I see people doing that as taking control. We are the strong ones. We are the ones who reject the vile life that is corporate cubicles.

People who seem to be able to tolerate it have in reality just given up. They are reduced to accepting the grey cubicle and unchanging life that is working in an office.

Sure, there are some shining lights and people that thrive. But the majority of people in offices are beaten down and just trying to stay anonymous and survive.

A nervous breakdown is going on the offensive! It's screaming no more! It's taking back your life in a burst of energy that leaves you exhausted and takes time to recover from. But when you do recover, and you will, you come out better and wiser than before.

I guard my mental health like the Crown Jewels now and really try not to do anything I don't want to do!

There are a (probably) minority of people with genuine brain chemistry imbalances, genetic or otherwise, that cause depression. But for the vast, vast majority of people being fed pills and trying to ignore their problems, your mental health issues are signs of issues you need to deal with, unresolved traumas, unfulfilling work, love, family, or social situations, political problems that you can't accept but you won't engage with, and so on.

I’m sorry, but this triggered me. Have you tried an open office? I long for my cubicles.

At least then I had like 4 square meters to myself. Both my space and my privacy have been degraded more and more.

Actually I lumped in cubicles with open offices as being the same thing.

I've worked in both!

I'll try to be careful with my words here:

So I found no difference in my actual happiness or well being such.

I do agree that having a 'home' in an office is important - and a cubicle you can call your own and decorate is something...

Totally agree that open plan noisy offices are a nightmare!

Hot-desking is another level of hell again!

All things considered I dont have poisitve views of any office situation based on my now >25years of experience! (damn, has it been that long...)

But I appreciate that some people do.

So thats just me :-)

These days I get to work from my home office with my wife and it's great! :-)

Having thrown off multiple jobs that tried to reduce me to mindless peon, I find that the attempt to force me into their paradigm is explosive and will only explode more in the future. Via me, or the countless others who see, agree, and comment on this and other threads like it. Revolutions don't have to be noisy :)

The best office I’ve had was one where we had a real room for every 4 people or so (and 20+sqm per room).

I HATED curry days at the canteen.

Then Covid came along and could work from home but then I should have known better when they installed MS Teams and we had longer useless meetings now with fading cheapskate Bob that uses his Nokia headphones as a headset with his barking dog as background noise.

- What precisely constitutes a burnout?

- How do you objectively differentiate between a challenging situation and over-stressed situation leading to burnout?

- What are the differences in tolerance for stressful situation from person to person? Is it related to certain personalities?

- How to conduct a self-analysis to determine if you're going through a burnout?

- Do other non-software professions go through burnout? Alternatively, is software engineering more prone to burnout?

I've always heard of burnout, but like depression which has specific symptoms and clinical diagnosis, what are the properties, symptoms and characteristics of a burnout?

I am wondering if I am going through one? I like what you said about guilt - I feel like I've gone through hell in workplaces and always curious if I should just "suck-it-in" or quit and find a better job.

You know you're burned out when things that used to motivate you to get up early and work through lunch now feel like burdens. Not just work stuff either, but burnout it starts affecting your life outside work, on things that you thought had nothing to do with work.

> a challenging situation

You're challenged when, even if you don't know how to get through it, you have in your mind a structure, a way of getting through it. You know you can figure it out, you just have to work it out, and the process of working through it energizes you. You're over-stressed when you don't see a way through, or when you see the way through but dread doing the necessary things.

Tolerance for stress depends, in part, on a person's level of resilience: your ability to face reality exactly as it is, your sense that what you do will have some meaningful impact, and your self-confidence in your ability to handle the situation. You might remember a time when you were a kid and something you dealt with seemed like the end of the world, but now you look back and wonder what the big deal was. Your ability to manage stressful situations grew.

In short, when you're burnt out, you're tired even when you get enough sleep, you are reflexively cynical and critical of the work, and you begin to feel like problems you should be able to handle require extraordinary efforts. Those feelings happen now and then when you're not burnt out, but if it becomes chronic, that's burnout.

For me, I knew I was burned out when I just could not face the thought of going into the office and doing my job any longer. It made me physically sick to my stomach and then, over time, started to manifest itself in other ways that negatively affected my physical health.

The linked article really spoke to me - as do a lot of the comments in this thread. I think that for those who burn out, the hardest thing is perhaps learning to forgive yourself. Sounds cliched but there it is.

Like literally dropped my notice yesterday. Cashed out a bunch of stock last week -- good timing, cuz shit is fallin this week! -- and already looking at grad school and cert programs.

Oooooh boy you should look into medicine. This is a profession that has been dealing with insane burnout since before software existed and is only recently getting any amount of attention from within the community. (Think 80+ hour surgical residency for 8 years with the self-perpetuating cycle of "that's what I had to do so I make these residents do it too" logic of hazing)

I was previously pre-med and at one of my med school interviews (when the school was bragging about their mental health resources) they mentioned a story of a physician who played candy crush every morning before he got out of bed "just so that he could have one win for the day."

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, mentioned in TFA, is probably the most widely used/recognised specific classification / diagnostic mechanism.

If you think you're experiencing burnout, my recommendation would be to seek mental health support and specifically request the burnout assessment. Getting that might be more difficult than you'd expect, the sector is often averse to making such determinations.

The main reason I know it was a burnout is that I never really found back. I am done with tech, or rather done with 40 hour weeks, done with unrealistic deadlines, done with so many things actually.

This whole comment, but especially this part, speaks to me. Thank you.

Because there's more to life than personal happiness. Struggle is the definition of life. It's what gives anything meaning. People have families that they support, and being that thankless workhorse for them ends up being a deeper satisfaction than personal moment to moment happiness. We could all go sit in cabins in the woods and whittle away on sticks until we die and probably be "happier". But if a tree falls in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound? That is to say, does a person in isolation enjoying their own happiness have any meaning whatsoever?

