The premise is interesting but feels incomplete. The "Monday morning excitement test" doesn't account for the hedonic treadmill - even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.
That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.
The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.
You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.
I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.
Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
Wow, politics seems the opposite to me. It has the morbid fascination of a train wreck. You can't stop it, you know it's going badly, yet you can't look away.
Family and building things are much more positive sources of energy to me.
Would you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs
Hedonic treadmill only applies to hedonia, not the eudaimonia that meaningful work typically brings. “Doing well” doesn’t have the same elastic snap back that “being well” does, and there’s some evidence it can provide a buffer on the hedonic treadmill effect.
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Not to demean your experience, but for me (5+ years now of daily grind for one purpose) that statement is very VERY real.
My thinking is - it's just another one of the struggles of doing real meaningful change - there's recurring, long and arduous timespans where no observable/exciting results manifest and one has to trudge forward.
If you know how to ease THAT part, please share (I'm begging you lol).
"Politics as a zero-sum game" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's only true if you see it as "competing over who gets all the power". In a more sympathetic perspective, politics is just how communities self-organize, make decisions and build compromise between the needs and interests of their stakeholders. Especially at the local level (where the feedback path between "make a decision" and "affect peoples' lives" is the shortest and most accessible), that can mostly involve people being available to do the work that needs to happen to build consensus and get anything done done to improve the lives of the community members.
I agree that the piece does feel incomplete, but it is a large topic to fully cover in a blog post. The author is stating that with purpose, life is a joy, not a chore. I feel like this is a message that many people need to hear!
The article started well until it changed from "you" to "I". After that, it felt like a mix of bragging and trying to sell a book.
I think its OK if some people don't get to live their dream jobs, some dreams have no equivalent in real life, and some people need to do the mundane, boring underground jobs that keep things together.
Solve your two problems first! I do think this resonates with a lot of especially YC founders who have broken through 1 and 2 but are missing the most important 3.
I will keep arguing that canvassing for a political movement is the highest potential thing most Americans could be doing now. I'm not talking about running for office yourself. You don't have to do it full-time. But try it. Focus on one issue and one bill. You could solve a key problem in weeks. See how this changes your life!
Please note that depression != burn-out. If you really can't get out of bed on a Monday morning, can't face the day, or muster any enthusiasm for anything, then you might not need a purpose, you might need medical assistance.
I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.
I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.
Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.
Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.
As someone with treatment resistant depression, it is odd people are against medication. Medication is proven safe and effective for treating depression. Therapy and medication should be used immediately in conjunction because 1. therapy is most effective when paired with medication, and 2. depression is a vicious cycle. The longer someone spends depressed, the more likely they will spiral into deeper depression, isolation, unemployment, etc.
No one should delay any part of depression treatment.
Agree that medication isn't necessarily the answer - mine was therapy not pills. But all of it is still medical assistance. And the medication helped me get started on the therapy, I'm not sure I could have got to a place where the therapy could have helped without it.
>I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
My experience from being a mental-health patient is that things take too much time. For me I struggled with how it seemed like that the society universally had agreed that medication for my condition is bad. Taking medicine doesn't mean that you cant threat your illness in other ways as well, in my experience taking medicine helps you to be able to take the changes you need in life.
There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches. It’s not that meds are the only option or they should be reserved for the most severe cases, it’s people’s reactions are different and there’s no way to tell without trying them. For some people they really do work wonders and you simply don’t know ahead of time.
Not everyone has a support structure they can count on as they fall apart. So some people just need help to get through a rough period even if a solution isn’t long term viable. When a spouse dies being able to function for the next few months can mean keeping the roof over someone’s head.
Mm. I'm glad for you that you can just think about your problems harder and get better, but that's not the reality of it for most people with depression.
Meds don't magically make you happy and they don't magically get you out of fixing the problems in your life. They make it easier and therefore possible to do so. I'd describe it as the crane that lifts up the heavy weight enough for you to shuffle out.
If you can just think harder about your problems, by all means, do that. But there's zero virtue to rawdogging it when help is available, especially as this can easily lead to an isolation spiral and become deadly.
> were because something was not right in my life.
THIS! Thats the reason why I always refused to take any medication: Doctors said you could "try X or Y and in some days I should feel better" - while the problems where mainly because of problems at work or within relationship.
Why should I take medics if I have problems at work with bad colleagues? This logic never made sense to me.
And my 2ct: If this wouldnt be a hardcore capitalist society in which most people struggle despite the fact living in a rich country, possessing nothing and having no homeownership, then there would be near zero demand for any psy medics.
As someone medicated I actually fully agree with you.
Depression is also a broad spectrum condition (much like autism). Years ago I watched this lecture by Sapolsky[0] and it really helped. Breaking down the different classifications is really helpful. The SSRIs always made me feel worse, and this (along with a lot of other research) helped make sense of it. A few years back I was diagnosed with ADHD and a psychologist friend encouraged me to give Adderall a try. It was the first time that medication "worked" and it really made a big difference in my life. The big reason why being that psychomotor retardation and anhedonia were my biggest symptoms. When coupled with an anxiety disorder it creates a strong negative feedback loop.
But here's the thing: medication isn't the cure. For me it alleviates (not eliminates) symptoms but at the end of the day it still requires work from me to ensure I create a positive feedback loop and don't let myself fall into that destructive loop. This is all stuff I had to learn on my own and through reading and seeking out friends with people who are more experts in the area. That's where I think our care system fails.
The best thing I can recommend to people is to be introspective. Each journey is personal, but whatever your issues are try to find the early warning signs. For me it can be little things like the dishes piling up or my desk getting messy (these seem you be common). Things like depression build up, so look for the signs. And most importantly, open up. This was the hardest for me and makes me feel demasculated and embarrassed much of the time. But I've also found it to help build stronger relationships with my partner and friends. That it helps open a door to communicate both ways. Maybe you open the door for you, but you also open a door many are too nervous to open themselves. It's worth the discomfort and gets easier with time. (Talking behind a handle is a great way to start too. So make alt accounts if you need to. That's how I started)
Burn out is the second or third year of non-stop fires and you are the one to solve all of the problems. Meanwhile the company is busy creating more fires because they haven’t finished burning that sweet sweet engineer candle.
For sure! I've written a lot about depression too! But I do think a lot of what people otherwise blame on burnout or depression is really this existential hunger to make more positive impact. Finding that highest purpose can change lives!
My depression was due to childhood trauma. No amount of purpose would have changed that. I had to deal with my demons before I could move into the kind of positive space where purpose made any kind of difference.
edit: but yes, now that I have done that work, purpose is good, and what keeps me positive and away from the black dog.
My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.
I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.
Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?
This is actually nowdays my main thesis for most negative things I see in society: The capitalist force pressing people into whatever jobs leads to estrangement, which will lead to a lot of negative outcomes over decades added up. (social/mental/physical health impact etc.)
And burn out isn't "I hate my job and don't enjoy it more". It's fatigue so hard that you feel like you haven't slept after waking up. I hate that burnout is thrown around so easily. It's something that should be moved to therapy and a long time off, not "switch jobs". If that fixes your burnout, it's early stages or not burnout.
I had burnout this year and was too dumbfounded in the supermarket to buy what I always buy or drive a car. I didn't have any mental capacity anymore. Like an IQ of 20 and the physical energy of a 100 year old.
Be unkind to yourselves, people. I find the best way to prevent depression and burn-out is to be brutally, ruthlessly frank with myself. There's nothing positive in accepting weakness and failure. I always feel better when I hold myself to the highest standards and don't make excuses. Of course, I don't always manage to fully do that but it's something to aspire to.
What's the analog of rhabdomyolysis for the mind? You're on a path to get it, bud. Not a personal attack, just my and a whole bunch of other people's experiences.
Weird ad for a self-help book with an intersection in politics that almost read like you're just hustling the wrong way, you just need to hustle right, and he's going to teach you all about it. The yellow highlighting did not help build credibility.
This resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
My advice would be to keep up with a schedule that still keeps you pretty busy and ideally waking up early at regular hours. Once you hit actual rock bottom burn out, you know sleeping in until noon and scrolling message boards for three hours before you realized you haven't eaten yet all day and the sun is already setting, it feels almost impossible to turn the switch back on when you need to. Even something like folding your clothes starts to feel like a monumental task pretty fast.
For all the yammering in this thread you’ve centered on the real problem no one can admit here.
You burn out creating value for others that you end up either not owning or it not materially contributing to your immediate community.
We evolved to work for ourselves and our tribe again immense satisfaction from that. Cleaning your house, pulling weeds volunteering locally. Etc.
But endlessly serving shareholders (ownership class or not) while giving up way more value then you out in yields a deep sense of happiness because we can’t express the unfairness woven into our life so deeply.
Also resonates with me. I helped my previous company scale and get acquired and then helped scale the new team some more. Then decided I wanted to go into a high-caliber start-up because I was kind of burned-out and after a year I did. I work with brilliant people, building a product that democratizes investing in my small EU country and seeing a company grow again is fun. The problem is we lack excitedness and the feedback loop is bad so my motivation hasn't picked-up. What helped me is a new hire that brought some emotions and excitedness to the team.
I have also been thinking of giving my notice for a while now, but I'm also struggling with finding a purpose so that part also hit me hard. I'm actually scared of leaving my job in case I find out it was the one thing that gave me purpose and I won't be able to find something better.
Congrats on doing it, and please do send a message if you do find something that gives you more purpose, it will greatly help me.
Sometimes it's possible to take an unpaid leave for six months or a year and then come back if you want to. If you perform well at your job, no reason they wouldn't want you back.
Thanks, I might take you up on that. I’ve mainly been in the work, kids, sleep loop the past decade so I need to find some hobbies and passion projects to work on.
damn bro having a billion dollar company and your own family must be so tough to deal with , happy to take them off your hands if you want to feel the drive to live again ;)
I agree with the premise but take issue with the measure for "success": do you feel excited to get up and work on Monday?
We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill.
To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).
Or you totally love doing what you do at work and, after spending a week at the beach, you can’t wait to go back because you’re so close to solving that interesting problem you’ve been working on for more than a month.
I am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism.
You work to earn, you earn to buy.
But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.
When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.
Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.
