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.
That’s because you’ve become so accustomed to politics as tribalism and sports-like entertainment that you’ve completely forgotten why we even started the political systems we have today in the first place. Divestment of power, not accumulation. Serving others, not ourselves. You can still embody those things. But it’s better to admit to ourselves that we aren’t selfless enough to do that, than hide behind a learned helplessness.
I bet if you stop watching national popular news outlets and instead focus on local politics you'll find them much more tame. Of course this depends on where you live.
IMO People focus way too much on national politics and not enough on local.
In the US we have a couple hundred; structurally, though, only at most two are usually meaningfully competitive at any given time (both locally and nationally, though historically not always the same two in every area as nationally), and which two are nationally conpetitive is very stable (though one of the two has changed at two different times in US history, one of which involved a significant period of only one national competitive party with internal factions.)
I understand. In Canada we have only had two parties create a federal government. But 5 separate parties have formed government provincially. 5 parties have federal presence. And if we didn't have first-past-the-post voting, we would easily have Greens, NDPs, and others in seats of federal power.
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
A good place to start is OSINT (open source intelligence) for your city/municipality because it requires little commitment, is scoped with regards to complexity and amount of information, and usually risk-free. Gather publicly available information about the companies in your area, who owns/runs them, your city council, any ongoing projects, the processes of funding stuff with public money and so on. Don't bother finding the best collection method or way to structure all the data, just start, you will figure things out on the way. Also be aware of your personal bias, which might make you dismiss important information or affect your judgement.
The next steps highly depend on where you live. Your HN profile says Australia, so at least safety-wise you are in a better spot. Connect to people in your area (preferrably offline), for example by organizing a local meetup, maybe there is one already. Activities can range from exchanging ideas to spreading awareness in your community to actively going against corrupt affairs. Make sure you know what and who you are up against, or you will have a very bad time.
Anticorruption is a group effort because it requires a lot of work and often special knowledge (info tech, law, finance, opsec, public relations and propaganda, ...) and, more importantly, a group provides safety from corrupt actors. On your own you will not be able to deal with lawsuits, misinformation, character assassination and worse.
I'd argue that the trend - that seems now deeply, deeply embedded - of alternative facts and straight lying is more important. As it opens the door to all manner of corruption.
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).
Perhaps it’s also the definition of meaningful work changes for an individual over time?
What I once found meaningful 20 years ago largely no longer feels that way. Both due to a lack of novelty and personal growth, and seeing how I was so naive regarding the outcomes and future I was supposedly building.
Those daily grinds back then for purpose were great - but sometimes the purpose never materializes since others (customers, business partners, society as a whole, etc) disagree with that purpose.
At least that’s how I tend to feel my life largely went. I thought I was building towards a different goal than what ended up happening, which makes me feel I wasted my life. Now it’s questioning whether or not I will ever find something that gives me that sense of purpose again without it ending up being a lie in the end. Why bring my “whole self” into a given task if it’s not going to end up with any sort of mental payback later?
Well in my personal opinion, there's extremely few material goals that have any purpose whatsoever, life is short, matter is ephermal.
Usually, I find, one has to invest an enormous effort to just find that purpose in the first place. And trying out paths/goals is part of that journey too.
I know I did a lot of soulsearching, in fact I was privilledged enough to save up for a couple of years to do JUST that, and I can report that it was a resounding success (with a sample size of one!).
However, as we're discussing this in the context of burnout, it's obvious that having a higher meaning did not take me out of my suffering. I still experience life as any other human being, I just feel like my life is not wasted - and the side effects of always striving for a goal - like focus and discipline - and other virtues - are a pleasant bonus. So I do sincerely think, that having a crystalized idea of my purpose creates a happy life for me.
There's nothing wrong with NOT having a goal, I just couldn't do it, even though matter IS ephermal, I believe that every action that we take, ultimately does have meaning.
In Positive Psychology, the science of meaning in life (not of life) breaks meaning down into three dimensions: coherence, significance, and purpose. If your job isn’t affording you significance (because your actions don’t “matter” in your organization) then your ability to find meaning in that work is threatened.
