[hashbig]

"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but I never felt burned-out. I felt tired, but content.

It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

[hearsathought]

> Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

Burnout isn't exhaustion. Burnout doesn't drain your body, it drains your mind. You could get burnout from comfortably sitting all day long. Exhaustion from doing something you love is exhilarating. Burnout from doing something you hate is mentally draining.

Burnout is a symptom of disillusionment. Disillusionment causes burnout. It's not physical. It's all mental.

[Cthulhu_]

> I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

Another phrase I recently heard about is bore-out, where you just lose your motivation because the job is unstimulating or meaningless (but you know you and your job can be better).

[lawn]

This hits hard and it explains very well what I'm going through.

[komali2]

> Two weeks before launch, they pulled the plug

> It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wrote about alienation from labor:

> “If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

> "Labour power is...a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live...the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.--does he consider this twelve hoursí weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hoursí labour...has no meaning for him...but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed...." (Wage Labour and Capital, 1847)

Imo though I agree with Graeber that we've gone beyond just alienation from the product of labor and into alienation from all purpose, in a world where a huge swath of labor and productive energy is put towards genuinely useless things.

> "...a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Bullshit Jobs, a Theory

[Lio]

Alienation from labour is a perfect description.

I once worked for a start up that got taken over. In the process all retained staff lost their options.

I don’t think the options were really worth that much so I guess we were supposed to just be happy we still had our jobs.

The pettiness of it though just sucked the life out of the work for me. I found it very hard to concentrate and very hard to give a shit about anything after that.

It’s a massive indicator that it’s time to move on.

[Tade0]

> In the process all retained staff lost their options.

For nothing in return? I don't know the first thing about startup operations, but that sounds deeply unfair.

[_moof]

A local maximum. "Maxima" is plural for "maximum".

[yard2010]

No offense but it sounds too fruity to be written by a human. You're just talking with psychophant chatgpt without doing the prompting.