I think this is, in part, what the article is arguing. Community, and multi-generational culture and tradition, were a technology which helped populations thrive in what we now consider abject poverty. As the world gets wealthier, due to more recent technologies like widespread markets, staying in the same place and interacting with only the same 100-500 people for one's whole life is no longer something that almost everyone has to do, which explodes the basis for those earlier techs.
With TFR rapidly falling, current and future children are much less likely to even have any family other than parents, which cuts out another pillar supporting community and tradition, too.
I don't have a pat answer or know where this is going, but--assuming humanity survives--unless we want to turn into Asimov's Spacers, we'll have to find something to care about.
One thing that I always try to bring up in these discussions is that “burnout” and “overwork” are two different problems, and I think this author would agree with me.
If your problem could be fixed with a raise or a nice vacation, that’s overwork. 996 schedules, crunch time, and a high cost of living make overwork.
Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia. Closer to a career-induced bout of major depression.
> Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia
I know I'm burnt out (increasingly severe burnout at that) and I ask myself that question daily. The truth is there is no point and I can't motivate myself anymore. I don't see any solution to the problem and I expect I will lose my job sooner or later at which point I'm not sure what I'll do.
I've largely come to the conclusion that what I need to be mentally healthy and what society needs from me are fundamentally incompatible things.
For tech folks that are making comfortable salaries, a raise won’t help.
But if you’re in a position where there is difficulty affording your living expenses, a raise can make a huge quality of life change. It can remove enough stress from your life that the stress of your job goes from pushing you over the edge to staying within your limits
I'm burned out because I have to raise two young children, work a full time job in a demanding career, and then in the hour or two a day of time that isn't accounted for in those two tasks, I need to maintain a household and try to care for myself. I feel a strong sense of purpose caring for my family, but don't have enough time to meet life's demands. Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
> Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
I have kids, but I don’t think having kids or even a lack of money is necessary to experience the type of burnout you’re describing.
While everyone and every situation is different, my personal experience is that having kids led to less burnout for me over time. I expected the opposite after reading comments online, but it turns out that for me the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing. The job no longer felt like some isolated drudgery without purpose because it played a clear role in my family’s well being. I also learned how to manage time and prioritize better after having kids.
But I will never gatekeep burnout or try to differentiate burnout based on having kids or money. I can even think of someone who was clearly experiencing burnout despite having neither kids nor a job and while not having to worry about money. Burnout isn’t a simple function of life circumstances, personal circumstances and mental well being play a large role. In some cases, certain personality types can seemingly become burned out under any circumstances. It’s a heavily personal reaction.
I feel the same way about kids. For me, I think, it changed my perspective. Lots of things at work that would have bothered or frustrated me no longer do so. Having kids is a great way to develop a Zen attitude about some things.
Though, to be fair, you gain a whole new set of much scarier things to worry about.
This. Focusing on your highest potential is energizing and the rest is what we call burnout. Having kids is what caused me to think so hard about these questions, both for myself and them. I have to justify every minute I'm not with them, and now my life fully represents my values.
I'm like this but four kids. The kids are my life, but in another way the two hours when they're in bed are my life. I try and get household shit done in tiny increments throughout the day - cleaning the kitchen in the morning before I start work, doing laundry at lunch, cleaning away dinner stuff while they brush teeth, so that I squeeze a little more self time in the evenings. In those hours, I have side projects I work on. And I do WAY too many. People would look at my life and say I need to focus on one thing to finish it, but I've learned (for me at least) that happiness comes from having lots of options when you have that free time. I forgive myself for not making major progress on things, not being productive outside of work, and I try to just enjoy my time whether it's writing fiction, building board games, hobby coding, messing with unity, reading, building models, casual gaming etc. lately I've been doing needle felting because I picked up a cheap Halloween decoration of a needle felt cute vampire. Halloween is long over but I'm not beating myself up about it. All my hobbies follow a pattern of things that I can pick up where I left off with minimum fuss. I don't do anything that takes an age to set up or has a minimum time commitment.
I would say hang in there, and once in a while give yourself permission to prioritise the "care for myself" over the "maintain a household".
Do things in little increments and don't torture yourself about not being full of energy all the time
Love the idea that your kids are your life and the two hours when they're in bed is also your life! I'm very much in that same place too.
Many of my posts and most of my book were written in either the first two hours after they go to school or the first two hours after they sleep.
I got a rare Sunday afternoon off, which is why we got this post now!
Totally agree that work only to pay for a household is a tough life. I'm trying to connect more people with work that can give more meaning now and maybe more money long-term. People chasing their highest potential tend to create greater projects!
When kids were added to the family, it actually improved my life. I actually had motivation then for making money—and making time.
Now, empty nested, I can see that I was both rudderless and identity-less before the kids. I'm wandering now (and retired) trying to find a replacement identity.
I'm still a father of course (and husband) but with less input and less to do. In fact I feel inclined to step back and let the girls have their lives now. So I road-trip, come up with projects to keep me busy, try to be an "educator".
I know a lot of people who DoorDash, have groceries delivered, have a house cleaner, and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.
It’s never quite as much time as expected, though. Each is a marginal addition of free time that brings its own complications (like my friend who did an alarming amount of DoorDash and is now investing a lot of time into dropping weight and managing cholesterol and blood sugar)
Hiring a housekeeper to come every couple of weeks has pretty much directly bought me time, at a pretty reasonable price. I like living in a neat and tidy home, but never cared much for scrubbing grout or polishing the stovetop in my free hours. I’m delighted every time she comes, and I never wake up Saturday thinking I’ll have to vacuum under the couch cushions.
Enough money to not work and care for your children is the correct answer.
But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.
Who needs assistants? I'll make do with enough money to draw a monthly stipend covering my expenses and leisure from for life. You know, like a salary, but without wasting my time on pointless tasks that give me no satisfaction.
I have more money and no kids, I still relate to your comment.
I burned out basically because I'm stupid and decided to work a demanding full time job while also remodeling my house by myself. Like all renovation jobs, it ended up being bigger than planned (I actually expected it to grow from us discovering something that had to be done during the renovation, I just never expected the thing we found to be as large as it was: we had to redo the whole foundation of our 1840 house, and because a machine wouldn't fit through the doors, we ended up digging out around 16m3 of hard packed dirt by hand and carrying it out of the house, also by hand)
What was supposed to be a kitchen upgrade turned into roughly half our house looking like something out of tomb raider for a year. 8 hours of intellectually demanding office work followed by 8 hours of grueling digging in "the mine" as came to nickname the ground floor really did a number on both me and my wife.
She crashed out first, which left me with no choice but to keep pushing long past what I felt I could handle. Saw a doctor who diagnosed me with burnout and told me to rest for 6 months,I instead held out for another ~6 months until my wife was back on her legs before allowing myself to rest.
The 6 months of sick leave the doctor prescribed wasn't nearly enough.
But hey, my kitchen is fucking gorgeous, so there's that, at least!
I don’t know the circumstances but this sounds very wrong. The moment you find a problem with the foundation, you call professionals. DIY has its value but your story is well beyond DIY.
It's so simple it's hard to really appreciate. Accepting what is and acknowledging that all you can do is your best and other mindful practices can really help. Easier said than done. I'd highly recommend the Healthy Minds app as a nice, no cost place to start learning. It grew out of a University of Wisconsin program and, as far as I know, is funded by donations and grants.
It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.
having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century
on the contrary. global population growth will plateau in a few decades, and negative population growth is already a problem in many countries, like all western countries, south korea, and also china.
Both of my parents worked full time. Neither of them seemed burnt out. Have plenty of friends where both parents work, neither seem burnt out. I'm always curious what makes it work for some an not others. Some of these couples are not high paid tech workers either. I'm even more amazed that some still find time for hobbies some how.
When you are at the age to notice your parents well being, you are no longer a young kid. Little kids are extremely demanding, both physically and mentally. That’s not to say it gets any easier, but when you aren’t sleeping for 4 months it hits totally different.
When you have over extended responsibilities you have to readjust expectations. Some adults never learn how to do that and feel miserable all the time.
I feel you. The answer is that you need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Also, it's good for kids to be spending time with other good people, too. Continuing in the way you describe is bad for you and you know it so the only thing left now is to figure out how to change it. I hope everything goes well with you.
interesting, there's the burnout where you love what you do but there's too much, and then there's the burnout where you cannot love what you do no matter how you spin it. both uphill battle but different scenarios
Kids and work definitely increase the degree of difficulty! I'm juggling three young kids while going full-time in politics and publishing my first book this year. What I've found is stretching to launch Positive Politics now is absolutely more work and I could be relaxing instead of writing on a Sunday but this truly gives me more energy. One big unlock was finding a job in politics doing investigative journalism fighting corruption truly lights me up. It's less money and a nonprofit, but this work plus my book truly have me chasing me my highest purpose and Positive Politics grow to be huge on its own too.
Btw, if you want a great investigation, check out Michael D. Griffin and his relationship with Elon Musk (and the Golden Dome program). That really blasts existential questions/politics wide open.
I like John Vervaeke's meaning-in-life questions (potentially mildly paraphrasing, because it has been a while since I came across them):
- what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone?
- what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it?
From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.
1. I'm intelligent enough to raise questions about the point of life.
2. I've always been an outcast, having it extremely difficult to build meaningful relationships, which are number one predictor of quality of life.
3. I live in a dirty, noisy, overcrowded city full of people who don't share my culture and work for a company that has no morality.
There is nothing for me to look forward to, and no straightforward way to build anything. I'll never have a group of friends to do things with, I'll never feel loved, and I'll never be important in any sense of this word. I'm an autistic ant in an anthill.
This first half of this definitely struck a chord. I spent the first three quarters of this year taking care of a terminally ill parent, then seeing them through hospice. If that sort of experience doesn't make a person step back from their life and question what they're doing nothing will.
I decided to step away from my job as an engineering VP and try something I actually wanted to do. It's terrifying, especially in this economy, but I wake up and feel excitement in the morning instead of dread for the first time in as long as I can remember.
I think a lot of people work on their career kind of "on credit", assuming it'll pay back in lifestyle improvements somehow. If this isn't forthcoming, the credit runs out.
As an aside, I really don't like these kinds of titles. They presume a lot about the (potential) reader without knowing anything about them. And it sounds like it's stating some kind of a fact but it really isn't. Different people are afflicted by different problems, you can't just make such a blanket statement about everyone.