Your work may have coherence and purpose, but if it doesn’t have significance then it isn’t the source of meaning you thought it was.
"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.
Same for me. Its so odd having an illness, and taking medicine against that illness, and mostly reading an "universal truth" that the medication that helps you is bad someway. As you say, therapy but also getting a better sleep hygiene, better nutrition and exercise is so much easier with medicine.
> 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.
It’s very well possible that you, and the person you answered to, are solidly part of the “needs medication” fraction. I do not believe that medication against depression is bad in general.
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.
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.
> There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches.
There absolutely are downsides and risks. There is a reason the
SSRIs carry a "blackbox" warning for youths due to increased suicide risks. There's a reason they should only be used under supervision of a doctor and need to be tapered off of.
That is not to say they aren't useful and necessary for some/many people but they aren't and shouldn't be a catch-all treatment.
A very specific edge case: If you ever think you might want to become a pilot, even just to fly small airplanes, the FAA still considers ADHD, depression, social anxiety, and other conditions where you are prescribed medication, to be disqualifying. And this is a "have you ever in your life" question on the medical form. So if you're prescribed ADHD medicine, even as a child, I understand that while it's not impossible, you are going to have a major uphill battle if you ever want to fly airplanes.
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.
>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.
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)
you took amphetamine and weren't depressed suddenly? in my experience, that lasts a bit, but give it another decade or so. it tends to bite in other ways.
Going to depend on your dosages. I try to stay low and will take breaks to help reduce dependency. I actually really dislike the feeling of a high dosage and it does have negative effects at that end.
Also remember that everyone reacts differently to things. SSRIs work great for some people, but not for me. So it's worth trying different classes of medicines too but also to make sure that when having more dangerous ones. I made sure close friends knew too
> 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.
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.)
A personal prison can mean many things, and if low wages automatically mean precarity, then that's a type of stress that would be worthwhile to try and create a lesser draw on, imo.
For me, I'm always framing whatever I currently earn as "right now". Right now I'm doing ok, but it's fairly likely it won't last longer than 2 years, because it never has, and I have no reason to think it will this time. That means that even if a bank were to give me a long term loan, I'd be stupid to commit to anything but the most manageable terms, which means I'd have to consider what I'd be able to make in a part-time laborer position when layoffs come around or something.
If I can theoretically make myself liable for a 3.5k a month tiny condo mortgage, even if it's less than half my take home, I'd be uncomfortable doing so unless it was half that amount. Therefore, either a miracle needs to happen on the career side or the housing market needs to finally crash before my partner and I move out of this basement, no kids, used car etc.. and that's fine for now. If I lose a job, I need to have at least a year if not more of liquid or close to liquid assets available to cover living expenses, and for that to be possible, I need to have relatively minimal fixed liabilities
Ive come to realize that there is very little that would make me truly comfortable with big risks, so I decided to just start taking them. If they dont work out, I will have the consolation that I tried, and so far, it has been working out well. I Got myself liable for a 7k mortgage, about 80% of my take home. Nervous about commitment but married my wife. Nervous about kids, but have one on the way.
If it all comes tumbling down tomorrow, I would be out a ton of money, but basically where I was 5 years ago. I wish I had taken the plunge on each of these things 5 years earlier.
I've actually started taking the same approach—despite the content of my comment—just not with huge amounts of debt for things that only offer tenuous personal value. So, for me I've decided that it makes way more sense to fully commit to my long term relationship, and if it fails eventually, it won't be because I was trying to keep one foot out the door. That said, aside from automatic common law designation, marriage is not something I'm planning atm, even after many years.
> I Got myself liable for a 7k mortgage, about 80% of my take home.
That is... spicy. I guess context matters though, if you're already financially secure and the ongoing income would otherwise just be added to other investments, and the remaining 20% is enough to cover you, and if you're in a place that locks in your interest rate for the whole mortgage, then I could see that being less dramatic. Likewise if you're both working or stand to inherit something.
