I’m younger than you, had the same issue and solved it by working less and doing more outside. Lifting weights in the sun, mountain biking, golf, surfing.

In understand this is a luxury not everyone can afford but what I do now is work from about 6-9am, go out during the day until about 3, work 4-6. Which if you add it up is still a solid 5 hour day.

For whatever reason it just makes me more productive and sleep better at night.

Before I did this I just felt like a slave to my computer, super tired all the time, depressed and lethargic. I had sleeping problems because I felt like I was missing out on “life” and for some reason I’d stay up late on Instagram, YouTube etc, maybe watching others live vicariously ? I felt dissatisfied.

Knowledge work pays well but IMO it can come at a pretty high cost if you don’t prioritise your life.

Edit: I read your reply on another post, I think you’re doing way too much at your job. It’s not manageable and it sounds like you’re burned out and likely failing at at least one of your duties making you feel down.

100% same on all of what you said, and I'm 29. If you're lucky enough to work in a job where you need to produce each week, but can crank whenever you want - go outside to get at least one long-ish walk/bike ride and also one weight/yoga sesh.

I see no point to be sitting at the computer if it's a beautiful day and I already got stuff done early or am going to do stuff late.

How do you handle meeting from 9-4pm?

I’m lucky in this respect, I’m in a different timezone to the main teams. They’re asleep when I’m awake mostly.

I know smart people manage this by blocking calendars etc though.

Hmm, wondering when do you go to sleep if you wake up at 6? 9? That kind of sucks.

It's the most common time to wake up. I'm surprised that you've never had a job that required you to wake up at 6 or earlier.

> Most common time people choose to wake up: 6:00 AM

https://snoozester.com/The-Wake-Up-Time-Report.snooze

> The peak time for waking up is between 6 and 6:30am.

https://www.edisonresearch.com/wake-me-up-series-2/

The terms "choose to" and "peak time" would imply that those are the most favored times, but the very concept of jobs requires that people wake up at those times whether they want to or not. In fact, the big peak in average waking times in June (when many people have vacations) seems to indicate that most people will in fact wake up later when they do have the choice.

Not OP, but I usually go to bed at 10 and wake up at 4:30 or 5. It only sucks if you are a night owl.

That's like 6-7 hours of sleep (below recommended normal). Do you take naps during day time?

That's not wildly outside normal ranges. The average recommended sleep for an adult is 7-9 hours, with up to an hour variance outside that still being within healthy ranges for some people.

No naps during the day. I just let go of my notions about how much sleep was enough, and started going to bed when I was tired and getting out of bed when I wake up. I do not use an alarm to wake up, and I do not get tired during the day, so I think I've settled on an adequate sleep schedule for my body.

I have the same schedule. I don’t take naps, and I can’t sleep more than 7 hours unless I’ve really pushed myself into exhaustion or I’m ill.

Ever since the Apple Watch came out, I tracked my sleep and for the last two years I average 6.5 hours, no matter what.

I just kind of assumed it was a consequence of becoming older.

I usually go to bed about 10-11, mostly get 7 hours. I can’t really sleep for longer than that.

I exercise everyday it wakes me up if I feel tired.

How did you manage this with your employer?

Doing this:

* Plan ahead

* Establish a clear list of goals and objectives with your manager. Make sure your moving toward completion of the goals and they can see that. This keeps them off your back.

* Make it clear that you want to manage your own time and ask if that’s going to be an issue. If it is, find out what can be done to alleviate it.

Sorry if that sounded obvious but it’s taken me years to figure this out.

Work remotely and not be micromanaged is how I manage something similar. Mine might be even more extreme. Sometimes the second half of my biphasic work schedule may not occur until as late as 9 PM.

And SO and kids?

People with these sort of ideal solutions rarely have kids. The parent article is better advice in that domain.

In my experience, kids tend to just follow along with their parents habits.

Like one family I know eats dinner at 1 am, because that’s when the father gets home from work. The kids nap in the evening, and do homework past midnight.

I originally thought that was madness, but they have 6 kids and 4 have gone to Ivy League schools apparently it works for them.

Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words. If for some reason that's not practical, then that's a problem in itself, so try working on that.

As harsh as it might sound to put it this way, the answer for how some people will be able to manage better with their SO and kids is, "because I don't have your SO and kids for my SO and kids," or more specifically, "by not allowing my relationship with my SO and kids to be like your relationship with your SO and kids." For kids especially and with people I know who have this problem, it's because they infantilize and underestimate their kids (past the point where they're actual infants) and think "that's just how they [i.e. kids] are." Your question posed as if it could have an answer that would somehow be general/widely applicable (and not highly dependent upon the tendencies and personalities of the people involved as individuals) certainly hints towards this.