As someone with a severe chronic illness that affects my ability to sustain energy: trust me, things can mean the absolute world to you and you can still burn out. You may burn out so hard you never recover. It may kill your ability to engage with meaning itself until you can learn how to be still again.
The bold and highlighting all over the place is really annoying. I get why it’s formatted that way but it’s a bit too much information and I find it hard to focus.
I think the described problem is real, but I'm astonished at the "went into politics" solution. I would expect that the lab work was a much more concrete, achievable, and lasting good than anything that will come of engaging with zero-sum or negative-sum games.
I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap.
Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.
the number of comments indicates that MANY OF US crave for some wise words about burnout... but the text we are presented with feels strangely empty of substance -- as if the author just wants to make some money with a book on a hot topic...
On the other hand I find that the real value of such posts are in the comment section here on HN, especially with posters who don't agree with the article.
Maybe this hits for millennials and older but as a gen-z I think it's safe to say we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive, our degrees are useless, dating and relationships have become damaged because of the apps, and we are inheriting a world that is broken and continues to shatter.
The older generations have everything and still feel burnt out and unhappy? Cool. Cool cool cool. That will certainly help with the nihilism.
Hey there, early Gen X here. We lived with the existential dread of nuclear war (The Day After traumatized a whole generation), our parents left us on our own with just 3 channels of TV for company because they both had to work, and our sexual awakening turned into a horror movie because of fear of AIDS (a death sentence at the time).
Sure, 2010 wasn't great, but it wasn't this bad in terms of career aspects, or rather: it did improve.
I'm not as confident it's bouncing back as fast this time. College debt wasn't as bad in 2010. You didn't need to compete against thousands of people around the globe in 2010. There were still human interviews in 2010.
Yes, housing, education, and medical care are way more expensive now than in my era. There's no sugar-coating that. Education, you already have, don't try to buy more unless the math works out. You're young so hopefully you don't need much medical care. Housing is a big problem, I agree. If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus. Are there any AI matchmakers yet? [Just kidding, maybe]
But don't worry about the world. The world has been broken ever since we discovered fire. My parents were born literally in the middle of World War II. Somehow it all worked out.
>If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
it's already hard enough finding jobs in traditionally properous states. What am I finding in New Mexico?
I also think it's a bit ironic that we need to work on relationships and meanwhile also need to move away from what's likely our existing social networks.
>The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus.
We do 1000% need to regulate dating app algorithms. We can't let tech companies exploit the human connection for money. But with all the other BS out there, meeting women seems so far down the list of priorities at the moment.
Are we talking about the middle of World War II in the US? A war that resulted in exactly 6 civilian deaths in the continental US and destroyed all serious competition for US industry for decades to come? That was one of the economically most advantageous positions in history.
By any objective metric the world is less broken than ever before. But people who want to be defeatist and cynical can always find a plausible sounding reason to justify their negativity regardless of the facts. I'm part of an older generation and not burnt out or existentially starving or whatever. And more importantly I'm not actually starving or dying of plague or being sent off to die for my king or any of the other horrors that were a routine part of human existence for most people before the modern era.
They want to be able to afford a house. Historically, in the US at least, for lower and middle class people that has been within reach. Now that's not the case. If I was in my late 20s and was lighting thousands per month on fire in rent, it'd be pretty darn alienating. Sure, if you zoom out far enough, the standard of living for zoomers is pretty good, there's not a mass casualty event when the potato crop fails. But if you don't (and I'd argue, you shouldn't) it's pretty clear that their economic prospects are worse than their parents. That is pretty bleak. It's no wonder why they're politically more radical than the other generations.
Put in the simplest terms: Economic nihilism happens when no house.
As an American, I am surrounded by people who are so convinced that their country is awful that they want to basically abolish vast swathes of the government. Their elected representatives say extremely negative things about my beliefs, literally every single day, including veiled and not-so-veiled threats.
The world may be physically comfortable but I do not feel safe. And that's because they do not feel safe from me. I don't want to sound defeatist but there is no objective way to describe it without sounding cynical.
Everytime someone says something like "how can I bring a kid into this world" I assume they know absolutely nothing about history at all. Be thankful your ancestors didn't think that when they were faced with actual life and death on the line, versus these people today being miffed that their apartment isn't as large as they'd like or they have to commute a little farther in or live in a city not featured in mass media.
I don't think anyone is comparing to old monarchies or etc, they're mentally comparing it to the 1950s and 60s and the postwar economic boom times.
You can point out that things weren't as good as they're presented back then either, or that people are falling for advertising, but no one is really impressed that their living standard is better than the 1800s or earlier.
To quote a Twitch streamer: "Radicalization is when no house".
The world is less broken when you only look at the top of the K shaped economy. There's less immediate turmoil, but also much less opportunity, and tons of flags saying opportunity will only decrease more. That's now how you encourage a high trust society.
I'll also add "Radicalization is when no community". And community is certianly broken among Gen Z. By design of those who want to maximize profits. Even the serfs of centuries ago had community because you need to work together to stay alive. Today's society is slowly realizing that, but this is after 80 years of individualism.
Speaking for my friends in their mid to late 20s, if you have a reasonable plan to get to a point where you can invest in your future as opposed to simply burning every last drop of income on mandatory expenses like food, housing and insurance I agree. When you can't foresee a way to get there you lack economic agency, economic nihilism is a rational response.
Under liberal capitalism, how you feel about the state of the world/economy is going to always be tied to how much money you're bringing in every month, so making a comment about how things are actually fine and Gen Z are "negative" and ungrateful is pointless if you're not going to make clear your own economic standing relative to others. I would be surprised if you're delivering Uber Eats with a Bachelor's degree, as many of Gen Z are doing today, considering the sentiment expressed.
This is the take all the younger generations complain about. Boomers had it good, laid waste to the world and the international scene and wonder why everyone else is bitter.
The happiest Gen Z I see are the ones that go to Church. Being religious is a bulwark against nihilism. And Church youth / under 30 groups are basically marriage express lanes, which takes the App /hookup culture hell out of the equation.
I think this is the only comment that captures the message of the article. I feel for everyone who is priced out of life, those are very serious problems, but it wasn't what the article is talking about.
If I was seeing lots of comments say something like "The cost of life is preventing me from pursuing my dreams" then the article would be relevant to that.
Man, posts like these always strike a nerve. I graduated in 2008. "Everything" wasn't just handed to us, we had our own share of horrible to deal with as well. And guess what? You'll get through it too.
I wasn't a fan of the article either but I think at any point in history you can make a convincing argument that the world is ending. I don't have any good advice as to how to defeat this perspective, but I am constantly reassured that because I'm not the only one that thinks things are shattered, there is a path to fixing it all.
Join some like-minded individuals and do something amazing. Fuck it, create a dating app without perverse incentives.
Maybe you did, but statistically those people are permanently behind.
>I wasn't a fan of the article either but I think at any point in history you can make a convincing argument that the world is ending
There's hoplessness of impending doom, and hopelessness of no progression. I do think Gen Z has a unique experience of the latter, where the former generations were mostly facing worries over the former. Boomers had the nuclear scare, Gen Z had the peak unease of the cold war, Millenials had 9/11 and a decade of questionable wars.
Gen Z doesn't have that impending doom... yet. COVID was very impacful, but not apocalyptic as long as you followed mandates (I know, a big "if" in the US). But I wouldn't hold my breath given all the conflicts out there, and the US's own warmongering riling up again.
Meanwhile, many can't even get their foot in the door. Not many 20 years olds ever felt like the future was hopeless, no matter what they did.
>Fuck it, create a dating app without perverse incentives.
Pay my rent for a year or so and you got a deal.
Otherwise, I feel like this is highlighting the exact tonedeafness Gen Z is tiring of. Gen Z doesn't just get to sit down and hack in their free time. They are doing gig work to pay rent and applying to thousands of jobs a day for hope of an interview (not even an offer).
I won't say it's uniquely bad. But it's bad in different ways from when you or I were growing up.
I gotta say even though not having kids seems like the most economically sane thing to me, it often makes me wonder, what will be the point of life after retirement. I have no wife, g/f or kids. Right now my only 'why' is to not disappoint my family and cause a couple of them could use my help financially. Other than that, I don't see a long term 'why'. My only compelling short term 'why' is that I don't want to be homeless. But that's pretty much a working to live and living to work type of reason to exist.
Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.
If you don’t have hobbies you pour your free time into, you are robbing yourself.
The purpose of work (for most people), once you’re past comfortable survival, should be to buy time for you to spend living your life in ways you enjoy and that gives you meaning. If you don’t have something that gives you that feeling, find it!
I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.
In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.
I like the overall message of this since I can deeply relate.
I have been looking for meaningful work since I was 18, started in sales went on to marketing and ended up in engineering as a data scientist.
Even though I feel closer than ever I still feel that I am not where I am suppose to be. One of my biggest problem is having to many options, to many callings. And they constantly keep changing, and perhaps that’s normal.
It’s easy and dangerous to get stuck in the idea or quest of finding the ultimate purpose and try to translate that into actual work.
Damn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better.
What worked is:
- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.
- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.
Stepping on my soapbox: Treat your mind, body, and present moment as if they're sacred. As if you could live a thousand lives and they would be sacred every time. All the other stuff, it's just this once.
Cleaning a mind of random grievances and addictions is good. Letting a body be weird, dance wrong, move in funny ways, sing poorly: this is good too.
The whole "purpose" thing is a side-effect. It can't be sought directly, I think.
Overcomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.
That is part of it but there is also something to be said about what is going on biochemically IMO. Even if you are feeling forward progress and comfortable about the scope of your problems, if you give yourself no time to rest and get out of a subconciously anxious state, that isn't very good.
Anxiety is meant to have your senses heightened to perhaps hear the tiger stalking you and encourage you to seek out a safer environment where you can comfortably rest. You aren't built to be in an anxious state for such extended periods of time. The tiger would have gotten you by then, with the way this system was designed. You aren't built to constantly run from the tiger.
>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.
I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.
If you come from immense privilege (growing up in an 8 figure household), have good health, and rich relationships and that isn't enough to curb your existentialism that's ok, but I find it hard to take this piece seriously as this is written like it's targeting the average financially stable worker. It strikes me as out of touch at best.
For the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.
Moved to NYC. Have a good team at my new job. Satisfied with my income. Have enough free time. Made a lot of good friends really fast, and now I see a rotating cast of them 3-7 days a week. Happy with my apartment. Have an east facing window so I don't have to set an alarm to wake up in the morning, I wake with the sunrise. Getting plenty of exercise and walking a 8-12k steps a day.
