I don't think it's a mental vs. physical thing at all.

I've had jobs where I had certainty about what I was doing every day, I witnessed the fruits of my labor and I had certainty about where I stood in the organization. I never suffered burnout from them.

I've also had jobs where I was always uncertain about what I ought to be doing, where the fruits of my labor often didn't seem to amount to much (e.g. perpetual project cancellations/always changing requirements/sudden architectural direction changes) and I was really uncertain about where I stood the whole time.

I tried dealing with it with sustained periods of heavy physical activity (e.g. jogging between tasks), meditation, etc. It only helped a little.

This perpetual miasma of uncertainty and consequent stress built up over time and when it became too much - that's when I burned out.

I don't doubt that working on a farm doing heavy physical labor under similar conditions would burn me out too. My parents used to sometimes give me vague gardening tasks when I was a teenager and I absolutely hated that.

Dramatization of this in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uuberh8Xks

Have to wonder too if there’s such a thing as the ambiguity of labor. Not knowing where one stands in an organization is a continuous passive stress, a background drone of worries. It’s an emotional labor that even comes with jobs that aren’t primarily social.

I think I've always found there to be some individuality and creativity in software work, so in this respect even when I'm burning out I feel more like Tony than Tommy.

>The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

It makes a lot more sense for it to apply to software developers too with this definition.

My uncertainty was because I always found this concept a little vague around the edges. What the fuck even is a self realized human being, for instance? Would Tony be one and Tommy not? Or neither? Or would the example need to be fleshed out before you could say?

To stay with the kitchen examples, cooks would not be alienated if they could:

- afford to eat where they work

- have creative agency over the recipes

- have the chance to meet with the customers of the restaurant who eat their dishes

So... an autonomous, self realized human being is just another way of saying a human being? What additional meaning does it impart then?

>To stay with the kitchen examples, cooks would not be alienated if they could: >- afford to eat where they work >- have creative agency over the recipes >- have the chance to meet with the customers of the restaurant who eat their dishes

So Tony would be not-alienated and Tommy working at McDonalds would be only meet 1/3 of the alienation criteria?

And developers would meet more likely hit the criteria if they're working for an expensive B2B rather than a B2C?

(genuinely curious btw, this is an interesting conversation)

> So... an autonomous, self realized human being is just another way of saying a human being? What additional meaning does it impart then?

The thing is that the worker loses these innate human characteristics, such as being autonomous and self realized, by becoming an economic entity in a capitalist setting. That is how I understand it.

> So Tony would be not-alienated and Tommy working at McDonalds would be only meet 1/3 of the alienation criteria?

Perhaps it is important to consider the notion of sense of provided value. As Tommy, I wouldn't feel like what I'm doing is meaningful. I'm preparing low quality unhealthy food and I could be replaced at any time, making me similar to a tool. I agree tho that as Tony I wouldn't probably feel alienated.

But as I've never worked as a cook, perhaps it is easier to describe alienation as a software developer.

I'll take as an example 2 distinct jobs I had.

One in a small startup with a very flat hierarchy, where I was involved in most technical decisions and I met customers and users. It was a B2B model so I couldn't technically own the product I contributed to make, but I was somehow convinced that it would provide some value for the "greater good".

The other job was in a medium sized startup, where technical decisions were imposed from the top and I had very little agency. Being a large product, my contributions would only have tiny effects on the final result. I was "checked on" daily by anxious managers. I had no contact with our users, and this wasn't the kind of product people would make grateful reviews about.

Can you guess where is it that I felt alienated?

Exactly. The problem is that more and more of the "easy tasks" that high-skilled jobs are automated/moved to computers. 30-50 years ago, an Engineer still would find to make some copies, sharpen a pencil or get fresh paper from storage, check his mailbox etc. So even high-skilled jobs had a lot of repetetive, simple work parts that gave the brain room to relax. Nowadays the easy tasks are removed, and we mostly deal with hard problemes 8h+ a day.

For example, modern large scale farming is pretty harmful and is destroying top soil and striping soil of important nutrients. But we all like to run around saying, "automated", and it mostly is, but it comes at a cost.

Those things are mostly "easy" in that they're monotonous and no individual task has much risk of failure, but in aggregate it's demanding enough that it's super-hard

That resonates with me. As a developer, I feel an intense desire to either contribute to open source, or go into a more "creative" field. And it's not the "good" kind of desire that gives me energy or pushes me to do things, but it's the kind of "bad" desire that feels like it's eating me alive sometimes. I have a master's degree, and a nice job with very good people. But somehow it doesn't feel enough for me.

I know this is a mental health problem, and I know that this may be a "real" calling instead of just a kind of FOMO. But a few people around me suffer from the same thing, so I wonder if there's not some kind of mechanism at play here. While I don't spend much time with "regular" people on social media, I spend time looking at open source developers, and creative people. When I was younger I felt kind of immune to the social media trap (showing your perfect life and all of that). Now, I realise that I may have fallen from it, just with different values.

