13 ms·
You’re not burnt out, you’re existentially starving
- justchad 9mo agoThis resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
- thanedar 9mo agoThanks! And congrats on giving notice! Excited to hear what you do next! Cheering for you!
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoCongratulations on breaking out and good luck, it’s real powerful work ahead for you! I did that a few years ago and it’s been transformative. HMU if you want help.
- justchad 9mo agoThanks, I might take you up on that. I’ve mainly been in the work, kids, sleep loop the past decade so I need to find some hobbies and passion projects to work on.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoYeah I’ve got three teens headed out the door so I’ve been there too. My un at icloud is best.
- tsunamifury 9mo agoFor all the yammering in this thread you’ve centered on the real problem no one can admit here. You burn out creating value for others that you end up either not owning or it not materially contributing to your immediate community. We evolved to work for ourselves and our tribe again immense satisfaction from that. Cleaning your house, pulling weeds volunteering locally. Etc. But endlessly serving shareholders (ownership class or not) while giving up way more value then you out in yields a deep sense of happiness because we can’t express the unfairness woven into our life so deeply.
- KellyCriterion 9mo ago++1
- Christopgr 9mo agoAlso resonates with me. I helped my previous company scale and get acquired and then helped scale the new team some more. Then decided I wanted to go into a high-caliber start-up because I was kind of burned-out and after a year I did. I work with brilliant people, building a product that democratizes investing in my small EU country and seeing a company grow again is fun. The problem is we lack excitedness and the feedback loop is bad so my motivation hasn't picked-up. What helped me is a new hire that brought some emotions and excitedness to the team. I have also been thinking of giving my notice for a while now, but I'm also struggling with finding a purpose so that part also hit me hard. I'm actually scared of leaving my job in case I find out it was the one thing that gave me purpose and I won't be able to find something better. Congrats on doing it, and please do send a message if you do find something that gives you more purpose, it will greatly help me.
- snek_case 9mo agoSometimes it's possible to take an unpaid leave for six months or a year and then come back if you want to. If you perform well at your job, no reason they wouldn't want you back.
- asdff 9mo agoMy advice would be to keep up with a schedule that still keeps you pretty busy and ideally waking up early at regular hours. Once you hit actual rock bottom burn out, you know sleeping in until noon and scrolling message boards for three hours before you realized you haven't eaten yet all day and the sun is already setting, it feels almost impossible to turn the switch back on when you need to. Even something like folding your clothes starts to feel like a monumental task pretty fast.
- nubg 9mo agoRelating to my other comment under your post, I feel like I am becoming this. I urgently need to stop it and am looking for books on this topics.
- timfsu 9mo agoIn my opinion, what you need is a person (or three), not a book :) Someone who relies on you, whatever the context, is some of the greatest motivation out there.
- nubg 9mo agoCan you elaborate? Do you mean getting kids? I just got out of a relationship that felt too close for me...
- triceratops 9mo agoI think they mean you should commit yourself to something that you have to show up for regularly, because someone you care about is counting on you. Not kids. Maybe start with a gym or workout buddy. Then work your way up to projects or volunteer work, with people you can't blow off.
- lunr 9mo agoAs a widower who just sent his kid off to the grandparents to visit for a few days, and is now missing his person, his kid, who relies on him and feeling the effects of missing purpose... Sure, it could be kids, a partner, a spouse, or a friend or family. But it could also be the rest of the team on the weekly bowling league, the puppies at the shelter who need playtime each week with a volunteer human, the community one serves as a volunteer firefighter, the homeless shelter where one helps serve the weekly dinner, the neighbor who needs help with yard upkeep, or any other parts of the village where one lives that relies on you, and makes you feel included, involved, and fulfilled inside by having that purpose.