> It feels like you’re stuck in the ordinary when all you want to do is chase greatness.
Gave up on greatness a long time ago, I'd settle for an "ordinary", where people just kind of try to NOT make bad things worse, or good things less enjoyable.
Politics are marketing tools for frameworks and candidates, they don’t provide the frameworks, or any deeper meaning to life itself. What a shallow and dangerous approach.
TFW you understand Marx's theory of alienation, but are desperate for an alternate explanation that puts the blame on workers and doesn't threaten capital.
As Churchill said, Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else.
Last time it took a depression and intense widespread economic pain for them to pick up socialism-lite. I don’t expect it to take anything less next time around. Nobody was asking for universal healthcare during/after the pandemic, we need an actual depression.
The intense pandemic relief delayed the effects of the pandemic in the US. We might have gotten away with it too, but then Trump pretty much cancelled the soft landing and plunged us off a cliff.
The effects of 2025 and 2026 are pretty much what we should have had in 2021. Prepare yourself.
Good stuff. You will enjoy my short essay, I want to give a lot of fucks! [1], which argues against the typical conclusion reached by people working at big corp long enough: "Stop caring. Stop giving a fuck. Focus on things outside of work".
The core insight it, if you start to feel the need to stop caring, instead of changing your character and values, treat it as a strong signal to change your environment.
Yeah no, that's not it. Not everyone has to chase the highest purpose. A lot of existential dread would go away if:
1/ People had hopes of buying a house in their lifetime
2/ They were not afraid of being let go at any point
3/ Social media did not create a hedonistic treadmill
The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible.
Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way.
And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.
Blogging has always required aggressive titles. My best posts for years all used this "you" or "we" focused framing too. Trying to solve people's biggest problems!
Even before AI, I think I've seen it used before in self-help books or therapy type stuff. It has always felt like an intellectually lazy attempt at reframing, painting things as black and white in the form of a thought-terminating cliche. "It's not X, it's Y" discounts X entirely, when usually the relationship between X & Y is more nuanced: "X and also Y", "X because Y", etc.
Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.
Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce.
Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays.
It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.
This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
I've thought about moving to Asia. Then I read about the racism there and realize I'd be right back at home, but now with a language barrier to boot. Oh well.
Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.
I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.
Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
Work ≠ capitalism! It's about making your work the most meaningful thing possible! If that's a very pro-social politics, might be exactly what you want!
I don't think people should have kids because they otherwise lack meaning, but it's absolutely true that kids change you in ways you would never have believed. If you think you might want kids but aren't sure, just do it.
> I don't think people should have kids because they otherwise lack meaning
I'm past the age where I can (or rather should have) kids and I have to say, the past decade or so I'm more and more thinking that people SHOULD have kids to have (more) meaning in their life. Put it another way, I've begun thinking that having children is a nice way to have a default baseline of meaning in your life. I really see that with all my friends, who all have kids.
I'm married with three kids! And that's great! But like I say in the post, I still know I'm capable of making a bigger positive impact on the world, so that's how I focus my political work!
It's interesting that you get downvoted for what is, from a historical perspective, a very down-to-earth reasonable take.
I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts.
Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.
I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
Like two people can't be together without being married.
But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids.
As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
Gonna try to be charitable, but this really feels like gaslighting. There's a lot more to the story of how much someone is thriving than "Nice place to live. More than enough stuff. Family and friends who love you." I'm burnt out because my fancy job requires me to live in an area with a cost of living so high that it's a genuine family crisis when the washing machine breaks because we don't have enough disposable income to replace it. It's not just a meaning problem out there.
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OR from someone called Philip Barden, here is a part of it:
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I really want to understand how binding and enforceable these annoying fucking notices at the bottom of emails are that was sent to me without me even asking for or knowing why and sometimes not even fucking certainly knowing whether I was the intended recipient or not.
So if someone fucked up and sent me a so called or really confidential email then not only I have the legal responsibility to delete that I am supposed to inform them that "hey yeah you sent it to me and I deleted it.. hope I was not the intended recipient.." or so.
I mean how does this thing work?
(I had received a couple of bank statements on one of my common Indian first name Gmail emails. I later realised those belonged to a lawyer who was probably informed by his bank that this happened because I had complained to the bank and had asked them to remove my email from that account. I received an email from that lawyer from another address I do not recall the domain of, but it was very angry and entitled and said shit like (paraphrasing) "By revealing this to a third party.. you have broken the law... you must hand over the email address without further delay…". I was younger and stupider, so I had just replied "Go fuck yourself" because I was really pissed. Luckily, I never heard from him again or any court because when I Googled him later he seemed to be a decently pedigreed lawyer from another city. Later, the bank replied saying it had been rectified - not before they wanted my phone number and KYC info and account details even though I had begun my communication to them saying it was not my account.)
I find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting.
I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold.
The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.
I'd argue "buy my book" posts, especially ones posted by the author, shouldn't make the front page of HN. Especially from YC alum. Is this an ad in disguise?
Agreed. The first half of this post is actually interesting, but the second half quickly transforms into an ad. That disappointed me, because I believe the author has something interesting to say.
The "You're not x. You're y." format reads as AI generated to me. I know that seeing AI syntax behind every corner is a problem that is only going to get worse and that I need to shift my mindset; nevertheless, it tinged how I reacted to the entire article.
The premise is interesting but feels incomplete. The "Monday morning excitement test" doesn't account for the hedonic treadmill - even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.
That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.
The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.
You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.
I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.
Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
Wow, politics seems the opposite to me. It has the morbid fascination of a train wreck. You can't stop it, you know it's going badly, yet you can't look away.
Family and building things are much more positive sources of energy to me.
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I love your “clean source of sustainable energy” metaphor. This is a great example of “eudaimonic” well-being, or the idea of “doing well.”
Would you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs
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Hedonic treadmill only applies to hedonia, not the eudaimonia that meaningful work typically brings. “Doing well” doesn’t have the same elastic snap back that “being well” does, and there’s some evidence it can provide a buffer on the hedonic treadmill effect.
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
This seems quite wrong in my experience. Meaningful work stays meaningful and exciting, every single day.
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Not to demean your experience, but for me (5+ years now of daily grind for one purpose) that statement is very VERY real.
My thinking is - it's just another one of the struggles of doing real meaningful change - there's recurring, long and arduous timespans where no observable/exciting results manifest and one has to trudge forward.
If you know how to ease THAT part, please share (I'm begging you lol).
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Certainly so if you are the one defining meaning.
"Politics as a zero-sum game" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's only true if you see it as "competing over who gets all the power". In a more sympathetic perspective, politics is just how communities self-organize, make decisions and build compromise between the needs and interests of their stakeholders. Especially at the local level (where the feedback path between "make a decision" and "affect peoples' lives" is the shortest and most accessible), that can mostly involve people being available to do the work that needs to happen to build consensus and get anything done done to improve the lives of the community members.
I agree that the piece does feel incomplete, but it is a large topic to fully cover in a blog post. The author is stating that with purpose, life is a joy, not a chore. I feel like this is a message that many people need to hear!
[dead]
The article started well until it changed from "you" to "I". After that, it felt like a mix of bragging and trying to sell a book.
I think its OK if some people don't get to live their dream jobs, some dreams have no equivalent in real life, and some people need to do the mundane, boring underground jobs that keep things together.
It didn’t catch me in the widely cast net.
I didn’t match the 1) nice place, 2) family and friends.
Apparently an ad huh.
Solve your two problems first! I do think this resonates with a lot of especially YC founders who have broken through 1 and 2 but are missing the most important 3.
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There's so little meaning (other than "Buy My Book!") in the latter part of the post that I thought I read the same paragraph 20 times
Worse, it's canvassing for a political movement.
I will keep arguing that canvassing for a political movement is the highest potential thing most Americans could be doing now. I'm not talking about running for office yourself. You don't have to do it full-time. But try it. Focus on one issue and one bill. You could solve a key problem in weeks. See how this changes your life!
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Made some edits last night. But I think the post still stood up 95%+.
The middle is full of stories of how I failed for years.
I think I can help you, here's how I failed, then succeeded, you can too!
And my book is truly the next step.
If you liked these ~2,000 words, there's 20x more in Positive Politics!
I specifically believe Positive Politics can best utilize the ambitious optimism of e.g. YC founders to solve the world's biggest problems!
yes, felt like one long humble brag after that. how tiresome.
Please note that depression != burn-out. If you really can't get out of bed on a Monday morning, can't face the day, or muster any enthusiasm for anything, then you might not need a purpose, you might need medical assistance.
Be kind to yourselves, people.
I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.
I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.
Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.
Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.
As someone with treatment resistant depression, it is odd people are against medication. Medication is proven safe and effective for treating depression. Therapy and medication should be used immediately in conjunction because 1. therapy is most effective when paired with medication, and 2. depression is a vicious cycle. The longer someone spends depressed, the more likely they will spiral into deeper depression, isolation, unemployment, etc.
No one should delay any part of depression treatment.
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Agree that medication isn't necessarily the answer - mine was therapy not pills. But all of it is still medical assistance. And the medication helped me get started on the therapy, I'm not sure I could have got to a place where the therapy could have helped without it.
Glad your journey has been positive, well done :)
>I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.
My experience from being a mental-health patient is that things take too much time. For me I struggled with how it seemed like that the society universally had agreed that medication for my condition is bad. Taking medicine doesn't mean that you cant threat your illness in other ways as well, in my experience taking medicine helps you to be able to take the changes you need in life.
There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches. It’s not that meds are the only option or they should be reserved for the most severe cases, it’s people’s reactions are different and there’s no way to tell without trying them. For some people they really do work wonders and you simply don’t know ahead of time.
Not everyone has a support structure they can count on as they fall apart. So some people just need help to get through a rough period even if a solution isn’t long term viable. When a spouse dies being able to function for the next few months can mean keeping the roof over someone’s head.
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Mm. I'm glad for you that you can just think about your problems harder and get better, but that's not the reality of it for most people with depression.
Meds don't magically make you happy and they don't magically get you out of fixing the problems in your life. They make it easier and therefore possible to do so. I'd describe it as the crane that lifts up the heavy weight enough for you to shuffle out.
