Of the many many hours I've spent on this website, this comment probably made me feel more relaxed than anything else.
Please continue your kind and helpful words on the internet:)
What books/resources do you suggest to follow more on this path of meditation (possibly also stoicism)?
I think these things helped me a lot in my recovery but I also don’t think it’s necessary or sufficient. I think my advice above is the real key, but vipassana and Buddhism give a pretty structured approach to achieve the appropriate detachment from what’s not truly real and the appreciation for what is. IMO that’s the basis for recovering from burnout durably. But the other thing is there’s no magic, it takes time.
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Fronsdal 1 https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 2 https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/
Thank you for pointing it out.
Eventually, I got married, had a family, found things to do in the community, and do plenty of sports and hobbies that involve shutting off the computer. Even though my jobs after my 20s have been even more soul-crushing than the ones I had earlier, I've never had a hint of burnout. When I'm done with work, I shut off the computer and that's it. I'll go build a piece of furniture, or repair my car, spend time with my kid, anything that doesn't involve office politics, two week sprints, or status reports. Just having a life outside of work has done wonders for my mental health. No meditation or spirituality needed!
If you do get burned out, the only remedy I've found is time away, sometimes many months of it. That's really tough (or impossible) for many people's financial situations, though.
I think what’s universally important is to keep active and engaged in what we’re doing. Some of us have to tell fictions that what we’re doing has meaning, whilst others just know what brings meaning to their life.
It feels flippant to say, "stop caring so much about things", but it's actually great advice.
We should think of ourselves as having a limited "caring budget", and be judicious in how we spend that budget. Part of the trick is figuring out what that budget is, since it can be different for different people, or even different for the same person at different times in their life.
I think framing burnout in this way is helpful: you get burned out when too much is too important to you, and you've overextended your emotional ability to give a part of yourself to each of those things, for too much time.
An important thing about that to me is that it doesn't at all consider whether things are going well or poorly with all those "too important" things. Certainly things going poorly will increase stress, but even caring too much about too many things that are all going well can burn you out.
In a complex job with a fast pace, a fair amount of tech debt around every edge, a relentless pace of innovation happening, and - yes - growth, there’s too much to be invested in everything. It doesn’t have to matter that much. The parts you really care about, the craft and quality of your work, your relationships, mentoring and growing the people around you, seeing things get better one piece at a time, and a few things - they can matter. But everything can’t. And even those you have to at some very deep level realize don’t matter really.
Stripe doesn’t really exist in this world. It’s a shared fiction to help frame the interactions between you and a few people you actually interact with in a day. The real truth is the only thing that happens in your days is you type on a computer and talk to a few people. It actually doesn’t matter in any meaningful way what you typed or some higher purpose around humbling honesty or exothermic curiosity or PMEs or whatever stories we tell ourselves to create some sort of reality out of the fiction. The only important things you really do is how you shape the lives of the people you interact with, and how you shape your own life.
Burnout is hard. Adopt a daily meditation practice. Let your mind heal by letting go of meaning and practice enjoying the moment you’re in with whomever you’re with, but most especially yourself. The joy will come back faster the faster you let go of things needing to matter or have deeper meaning, especially when those things are a fiction like a company or a career or any of the other small and big lies we’ve been told and we reinforce to ourselves daily. I know I’ve been there man, and I know exactly - exactly - the sensations and experiences you describe. It gets better, but I think once you get there it never totally goes away and it’s easier to slip back.
FWIW I don’t think burnout is the same as depression. I’ve felt both and burnout is different. It’s that loss of ability to engage - which overlaps with depression - but usually doesn’t come with the thoughts of hopeless despair and desire for life to be over. It’s just more of a deadness and inability to initiate what you think you should want to do but can’t, and it pervasively impacts everything.
It gets better.