- Aeglaecia 9mo agodamn bro having a billion dollar company and your own family must be so tough to deal with , happy to take them off your hands if you want to feel the drive to live again ;)
- antman123 9mo agoget married and have kids
- mensetmanusman 9mo agoThis solves it for most, but secular society has lost any structural capability to succeed in this. Marriage rates have dropped over 70%. There are extremely thriving sub-communities in places though. Graft on to those.
- HendrikHensen 9mo ago> This solves it for most, but secular society has lost any structural capability to succeed in this. Can you explain how you see a causation between religion and marriage success?
- mensetmanusman 9mo agoReligion realigns order, people look up in the same direction instead of past each other when contemplating meaning.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoMany religions still have pre-arranged marriages. Easy way to solve the issue of having to look attractive in an app.
- thanedar 9mo agoI'm married with three kids! And that's great! But like I say in the post, I still know I'm capable of making a bigger positive impact on the world, so that's how I focus my political work!
- belval 9mo agoIt's interesting that you get downvoted for what is, from a historical perspective, a very down-to-earth reasonable take. I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts. Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoI built a measurement framework for this called a cohesion matrix. You can rate your integration/coherence/cohesion based on this rubric: https://kemendo.com/CohesionMatrix.html https://kemendo.com/CohesionMatrix.html
- amelius 9mo agoLooks more like a vector than a matrix to me.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoIt computes a vector from two matricies so you’re definitely right!
- bpodgursky 9mo agoMaybe unfair, but I can't read a title with this cadence anymore without assuming it's AI.
- StilesCrisis 9mo ago100%. “It’s not [x]. It’s [y].” is highly overused by ChatGPT in particular. I hope this article isn’t just AI slop, but that’s not a great start.
- WXLCKNO 9mo agoUnfair or not, same thing for me. Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce. Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays. It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.
- thanedar 9mo agoBlogging has always required aggressive titles. My best posts for years all used this "you" or "we" focused framing too. Trying to solve people's biggest problems!
- hexbin010 9mo agoYou're not being unfair. You're showing wisdom.
- llmslave2 9mo agoIt definitely has a lot of signs of AI writing, but at the same time the flow doesn't really scream AI to me.
- krackers 9mo agoEven before AI, I think I've seen it used before in self-help books or therapy type stuff. It has always felt like an intellectually lazy attempt at reframing, painting things as black and white in the form of a thought-terminating cliche. "It's not X, it's Y" discounts X entirely, when usually the relationship between X & Y is more nuanced: "X and also Y", "X because Y", etc. Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.
- unstyledcontent 9mo agoI'm burned out because I have to raise two young children, work a full time job in a demanding career, and then in the hour or two a day of time that isn't accounted for in those two tasks, I need to maintain a household and try to care for myself. I feel a strong sense of purpose caring for my family, but don't have enough time to meet life's demands. Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
- StilesCrisis 9mo agoSadly, having more money doesn’t buy time. At least, not until you have enough money that you can hire assistants, but that’s pretty extreme.
- lithocarpus 9mo agoI mean, it does for people like me who decide to work less as they don't need to earn as much.
- shrubby 9mo agoI decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up. It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy. But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.
- Freak_NL 9mo agoWho needs assistants? I'll make do with enough money to draw a monthly stipend covering my expenses and leisure from for life. You know, like a salary, but without wasting my time on pointless tasks that give me no satisfaction.
- Xenoamorphous 9mo agoEnough money to not work and care for your children is the correct answer. But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.
- aster0id 9mo agoI agree with the premise but take issue with the measure for "success": do you feel excited to get up and work on Monday? We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill. To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 9mo agoI was hooked by the first few paragraphs but the immediate switch to focus on work was disappointing. The happiest people I know treat work like the necessary evil to be endured to fulfill all other facets of life.
- Mistletoe 9mo agoThe happiest people I know don’t work or love their work. I can’t think of any that fit your description.
- tverbeure 9mo agoOr you totally love doing what you do at work and, after spending a week at the beach, you can’t wait to go back because you’re so close to solving that interesting problem you’ve been working on for more than a month.