Additionally, a mortgage is one of those things where if you've consistently earned whatever income it is, then it's more a matter of being excessively cautious. I've probably only ever earned an income for half of my working life; year on year I might make zero or full-time income, and the economy (in Canada) is indeed tangibly precarious right now.
Broadly I agree though. I wouldn't be in the relatively good position I'm in now without a series of scary bets earlier, moving to a new city, trying harder at more ambitious career moves etc..
It's just that there have been multiple times where I've lost a job, couldn't find _anything_ to pay bills with for long enough that I've literally dropped all the way to zero financially, losing the rental, and needing to live out of a car, so those kinds of liabilities just don't (yet?) make any sense. My hunch is that for people who haven't had that experience, it's more of a major milestone that they're eventually going to do without a doubt in their mind, they just need the raw salary number
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.
As a widower who just sent his kid off to the grandparents to visit for a few days, and is now missing his person, his kid, who relies on him and feeling the effects of missing purpose...
Sure, it could be kids, a partner, a spouse, or a friend or family. But it could also be the rest of the team on the weekly bowling league, the puppies at the shelter who need playtime each week with a volunteer human, the community one serves as a volunteer firefighter, the homeless shelter where one helps serve the weekly dinner, the neighbor who needs help with yard upkeep, or any other parts of the village where one lives that relies on you, and makes you feel included, involved, and fulfilled inside by having that purpose.
Not sure if you're single, but go on some dates. Getting excited about another human being can be a huge boost. You don't need to replace work with other intellectualism (though you certainly can!)
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.
There is danger to that as well. Work can be an addiction. It is often solitary and removes you from focus on your actual self, friends, family, or community, in favor of "the work."
Yeah but work isn't all there is to life, at least for me. There are way more fulfilling things. If you like your work more than anything else in life, good for you. Different strokes for different folks.
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.
Anyone can develop a Zen attitude by committing to Zen meditation, or other forms of meditation. It may sound trite, but depression can come from managing the past, anxiety from managing the future. But the past is gone, the future is just a fantasy, what is real is what is happening now. The more time spent in the present, the less anxiety and depression. This is one of the benefits of meditation.
That's a pretty short period in the grand scheme of things. Before you know it they'll be driving and just a year or two from leaving the nest and you'll wish you could have had more time with them.
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)
I am hardware developer and certified electrician as a hobby. I have regularly clients that are buying time while I do really simple things on the property. It’s really cringe to be asked to vacuum their dirt for couple hours. I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money. I tried politely ask to do rudimentary things by themselves, but it never worked out. I grew in poverty and have hard time understanding this.
My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.
> I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money.
This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.
It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.
This is a core reason for my own burnout - why should I work for a culture that seemingly promotes lazy/hypocritical behavior? Reminds me of "Idiocracy" or "burn after reading" the "league of morons"
Yes. Not only that, but I can work with electricity meters and put seals. It’s in Germany and very complicated and best unemployment insurance I could find.
Glad you brought up your friend in the 2nd bit there as it seems to have become relatively common for some people to make food delivery services a very regular part of their lifestyle without really paying attention to the staggering amount of saturated fat they are ingesting even from the majority of "healthy" options available on these services (nevermind the even worse fast food options)
Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.
Randomized controlled trials show LDL consistently drops with lower saturated fat intake, and randomized controlled trials show LDL strongly correlated with coronary risk. It’s one of the best-established causal relationships in nutrition science.
The American Heart Association’s narrative is based in observed clinical relationship between saturated fat intake, LDL, and coronary events.
Excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both bad.
There’s been a big social media push to turn saturated fat into a good thing, but everything I actually read in the research still points to excess saturated fat being a bad idea.
It's not about buying time though, it's about what you do with the bought time. I see a lot of people using these expensive services and then wasting the extra time - or worse, filling time while they wait for the completion.
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.
That’s the best improvement to my life ever. I migrated from a normal-person rental to a million-dollars house, but to me the true luxury is, having someone to set the house back to impeccable state. I should have done that in my 42sqm flat.
