If you can afford it, following the intrinsic motivation may be exactly what you need to do.

Sometimes I'm in the position where I want or need to do something even though I'm dreading it or am not excited about.

A few things have helped me when that's the case: 1. Coaxing myself rather than trying to crack the whip. - Finding what's interesting about the task - Thinking through how it might be made interesting or easy - Thinking through whether I can automate it away - Starting on a tiny piece without committing to finishing it right away - Lowering my requirements on quality for a first try to basically zero - Developing a habit around the task with a reward like a streak or a check mark 2. Writing out my thoughts - Why do I want to take on this task? - Why don't I want to take on this task? If I can drill down on both of those maybe I can come to some kind of resolution

Anyway, a lot of what works depends on what's broken in the current situation. I think that sometimes your desire to avoid something is right and sometimes it needs to be worked around. But in either case it can be at least heard with thoughtfulness and compassion. There's probably insight in the feeling that you don't want to miss out on.

On the other hand, I think it's a mistake to treat these feelings as the only thing either. Often even strong feelings are temporary and situational and getting better information or just letting time pass or building up a feeling of success from small wins will let the storm move on.

> If you can afford it, following the intrinsic motivation may be exactly what you need to do.

and

> Anyway, a lot of what works depends on what's broken in the current situation. I think that sometimes your desire to avoid something is right and sometimes it needs to be worked around. But in either case it can be at least heard with thoughtfulness and compassion.

Thanks for sharing these examples! I'm just wrapping an article which I think you and the OP would find interesting as it deals with this very problem. My goal is to help people see procrastination, laziness and play in a more useful manner.

I am terrible at working on things I don’t give a shit about. The list of those things extends with every passing year. And, I realised very late (mid 30s) how much stress was caused by forcing myself to brute force this problem instead of trying to understand it better.

To paraphrase Daniel Ariely: we’re irrational creatures, but the beautiful part is that we’re predictably irrational. Know your flaws and set up systems to help account for them. In other words: it’s not your fault that you feel a certain way, but it’s your responsibility to act when you can.

It'll be ready by Tuesday (if you're interested, drop me a line and I'll send you the link: hello@<my site domain from the profile page>).

Off the top of your head, do you have a strong sense of what work would interest you? And, if so, why you have not been working on it or working towards working on it?

Learning and creating things which people enjoy, regardless of the medium (design, code, writing).

(It used to be publishing, then helping small startups grow, then privacy and now a cross section of mental health and tech.)

Ideal:

1. Build a small thing solving an actual problem

2. Tell as story and teach people something using the thing I build: https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/

Here's how not to approach this problem:

I had spent ages thinking about this, or rather justifying my existing choices. I literally had SWOT analysis charts describing different paths I could take.

The main issue was that I was approaching this from a purely rational point of view. But, I had to first learn about the emotional component of my decisions and biases. I grew up without financial security so that also tends to cloud my judgement (e.g. by comparing myself to people who work more stressful jobs). I was busy, overworked and really stressed then (but well paid!).

Scaling down was very hard, in terms of self-judgement, but my health has improved drastically.

I don't have time to write about this here, but in short: I think that many people who end up in engineering careers tend to get caught in a situation where they keep getting rewarded for solving problems, but eventually lose the context of what kinds of problems they're solving.

For _example_: you start with your first SWE gig in an area you like, move to a tech lead/architect, then to a CTO working on a much meatier/"serious" problems.

But as soon as you step back from the game progression graph (intentionally or not) you realise you lost the context, you don't give a shit about adtech or crypto, or marketing, or agile. You are really good at something you actually don't give a shit about.

I don't think that SWEs are the only to end up with this issue, but that people who choose this line of work are more predisposed to getting a kick from chasing problems.

I've just published the article. Here's the link and the discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35068319

I’m sorry to hear that, that sounds really hard. Are you talking about this stuff with someone that can help you?