- homeonthemtn 9mo agoI am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism. You work to earn, you earn to buy. But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this. When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self. Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck. Etc etc
- oh_nice_marmot 9mo agoI feel the same way. That I'm just put through the consume more and more treadmill and it's on social media, news feeds, YouTube, tv and so on. So, don't condense your thought here, I would love to read everything.
- pepperball 9mo ago> Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". And people sit around stupidly asking why everyone is pissed off and angry.
- randallsquared 9mo agoI think this is, in part, what the article is arguing. Community, and multi-generational culture and tradition, were a technology which helped populations thrive in what we now consider abject poverty. As the world gets wealthier, due to more recent technologies like widespread markets, staying in the same place and interacting with only the same 100-500 people for one's whole life is no longer something that almost everyone has to do, which explodes the basis for those earlier techs. With TFR rapidly falling, current and future children are much less likely to even have any family other than parents, which cuts out another pillar supporting community and tradition, too. I don't have a pat answer or know where this is going, but--assuming humanity survives--unless we want to turn into Asimov's Spacers, we'll have to find something to care about.
- stanleykm 9mo agoprobably doesnt help that we spend 1/3rd to 1/2 of our lives making some other asshole rich
- teaearlgraycold 9mo agoWork for an unproven startup and odds are no one is getting rich!
- olivierestsage 9mo agoGonna try to be charitable, but this really feels like gaslighting. There's a lot more to the story of how much someone is thriving than "Nice place to live. More than enough stuff. Family and friends who love you." I'm burnt out because my fancy job requires me to live in an area with a cost of living so high that it's a genuine family crisis when the washing machine breaks because we don't have enough disposable income to replace it. It's not just a meaning problem out there.
- HendrikHensen 9mo agoAs an aside, I really don't like these kinds of titles. They presume a lot about the (potential) reader without knowing anything about them. And it sounds like it's stating some kind of a fact but it really isn't. Different people are afflicted by different problems, you can't just make such a blanket statement about everyone.
- baobun 9mo agoI think the "you" here is an obvious self-insert by the autor which is fine in my book. It's only about you if you choose to read it that way.
- llmslave2 9mo agoMaybe this hits for millennials and older but as a gen-z I think it's safe to say we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive, our degrees are useless, dating and relationships have become damaged because of the apps, and we are inheriting a world that is broken and continues to shatter. The older generations have everything and still feel burnt out and unhappy? Cool. Cool cool cool. That will certainly help with the nihilism.
- kevinh 9mo ago15 years ago this exact comment would have been written swapping out millennials for gen x and gen z for millennials.
- spoiler 9mo agoAs a late millennial: yep. We're in the same boat. Nihilistic optimism isn't the worst coping mechanism, though!
- GMoromisato 9mo agoHey there, early Gen X here. We lived with the existential dread of nuclear war (The Day After traumatized a whole generation), our parents left us on our own with just 3 channels of TV for company because they both had to work, and our sexual awakening turned into a horror movie because of fear of AIDS (a death sentence at the time). Also, there were no jobs.
- esseph 9mo agoAnd our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
- 9mo ago
- jcims 9mo agoI've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers. In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long. Feelsgoodman.
- primaprashant 9mo agoGood stuff. You will enjoy my short essay, I want to give a lot of fucks! [1], which argues against the typical conclusion reached by people working at big corp long enough: "Stop caring. Stop giving a fuck. Focus on things outside of work". The core insight it, if you start to feel the need to stop caring, instead of changing your character and values, treat it as a strong signal to change your environment. [1]: https://anandprashant.com/posts/i-want-to-give-a-lot-of-fucks https://anandprashant.com/posts/i-want-to-give-a-lot-of-fuck...
- parpfish 9mo agoOne thing that I always try to bring up in these discussions is that “burnout” and “overwork” are two different problems, and I think this author would agree with me. If your problem could be fixed with a raise or a nice vacation, that’s overwork. 996 schedules, crunch time, and a high cost of living make overwork. Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia. Closer to a career-induced bout of major depression.