I have a very creative job and it provides me a lot out creative outlet but that doesn't stop me daydreaming about making something of my own and that desire is something I struggle with a lot. Interestingly it's become more acute as I've got older, had kids and have more time that is taken up by home-life. Before I could throw myself into other hobbies that have largely fallen by the wayside. It doesn't help that my health took a large oopsie this year and I'm still getting back on my feet from that. I've very slowly started scratching that itch and every time that I do I definitely feel more relaxed.

My other issue is that I've spent so long being creative in a commercial setting I find it very hard not to look at everything through a product lens.

It feels like that. I never really understood that I had a desire for recognition before and so I mostly ignored it, but these days it's getting harder.

> My other issue is that I've spent so long being creative in a commercial setting I find it very hard not to look at everything through a product lens.

That doesn't help too. Switching before "work mode" and "home mode" when coding takes a bit of time for me, which makes it harder to do things as I don't have that much time after work.

I just bought an old house and I spend hours on it, working on shelves, building new floors etc, it's absolutely paradise.

More recently it's been woodworking for me, having spent this last Sunday building a small coaster set that someone commissioned from me. Completing the order was the absolute highlight of my month, the physicality of the thing allows for knowing every intimate detail about it that feels somewhat similar to the early programs many of us wrote. With early and simple programs, the ones written purely by a single person without management or team input, the programmer is able to fully encapsulate their ideas of the thing at the time of creation. This includes the good parts, the corners cut, the ideas they had when crafting it, and even the memory of where they were in the world when they created it. The problem with a program is that this can get lost over time, a change here, an update there, a PR from someone random, a critique from a new team member, and after a couple years it's different, the feeling of the thing is somehow lost. Having spoken to many building construction laborers, who if you survey them will typically say they have a high level of job satisfaction from seeing their work stand before them, I think the constant churn in the work we see today contributes to the sense of burnout many of us have felt.

With a physical good though, the essence of the craftsmanship in an item remains as long as the item is intact. I can still look at an old shelf a made a decade ago and have it put me directly back into the scene I was in during the time. The slightly odd pattern on one corner an indication of losing some footing while using an orbital sander, a scuff mark from transporting it from it's original home to a new apartment, the physicality creates a true mental time capsule. I'd encourage anyone who is in this field, especially if they've never done so before, to try building real things or to work with their hands in some way. Even if you don't make money from the activity in a direct sense, the stress reduction and life satisfaction it creates can go a long way in avoiding burnout and misery.

You name one reason. And it's a true reason but there are many others. Your explanation doesn't cover them all.

There are only two reason people get burned out: long periods of mental or physical stress. A dancer can burnout when asking too much of the body. A fit person can burnout when the lie of an affair is going on for too long. And of course your explanation is also a very valid one.

A burnout is 100% physical (the body is exhausted), but the cause can be mental or physical (or both).

Unfortunately I have experience with being burned-out. So I can give my best advice to others who are struggling with a burnout: the key to recovery is acceptance. A burnout is potentially life threatening so you really need to step on the brakes and accept that you can't go on like you do. Also accept that it might take at least a year to fully recover. And accept that you will experience very strange thoughts and feelings because everything in your body is messed up. If you don't accept that you are burned-out you will really struggle to get better. Get help!

If you ever find youself typing a sentence that starts with this, please stop and hit the backspace button until it's gone. You are most likely going to to say something that is completely wrong or misses 90% of the actual reasons something happens.

Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)

You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives.

I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you.

All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know.

It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.

There are downsides to that form of existence. It is not optimal for extracting maximum contributions to society from every individual.

Our current social configuration seems to optimize for maximum “extraction” of social contribution from individuals.

But it follows some dark patterns: unless you’re fabulously wealthy, your contributions are generally opt-out instead of opt-in, and it coerces people into settling for local maxima (flipping burgers instead of writing code, writing code instead of research, research instead of etc.)

I also agree that the impersonal nature of this configuration is disturbingly dissociative, and it’s sad that the only antidotes are (1) work harder, so you have less time to think (2) opt-out.

"High mental activity guided by will power" sounds like a fantastic foundation for any role and my ideal.

There is a place for manual labour (been there, done that), and both can work.

People are burned out due to understaffing and/or misallocation of resources.

This is intensely acute for some right now due to the chips falling back down to earth while people adjust to pre-post-pandemic.

That means that, while writing code, I can go into what I term a “fugue state.” Hours can pass, and I barely notice.

This has one fairly visible artifact: My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green.

When I come out of this state, I am done. Totally exhausted. Not sore, like I was working out, but definitely physically tired.

I sleep well, those nights.

I apologize for the acronym. I thought it was common terminology.