Maybe you are just expending your willpower on things you really don't want to do? Maybe you don't want to be a programmer? Maybe go do something else. I don't know your financial situation or goals but if you can make less money maybe find something entry level in another totally unrelated field. I took a 65% paycut once because I was in the same situation as you, completely burned on my career. I took an unrelated office job and was able to thrive because I had an existing skill set (technology) that made me standout. I was able to apply programming to speed up and automate processes at my new job. A lot of this was simple MS Office macros. I started to like programming again because I was doing it out of my own choice, no one expected it.

I was quickly promoted becuase of this and got raises swiftly. This eventually led to the company allowing me to start my own company and build them a saas that they paid me for every month for a decade even after I left. I found I enjoyed development again.

[ Years later, I found out, I just enjoy developing for myself but that's another story :) ]

Incredible story, thanks for sharing.

> I just enjoy developing for myself

That seems to be the main issue. I tried sysadmin for a while, it was more varied than a swe role and I enjoyed it more, but after a while it still became "boring" and mentally unbearable. I like writing software for myself however.

I've had this issue since school. And as soon as a subject is done with, and the pressure of "have to" is relieved, I actually start to give a shit about it. By then however, I had already gotten a bad grade on the exam.

I'm probably some kind of neurodivergent. Not sure what exactly is "wrong" with me, although I've had plenty of "professional" help.

Respectfully its going to be like this forever unless you decide to make a major change. This will be your next 60 years. Or it can be different in a few weeks / months.

One idea, may not be your cup of tea though... I don't know your situation as far as family.

Have you considered joining the military? It provides structure, a million different career paths, travel, comradery and physical fitness. Plus a pension if you stay in for 20 years. On top of that there are multiple branches to choose from depending on your wants.

If I had reached burn out in my twenties, I would have joined the military.

May not happen depending on what sort of “professional help” they’ve gotten.

A valid point, I did overlook that.

I have considered it, but I'm not giving my life for my country. A country is just an emergent structure. There are others like it.

There's always the airforce :)

Sorry, I don't think I get the joke. For context, I'm european (Netherlands). What other kind of "change" were you alluding to I could make? I'm not sure what it could be. It seems the root of my issue is that _having_ to do something makes me dislike it, to the point where my brain just mentally blocks and says "nope". I realize it's not normal, and it's a more (very) extreme version of procrastination perhaps.

I'm responding to the comment you made about dying for your country. Only pilots / special units fight in the air force, everyone else is support and relatively safe. No joke intended.

> It seems the root of my issue is that _having_ to do something makes me dislike it

I'm like you: I have very hard time working on something someone tell me to do, yet I can spend hours working on my own projects without any issue. Of course this led to pretty big issues like failing my PhD and having to go back in my country. Then I quitted my first real job after 4 months because I was feeling I wasn't pay enough and the conditions weren't to my liking, and finally found a full remote one which pays quite a bit more.

My advice would be to either find a job in which the conditions aren't too bad (4 days weeks, full remote, etc.), or a government worker like position where you can be paid doing jack shit.

How did you find the courage to take a 65% pay cut?

I'm in a very similar position to what you were probably in and honestly taking a random office job does feel like the "right" choice here.

I could never stomach a 65% pay cut though because I have dreams/goals of someday not working at all. I save a significant portion of my income and live well within my means all toward a goal of retiring hopefully around 50 or 55.

One could reasonably ask why I am delaying pleasure now for pleasure then, but my answer is simple. While I am burned out and while I am struggling, I'm not sure I am struggling as much as I would be at 50/55, potentially battling some horrible illness, and unable to stop working or even cut back because I had saved so little.

I hear you.

I was younger and didn't have kids yet. I couldn't do it today. I was probably 8 years into my career making I think around a 100k. I travelled for work every couple months, 11 days at a time. Those trips I worked 6am to midnight every day. I was so burnt I couldn't think straight. Prior to that job I was burnt as well, I just couldn't take it anymore. I was late 20s and felt 50. I called my wife from one of the trips and asked her to just start reading me the list of open positions at her company that were not tech. She mentioned one, I said that's it. Interviewed the next week, they offered me the job that day and I started 2 weeks later. It was try something different or be miserable. I was very seriously considering enlisting as well just to get out.