- athrowaway3z 9mo agoI think you need to rework some definitions or vocabulary if "overwork" is solved by "raise". Maybe in extreme cases where a raise translates into big time savers like a maid, but those are not the type of raises you while keeping the same job.
- parpfish 9mo agoFor tech folks that are making comfortable salaries, a raise won’t help. But if you’re in a position where there is difficulty affording your living expenses, a raise can make a huge quality of life change. It can remove enough stress from your life that the stress of your job goes from pushing you over the edge to staying within your limits
- thanedar 9mo agoFor sure. That's why I focused on the Monday morning meaning problem. Dreading work is very different than overwork. I'm arguing we replace the "what's the point?" question with a "what's my highest purpose? exploration. In that second answer is the solution to what many are calling burnout.
- SkyeCA 9mo ago> Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia I know I'm burnt out (increasingly severe burnout at that) and I ask myself that question daily. The truth is there is no point and I can't motivate myself anymore. I don't see any solution to the problem and I expect I will lose my job sooner or later at which point I'm not sure what I'll do. I've largely come to the conclusion that what I need to be mentally healthy and what society needs from me are fundamentally incompatible things.
- HPsquared 9mo agoI think a lot of people work on their career kind of "on credit", assuming it'll pay back in lifestyle improvements somehow. If this isn't forthcoming, the credit runs out.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bnj 9mo agoThe "You're not x. You're y." format reads as AI generated to me. I know that seeing AI syntax behind every corner is a problem that is only going to get worse and that I need to shift my mindset; nevertheless, it tinged how I reacted to the entire article.
- markus_zhang 9mo agoDamn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better. What worked is: - Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do. - YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.
- randallsquared 9mo agoI think the described problem is real, but I'm astonished at the "went into politics" solution. I would expect that the lab work was a much more concrete, achievable, and lasting good than anything that will come of engaging with zero-sum or negative-sum games. I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap. Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.
- Arainach 9mo agoI find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting. I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold. The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.
- lateral_cloud 9mo ago[flagged]
- kgwxd 9mo agoI'd argue "buy my book" posts, especially ones posted by the author, shouldn't make the front page of HN. Especially from YC alum. Is this an ad in disguise?
- AlexB138 9mo agoAgreed. The first half of this post is actually interesting, but the second half quickly transforms into an ad. That disappointed me, because I believe the author has something interesting to say.
- BizarroLand 9mo agoThere is only a sentence worth of interesting in the entire post, and most of that is the quote at the very beginning. The rest is a massive BS cloud. Everything after the word "vacuum" is hogwash.
- Gooblebrai 9mo agoI'm not the author. I just found the article, read it and found it interesting enough. I don't know who the guy is or even what he does.
- AlexB138 9mo agoThis first half of this definitely struck a chord. I spent the first three quarters of this year taking care of a terminally ill parent, then seeing them through hospice. If that sort of experience doesn't make a person step back from their life and question what they're doing nothing will. I decided to step away from my job as an engineering VP and try something I actually wanted to do. It's terrifying, especially in this economy, but I wake up and feel excitement in the morning instead of dread for the first time in as long as I can remember.
- thanedar 9mo agoLove how you highlighted your morning excitement now! That's what I was going for in this post! What are you trying now that you actually want to do? Cheering for you! (And please let me know what you would've liked to see in the second half! Blog posts are easy to edit!)
- Induane 9mo agoI am existentially starving AND burned out. I haven't been lucky enough that startups I got in on early panned out so I don't have the ability to take a sabbatical.
- kgwxd 9mo ago> It feels like you’re stuck in the ordinary when all you want to do is chase greatness. Gave up on greatness a long time ago, I'd settle for an "ordinary", where people just kind of try to NOT make bad things worse, or good things less enjoyable.