If you can just think harder about your problems, by all means, do that. But there's zero virtue to rawdogging it when help is available, especially as this can easily lead to an isolation spiral and become deadly.
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> were because something was not right in my life.
THIS! Thats the reason why I always refused to take any medication: Doctors said you could "try X or Y and in some days I should feel better" - while the problems where mainly because of problems at work or within relationship.
Why should I take medics if I have problems at work with bad colleagues? This logic never made sense to me.
And my 2ct: If this wouldnt be a hardcore capitalist society in which most people struggle despite the fact living in a rich country, possessing nothing and having no homeownership, then there would be near zero demand for any psy medics.
As someone medicated I actually fully agree with you.
Depression is also a broad spectrum condition (much like autism). Years ago I watched this lecture by Sapolsky[0] and it really helped. Breaking down the different classifications is really helpful. The SSRIs always made me feel worse, and this (along with a lot of other research) helped make sense of it. A few years back I was diagnosed with ADHD and a psychologist friend encouraged me to give Adderall a try. It was the first time that medication "worked" and it really made a big difference in my life. The big reason why being that psychomotor retardation and anhedonia were my biggest symptoms. When coupled with an anxiety disorder it creates a strong negative feedback loop.
But here's the thing: medication isn't the cure. For me it alleviates (not eliminates) symptoms but at the end of the day it still requires work from me to ensure I create a positive feedback loop and don't let myself fall into that destructive loop. This is all stuff I had to learn on my own and through reading and seeking out friends with people who are more experts in the area. That's where I think our care system fails.
The best thing I can recommend to people is to be introspective. Each journey is personal, but whatever your issues are try to find the early warning signs. For me it can be little things like the dishes piling up or my desk getting messy (these seem you be common). Things like depression build up, so look for the signs. And most importantly, open up. This was the hardest for me and makes me feel demasculated and embarrassed much of the time. But I've also found it to help build stronger relationships with my partner and friends. That it helps open a door to communicate both ways. Maybe you open the door for you, but you also open a door many are too nervous to open themselves. It's worth the discomfort and gets easier with time. (Talking behind a handle is a great way to start too. So make alt accounts if you need to. That's how I started)
[0] http://www.robertsapolskyrocks.com/depression.html
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Burn out is the second or third year of non-stop fires and you are the one to solve all of the problems. Meanwhile the company is busy creating more fires because they haven’t finished burning that sweet sweet engineer candle.
For sure! I've written a lot about depression too! But I do think a lot of what people otherwise blame on burnout or depression is really this existential hunger to make more positive impact. Finding that highest purpose can change lives!
My depression was due to childhood trauma. No amount of purpose would have changed that. I had to deal with my demons before I could move into the kind of positive space where purpose made any kind of difference.
edit: but yes, now that I have done that work, purpose is good, and what keeps me positive and away from the black dog.
My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.
I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.
Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?
I’m largely similar, except don’t even feel anything for spouse anymore either.
Even nice vacations aren’t enjoyable the way they used to be.
All started at the beginning of the pandemic (long before getting COVID).
Have had poor luck getting doctors to diagnose and treat actual problems, so haven’t tried for this.
Medically quite healthy by all measures.
What confuses me is I see people 10-20 years older with passions for doing things. They seem to have a zest for life that I cannot comprehend.
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Medical assistance is not going to help when the thing that is making you depressed is the non negotiable 9-5 you have to do 5 days a week.
You’re not in the right field you say? Then you’ll be depressed from the poverty that comes from abysmal wages and the complete lack of job security.
This is actually nowdays my main thesis for most negative things I see in society: The capitalist force pressing people into whatever jobs leads to estrangement, which will lead to a lot of negative outcomes over decades added up. (social/mental/physical health impact etc.)
Unless you're in prison, everything is negotiable. But some people build a private prison in their own minds.
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9-5 5 days per week sounds wonderful.
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I don't think it's quite that binary. Depression can cause burn out and burn out can cause depression. They're inextricably linked.
agree completely. But they are different things, and need different treatment.
And burn out isn't "I hate my job and don't enjoy it more". It's fatigue so hard that you feel like you haven't slept after waking up. I hate that burnout is thrown around so easily. It's something that should be moved to therapy and a long time off, not "switch jobs". If that fixes your burnout, it's early stages or not burnout.
I had burnout this year and was too dumbfounded in the supermarket to buy what I always buy or drive a car. I didn't have any mental capacity anymore. Like an IQ of 20 and the physical energy of a 100 year old.
And the money to pay for it. So better get to work.
Be unkind to yourselves, people. I find the best way to prevent depression and burn-out is to be brutally, ruthlessly frank with myself. There's nothing positive in accepting weakness and failure. I always feel better when I hold myself to the highest standards and don't make excuses. Of course, I don't always manage to fully do that but it's something to aspire to.
Please don't do this to yourself.
Please go and get help.
Brains really don't work this way, and you are damaging yourself.
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What's the analog of rhabdomyolysis for the mind? You're on a path to get it, bud. Not a personal attack, just my and a whole bunch of other people's experiences.
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Weird ad for a self-help book with an intersection in politics that almost read like you're just hustling the wrong way, you just need to hustle right, and he's going to teach you all about it. The yellow highlighting did not help build credibility.
This resonates with me right now. I helped build a unicorn startup over the last 10 years but feel empty and burnt out when I’m working now. I feel like I’m wasting my time in exchange for a paycheck. I recently turned in my notice, I’m going on sabbatical. I’m hoping to find my passion and follow that. Finding that is something I’m struggling with though. Anyways, great article!
My advice would be to keep up with a schedule that still keeps you pretty busy and ideally waking up early at regular hours. Once you hit actual rock bottom burn out, you know sleeping in until noon and scrolling message boards for three hours before you realized you haven't eaten yet all day and the sun is already setting, it feels almost impossible to turn the switch back on when you need to. Even something like folding your clothes starts to feel like a monumental task pretty fast.
Relating to my other comment under your post, I feel like I am becoming this. I urgently need to stop it and am looking for books on this topics.
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For all the yammering in this thread you’ve centered on the real problem no one can admit here.
You burn out creating value for others that you end up either not owning or it not materially contributing to your immediate community.
We evolved to work for ourselves and our tribe again immense satisfaction from that. Cleaning your house, pulling weeds volunteering locally. Etc.
But endlessly serving shareholders (ownership class or not) while giving up way more value then you out in yields a deep sense of happiness because we can’t express the unfairness woven into our life so deeply.
++1
Also resonates with me. I helped my previous company scale and get acquired and then helped scale the new team some more. Then decided I wanted to go into a high-caliber start-up because I was kind of burned-out and after a year I did. I work with brilliant people, building a product that democratizes investing in my small EU country and seeing a company grow again is fun. The problem is we lack excitedness and the feedback loop is bad so my motivation hasn't picked-up. What helped me is a new hire that brought some emotions and excitedness to the team.
I have also been thinking of giving my notice for a while now, but I'm also struggling with finding a purpose so that part also hit me hard. I'm actually scared of leaving my job in case I find out it was the one thing that gave me purpose and I won't be able to find something better.
Congrats on doing it, and please do send a message if you do find something that gives you more purpose, it will greatly help me.
Sometimes it's possible to take an unpaid leave for six months or a year and then come back if you want to. If you perform well at your job, no reason they wouldn't want you back.
Congratulations on breaking out and good luck, it’s real powerful work ahead for you!
I did that a few years ago and it’s been transformative.
HMU if you want help.
Thanks, I might take you up on that. I’ve mainly been in the work, kids, sleep loop the past decade so I need to find some hobbies and passion projects to work on.
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Thanks! And congrats on giving notice! Excited to hear what you do next! Cheering for you!
damn bro having a billion dollar company and your own family must be so tough to deal with , happy to take them off your hands if you want to feel the drive to live again ;)
I agree with the premise but take issue with the measure for "success": do you feel excited to get up and work on Monday?
We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill.
To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).
I was hooked by the first few paragraphs but the immediate switch to focus on work was disappointing.
The happiest people I know treat work like the necessary evil to be endured to fulfill all other facets of life.
Or you totally love doing what you do at work and, after spending a week at the beach, you can’t wait to go back because you’re so close to solving that interesting problem you’ve been working on for more than a month.
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What were you looking to read about in that spot?
Work shouldn't be treated as a "necessary evil".
Reconciling the work vs. meaning split is hugely important.
Even if it means making less money short term, aligning work and purpose through work like politics and writing can make us way happier long-term.
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The happiest people I know don’t work or love their work. I can’t think of any that fit your description.
I am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism.
You work to earn, you earn to buy.
But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.
When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.
Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.
Etc etc
I think this is, in part, what the article is arguing. Community, and multi-generational culture and tradition, were a technology which helped populations thrive in what we now consider abject poverty. As the world gets wealthier, due to more recent technologies like widespread markets, staying in the same place and interacting with only the same 100-500 people for one's whole life is no longer something that almost everyone has to do, which explodes the basis for those earlier techs.
With TFR rapidly falling, current and future children are much less likely to even have any family other than parents, which cuts out another pillar supporting community and tradition, too.
I don't have a pat answer or know where this is going, but--assuming humanity survives--unless we want to turn into Asimov's Spacers, we'll have to find something to care about.
I feel the same way. That I'm just put through the consume more and more treadmill and it's on social media, news feeds, YouTube, tv and so on.
So, don't condense your thought here, I would love to read everything.
> Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it".
And people sit around stupidly asking why everyone is pissed off and angry.
One thing that I always try to bring up in these discussions is that “burnout” and “overwork” are two different problems, and I think this author would agree with me.
If your problem could be fixed with a raise or a nice vacation, that’s overwork. 996 schedules, crunch time, and a high cost of living make overwork.
Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia. Closer to a career-induced bout of major depression.
> Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia
I know I'm burnt out (increasingly severe burnout at that) and I ask myself that question daily. The truth is there is no point and I can't motivate myself anymore. I don't see any solution to the problem and I expect I will lose my job sooner or later at which point I'm not sure what I'll do.
I've largely come to the conclusion that what I need to be mentally healthy and what society needs from me are fundamentally incompatible things.
No answers here, but I feel you. Looking to switch careers to teaching, I hope that will help. Ill lyk
I think you need to rework some definitions or vocabulary if "overwork" is solved by "raise".
