This is happening to me. Been in a severe burnout for a little over 6 months (since before the 2018 holidays) and possibly as much as a year before that.

Got put on a project that ended up being my Waterloo. Ruby was the language, but I'm more of a php/shell/MATLAB data swizzler functional programmer. It had 100 developers over a decade, roughly 100:1 code bloat, an order of magnitude more side effects than I've ever encountered in any other code, no straightforward way to unit test the critical path I was tasked with fixing because it ran live in AWS, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I think my brain got so saturated with antipatterns that it went into a kind of survival mode and started overwriting anything nonessential. Which basically meant that all the precious neurons we use for finding outside-the-box solutions were being used to find the safe path through minefields day in and day out. When the inspiration ran out, the brute force path was so much rougher to traverse that my productivity dropped an order of magnitude or more. I assume it might be similar to what a professional artist experiences when they're forced to be creative to meet a deadline but in the end produce subpar work or even nothing at all.

Nobody ever told me when I was young and bouncing off the walls with exuberance and creativity that someday that wellspring might run out. That I'd wake up one day tired, so impossibly tired that when I sit down at the computer I'm asleep within 15 minutes.

Similar things have happened in other departments. Like: my teeth are super strong so I've never had a cavity, but nobody told me my gums would weaken and threaten all my teeth. Our greatest strengths can fail at any time, for reasons we don't anticipate. Then what do we do?

I'm a big picture thinker so I worry that this sort of systemic fatigue is beginning to affect world politics. Like, if automation increases wealth inequality, then we're royally hosed. Or at the very least, something has to change (maybe even capitalism itself). And we know this, deep down inside. Everywhere I look, I see compounding dysfunction. I see the gears within the dysfunction. I see the people turning the thumbscrews of the people fixing the gears so that the machine becomes the thumbscrew crushing the world.

But hey, maybe I'm just burned out.

And as a footnote, I've been improving. But healing takes time proportional to the original insult, which is a great deal longer than I had hoped for.

Been there too. What I got out of it besides the burnout is the experience not to work on such projects ever again even if my job is on the line. Or set low expectations and take my time with it. I think I burned out 3 times but the intensity of the latest burn were most signigicant. Took me a while to get back to work, about a year, and at the time I felt a bit desperate, felt like I lost my livelyhood. Felt scary. What helped me cope was painting; through painting I felt like i was doing a purge for my brain and and at the same time like I was meditating. It just happened to be painting for me, but something tells me that using my hands/my body had something to do with it. My burnouts were luckily not chronic. Im sure that whoever exposes themselves to these stressors for a longer periods of time can become permanently damaged. Things turned around quite well to me and am as good as new or at least I feel that way. Do take some time off, live thriftily and try out things like old hobbies, ramdom things that are not computer related. Sports/physical/nature/performance/arts/volunteering. Good luck to you!

Ya I've been taking a break from programming for a few months, doing recreational programming (like learning Unity) and remodeling our home. I also think that painting is uniquely therapeutic.

For anyone reading this, don't discount the physical. I realized lately that part of my burnout was chemical, so I've been taking:

* essential fatty acids (Nature's EFA)

* B 100 complex

* magnesium citrate before bed (Natural Calm)

* zinc

* iron (limit this to occasional small doses or it's dangerous)

I've also found that leafy green vegetables help, as well as walking a few times a week for 15-20 minutes.

I wasn't sure why I was so tired, so I searched the bodybuilding.com forums for advice since I lift. If you aren't sure what's ailing you, I would recommend taking all of the supplements you think might help for 1-2 weeks and then go back to your normal multivitamin or whatever and note any changes.

My gut feeling is that my omega 3s were way too low, and probably my electrolytes, and certainly I wasn't drinking enough water or sleeping properly. I got diagnosed with sleep apnea early in my burnout and wear Breathe Right strips but should have probably tried a CPAP machine.

> Nobody ever told me when I was young and bouncing off the walls with exuberance and creativity that someday that wellspring might run out. That I'd wake up one day tired, so impossibly tired that when I sit down at the computer I'm asleep within 15 minutes.

A metaphor I like for creativity is a forest. The wood of a forest is a renewable resource, and cutting down trees can actually make the forest healthier and grow more efficiently. The problem comes when the forest is managed unsustainably; trying to meet some external short-term demand.

I think that with mental health in general, many of us suffer the fallacy of thinking that because we're healthy now, we can take any amount of stress and abuse.

Thank you, that's a good metaphor, I'll remember that. I feel like I got just to the point where the trees along the bank of a river had been cut down, so the soil had begun eroding and the water table was dropping. Luckily (in a way) I'm off that project and beavers have moved in and started building dams, and it may take a while but the ecosystem in my brain seems to be recovering, albeit slowly :-)

fair point, no income => depression