- thanedar 9mo agoYour greatness is still all here! And it can be earned precisely by fighting to fix bad things. I found that working in politics, against corruption and for Positive Politics, is how I make the most positive impact and gain the most energy!
- hackable_sand 9mo agoI hope for your sake there is someone out there to stop you.
- icedrift 9mo agoIf you come from immense privilege (growing up in an 8 figure household), have good health, and rich relationships and that isn't enough to curb your existentialism that's ok, but I find it hard to take this piece seriously as this is written like it's targeting the average financially stable worker. It strikes me as out of touch at best.
- damnkidsyo 9mo ago[dead]
- dluan 9mo agoThis is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade. Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath. There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
- ManuelKiessling 9mo agoMh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
- dluan 9mo agoI think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too. But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
- mr_world 9mo agoThis is literally my first time hearing this. All the stuff I see from china is about lying flat, giving up because no matter how hard you work it won't make a difference? Is this a Shenzhen attitude?
- tolerance 9mo agoAm I the only one who is overwhelmed in my capacity to parse across the various means of emphasis that colour this page?
- highfrequency 9mo agoOvercomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.
- asdff 9mo agoThat is part of it but there is also something to be said about what is going on biochemically IMO. Even if you are feeling forward progress and comfortable about the scope of your problems, if you give yourself no time to rest and get out of a subconciously anxious state, that isn't very good. Anxiety is meant to have your senses heightened to perhaps hear the tiger stalking you and encourage you to seek out a safer environment where you can comfortably rest. You aren't built to be in an anxious state for such extended periods of time. The tiger would have gotten you by then, with the way this system was designed. You aren't built to constantly run from the tiger.
- mkoubaa 9mo agoThe purpose of life is not only to be happy. It's not a useless metric but don't over-index on it
- nis0s 9mo agoPolitics are marketing tools for frameworks and candidates, they don’t provide the frameworks, or any deeper meaning to life itself. What a shallow and dangerous approach.
- anal_reactor 9mo agoI'm burned out because: 1. I'm intelligent enough to raise questions about the point of life. 2. I've always been an outcast, having it extremely difficult to build meaningful relationships, which are number one predictor of quality of life. 3. I live in a dirty, noisy, overcrowded city full of people who don't share my culture and work for a company that has no morality. There is nothing for me to look forward to, and no straightforward way to build anything. I'll never have a group of friends to do things with, I'll never feel loved, and I'll never be important in any sense of this word. I'm an autistic ant in an anthill.
- anon291 9mo agoHow can you have a sense of culture if you cannot build relationships? One person cannot have a culture.
- kledru 9mo agothe number of comments indicates that MANY OF US crave for some wise words about burnout... but the text we are presented with feels strangely empty of substance -- as if the author just wants to make some money with a book on a hot topic...
- klez 9mo agoOn the other hand I find that the real value of such posts are in the comment section here on HN, especially with posters who don't agree with the article.
- thr0waway001 9mo agoI gotta say even though not having kids seems like the most economically sane thing to me, it often makes me wonder, what will be the point of life after retirement. I have no wife, g/f or kids. Right now my only 'why' is to not disappoint my family and cause a couple of them could use my help financially. Other than that, I don't see a long term 'why'. My only compelling short term 'why' is that I don't want to be homeless. But that's pretty much a working to live and living to work type of reason to exist. Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.
- stouset 9mo agoIf you don’t have hobbies you pour your free time into, you are robbing yourself. The purpose of work (for most people), once you’re past comfortable survival, should be to buy time for you to spend living your life in ways you enjoy and that gives you meaning. If you don’t have something that gives you that feeling, find it!
- tehjoker 9mo agoKind of a strange pivot to talk about meaning and connect it to capitalism
- thanedar 9mo agoWork ≠ capitalism! It's about making your work the most meaningful thing possible! If that's a very pro-social politics, might be exactly what you want!