>> Don't underestimate the practicality of telling people to fuck off, even if it will have to be put in different words.

A valuable (possibly the most?) life skill is to be able to tell people to fuck off in the most sincere and HR approved way imaginable, it's very empowering, would recommend 10 for 10.

Not what I was talking about. What you're describing is a great way to make your co-workers hate you (or make your subordinates hate working for you if you have any and you tolerate this style of communication) while telling yourself how clever you are for figuring out how to flip the script on the system. It's not clever at all. Anyone with a brain can see what's going on when you do it, and it shouldn't be permitted just because someone managed to make their barbs in subtext, rather than explicitly peppering in words like "fuck you." Not-clever toxic passive aggression is one of the worst contributions that office culture has "given" to modern society. And it's certainly not something that makes sense for someone to recommend weaponizing against one's family...

The practicality of telling people to fuck off means saying the equivalent of, "I need you to fuck off right now [so I can take care of something important without any distractions/obstructions]," ideally having cultivated the kind of relationship where the receivers understand that importance, whether it's stated plainly or merely implied.

Having an SO and/or kids can involve more than just tendency and personality issues. Even with the healthiest of boundaries some constraints are non-negotiable and possibly outside ones control.

Typed on my phone.

Six hours of work? Lie the other 2 and call it a day.

Or, renegotiate a contract for 6 hours per day.

Given how much productivity I presume you bring, I’d lie.

I don’t feel bad about it since companies care too little (in general). If they care, then I would care. E.g. a 10x more productive engineer doesn’t get 10x the pay. I met one of these people, they lied. They worked 2 hours, shipped one hour of code in production, saved the other one to commit on a rainy day and still got employee of the year because they were by far the most productive.

You could also become a freelancer, then you don’t have to lie.

My point is: six hours of productive work should be enough.

Part of the problem is that I'm a Software Engineer as well as a Business Analyst and Project Manager. I'm also managing a dev team, so it's really difficult to only work 6 hours a day. Hell, I can't even do all my work in a 40 hour work week.

Yes, I realize this isn't a me issue and I'm looking for other work. The problem is that I'm encountering a lot of ageism in this field too.

If you happen to live in Canada, email me, my HN userid at gmail.

Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise.

I work for a big company that has, in my opinion, good work/life balance and a great work culture, and we're always hiring.

Ageism is not a thing where I work (I am almost your age).

Can't promise anything but some guidance on what to apply for and some personal anecdotes about my time here, but if you're interested, happy to share.

> Honestly, you're doing 4 jobs, and I assume only being paid for one. Fuck that noise.

I just wanted to highlight this. Pure gold.

I simply don’t finish work if I am spent. If I do, then I am worse the next week. I have the luxury of only needing to take care of myself.

Ask to hire for help. The business case is: either you break down, and the company loses a valuable person, or they get extra hands and can resume business operations. And while you’re at it ask for a pay raise because you were likely underpaid.

Ageism sucks. See if you can look younger or see if you can work at a company of a linkedin connection.

I am just brainstorming, you know what might apply to you.

This. I have the same problem (ie 4 roles bundled as one role) and I am so tired. After speaking to many people that are far more successful than me in their careers, I was told: 1. You cannot be successful at 4 things at the same time. I do not work like this because it is impossible. You must pick what you are focusing on. 2. Agree with your management where they expect you to be spending your time. Agree on the plan for everything else which is not in the prior category.

While I agree there is a lot of ageism, there is something worse than ageism - obvious fatigue and lack of enthusiasm during interviews. You can read burnout on a person in the first few seconds - you may need to get a break so that you can have the proper mindset for interviews.

I’m afraid of ageism too, and I’m 39. I’m lucky to work for a company that looked beyond this and saw my skills as a self-taught programmer, and took me on with a freelance contract.

My main concern is continuing to find work whenever this current job ends. It’s a good field, and I enjoy it because it’s helpful to society ( nursing related software ) but I know I’m not the greatest programmer out there.

My current gig should last a few more years at least, and I have no plans on leaving this company. Still, ageism and staying current is always on the back of my mind, and a part of me wonders if there’s something I’m missing regarding my career

Early 40’s and I feel very lucky to have a job. I feel certain that once I hit 50 I’ll be unable to get hired. I think the trick is to make sure the job you have by 45 is somewhere that will be willing to keep you as you age.