Maybe in extreme cases where a raise translates into big time savers like a maid, but those are not the type of raises you while keeping the same job.
For tech folks that are making comfortable salaries, a raise won’t help.
But if you’re in a position where there is difficulty affording your living expenses, a raise can make a huge quality of life change. It can remove enough stress from your life that the stress of your job goes from pushing you over the edge to staying within your limits
For sure. That's why I focused on the Monday morning meaning problem.
Dreading work is very different than overwork.
I'm arguing we replace the "what's the point?" question with a "what's my highest purpose? exploration.
In that second answer is the solution to what many are calling burnout.
I'm burned out because I have to raise two young children, work a full time job in a demanding career, and then in the hour or two a day of time that isn't accounted for in those two tasks, I need to maintain a household and try to care for myself. I feel a strong sense of purpose caring for my family, but don't have enough time to meet life's demands. Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
> Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.
I have kids, but I don’t think having kids or even a lack of money is necessary to experience the type of burnout you’re describing.
While everyone and every situation is different, my personal experience is that having kids led to less burnout for me over time. I expected the opposite after reading comments online, but it turns out that for me the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing. The job no longer felt like some isolated drudgery without purpose because it played a clear role in my family’s well being. I also learned how to manage time and prioritize better after having kids.
But I will never gatekeep burnout or try to differentiate burnout based on having kids or money. I can even think of someone who was clearly experiencing burnout despite having neither kids nor a job and while not having to worry about money. Burnout isn’t a simple function of life circumstances, personal circumstances and mental well being play a large role. In some cases, certain personality types can seemingly become burned out under any circumstances. It’s a heavily personal reaction.
I feel the same way about kids. For me, I think, it changed my perspective. Lots of things at work that would have bothered or frustrated me no longer do so. Having kids is a great way to develop a Zen attitude about some things.
Though, to be fair, you gain a whole new set of much scarier things to worry about.
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> the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing.
Depends. At 3am it's not.
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This. Focusing on your highest potential is energizing and the rest is what we call burnout. Having kids is what caused me to think so hard about these questions, both for myself and them. I have to justify every minute I'm not with them, and now my life fully represents my values.
I'm like this but four kids. The kids are my life, but in another way the two hours when they're in bed are my life. I try and get household shit done in tiny increments throughout the day - cleaning the kitchen in the morning before I start work, doing laundry at lunch, cleaning away dinner stuff while they brush teeth, so that I squeeze a little more self time in the evenings. In those hours, I have side projects I work on. And I do WAY too many. People would look at my life and say I need to focus on one thing to finish it, but I've learned (for me at least) that happiness comes from having lots of options when you have that free time. I forgive myself for not making major progress on things, not being productive outside of work, and I try to just enjoy my time whether it's writing fiction, building board games, hobby coding, messing with unity, reading, building models, casual gaming etc. lately I've been doing needle felting because I picked up a cheap Halloween decoration of a needle felt cute vampire. Halloween is long over but I'm not beating myself up about it. All my hobbies follow a pattern of things that I can pick up where I left off with minimum fuss. I don't do anything that takes an age to set up or has a minimum time commitment.
I would say hang in there, and once in a while give yourself permission to prioritise the "care for myself" over the "maintain a household".
Do things in little increments and don't torture yourself about not being full of energy all the time
Love the idea that your kids are your life and the two hours when they're in bed is also your life! I'm very much in that same place too.
Many of my posts and most of my book were written in either the first two hours after they go to school or the first two hours after they sleep.
I got a rare Sunday afternoon off, which is why we got this post now!
Totally agree that work only to pay for a household is a tough life. I'm trying to connect more people with work that can give more meaning now and maybe more money long-term. People chasing their highest potential tend to create greater projects!
When kids were added to the family, it actually improved my life. I actually had motivation then for making money—and making time.
Now, empty nested, I can see that I was both rudderless and identity-less before the kids. I'm wandering now (and retired) trying to find a replacement identity.
I'm still a father of course (and husband) but with less input and less to do. In fact I feel inclined to step back and let the girls have their lives now. So I road-trip, come up with projects to keep me busy, try to be an "educator".
People underestimate how quickly you burn out when you're completely on your own. It's the people around you that give you purpose and motivation.
Sadly, having more money doesn’t buy time. At least, not until you have enough money that you can hire assistants, but that’s pretty extreme.
I know a lot of people who DoorDash, have groceries delivered, have a house cleaner, and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.
It’s never quite as much time as expected, though. Each is a marginal addition of free time that brings its own complications (like my friend who did an alarming amount of DoorDash and is now investing a lot of time into dropping weight and managing cholesterol and blood sugar)
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Hiring a housekeeper to come every couple of weeks has pretty much directly bought me time, at a pretty reasonable price. I like living in a neat and tidy home, but never cared much for scrubbing grout or polishing the stovetop in my free hours. I’m delighted every time she comes, and I never wake up Saturday thinking I’ll have to vacuum under the couch cushions.
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Enough money to not work and care for your children is the correct answer.
But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.
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Who needs assistants? I'll make do with enough money to draw a monthly stipend covering my expenses and leisure from for life. You know, like a salary, but without wasting my time on pointless tasks that give me no satisfaction.
I mean, it does for people like me who decide to work less as they don't need to earn as much.
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I have more money and no kids, I still relate to your comment.
I burned out basically because I'm stupid and decided to work a demanding full time job while also remodeling my house by myself. Like all renovation jobs, it ended up being bigger than planned (I actually expected it to grow from us discovering something that had to be done during the renovation, I just never expected the thing we found to be as large as it was: we had to redo the whole foundation of our 1840 house, and because a machine wouldn't fit through the doors, we ended up digging out around 16m3 of hard packed dirt by hand and carrying it out of the house, also by hand)
What was supposed to be a kitchen upgrade turned into roughly half our house looking like something out of tomb raider for a year. 8 hours of intellectually demanding office work followed by 8 hours of grueling digging in "the mine" as came to nickname the ground floor really did a number on both me and my wife.
She crashed out first, which left me with no choice but to keep pushing long past what I felt I could handle. Saw a doctor who diagnosed me with burnout and told me to rest for 6 months,I instead held out for another ~6 months until my wife was back on her legs before allowing myself to rest.
The 6 months of sick leave the doctor prescribed wasn't nearly enough.
But hey, my kitchen is fucking gorgeous, so there's that, at least!
I don’t know the circumstances but this sounds very wrong. The moment you find a problem with the foundation, you call professionals. DIY has its value but your story is well beyond DIY.
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Why didn't you just pay someone to take over out of interest?
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It's so simple it's hard to really appreciate. Accepting what is and acknowledging that all you can do is your best and other mindful practices can really help. Easier said than done. I'd highly recommend the Healthy Minds app as a nice, no cost place to start learning. It grew out of a University of Wisconsin program and, as far as I know, is funded by donations and grants.
Healthy Minds https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app
> because I have to raise two young children
It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.
If you wait until everything is planned, ready and accounted for you'll never have kids.
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having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century
on the contrary. global population growth will plateau in a few decades, and negative population growth is already a problem in many countries, like all western countries, south korea, and also china.
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Both of my parents worked full time. Neither of them seemed burnt out. Have plenty of friends where both parents work, neither seem burnt out. I'm always curious what makes it work for some an not others. Some of these couples are not high paid tech workers either. I'm even more amazed that some still find time for hobbies some how.
When you are at the age to notice your parents well being, you are no longer a young kid. Little kids are extremely demanding, both physically and mentally. That’s not to say it gets any easier, but when you aren’t sleeping for 4 months it hits totally different.
When you have over extended responsibilities you have to readjust expectations. Some adults never learn how to do that and feel miserable all the time.
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Appropriate responsibility. Let the kids assume even the most minor appropriate responsibility. maintain an healthy neutrality.
I feel you. The answer is that you need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Also, it's good for kids to be spending time with other good people, too. Continuing in the way you describe is bad for you and you know it so the only thing left now is to figure out how to change it. I hope everything goes well with you.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
I relate so much to this comment. We love our kids but it's hard to balance various demands.
Often times ourselves get the short end, but others find a way to give each their due including themselves
interesting, there's the burnout where you love what you do but there's too much, and then there's the burnout where you cannot love what you do no matter how you spin it. both uphill battle but different scenarios
good luck to you though
Kids and work definitely increase the degree of difficulty! I'm juggling three young kids while going full-time in politics and publishing my first book this year. What I've found is stretching to launch Positive Politics now is absolutely more work and I could be relaxing instead of writing on a Sunday but this truly gives me more energy. One big unlock was finding a job in politics doing investigative journalism fighting corruption truly lights me up. It's less money and a nonprofit, but this work plus my book truly have me chasing me my highest purpose and Positive Politics grow to be huge on its own too.
#ad
Btw, if you want a great investigation, check out Michael D. Griffin and his relationship with Elon Musk (and the Golden Dome program). That really blasts existential questions/politics wide open.
I like John Vervaeke's meaning-in-life questions (potentially mildly paraphrasing, because it has been a while since I came across them):
- what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone?
- what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it?
From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.
I'm burned out because:
1. I'm intelligent enough to raise questions about the point of life.
2. I've always been an outcast, having it extremely difficult to build meaningful relationships, which are number one predictor of quality of life.
3. I live in a dirty, noisy, overcrowded city full of people who don't share my culture and work for a company that has no morality.
There is nothing for me to look forward to, and no straightforward way to build anything. I'll never have a group of friends to do things with, I'll never feel loved, and I'll never be important in any sense of this word. I'm an autistic ant in an anthill.
How can you have a sense of culture if you cannot build relationships? One person cannot have a culture.
This first half of this definitely struck a chord. I spent the first three quarters of this year taking care of a terminally ill parent, then seeing them through hospice. If that sort of experience doesn't make a person step back from their life and question what they're doing nothing will.
I decided to step away from my job as an engineering VP and try something I actually wanted to do. It's terrifying, especially in this economy, but I wake up and feel excitement in the morning instead of dread for the first time in as long as I can remember.
Love how you highlighted your morning excitement now! That's what I was going for in this post!
What are you trying now that you actually want to do? Cheering for you!
(And please let me know what you would've liked to see in the second half! Blog posts are easy to edit!)
I think a lot of people work on their career kind of "on credit", assuming it'll pay back in lifestyle improvements somehow. If this isn't forthcoming, the credit runs out.