- yoan9224 9mo agoThe premise is interesting but feels incomplete. The "Monday morning excitement test" doesn't account for the hedonic treadmill - even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it. Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural. That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement. The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.
- heyjamesknight 9mo agoHedonic treadmill only applies to hedonia, not the eudaimonia that meaningful work typically brings. “Doing well” doesn’t have the same elastic snap back that “being well” does, and there’s some evidence it can provide a buffer on the hedonic treadmill effect.
- thanedar 9mo agoYou get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics. I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics. Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
- heyjamesknight 9mo agoI love your “clean source of sustainable energy” metaphor. This is a great example of “eudaimonic” well-being, or the idea of “doing well.”
- unlikelymordant 9mo agoWould you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs
- NoGravitas 9mo agoTFW you understand Marx's theory of alienation, but are desperate for an alternate explanation that puts the blame on workers and doesn't threaten capital.
- Herring 9mo agoAs Churchill said, Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else. Last time it took a depression and intense widespread economic pain for them to pick up socialism-lite. I don’t expect it to take anything less next time around. Nobody was asking for universal healthcare during/after the pandemic, we need an actual depression.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoThe intense pandemic relief delayed the effects of the pandemic in the US. We might have gotten away with it too, but then Trump pretty much cancelled the soft landing and plunged us off a cliff. The effects of 2025 and 2026 are pretty much what we should have had in 2021. Prepare yourself.
- canyp 9mo agoWeird ad for a self-help book with an intersection in politics that almost read like you're just hustling the wrong way, you just need to hustle right, and he's going to teach you all about it. The yellow highlighting did not help build credibility.
- marcus_holmes 9mo agoPlease note that depression != burn-out. If you really can't get out of bed on a Monday morning, can't face the day, or muster any enthusiasm for anything, then you might not need a purpose, you might need medical assistance. Be kind to yourselves, people.
- thanedar 9mo agoFor sure! I've written a lot about depression too! But I do think a lot of what people otherwise blame on burnout or depression is really this existential hunger to make more positive impact. Finding that highest purpose can change lives!
- marcus_holmes 9mo agoMy depression was due to childhood trauma. No amount of purpose would have changed that. I had to deal with my demons before I could move into the kind of positive space where purpose made any kind of difference. edit: but yes, now that I have done that work, purpose is good, and what keeps me positive and away from the black dog.
- anyfoo 9mo agoI don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication. And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication. I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life. Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away. Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.
- habinero 9mo ago
- LeftHandPath 9mo agoFor the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.
- highfrequency 9mo agoWhat were the main drivers?
- LeftHandPath 9mo agoMoved to NYC. Have a good team at my new job. Satisfied with my income. Have enough free time. Made a lot of good friends really fast, and now I see a rotating cast of them 3-7 days a week. Happy with my apartment. Have an east facing window so I don't have to set an alarm to wake up in the morning, I wake with the sunrise. Getting plenty of exercise and walking a 8-12k steps a day.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoI don't know if this article is for me: >You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed. I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.
- sailorganymede 9mo agoThe bold and highlighting all over the place is really annoying. I get why it’s formatted that way but it’s a bit too much information and I find it hard to focus.
- jwrallie 9mo agoThe article started well until it changed from "you" to "I". After that, it felt like a mix of bragging and trying to sell a book. I think its OK if some people don't get to live their dream jobs, some dreams have no equivalent in real life, and some people need to do the mundane, boring underground jobs that keep things together.
- zerofor_conduct 9mo agoyes, felt like one long humble brag after that. how tiresome.
- kubb 9mo agoIt didn’t catch me in the widely cast net. I didn’t match the 1) nice place, 2) family and friends. Apparently an ad huh.
- jojobas 9mo agoWorse, it's canvassing for a political movement.
- thanedar 9mo agoI will keep arguing that canvassing for a political movement is the highest potential thing most Americans could be doing now. I'm not talking about running for office yourself. You don't have to do it full-time. But try it. Focus on one issue and one bill. You could solve a key problem in weeks. See how this changes your life!