I just have a couple of points to make that are not advice and not at all trying to tell you how to live.

1) My brother died from a sudden illness (genetic, but no known predisposition in our family, e.g., unavoidable) in his 30's with four young children. Stress was really bad for this. Accepting significant stress and burnout now for only a possibly low-stress future is not necessarily a good bet or trade-off.

2) My dad was a workaholic because he was worried about money and retirement and being the "invaluable employee" when I was a kid. He worked often until late at night and on weekends. He came to lots of my games and stuff, but he always missed everyday life. Always. He and his mates were all eventually "downsized" from his high-paying job at a Fortune 100 when they sold off his software development unit to a competitor when I was a late teenager. He realized he fucked up our relationships and was fucked up himself by the lack of work-life balance, and took a job that was less demanding and of course paid less, but it was already pretty late by then. I was maybe 17 or so already. You can't get that back, and our relationship was never the same as when I was really little.

Anyway, a fat paycheck is nice, but there are other nice things in life too. I hope you do what is right for you.

This resonates with me. My Father in laws retirement party was supposed to be this past weekend. He spent it in the hospital getting treated for a stroke. He pretty much did nothing but work.

Gotta say there are worse ways to fuck up a relationship

>> Feels like my entire life my "willpower" stat has been near zero.

Things can go the other way too. Too much willpower and you find yourself at work Sunday morning because, unlike everyone else, you didn't raise hell about not working weekends. Then you get an angry email from your boss saying that the fiscal year is ending and you haven't used all your vacation days yet. We all must find a happy middle between just walking away from all work, and the inability to ever walk away.

> I don't care about php, I don't care about their legacy codebase, I don't care about their bugs.

> Literally couldn't bring myself to do these tasks.

Nobody would bring themselves to do these tasks if the corporations weren't paying for it!

As an aside, PHP and TypeScript are the only popular non-FP languages I know that support ad-hoc union types: e.g. private int|float $foo;

Python supports `Union[int, float]` or `int | float` after 3.10.

These languages are dynamic at their core. Add in the weird edgecases that result from automatic conversions/coersion, and their type systems are a joke. In any case, the code I was working from was still from the "docstring comments as types"-era.

From anecdotal experience, this sounds like a gut bacteria issue. Do you tend to have constipation or diarrhea?

Oh what the hell, here goes nothing. I've haven't had constipation or diarrhea per se, although the consistency was always a bit softer and stickier than desired. Daily yoghurt consumption as a gut-probiotic has fixed this problem for me, although I still have to guard my sugar intake. High sugar intake destroys my gut biome (or rather, replaces it with sugar-eaters). Stressful days also seem to wreak havoc on my digestive system, e.g. the day of a job interview. Haven't found a fix for that yet, beyond mentally letting go (easier said than done sometimes).

Might be worth asking a gastroenterologist for a hydrogen/methane breath test. Sugar sensitivity can be a red flag for early SIBO, and full blown SIBO is something that you'd definitely want to avoid if possible since it's difficult resolve and many aren't successful.

I think it's more likely a side-effect of neurodivergence. I don't identify with the symptoms that google spit out, and autism is known to be correlated to a "mistuned" gut. I have been diagnosed with asperger, although that diagnosis has since been rescinded (no diagnosis to replace it however). All I can say for sure is that there is a deviation from normal in the way my brain works.

And when I say high sugar intake, I truly do mean high. I can and will eat ~500g of candy in one sitting if I have unfettered access to it.

I love the unexpected directions HN threads can take :)

I've struggled with this for most of my life, and recently went on sabbatical when I, too, saw myself no longer able to perform, and I took myself out of the game before my personal struggles had a chance to force me out.

I think the post is giving questionable advice about the role of willpower in making the right choices. I think it is advising the use of willpower for challenges that may be better addressed in other ways.