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 decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up.
It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.
But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.
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.
Heh, so I oversimplified that part of the story in my original post, for the sake of brevity.
You're right, one shouldn't DIY the foundation of ones house, unless you really know what you're doing(and honestly, not even then: it's too much work!)
I'm not sure it was clear in my original comment, but the 1840 I wrote in there is the original construction year of the house. The technique my foundation was built with hasn't been used for a little over a century: Not a lot of construction firms around with experience in it! And it's not easy to replace a foundation, because, well, it's under the house! Luckily repairing turned out to be possible(simplifying again, sorry!), and not particularly difficult in technical terms. It just wasn't easy either, but in physical terms.
I did have a professional "building conservationist"(rough translation) over for consultation. Basically he looked over what was, I told him my plan, and then he told me what to do instead. (I actually wasn't far off - I had spent a lot of time reading up on it before he came - he just added a few (possibly vital) details I hadn't thought of)
The conservationist did have a construction firm and offered their services, but we had budgeted for a kitchen upgrade, and while we had some margins in the original plan, with the extra work we got surprised with, we were strained to afford the materials. Just the ground insulation material cost almost as much as the new IKEA kitchen furniture!
The good thing in all this is that the new construction should, in theory, according to the conservationist who actually does know these things, probably last a couple of centuries!
Not everyone has the means to call in a “professional” and pay the fully loaded price without trying to trim some fat. It sounds to me like they were taking the fat out of the foundation job by mining out a space for the repair. What he’s describing is probably between the mid five figures and the low six figures to get a professional to do. I don’t know many people who could come up with the down payment for a construction loan on that.
I also took on a remodel under similar conditions and I think that the decision they undertook was likely very reasonable at the time. The outcome, in retrospect, would be obvious as well. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and finish something.
3 factors. Biggest one the aforementioned stupidity. I'm also very stubborn, so that didn't help either.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the planned changes, combined with the unplanned ones (which were like 90% of the work), put the project well outside our budget unless we did it ourselves.
Tbf, I did start the comment with "I have more money and no kids". I don't fault anyone for discarding poverty after that point on!
But yeah, in the end even my budget was stretched to it's limits! Not that I was in any way poor, pulling around 3x the average salary in my area. Shit just got crazy expensive. Had I known the condition the house was in when I bought it, I would've lowered my offer by around 25%. But it was impossible to inspect the foundation without first breaking up the floor, and I don't blame the seller for not wanting to do that. I don't think they knew the condition either tbf. Based on the bottled message I found, nobody had looked under those floorboards since shortly after Kennedy's assassination!
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.
This sort of "hurry up or it'll be too late" attitude is a great way to figure out that you don't want to have kids after it's too late to make that choice.
This is factually false :) and if you’re really worried, there are many options available to you to preserve what you will need or consider adoption - there are so many humans being born without a family after all.
I agree with you on a factual basis, but you understand that a large amount of people have a deep emotional instinct to not be ok with those options, right?
Indeed, that’s what I mean by raising awareness. It takes time to change such deeply rooted beliefs. I think if humans are to prosper and resolve planet-wide challenges like global warming, we need to be better at managing resources and we need to work together as a species, not separate counties fending for themselves.
Well, I'm not sure I agree with convincing people to not feel this way, but its admirable that you are putting in effort to change the world in a way that fits your morals
Most people I know realize they should have had kids sooner once they have them. Adoption is also not that easy, there are plenty of cases where adoption causes kidnapping.
There have been a lot of cases where adopted kids where not abandoned but rather taken from their parents. There is a market in adoptions and not everybody involved has been "clean".
Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.
If {some subset of the government, rich people, people who control the economy} want more people to have kids, which is something I keep hearing from that class of people: They need to collectively figure out how to put more money into the pockets of people. Higher salaries, drastic tax cuts, cheaper housing, more people will be financially ready and more kids will happen as a result. Also, work hours need to be standardized at 4 hours/day per person OR costs of living need to be designed that 1 parental income is enough.
i agree with most of your points, especially the reduction of work hours, but cost is not the issue that keeps people from having kids. it's actually the reverse. the more money people have, the less likely they have kids.