- davelaing 9mo agoI like John Vervaeke's meaning-in-life questions (potentially mildly paraphrasing, because it has been a while since I came across them): - what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone? - what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it? From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.
- seph-reed 9mo agoStepping on my soapbox: Treat your mind, body, and present moment as if they're sacred. As if you could live a thousand lives and they would be sacred every time. All the other stuff, it's just this once. Cleaning a mind of random grievances and addictions is good. Letting a body be weird, dance wrong, move in funny ways, sing poorly: this is good too. The whole "purpose" thing is a side-effect. It can't be sought directly, I think.
- dangus 9mo agoSeems like self-help slop with a flawed argument. This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible. Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way. And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.
- black_13 9mo ago[dead]
- blackcat30 9mo agoNo,trust me, it is burnout.
- blackcat30 9mo agoNo, trust me, it is burnout and working too much for too little gain.
- hackboyfly 9mo agoI like the overall message of this since I can deeply relate. I have been looking for meaningful work since I was 18, started in sales went on to marketing and ended up in engineering as a data scientist. Even though I feel closer than ever I still feel that I am not where I am suppose to be. One of my biggest problem is having to many options, to many callings. And they constantly keep changing, and perhaps that’s normal. It’s easy and dangerous to get stuck in the idea or quest of finding the ultimate purpose and try to translate that into actual work.
- jatins 9mo agoYeah no, that's not it. Not everyone has to chase the highest purpose. A lot of existential dread would go away if: 1/ People had hopes of buying a house in their lifetime 2/ They were not afraid of being let go at any point 3/ Social media did not create a hedonistic treadmill The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
- StarterPro 9mo agoPor que no los dos
- crossroadsguy 9mo ago> please note > The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE > Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved OR from someone called Philip Barden, here is a part of it: > This email is intended for the addressee named within only. It may contain legally privileged or confidential information. If you are not the named individual you should not read this email and if you do so, you must not under any circumstances make use of the information therein. If you have read this email and it is not addressed to you, please notify IT@devonshires.co.uk and confirm that it has been deleted from your system and no copies made. I really want to understand how binding and enforceable these annoying fucking notices at the bottom of emails are that was sent to me without me even asking for or knowing why and sometimes not even fucking certainly knowing whether I was the intended recipient or not. So if someone fucked up and sent me a so called or really confidential email then not only I have the legal responsibility to delete that I am supposed to inform them that "hey yeah you sent it to me and I deleted it.. hope I was not the intended recipient.." or so. I mean how does this thing work? (I had received a couple of bank statements on one of my common Indian first name Gmail emails. I later realised those belonged to a lawyer who was probably informed by his bank that this happened because I had complained to the bank and had asked them to remove my email from that account. I received an email from that lawyer from another address I do not recall the domain of, but it was very angry and entitled and said shit like (paraphrasing) "By revealing this to a third party.. you have broken the law... you must hand over the email address without further delay…". I was younger and stupider, so I had just replied "Go fuck yourself" because I was really pissed. Luckily, I never heard from him again or any court because when I Googled him later he seemed to be a decently pedigreed lawyer from another city. Later, the bank replied saying it had been rectified - not before they wanted my phone number and KYC info and account details even though I had begun my communication to them saying it was not my account.)
- delifue 9mo agoKey sentence Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work.
- valenceidra 9mo agoAs someone with a severe chronic illness that affects my ability to sustain energy: trust me, things can mean the absolute world to you and you can still burn out. You may burn out so hard you never recover. It may kill your ability to engage with meaning itself until you can learn how to be still again.
- arisAlexis 9mo agoI really don't like articles that are just about plugging in the authors other real business. Nothing new, all truisms.
- greenie_beans 9mo agothis is a book ad. i ain't buying it
- DrPimienta 9mo agoNo, actually, I'm burnt out.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]