Honestly, I'm thinking about how to convincingly lie about my age when I'm that age. It's part of the reason why I don't smoke and don't do much alcohol.

And by the way, I hate lying. I know I can do it relatively well, but I almost never do it because I hate the ethical implications and the memory implications of it. The thing is though, when it comes to companies, they have warped things so much that I'm willing to not stand by my own principles. It really feels to me that they threw a backhanded punch first. Fine, they can do that, but then I can throw one back and encourage other people to do so as well.

Oh, and if I'd be in the interview chair as an interviewer, I'd rather look at someone's experience and transferable skills and throw the whole ageism thing out of the window.

There's two things, or their combination, that I find really confusing about ageism and it's apparent prevalence (I believe it, but no first-hand experience being in my 20s):

- 'nobody' stays at one company for decades or an entire career any more (perhaps in part because of the massive decline, at least in the UK, of defined-benefit pensions, so 'you' - employer - are not on the hook for that either), so the the 50yo just has potentially a lot more experience than the 30yo, and in reality no difference in how long they'll work there that's due to their ages

- it's widely known that this is the case, so there's surely a big under-tapped pool of older applicants, with fewer competing offers?

Honestly I think it'd be hard for me not to be ageist (if I were a hiring manager, and it weren't illegal to discriminate on the basis of certain 'protected characteristics' which include age) - I'd snap up that cheap experience!

> I'm a Software Engineer as well as a Business Analyst and Project Manager. I'm also managing a dev team,

That's really too much context switching. Of course you're getting burnt.

Effectively pulling all those things off was possible 10 or 20 years ago. The world has gotten too complex now. Unfortunately, it is sort of expected in some shops.

One thing that I find helps tremendously: Don't try to wear more than one hat per day. If you're doing management-related tasks today, don't try to do software engineering on the same day. Even if it means you waste a few hours in a day.

I'm a little younger than you (43), but can very much relate. My current position is similar and trying to do all 3 of those things (and do them well) over the past couple of years has lead me to the verge of burnout. The paradox is that I still love what do, and I really enjoy it when I have a chance to focus on one aspect for longer than 15 minutes at a time.

But the demand to constantly be hyper-productive at all three of those things simultaneously just because I happen to have the skillset(s) means I have a hard time caring about any of them.

Sounds like there is no good answer but a start maybe simplify your lifestyle and talk to your current employer about working 32 hours per week. Most likely they will say no and you will need to jump ship.

This is a great time to find freelance work. Your soon to be former employer maybe your first client.

I'd probably be as wiped out of I had the responsibility of three roles.

Have you considered finding something else?

have you thought about joining Government? pretty laid back there. Less pay, but if you are okay with that, its worth it if you value time > money

Haha...interesting you'd say that.

I worked for two State Governments, Oregon and Nebraska for a combined 13 years total.

I ended my career at the State of Oregon as an IT Director for a State Agency.

So several things about state employment bothered me to no end:

1. State employee union contracts catered to the lowest common denominator. What I mean by that for one thing, is that you cannot negotiate your salary or your "work out of class" rules/pay.

2. Implementing technology (context was 15 years ago) one always had to consider the public perception. This meant that when iPhones were first introduced, I couldn't consider them as part of my IT planning because of the public perception that I'd be wasting tax dollars on them. Despite the fact that they were superior in every way to what Blackberry was offering at the time.

3. I couldn't buy things off of price agreement despite finding prices lower than what the State had already negotiated.

_I ended my career at the State of Oregon as an IT Director for a State Agency._

I think thats the issue you're too high up in the job ladder to not have any 'work responsibilities'.... If you drop back down to the nameless IT 'tinkerer' programmer , responsibilities will vanish!

You mention "If I could retire now, I would"... so maybe you have certain life logistics preventing you from taking a lower pay-grade... but if not...

I have wondered about that. Some jobs I think make you die from within even if they are only 9to5. One buddy of mine had a govt job and complained about it everyday… it made him toxic. He eventually left but took waaaay to long.

trick is to bounce around departments until you get into a good group of non-toxic folks, and your skill level is above everyone. 2 hours of work is the equivalent of 2-5 days of another programmers work, and everyone loves your output.

If you're working from home, its really not that bad, since the other 6 hours of teh day you can learn anything you want. Just have to be near computer incase something happens etc...