I think it's also because high middle class earners are financially smart (don't buy things if they don't have the money), AND health-smart (realize their body's needs, including sleep) so they choose logically not to have kids, because they do not have the resources for it, and will not sacrifice their own well-being just to have kids.
The upper class is financially smart, AND has the resources (20+ years of child rearing costs already secured upfront, ability to hire night nannies, ability to take a few years away from work without income, own a home and not at the mercy of rent increases), so they have kids.
The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to sacrifice themselves and buy things they cannot afford. They are given insufficient resources and told that they should have kids, so they do.
The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to buy things they cannot afford, including kids, so they have kids.
i don't believe that is true.
raising kids is not that expensive. what is expensive is the high expectations for what you should spend on your kids with that middle class and high earners have. like sending kids to college.
Huh? In a world where people have zero job security, could get put on some layoff or 15%-per-year PIP quota any time and lose their income at the whim of some politics 5 levels above, and any random health issue could cost hundreds of thousands due to insurance not paying, I'd say as a self-proclaimed financially literate person, that you'd need to save up a couple million in cash and set it aside to even begin considering kids.
I could be on the chopping block tomorrow at work and then have to downsize my lifestyle next week, but I'm prepared to downsize as a child-less person. If I didn't have the entire course of child-rearing costs saved up in cash I wouldn't consider starting the process. If children cost $2 million over the entire course of their life, I need to have $2 million now. In cash. That's the financially smart way in an income-uncertain world; you don't ever assume things that you don't already have.
20 years ago, job security was pretty good, you could relax and saving up the full cost in cash was not a prerequisite. You could throw your money into a mutual fund and get rich, because the US had sane economic leaders. You were virtually guaranteed a job if you had skills. None of this is guaranteed anymore. Nowadays, you either have it or you don't; the system guarantees you nothing about the future.
And if one wants to avoid that chopping block in today's corporate work environments, working nights and weekends is a good start, but then you'd have no time for kids.
2 million? how do you even come up with that number? you are proving my point.
food, clothes, school materials, a bike. maybe a computer. also a bed and a few square meters of space in your home. everything else is optional. that doesn't cost 100,000 per year. not even 10,000.
sure, with less money you have less to offer or your kids. no or only cheap vacations, no expensive toys. no fancy brand name clothes. no expensive extra curricular activities. and certainly no money for college. but none of these things are necessary to have and raise kids. and it is not irresponsible to have kids and raise them that way either.
Start with housing. A few more square meters costs ~$1000 more on top of what I pay now, per month.
That's $200K in today's dollars or $500-700K over their childhood (0-18 years) if you include inflation, rent increases over the next 20 years.
If you want to sleep 8 hours a day AND work demands 12-15 hours a day, you absolutely need nannies, add $500K for that.
Because today's work environments demand that many hours a day, you evidently don't have time to cook anymore so you need to buy all your food, add $20K/year for that, or $350K.
you seem to be living in a very expensive area. (where, if i may ask?). those with lower income are not going to be living there, so your constraints are not going to apply to them.
and your math only works for middle to high income earners.
2k/month for a nanny to compensate for 5 hours lost per day means that you have to earn 20$ per hour extra. in a minimum wage job that only pays $15 per hour you would be financially better off to work less, so you don't need that nanny.
so you simply aren't going to work 15 hours per day. same for the food. 20K per year is more than $50 per day. again, you are going to work less in order to make the time to cook because the extra money earned does not make up for the higher expense of eating out.
are you suggesting that there are no jobs that demand less than 12 hours per day? so your choice is either work 12-15 hours or be unemployed? i do not believe that.
> Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.
It's sad to see people so deep in the consumerist rat race that giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet.
Weirdly enough people who actually don't have money are the one having the most kids. And people who lived pretty much from 300k years ago until the ~1950s had it worse than you yet they had more kids. People making 1m a year have less kids than people working in fucking coal mines 100 years ago.