If "life is a game", and willpower is a jetpack with limited fuel, the piece reads like a strategy guide that tells you how to best use your jetpack to go about routine tasks, and focuses on preservation of fuel to ensure you can keep using the jetpack for those tasks. It fails to ask the question: is a jetpack the right tool in the first place? Is the preservation of fuel just sidestepping a deeper and more fundamental issue? Should you really be using a jetpack to ascend a few flights of stairs?

I see my collapse at work as partly due to a misapplication of willpower to surmount obstacles that could be best bypassed by navigating around or through those obstacles instead of assuming that the only option is up and over. This was a perspective that I could not see while I was in the situation, but as I've gained more critical distance, I've started to realize that lack of willpower was not the primary problem.

Everyone is different of course, but for me, establishing a mindfulness meditation habit in the morning and then building a solid core routine of daily habits around that and around tested cognitive approaches to reframing problems has been a much more sustainable path.

I think of it as priming my mind to make hard decisions with less effort, thus reducing the need for willpower in the first place. And the impact has really felt magical. Things I could hardly convince myself to do even after mustering every bit of willpower suddenly started to become automatic and effortless - no willpower required.

This started with the most basic of things: doing the dishes regularly, eating better foods, going to bed earlier, etc. This habit loop has a cascading positive effect. Better sleep led to better sessions of mindfulness and more moments of experiential insight. This in turn led to even more pronounced effects and less "limbic friction" for daily tasks. The effect doesn't seem to be that you gain more willpower, but that the willpower required to complete a task is reduced drastically, because your brain has seen more clearly the cost/benefit of each possible path.

I suddenly found myself digging in to some tasks and problems that I'd been avoiding for months/years. I suddenly found myself believing that this set of foundational habits would become the core of my next work endeavor.

I should disclaim that I'm still very much mid-journey, but I've done the willpower thing and failed. Cognitive approaches that change how your brain weighs decisions seems far more sustainable, and leaves the jetpack ready for when you really do need to scale the side of a cliff.

Yes, these are great points.

> This habit loop has a cascading positive effect.

"The power of habit" is a great book on how to establish good habits. I no longer need willpower to do sports in the morning unless I'm completely trashed. Once something truly is a habit, it doesn't take willpower to do it anymore. It rather takes effort to deviate from it.

> This was a perspective that I could not see while I was in the situation, but as I've gained more critical distance, I've started to realize that lack of willpower was not the primary problem.

Taking a step back when finding a situation awful or feeling bad is also a helpful habit.

I wasted way too much jet fuel due to my own cognitive biases and emotions. Usually it's so much better to simply raise that issue with that friend, colleague or partner than to swallow things down and try to power through.

Yeah, I liked most of this but "willpower" is a dangerous concept to me. I mostly believe it's a useless and terrible way to frame this sort of thing; it engenders guilt without helping.

Lack of willpower is really just "right now, your body can't seem to see the value in what you're theoretically supposed to do." There are two ways of dealing with it, one might be "no, seriously, this sucks and is pointless, so just DONT DO IT."

The other is usually, find a way to trick yourself. Play little games, timers, whatever. Just understand that "is there something wrong with me" is a trap. There isn't, you just have to figure out the trick.

Coping mechanisms are often helpful. But shouldn’t be used to evade recognizing and possibly addressing the underlying issues. Sometimes there is physiologically or psychologically something wrong.

you could rename willpower with energy and get to a similar point, but at least for me, i feel willpower is what is driving me throughout the day. i don't see where the guilt should come from? if i run out of willpower or energy i need to rest and relax. every evening i reach that point. why should i feel guilty about that? there is nothing wrong with willpower running out. when i reach that point i know that i deserve a rest.

decision fatigue is another aspect of this. to many decisions to make and you are getting tired of that. i solve that by automating many things. (like watching tv or listening to books, i have them on a schedule, and the only time i need to make a decision is when i need to find something new to watch which happens every few months.

What's your thought process behind quitting rather than just continuing to phone it in until you get fired so you can collect unemployment?

Honor and dignity. I don't feel good about noticeably producing underwhelming work, which was stressing me out and deleterious to my mental state. In any case I departed with mutual understanding, and I was told that I was welcome to apply again if I felt better in the future.