I can honesty LY tell you moving from private industry to state government was the best decision I have made. Definitely move around until you find people and a department that you like.

I’m not the most wizened of veterans, but rarely have I seen someone put in a true solid 8 hours of work in a day (excluding 11th hour crunches), and even rarer with any regularity. The norm in my experience, in-office or remote, is 3 hours per day. It’s kind of like the televised broadcast of American football. Add up all the commercials (distractions), commentary (socializing), and stoppage (eating/relieving) and you’re left with a fraction of productivity. Not complaining; everything seems to have worked out just fine.

My psychologist urged me to listen to my body. If you find you haven't got an 8 hour day in you, do what you can in less and stop pretending.

Spend part of every day outside. Spend part of every week in the company of others.

I too was very concerned about if I could "stop" and worried about my mojo and work ethic which went missing around 10 years ago. You learn to cope, and I read enough financial investment advice to realize I need less than I feared post work, but probably I won't entirely retire: moving to a different intensity of work is the goal probably.

It helps to live in an economy with a public health service. Moving country in these times is hard, moving country also breaks social ties which are really important in older age but mid-50s you can make bridges to a new community. So, if you are in a place where health costs will be a major concern, think about international relocation. The longer you leave it the less likely it is to work.

I'm a 54 year old too, who has been cutting code since I was 18. Currently running my own startup which is doing well, but I find that the long years of long hours have sapped my energy levels quite drastically.

I deliberately only work about 4 to 6 hours per day max, and delegate everything else to my team. I also take Wednesdays off entirely to spend as a 'date day' with my wife who also has doesn't have a work shift on Wednesdays, and I don't work on weekends any more.

My working hours are broken up - I may do 2 or 3 hours in the morning when I wake up, but then I go off an indulge in my other passions such as music production etc. Then I may do a couple more hours in the afternoon when the rest of my remote team are coming online on the other side of the world, then I will take a break to cook dinner etc. and check in quickly before going to bed to ensure all tasks are on track. Like the comment poster above I also take regular naps in the afternoon to recharge my batteries.

I also don't have more than 2 to 3 meetings per week, and I am VERY selective about who I meet with and for how long. I am totally focused on maximising every ounce of energy towards only things that will move my startup forward.

Conversely, some of those meetings are actually spent mentoring other startup founders - I find that it really motivates me to 'give back' to the community a little after decades of receiving help and advice.

An yes, I have been through actual burnout 4 times in my career. Each time gets worse, but I also now know to look for the signs - plus my family and colleagues also keep watch for early signs, which helps me mitigate the onset of bad habits and work patterns that may trigger it.

Consider that COVID is part of it. I was enjoying myself at work until it hit and then my motivation and desire to learn new things plummeted. I decided to take a sabbatical to recharge and it took a few months before I could enjoy writing code again.

I just didn't realize I was burnt out by the world in general.

I feel this so much. But I can’t take a sabbatical - I have to pay bills.

I basically work everyday and tell myself “just one more hour and then I’ll take off the rest of the day”. I do that every hour until I get as close to 5 as possible.

I’ve been like this for over a year. This is my life. I try not to think about it.

A sabbatical now may stave off not being able to work for months or years later. Possibly sooner than you think.

Another option is to dial back on committments and intensity, possibly with a reduction in income. It's no a full work cessation, but it is preserving sanity and intellectual capacity.

If your finances are stretched now, start cutting. Deep, hard, and fast.

If you've a partner, involve them in this discussion.

Can you handle a few months off on savings? I realize I'm talking from a privileged position but it can make a real difference.

I can, but my wife works so hard and she would be so angry if i burned through our savings. I wouldn’t blame her. Also my kids work so hard at school. If I stopped working, it would be a terrible example.

There's a weird fixation on productivity that gets drilled into our heads at a young age. It's beyond okay to not be running 100% all the time, regardless of what the paradigm espouses as value.

The problem I see is that the delivery system has evolved in many companies / tech in general to be JIT, but for human resources.

While at FAANG, I was at capacity every week. So a 'normal' week (which was actually quite rare), I expected to spend 35-45 hours in work + meetings.

But 75% of those weeks, some urgent issue would come up. Then you have an extra 15-25 hours of attending to the urgency, falling behind 5-15 hours on planned work, and then you spend all evening thinking about how to solve the Very Urgent Problem.

Even if you are good at compartmentalizing, you'll be confounded by redundant messages from middle managers asking you about the status of the Very Urgent Problem.