Does grinding oneself into dust at a thankless job for a faceless corporation in the name of perpetual economic "growth" at the cost of the entirety of survivable nature as we know it have any meaning whatsoever? Because that's the flipside of what you're saying.

It may not be possible for us to go back to a time before modern technology, medicine, etc (or maybe its more likely than we think), but is it any wonder that so many peoples' brains yearn for something like that? The definition of life may be struggle, as you say, but struggle without self-determination may be the very thing that kills whatever "human" is.

There are some things worth struggling against, but I see no better reason to quit than a pointless struggle.

jk, but seriously, meaning is subjective, and nihilism is a thing. one mans isolation may mean worlds to him, and thats good enough.

also, careful about shaming people for being content with personal happiness...for some thats an accomplishment.

But everyone is discounting struggling for faceless corporate entities that do not and will never give a shit about you.

After all this whole concept of spending a career at someone else's company only started in the late 20th C when the industrial rev created the modern corporation.

The nice thing about working for someone else's company is you work 40 hours, then it leaves your mind for the rest of the time. If there's some problem at work, it's usually "not in my job description." Like, printer doesn't work? Call the Department of Inhuman Resources. Not your problem.

If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.

I'm not saying we should go back to being one problem away from death, but also solving problems that just fundamentally don't matter to us personally doesn't seem to be great either.

But working for someone else - payroll was not my department.

Picture changes drastically if you have an abusive boss or a toxic work culture. There have to be a bunch of people on HN who physically cringed when they saw 40 hours, some have even talked themselves into being macho about it.

I'm one of them.

But a 24/7 stress of self-employment is not for the faint of heart either. What's the compromise?

Such places don't exist forever, and they don't tend to be massive growth situations. But they are probably what many people yearn for.

If only most people realized that :-)

What in modern society (or even this website) makes you think it's only 40 hours?

Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.

> If you work for yourself, it's 24/7. No vacations, either. All problems are your problem. Printer quit? Whatcha gonna do about it? It isn't for everyone.

Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.

The jobs I've held for the entirety of my so-far 8 year career, where I can count on my hands the number of times I've worked more than 40 hours in a week.

> Or that you can just go "not my problem boss" -- in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot.

The fact that I've done that, many times, and not gotten fired. If you are skilled and a good performer, you have a lot of leverage, doubly so in the current job market.

> Bullocks. You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact. This is standard freelance stuff.

What happens when a client decides not to pay you? What happens when you can't find enough work to make whatever amount you want to make? How do you establish a reliable client base that won't saddle you with those first 2 problems in the first place? That's just the tip of the iceberg of problems you'll have to deal with on your own if you go the freelance route, which a salaried job will abstract away from you. Not everyone wants to deal with those issues; I certainly don't.

Rush hour times makes it pretty obvious. Another thing is I've worked as both employer and employee. People leave after 8 hours.

> You set the hours as a contractor -- literally, in the contact.

Your 40 hour employee contract says 40 hours, literally. Why are you able to stand up for yourself as a contractor (who can be shown the door any second) but not as an employee?

> in an At Will state that can literally get you fired on the spot

Only if they are looking for an excuse to get rid of you anyway. And contractors are easy to fire on the spot, there are no legal restrictions on that.

Also, if you're a contractor, you spend a lot of time looking for contracts. 24/7.

Psh, what preceded that was far worse and also involved a lifetime of laboring for someone else's benefit.

My take on this is that there's some part of our minds that knows we don't have to be servants to our companies. And knowing that, yet subjugating ourselves anyway creates an itch. That itch grows a little every day we wake up to an alarm and haul ourselves into the office for useless meetings. We know deep down this isn't an acceptable road for our lives. But we're here anyway, with a story that somehow justifies closing jira tickets - day in, day out.

Coincidentally, depression is an evolved mechanism for stopping you from doing something that you know deep down is unhealthy for your soul but habitual. It works by every day making it harder to do the thing you know you shouldn't do. The longer you resist it, the deeper depression burrows, until you finally can't bring yourself to make pleasantries with your spouse - or, in this case, haul yourself into the office.

For my money, burnout is a depression symptom which grows out of a long term, habitual suppression of your will. "I want X, but I can't have it because of <habitual rationalisation>". After growing up being told we can do anything, we aren't adapted for existence as a few pixels in a giant org chart. Burnout is a healthy backstop to force you to pursue the life you need, even if each day you can convince yourself you don't want it.

I was only responding to the implicit claim of the grand parent.

FWIW, I think "that's how it always has been" has no impact on the morality of something, so I am inclined to agree with you.

But we don't need to paint a rosy picture of a lost past to critique the status quo.

The yeoman artisan period has always been more myth than reality.

“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…

…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.” ― Wilhelm von Humboldt

Mid- and post-industrial revolution Europe had many large companies with many employees. In fact, the British East India Company (founded in the year 1600) was the first company to sell shares of ownership to raise enough capital to buy/build the necessary supplies to do large-scale business (in their case, mostly ship construction).

Of course, modern labor laws were created in response to the horrible human rights abuses committed by business owners against their employees beginning at that time.

The opposition of "big capital" vs "labor" (and hence the philosophy built on that dichotomy that underpins Marxism) didn't really exist prior to these large industrial revolution companies.

Prior to that, small businesses (and banks/lenders) were the bread and butter of economic society.

Luckily Marxism hasn't really been taken seriously by economists since it couldn't resolve it's main tenant (labour theory of value) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_problem

You weren’t beholden to someone else’s corporation, but you were to someone else’s land or tribe/community.

1) "nervous breakdown"

2) "just snap out of it",

3) "getting over it"

4) "You just..."