able to do some entirely new thing, if you can even muster the energy to engage in the switching process (e.g. job hunting, etc.), and the familiarity of the thing that's burning you out brings its own kind of perverse comfort.

However, now that I've been deeeeeep in it for a couple years (still doing the thing that's burning me the whole time and even now) I've developed an appreciation for what it probably really is... existential malaise. That's a really useful thing to experience. Because it can be used to redefine a superficial value system you've adopted, to get to this point of dread in the first place, toward things you do actually find personally fulfilling for their own sake. Sometimes in dramatic fashion.

[consp]

> You simultaneously feel like you're too burned out to be able to do some entirely new thing, if you can even muster the energy to engage in the switching process (e.g. job hunting, etc.), and the familiarity of the thing that's burning you out brings its own kind of perverse comfort.

This describes an average Monday. Though I would not describe it as comfort but as continuous eternal pain you try very hard to ignore.

[jajko]

Well it certainly describes this Monday, but I don't think we talk about same level of things

[TeMPOraL]

It probably describes all Mondays before too; it just seems that today is worse, because suffering is fresh.

[adamc]

I could same the same of depression (in my case, arising from divorce). Difficult times enable values clarification.

[rubicon33]

> toward things you do actually find personally fulfilling for their own sake. Sometimes in dramatic fashion.

Go on…

[hobs]

The problem with this journey into lived nihilism is that it so often ends with suicide. Stay safe.

[throwaway42668]

Thanks. Appreciate it. I'm probably fortunate that I came to grips with that whole end of things 20 years prior to work-induced burnout. I can probably safely credit the experiences for both the relative ease with which I went down the burnout hole and the relative ease of building a mindset for dealing with it.

Everything has its unsigned and signed integers.

[hobs]

Oof, like looking in a mirror. Maybe I shouldn't start that company then.

[throwaway42668]

Maybe. Dunno. Depends a lot on so many things. I mean, I'm excited about doing another startup after this one using everything I've learned about how I actually want to be spending my time and what kinds of users/customers/people I want to be interacting with everyday.