Taking a break / vacation means twice as much work for 1-3 weeks before the vacation, and 1-3 weeks after, as you must prepare for coverage for while you are out of office, and then catch up on what happened while you were gone.

Add in the death of a loved one, medical issue or even a string of minor problems and you're completely subjugate to external circumstances. This will lead to burnout, at a minimum.

As a younger person, this kind of environment made me feel important and necessary. Later I began to realize this is the opposite of the truth. Important and necessary people have the power to set their own terms.

I am not sure why things have evolved this way. I recently watched Koyaanisqatsi ('life out of balance') a film from the 80s about modernity and technology and found it as relevant as ever. However the busyness that used to be outwardly visible has now migrated into our minds and seems to be causing mass unhappiness and mental health issues.

I think it has to do with reifying things that hadn't ought to be rigid. A 0001 deadline is arbitrary, being one minute over is not really consequential from a logical perspective until you've negotiated and inked a contract that makes fees contingent on having X done prior to 0001, and once that contract is signed and made into company custom...

The biggest personal lesson from covid and lockdowns was that I dont need to be running at 100% for work all the time.

Bertrand Russell wrote about this in In Praise of Idleness

For any who have not seen:

https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

"In Praise of Idleness." Harper's Magazine. By Bertrand Russell

> This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

This has been a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing!

I will add that I recommend the whole "In Praise of Idleness" book from Russell, it's a collection of essays and lots of them are interesting 70-80 years later.

A personal favourite of mine is "The Ancestry of Fascism", delineating social movements in history through the perspective of a constant pendulum pushing/pulling from opposite directions for any kind of social movement (political, artistic, etc.).

I work with people in their 20s through 50s (I'm not quite as experienced as you, but I'm a solid Gen X, so getting there). I feel like this a common sentiment across all ages, which is honestly something new in the past two years.

As an example - we had a very useful, functional internal developer tool written in Elm (the language, not the mail program). The original devs all quit and no one was interested in learning a new language, so the tool is being shut down and "all" (minus the useful parts) content is moving to a half-assed mix of Wiki, Atlassian tools, and honestly just falling through the cracks.

I wasn't involved in the tool's development or depreciation, but just the fact that we have tons of interns and junior software devs around that couldn't be bothered or forced to learn a new language backs up your "I'm spent" motivation TED talk.

I, too, am not excited to take over maintenance of someone else's pet project, whose quality I am not capable assessing (and the "fun of starting" gone).

Coworker: We'll use Docker, Minikube dev setup,@#$%@.io and Unicorn-Lang, this will be awesomest! Me: Oh, have you considered boring tech? Coworker: ah, it's old, not how software is built today.

Also coworker: leaves 1.5 years later with with us having to pick up the pieces.

I feel that way now but I'm only 37. I knew it was a bit soon so I went to a doctor, and turns out my testosterone is at 250 (whereas at my age it should be over 1,000).

No idea if that's something you've already explored, but felt it couldn't hurt to share.

>whereas at my age it should be over 1,000

Where did you get that reference range for a 37 year old? I'm not sure that was even true 30 years ago.

That's what my doctor told me. I'm sure there are differing opinions but meh whatever, I know it could be higher so that's good enough.

I just looked this up last week and I believe the reference said >950 or so put you in the 97.5 percentile of men 18-39.

Found it: it’s actually 916 ng/dL https://www.healio.com/news/endocrinology/20170223/researche...

exercise daily, especially strength training. get some traditionally manly hobbies like building stuff. it worked for me.

Your doctor is misinformed. No one except outliers going through puberty have natural testosterone over 1000. The average for someone in their 30s is around 300-400. 250 is on the lower side but not so low that most people with that level would have the symptoms of low testosterone.

This is something I've entirely thought about and likely suffering from.

That being said, I am trying some other remedies before I take Androgel or Androderm and they seem to be slightly helping.

Your testosterone is supposed to be dropping off as you get older though? Does your doctor actually treat this still?

Yes, natural testosterone production decreases throughout your life once you finish puberty. Doctors vary wildly in what levels they will treat. You can find "mens clinics" that will give you testosterone therapy at virtually any blood level, they don't care. They're very expensive though (~$2000+ a year).

I started taking some Ashwaganda and experienced positive effects so far. Give it a try, maybe it works out for you as well

any more details on "positive effects"? Have you had blood work?