As an aside, I really don't like these kinds of titles. They presume a lot about the (potential) reader without knowing anything about them. And it sounds like it's stating some kind of a fact but it really isn't. Different people are afflicted by different problems, you can't just make such a blanket statement about everyone.
I think the "you" here is an obvious self-insert by the autor which is fine in my book. It's only about you if you choose to read it that way.
probably doesnt help that we spend 1/3rd to 1/2 of our lives making some other asshole rich
Work for an unproven startup and odds are no one is getting rich!
As someone with a severe chronic illness that affects my ability to sustain energy: trust me, things can mean the absolute world to you and you can still burn out. You may burn out so hard you never recover. It may kill your ability to engage with meaning itself until you can learn how to be still again.
The bold and highlighting all over the place is really annoying. I get why it’s formatted that way but it’s a bit too much information and I find it hard to focus.
I think the described problem is real, but I'm astonished at the "went into politics" solution. I would expect that the lab work was a much more concrete, achievable, and lasting good than anything that will come of engaging with zero-sum or negative-sum games.
I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap.
Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.
the number of comments indicates that MANY OF US crave for some wise words about burnout... but the text we are presented with feels strangely empty of substance -- as if the author just wants to make some money with a book on a hot topic...
On the other hand I find that the real value of such posts are in the comment section here on HN, especially with posters who don't agree with the article.
Maybe this hits for millennials and older but as a gen-z I think it's safe to say we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive, our degrees are useless, dating and relationships have become damaged because of the apps, and we are inheriting a world that is broken and continues to shatter.
The older generations have everything and still feel burnt out and unhappy? Cool. Cool cool cool. That will certainly help with the nihilism.
15 years ago this exact comment would have been written swapping out millennials for gen x and gen z for millennials.
Hey there, early Gen X here. We lived with the existential dread of nuclear war (The Day After traumatized a whole generation), our parents left us on our own with just 3 channels of TV for company because they both had to work, and our sexual awakening turned into a horror movie because of fear of AIDS (a death sentence at the time).
Also, there were no jobs.
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As a late millennial: yep. We're in the same boat. Nihilistic optimism isn't the worst coping mechanism, though!
Perhaps. And if it was true back then, it's even more true today.
Everything is noticeably more expensive than it was 15 years ago, though.
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Sure, 2010 wasn't great, but it wasn't this bad in terms of career aspects, or rather: it did improve.
I'm not as confident it's bouncing back as fast this time. College debt wasn't as bad in 2010. You didn't need to compete against thousands of people around the globe in 2010. There were still human interviews in 2010.
Kind of but 15 years ago if you met online it was an embarrassing thing or something only old people did.
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This is a such a cop-out. We millennials had it easy compared to zoomers.
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Don't give up--it gets better.
Yes, housing, education, and medical care are way more expensive now than in my era. There's no sugar-coating that. Education, you already have, don't try to buy more unless the math works out. You're young so hopefully you don't need much medical care. Housing is a big problem, I agree. If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus. Are there any AI matchmakers yet? [Just kidding, maybe]
But don't worry about the world. The world has been broken ever since we discovered fire. My parents were born literally in the middle of World War II. Somehow it all worked out.
>If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
it's already hard enough finding jobs in traditionally properous states. What am I finding in New Mexico?
I also think it's a bit ironic that we need to work on relationships and meanwhile also need to move away from what's likely our existing social networks.
>The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus.
We do 1000% need to regulate dating app algorithms. We can't let tech companies exploit the human connection for money. But with all the other BS out there, meeting women seems so far down the list of priorities at the moment.
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Are we talking about the middle of World War II in the US? A war that resulted in exactly 6 civilian deaths in the continental US and destroyed all serious competition for US industry for decades to come? That was one of the economically most advantageous positions in history.
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By any objective metric the world is less broken than ever before. But people who want to be defeatist and cynical can always find a plausible sounding reason to justify their negativity regardless of the facts. I'm part of an older generation and not burnt out or existentially starving or whatever. And more importantly I'm not actually starving or dying of plague or being sent off to die for my king or any of the other horrors that were a routine part of human existence for most people before the modern era.
They want to be able to afford a house. Historically, in the US at least, for lower and middle class people that has been within reach. Now that's not the case. If I was in my late 20s and was lighting thousands per month on fire in rent, it'd be pretty darn alienating. Sure, if you zoom out far enough, the standard of living for zoomers is pretty good, there's not a mass casualty event when the potato crop fails. But if you don't (and I'd argue, you shouldn't) it's pretty clear that their economic prospects are worse than their parents. That is pretty bleak. It's no wonder why they're politically more radical than the other generations.
Put in the simplest terms: Economic nihilism happens when no house.
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As an American, I am surrounded by people who are so convinced that their country is awful that they want to basically abolish vast swathes of the government. Their elected representatives say extremely negative things about my beliefs, literally every single day, including veiled and not-so-veiled threats.
The world may be physically comfortable but I do not feel safe. And that's because they do not feel safe from me. I don't want to sound defeatist but there is no objective way to describe it without sounding cynical.
Everytime someone says something like "how can I bring a kid into this world" I assume they know absolutely nothing about history at all. Be thankful your ancestors didn't think that when they were faced with actual life and death on the line, versus these people today being miffed that their apartment isn't as large as they'd like or they have to commute a little farther in or live in a city not featured in mass media.
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I don't think anyone is comparing to old monarchies or etc, they're mentally comparing it to the 1950s and 60s and the postwar economic boom times.
You can point out that things weren't as good as they're presented back then either, or that people are falling for advertising, but no one is really impressed that their living standard is better than the 1800s or earlier.
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To quote a Twitch streamer: "Radicalization is when no house".
The world is less broken when you only look at the top of the K shaped economy. There's less immediate turmoil, but also much less opportunity, and tons of flags saying opportunity will only decrease more. That's now how you encourage a high trust society.
I'll also add "Radicalization is when no community". And community is certianly broken among Gen Z. By design of those who want to maximize profits. Even the serfs of centuries ago had community because you need to work together to stay alive. Today's society is slowly realizing that, but this is after 80 years of individualism.
Speaking for my friends in their mid to late 20s, if you have a reasonable plan to get to a point where you can invest in your future as opposed to simply burning every last drop of income on mandatory expenses like food, housing and insurance I agree. When you can't foresee a way to get there you lack economic agency, economic nihilism is a rational response.
Under liberal capitalism, how you feel about the state of the world/economy is going to always be tied to how much money you're bringing in every month, so making a comment about how things are actually fine and Gen Z are "negative" and ungrateful is pointless if you're not going to make clear your own economic standing relative to others. I would be surprised if you're delivering Uber Eats with a Bachelor's degree, as many of Gen Z are doing today, considering the sentiment expressed.
This is the take all the younger generations complain about. Boomers had it good, laid waste to the world and the international scene and wonder why everyone else is bitter.
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Are millennials the "older" generation now? Ooof, my bones...
Some of us turned 40 this year.
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The happiest Gen Z I see are the ones that go to Church. Being religious is a bulwark against nihilism. And Church youth / under 30 groups are basically marriage express lanes, which takes the App /hookup culture hell out of the equation.
Church is really the last "3rd place" around, so I'm not surprised. It's alsmost like community is important.
Good luck if you're not strongly religious, though.
>And Church youth / under 30 groups are basically marriage express lanes
Given recent news, this is part of why I'm not religious.
Yep. It’s almost like living the right way has profound benefits over living however the hell you feel.
I’ll get downvoted into oblivion for stating the obvious, but if you’re tired of running yourself ragged you should turn to Jesus.
His burden is easy and his yoke is light.
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> we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive
Perhaps the problem starts with the fact that we continue to steer society in the direction where everything we want costs money.
I think this is the only comment that captures the message of the article. I feel for everyone who is priced out of life, those are very serious problems, but it wasn't what the article is talking about.
If I was seeing lots of comments say something like "The cost of life is preventing me from pursuing my dreams" then the article would be relevant to that.
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"We" being the billionaires and boomers who want to preserve their property value, yes.
Maybe don't want as much?
Man, posts like these always strike a nerve. I graduated in 2008. "Everything" wasn't just handed to us, we had our own share of horrible to deal with as well. And guess what? You'll get through it too.
I wasn't a fan of the article either but I think at any point in history you can make a convincing argument that the world is ending. I don't have any good advice as to how to defeat this perspective, but I am constantly reassured that because I'm not the only one that thinks things are shattered, there is a path to fixing it all.
Join some like-minded individuals and do something amazing. Fuck it, create a dating app without perverse incentives.
>And guess what? You'll get through it too.
Will you? https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...
Maybe you did, but statistically those people are permanently behind.
>I wasn't a fan of the article either but I think at any point in history you can make a convincing argument that the world is ending
There's hoplessness of impending doom, and hopelessness of no progression. I do think Gen Z has a unique experience of the latter, where the former generations were mostly facing worries over the former. Boomers had the nuclear scare, Gen Z had the peak unease of the cold war, Millenials had 9/11 and a decade of questionable wars.
Gen Z doesn't have that impending doom... yet. COVID was very impacful, but not apocalyptic as long as you followed mandates (I know, a big "if" in the US). But I wouldn't hold my breath given all the conflicts out there, and the US's own warmongering riling up again.
Meanwhile, many can't even get their foot in the door. Not many 20 years olds ever felt like the future was hopeless, no matter what they did.
>Fuck it, create a dating app without perverse incentives.
Pay my rent for a year or so and you got a deal.
Otherwise, I feel like this is highlighting the exact tonedeafness Gen Z is tiring of. Gen Z doesn't just get to sit down and hack in their free time. They are doing gig work to pay rent and applying to thousands of jobs a day for hope of an interview (not even an offer).
I won't say it's uniquely bad. But it's bad in different ways from when you or I were growing up.
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I built a measurement framework for this called a cohesion matrix. You can rate your integration/coherence/cohesion based on this rubric:
https://kemendo.com/CohesionMatrix.html
Looks more like a vector than a matrix to me.
It computes a vector from two matricies so you’re definitely right!
I gotta say even though not having kids seems like the most economically sane thing to me, it often makes me wonder, what will be the point of life after retirement. I have no wife, g/f or kids. Right now my only 'why' is to not disappoint my family and cause a couple of them could use my help financially. Other than that, I don't see a long term 'why'. My only compelling short term 'why' is that I don't want to be homeless. But that's pretty much a working to live and living to work type of reason to exist.
Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.
If you don’t have hobbies you pour your free time into, you are robbing yourself.
The purpose of work (for most people), once you’re past comfortable survival, should be to buy time for you to spend living your life in ways you enjoy and that gives you meaning. If you don’t have something that gives you that feeling, find it!
I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.
In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.
Feelsgoodman.
I like the overall message of this since I can deeply relate.
I have been looking for meaningful work since I was 18, started in sales went on to marketing and ended up in engineering as a data scientist.
Even though I feel closer than ever I still feel that I am not where I am suppose to be. One of my biggest problem is having to many options, to many callings. And they constantly keep changing, and perhaps that’s normal.
It’s easy and dangerous to get stuck in the idea or quest of finding the ultimate purpose and try to translate that into actual work.
Damn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better.
What worked is:
- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.
- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.
Stepping on my soapbox: Treat your mind, body, and present moment as if they're sacred. As if you could live a thousand lives and they would be sacred every time. All the other stuff, it's just this once.
Cleaning a mind of random grievances and addictions is good. Letting a body be weird, dance wrong, move in funny ways, sing poorly: this is good too.
The whole "purpose" thing is a side-effect. It can't be sought directly, I think.
Overcomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.
That is part of it but there is also something to be said about what is going on biochemically IMO. Even if you are feeling forward progress and comfortable about the scope of your problems, if you give yourself no time to rest and get out of a subconciously anxious state, that isn't very good.
Anxiety is meant to have your senses heightened to perhaps hear the tiger stalking you and encourage you to seek out a safer environment where you can comfortably rest. You aren't built to be in an anxious state for such extended periods of time. The tiger would have gotten you by then, with the way this system was designed. You aren't built to constantly run from the tiger.
I don't know if this article is for me:
>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.
I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.
If you come from immense privilege (growing up in an 8 figure household), have good health, and rich relationships and that isn't enough to curb your existentialism that's ok, but I find it hard to take this piece seriously as this is written like it's targeting the average financially stable worker. It strikes me as out of touch at best.
The purpose of life is not only to be happy. It's not a useless metric but don't over-index on it
For the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.
What were the main drivers?
Moved to NYC. Have a good team at my new job. Satisfied with my income. Have enough free time. Made a lot of good friends really fast, and now I see a rotating cast of them 3-7 days a week. Happy with my apartment. Have an east facing window so I don't have to set an alarm to wake up in the morning, I wake with the sunrise. Getting plenty of exercise and walking a 8-12k steps a day.
> It feels like you’re stuck in the ordinary when all you want to do is chase greatness.
Gave up on greatness a long time ago, I'd settle for an "ordinary", where people just kind of try to NOT make bad things worse, or good things less enjoyable.
Your greatness is still all here! And it can be earned precisely by fighting to fix bad things.
I found that working in politics, against corruption and for Positive Politics, is how I make the most positive impact and gain the most energy!
I hope for your sake there is someone out there to stop you.
No, trust me, it is burnout and working too much for too little gain.
Key sentence
Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work.
Politics are marketing tools for frameworks and candidates, they don’t provide the frameworks, or any deeper meaning to life itself. What a shallow and dangerous approach.
I am existentially starving AND burned out.
I haven't been lucky enough that startups I got in on early panned out so I don't have the ability to take a sabbatical.
No, actually, I'm burnt out.
TFW you understand Marx's theory of alienation, but are desperate for an alternate explanation that puts the blame on workers and doesn't threaten capital.
As Churchill said, Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else.
Last time it took a depression and intense widespread economic pain for them to pick up socialism-lite. I don’t expect it to take anything less next time around. Nobody was asking for universal healthcare during/after the pandemic, we need an actual depression.
The intense pandemic relief delayed the effects of the pandemic in the US. We might have gotten away with it too, but then Trump pretty much cancelled the soft landing and plunged us off a cliff.
The effects of 2025 and 2026 are pretty much what we should have had in 2021. Prepare yourself.
Good stuff. You will enjoy my short essay, I want to give a lot of fucks! [1], which argues against the typical conclusion reached by people working at big corp long enough: "Stop caring. Stop giving a fuck. Focus on things outside of work".
The core insight it, if you start to feel the need to stop caring, instead of changing your character and values, treat it as a strong signal to change your environment.
[1]: https://anandprashant.com/posts/i-want-to-give-a-lot-of-fuck...
this is a book ad. i ain't buying it
Yeah no, that's not it. Not everyone has to chase the highest purpose. A lot of existential dread would go away if: 1/ People had hopes of buying a house in their lifetime 2/ They were not afraid of being let go at any point 3/ Social media did not create a hedonistic treadmill
The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
No,trust me, it is burnout.
Seems like self-help slop with a flawed argument.
This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible.
Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way.
And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.
I really don't like articles that are just about plugging in the authors other real business. Nothing new, all truisms.
Maybe unfair, but I can't read a title with this cadence anymore without assuming it's AI.
Blogging has always required aggressive titles. My best posts for years all used this "you" or "we" focused framing too. Trying to solve people's biggest problems!
You're not being unfair. You're showing wisdom.
Even before AI, I think I've seen it used before in self-help books or therapy type stuff. It has always felt like an intellectually lazy attempt at reframing, painting things as black and white in the form of a thought-terminating cliche. "It's not X, it's Y" discounts X entirely, when usually the relationship between X & Y is more nuanced: "X and also Y", "X because Y", etc.
Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.
It definitely has a lot of signs of AI writing, but at the same time the flow doesn't really scream AI to me.
Unfair or not, same thing for me.
Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce.
Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays.
It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.
100%. “It’s not [x]. It’s [y].” is highly overused by ChatGPT in particular. I hope this article isn’t just AI slop, but that’s not a great start.
Por que no los dos
This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
I've thought about moving to Asia. Then I read about the racism there and realize I'd be right back at home, but now with a language barrier to boot. Oh well.
Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.
I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.
Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.
I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
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Are you still in China? If so how are you finding the work life? Should blog on it esp as a YC alum that’s a cool perspective
Kind of a strange pivot to talk about meaning and connect it to capitalism
Work ≠ capitalism! It's about making your work the most meaningful thing possible! If that's a very pro-social politics, might be exactly what you want!
get married and have kids
I don't think people should have kids because they otherwise lack meaning, but it's absolutely true that kids change you in ways you would never have believed. If you think you might want kids but aren't sure, just do it.
> I don't think people should have kids because they otherwise lack meaning
I'm past the age where I can (or rather should have) kids and I have to say, the past decade or so I'm more and more thinking that people SHOULD have kids to have (more) meaning in their life. Put it another way, I've begun thinking that having children is a nice way to have a default baseline of meaning in your life. I really see that with all my friends, who all have kids.
> have kids because they otherwise lack meaning
That's how life on earth worked for 3 billion years. I think that assuming humans are somehow above that is unwise. We're not.
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I'm married with three kids! And that's great! But like I say in the post, I still know I'm capable of making a bigger positive impact on the world, so that's how I focus my political work!
This solves it for most, but secular society has lost any structural capability to succeed in this.
Marriage rates have dropped over 70%.
There are extremely thriving sub-communities in places though. Graft on to those.
> This solves it for most, but secular society has lost any structural capability to succeed in this.
Can you explain how you see a causation between religion and marriage success?
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Cool, lemme just pitch on Tinder "30 and am between jobs, need happiness". Problem solved!
It's interesting that you get downvoted for what is, from a historical perspective, a very down-to-earth reasonable take.
I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts.
Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.
I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
Like two people can't be together without being married.
But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids.
As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
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Gonna try to be charitable, but this really feels like gaslighting. There's a lot more to the story of how much someone is thriving than "Nice place to live. More than enough stuff. Family and friends who love you." I'm burnt out because my fancy job requires me to live in an area with a cost of living so high that it's a genuine family crisis when the washing machine breaks because we don't have enough disposable income to replace it. It's not just a meaning problem out there.
Am I the only one who is overwhelmed in my capacity to parse across the various means of emphasis that colour this page?
> please note
> The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE
> Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved
OR from someone called Philip Barden, here is a part of it:
> This email is intended for the addressee named within only. It may contain legally privileged or confidential information. If you are not the named individual you should not read this email and if you do so, you must not under any circumstances make use of the information therein. If you have read this email and it is not addressed to you, please notify IT@devonshires.co.uk and confirm that it has been deleted from your system and no copies made.
I really want to understand how binding and enforceable these annoying fucking notices at the bottom of emails are that was sent to me without me even asking for or knowing why and sometimes not even fucking certainly knowing whether I was the intended recipient or not.
So if someone fucked up and sent me a so called or really confidential email then not only I have the legal responsibility to delete that I am supposed to inform them that "hey yeah you sent it to me and I deleted it.. hope I was not the intended recipient.." or so.
I mean how does this thing work?
(I had received a couple of bank statements on one of my common Indian first name Gmail emails. I later realised those belonged to a lawyer who was probably informed by his bank that this happened because I had complained to the bank and had asked them to remove my email from that account. I received an email from that lawyer from another address I do not recall the domain of, but it was very angry and entitled and said shit like (paraphrasing) "By revealing this to a third party.. you have broken the law... you must hand over the email address without further delay…". I was younger and stupider, so I had just replied "Go fuck yourself" because I was really pissed. Luckily, I never heard from him again or any court because when I Googled him later he seemed to be a decently pedigreed lawyer from another city. Later, the bank replied saying it had been rectified - not before they wanted my phone number and KYC info and account details even though I had begun my communication to them saying it was not my account.)
I find the presentation of this article jarring. Bold, italics, underlining, yellow highlighting, light yellow highlighting.
I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold.
The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.
I'd argue "buy my book" posts, especially ones posted by the author, shouldn't make the front page of HN. Especially from YC alum. Is this an ad in disguise?
Agreed. The first half of this post is actually interesting, but the second half quickly transforms into an ad. That disappointed me, because I believe the author has something interesting to say.
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I'm not the author. I just found the article, read it and found it interesting enough. I don't know who the guy is or even what he does.
Same. I can identify with the subject matter, but the whole thing was just so off-putting. Trite, sound bites.
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The "You're not x. You're y." format reads as AI generated to me. I know that seeing AI syntax behind every corner is a problem that is only going to get worse and that I need to shift my mindset; nevertheless, it tinged how I reacted to the entire article.