I’ve done bloodwork prior to taking Ashwaganda and will do again in two to three months. Testosterone was low, not excessively so but was feeling exhausted and unmotivated. Ashwaganda appears to have given me the energy and motivation back but I’ve only been taking it for a week so am not exactly sure how I’ll fare in the longer term. It gave me enough energy to work out now so Im hoping to raise my energy to prior levels or close by.

Do you go to a doctor to prescribe blood work for you? I am interested in doing bloodwork as part of a wellness check to check for deficiencies etc but am unsure about how to approach this.

You can simply ask your doctor about which tests you want to do and he can order them for you. This might be expensive depending on your insurance.

Here's a good resource on both methods, and places to order online if you go with that method:

https://old.reddit.com/r/steroids/wiki/bloodwork/list

If you live in the USA you should be able to order online and then go in person to like a labcorp or whatever. If you ever got a drug test for a job, thats the sort of place that usually does it. I think some states you may need a referral but most you do not. For a hormone related test covering testosterone and other factors it is going to cost >100 dollars.

Also worth checking Vitamin D levels - inside all day at the computer, especially with lockdown, can lead to a deficiency which has direct physiological impacts.

> I’ve only been taking it for a week

Why even suggest it then?

Same age. Same experience.

I'm 56, and a couple of years ago I was very much where you are. I was used to hard work (about a dozen startups over the years), I was used to learning and excelling and being recognized for it. Until I wasn't. To keep a long story short, I was able to retire and took advantage of it.

I highly recommend that you take a good hard look at what it would take for you to get to retirement, and make a plan. It might require cutting back in some areas, but if you don't figure out how to do it then the universe will and it'll probably be worse. Your plan might involve "one last push" to build up savings, or it might involve a "wind down" at a less stressful kind of job that you can sustain for longer. That's up to you. One thing I will say is that I've known several people who tried the "learning new things" route as an antidote to burnout, and it backfired badly. They ended up being even more stressed, unable to perform at their accustomed level, younger colleagues being resentful, etc. Maybe it'll be different for you, but it seems to me that learning new things is best done on your own time - cutting back on work hours to make room if necessary. A sabbatical or a period of part-time work might seem like it's just dragging things out even more, but sometimes it's the right strategy if it keeps you from losing it altogether.

Good luck.

I never really made the connection before listening to a recent podcast with an expert on serotonin and dopamine, but do you think this is a natural effect of declining dopamine? Online searching seems to indicate dopamine declines with age and is also responsible for taking risks and motivation for both short and long term goal attainment

This is highly likely and is worthy of much more research on my end.

Thank you for reminding me of this!

Is there any action you can take based on this knowledge to change your outcome, or is it simply an unavoidable part of aging?

I don’t really know much on the topic honestly. There are the usual natural ways to increase dopamine like exercise, getting sunlight, and reducing obesity. There are supplements that supposedly help like vitamin D and magnesium. Then there are drugs that act as dopamine agonists. Where these all fall in terms of efficacy I have no idea.

Im in a different field but I too have felt similarly.

I would suggest a couple of things:

- see a psychologist (not a psychiatrist, athough a psychiatrist may be step later on) - this should help you develop tools to make yourself better

- dont take work home, stop when you are tired - i saw that you fulfill multiple roles, could some of that be delegated? are you being compensated for those roles or did they just pile on over time? maybe its time to talk to your boss about it…

- take a real vacation, as in stay home and dont do anything

- excersize, avoid alcohol/substances

I guess I am very lucky then. I am 60 and still very active in development. I develop my own products and I develop new products for clients in various industries. The range is very wide (firmware, low level soft, enterprise applications back and front end, equipment / process control, desktop productivity and entertainment software etc. etc).

I do get tired every once in a while but since I am an independent company I can almost always take my time and recover. So far I did not loose any of that sense of excitement when starting on design of completely new project. I guess being ISV for the last 22 years helps greatly in this department.

Also read a lot, play me some music on keyboard (insanely bad but who cares) and do fair bit of physical activity (cycling, hiking, swimming in the lakes and ocean.

As a result I am very fit, have lots of energy and my brain is always itching to start something new.

What I do not have is a ton of money but I am not doing too bad and would not trade my freedom for anything

> As a 54 year old Software Engineer, who has had a nice IT career for over 26 years, I'm spent.

What did you feel like at 30, 40 and 47 for comparison?

If it's different, what position / work did you do during those years vs what you do now? Software Engineer and IT is a pretty wide net.

Have you ever taken a sabbatical?

An unpaid sabbatical just isn't in the cards for me at the moment.

This is going to sound really stupid, but get bloodwork done for a vitamin deficiency.

As one ages, nutrient absorption wanes. You often need more, to get the same as when younger.

So even with an unchanging diet, you may have changed.

Working out is the same, eg a 30 minute walk may require a 35 minutes, 40 minutes, for the same cardio benefit.

The work that you're saying you do daily from 7am-1pm, do you feel satisfied about it at the end of the day? Does it create meaning for you on the grander scheme of things? (based on what your personal values are, and you personally find meaningful)

If not, then it's probably time to switch employer, to one that has a product/mission that is aligned with a topic/field that would bring more meaning into your life.

If that's not possible, you could try spending one less hour per day on that job you have, and invest that hour in something that creates meaning in your own terms.

I'm 52 got laid off a pseudo-IT job went to a technical college, graduated, got entry level IT and after a year I feel burned out. I'm at the bottom rung of IT where even young people get burned out.

Now each day is just a blur of anxiety. I used to love IT, school was a blast I loved programming, servers, networking, security, web design, troubleshooting, but help desk not so much at 52.

I used to work evenings and nights at my old job now 9pm seems like 3am.

>"I'm finding that after 1pm I'm basically fried (I start working around 7AM)."

Sometimes I do the same - starting 6-7AM and by around noon I quit. I consider it quite normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Except some emergencies productive people (and I count myself as one) do not really shovel gravel 8 hours a day. No point in doing so.

Like a couple of others have suggested, get a checkup at the doctor. This sounds more like an energy problem than a psychological one.

It's so hard to reply without coming off as presumptuous and ignorant of your situation, so I apologize in advance. These kinds of feelings can of course be a sign of burnout that can get better with the suggestions in the article plus some significant time off that doesn't come with the penalty of having to make up for all the time off.

On the other hand, maybe it's time to reexamine when you can retire. There are a lot of forums about this, my wife 'rescued' me from feeling like I needed to work to normal retirement age after reading a lot of Mr. Money Mustache, FWIW.

Younger than you by not much and spent. I have no idea how to recover from this.

Are you exercising? Lack of physical exercise is literally a killer.

If you're open to try new approaches, meditating may help.

Go to church

Just curious, but what’s your definition of “growth mindset”?

I love being challenged, believe I can change to meet most challenges I face, and enjoy looking for opportunities to improve myself. This is how I’d understood the concept of “growth mindset” from Carole Dweck’s book Mindset.

Maybe the difference for me is that none of these things are core components of my identity? It’s just a way of interacting with the world that I find interesting vs. something I feel compelled to go all-gas-no-brakes on all the time.

My definition of growth mindset is the same as yours.

I don't identify with it so much as I think of it as my baseline. Does this mean my baseline has changed? Absolutely.

It's still irksome because I too enjoyed looking for opportunities to improve myself or the methods I use to get things done. Now, I just don't give a fuck.

I thought by the time you're 54 you could retire. I'm much younger and I could retire in a couple of years. What is your saving rate? - you can read more here https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Your job starts at 7am? You could start later, like 10. Have your 2-3h lunch time. Finish at 6pm. Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.

Invariably, comment threads like this, pop up when I provide some current thoughts about my career. A career that quite a few HN readers share apparently, but that's where the similarities end.

Quite a lot of you didn't grow up in abject poverty and it shows.

The hole this puts you in, 99% of people have a really, really difficult time climbing out of and describing what this process is like, is lost on a lot of people. My biological mother made extremely poor choices and never took my future into consideration. We were housing insecure and we were food insecure. My personal safety was at times in jeopardy.

I've been in survival mode most of my life. It's only the last 5 years that I was in a position to finally make thriving choices for me AND for my family. It was only this month that I finally made the ultimate thriving choice to live in a place that I've dreamt of living in since I was a kid. I'm not even going into any other details about what effect this has on you as an adult, like homelessness, how expensive being poor is, etc.

So I'm only left feeling like laughing (and sometimes crying) when someone mentions savings. Shit, it's only been in the last 10 years, that I got over mentally calculating the cost of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure I could afford it. To this day, I still have anxiety over swiping my card in front of people at the grocery store, thinking that surely it's going to be declined (it hasn't in years).

I'm only just now able to start dedicating some of my salary to a savings account (or other investments). There is no time left to ultimately retire with anything matching my current salary, so I've resigned myself to work until I literally can't anymore and with a remote IT job, sitting at a desk, that sounds like 30 more years or more.

Change jobs? I guess you missed the part where I'm encountering ageism? I've had to lop off a decade of my experience in order to try to not appear older with my experience alone.

You aren't alone brother. I grew up with rich and poor family, but chose the poor.

People who have never had to wonder if they were going to have a meal or a place to sleep as a child can never know how it can permanently change your life. I'm glad you are making strides, I still struggle to, so that's quite the accomplishment and you should be proud.

I don't think I will ever stop tallying my groceries as I put them in the basket. Or being surprised when my kids ask for something from the impulse ailse, I literally don't even see it I'm so used to not being able to get any of it.

I firmly believe if every person had to at least work a minimum wage job for a year and try to survive off it, our society would be so much better off, you wouldn't have to explain being poor to some privileged kid who has all the answers because it worked for them.

Half of the country will never know what it's like to be the other half, but one side has all the incentives to keep it that way.

I have family who still spout 'If I were born poor I'd still end up rich' (translation- poor people are just stupid, I'm smart).

I'm cheering you on, and you give me hope!

I'm cheering you on too!

Set your sites on what you want and don't waver for as long as you can. It will happen!

Much appreciated, that seriously helps. I'm going to start trying to focus on myself more and getting myself right.

Thanks for the positivity!

>>I thought by the time you're 54 you could retire. I'm much younger and I could retire in a couple of years. What is your saving rate?

That is not going to help him much now. Not everyone has or could have started saving early in life. Some did not due to ignorance, some did not due to life circumstances, some did but other life events could have taken that from them (i.e bad investments, divorce, medical issue, or 100's of other things).

Just because you have the luck and privilege to be on the FIRE path does not mean everyone else is as lucky or choose that path. This person may have not planned to retire early and looking back now wished they had made that plan in the 20's. The road not taken an all that...

>>Change jobs until you find a job like that. There are plenty, I can assure you.

Again it would seem you are taking your anecdote and applying it globally. This is very region specific and I can assure you in my region there are exactly Zero jobs in IT that allow you to start at 10am, take a 2-3 hour lunch, and knock off an 6pm...

I will not implicitly state those are not common, but I can not imagine a region where they are?

I didn't say he should have retired, it's just my expectation for a software engineer to have the ability to retire by then.

It's very likely he could retire but he just didn't realized. Maybe looking into it, it's not a bad idea.

I worked on 3 continents, in more than 10 companies. No employer ever told me I'm coming in too late, my lunch time it's too long or I'm leaving too early (6pm).

Retiring early is risky. Due to market volatility the safe withdrawal / drawdown rate is lower the longer you need your pot to last, and the impact of miscalculating your expenses worse the lower that rate becomes.

Underestimate your annual expenses by $10K on a 5% SWR? Ok you need a pot of $200K more. At 3%? $333K more. 2%? $500K.

With interest rates in a 700 year downward trend, and yields dropping across all asset classes, you should NOT assume, as a software engineer, that you will be able to retire in your 50s.

Still, of that's something that appeals, start saving and investing, otherwise the chance is literally 0.

10 companies, and "much younger" than the OP. hmmmmm I wonder.....

That aside, like I said if your experience is true, which i have my doubts, it does not match mine. Most companies I know of even if they have flex time want their people to start before 9am, and generally do not allow 2-3hr lunches as normal course. Now if you only worked as a contractor this may be different but a salaried position employed directly for a company... Notta gonna happen every often.

At most of the companies I have worked for you would be put on performance review and then terminated.

Very interesting, I worked both as permanent and on contract basis and they did their best to keep me. Nobody even come close to fire me. I guess just different kind of experience. I'm not trying to convince you, I'm just saying, there is better out there.

With all due respect, saying you're 54 isn't enough context. The past 18 months have been a lot. For everybody, in and out of tech. Knowing you've been in tech longer than most helps sell... what? that you're more deserving of being tired that the rest of us? (Not rowdy invalid, there is an official retirement age after all...) But shit, the new iPhone came out and all I could hear was how much I don't want to wait in line nor be made fun of for my phone having a button and being an olds. I'm really afraid this is a permanent state but I don't have as many years to fall back on. I have enough savings not to starve but the pandemic changed things and those savings aren't going to last forever! (Rapidly dwindling, some might say.) Hope yours lasts longer than mine!

What a bizarre takeaway from what I said.

Saying I'm 54 and have had a 26+ year career in tech was MY context for feeling spent.