We don't have less kids because we're poorer than 50 years ago, we have less kids because we drunk way too much capitalist kool aid and put traveling, buying shit, careers, money in front of everything else on our list of priorities: https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values...
> giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet
It is, though. My own food, water, housing, heating, hobbies and things that make me happy, are all cells on that sheet as well. The numbers add up now. Money for kids would absolutely obliterate all the other cells on that sheet, and the numbers wouldn't add up.
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.
It’s a trend and it’s slowing down not plummeting. And even if it is, there are already more of us than we know how to sustain.
The problem at hand is not growth rate slowing down, it’s humans divided in tiny pockets of countries burning through what little we have left of natural resources.
People who have kids today, do so knowing that their children will most certainly be displaced by natural disasters.
there are already more of us than we know how to sustain
what is the evidence for that? if that were true then we would have lot's of people going hungry, but that's simply not the case. poverty is getting reduced world wide. if we could not sustain the current population, we should have lots of people dying from hunger and the population should stop growing. but the reason why population is growing especially in africa is exactly because the growth is still sustainable. if it wasn't, then it could not be growing.
In 100 years, "us" is going to be Elon Musk's grandchildren, people from Niger, etc. and none of them are going to think like you whether they have to move or not.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Well, then, as a Millennial it seems like I had it the best. The ‘90s were fantastic. Then 9/11 and those wars weren’t great but didn’t affect life except in those countries. Started uni just before the GFC, only to finish grad school just as startups were picking up in the early 2010s and then when 2020 hit had lots of money already that work wasn’t critical. Then modern generative AI showed up and I have so much experience it just accelerated me.
My life rules hahaha. Only problem is that the older generations are going to parasitize my kids for disability money and shit but I’ll just move them to where humanity is growing if it comes to that.
Bizarrely my parents also feel like their generation had a great time. So who can tell. Maybe I’ll make it so that Gen Beta says the same story.
And our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Gen X was called the Slacker Generation because we didn't think it was worth trying very hard. We didn't want the life of our parents: working all day at a job they hated just to buy stuff to impress neighbors that they didn't like. [Yes, Fight Club was about Gen X--or at least that's what we tell ourselves.]
But it got better. For me, computers were a salvation. I found that all that time I spent writing PC video games resulted in skills that companies valued. We were the first digital natives. I remember having to teach 50-something year-old CEOs how to type ("Hold down the shift key for uppercase").
I don't know what unique characteristics will save today's Gen Z. They be able to take advantage of the wrenching change that AI is about to unleash. They'll be in the thick of the changes, but still young enough to adapt. Us older generations will have a harder time.
> I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Their words implied they were a member of your generation.
There is some difference between real struggles, and uncomfortable fear for things which didn't happen. Were you unable to afford a home because of fear of nuclear war? Or for fear of AIDS?
I was unable to afford a home because of fear of bouncing checks. I lived in an apartment with 3 other roommates.
And we all knew people who had died of AIDS, and I wasn't even in an at-risk community. Gay men I knew felt that they had gone through an apocalypse, like they were the survivors of a secret war that no one talked about.
Home ownership when I was growing up was around 50%. Not owning a home was extremely normal, not a sign of deprivation.
Not ever in your life being able to afford a home is the new normal, and to me it's a sign of deprivation. That's the reality younger generations are dealing with, not only temporarily renting, but renting for life.
Which isn't anything new. It's feudalism, and the way things usually are. But that's a far greater concern for those in that situation, than AIDS or nuke scares.
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.
I only felt the empathy someone can have when they have also lived through the same events, for all the zoomers graduating into the post Covid job market.
Millennials and younger are all fucked for the same reasons and are going to continue getting fucked over unless some revolutionary change happens.
We’ll also be in this together as we watch our boomer/genx parents burn up the last of any existing generational wealth sitting comatose in a nursing home because they refused to accept that they will actually die some day, and so made no plans for it
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.
If you believe that there is no action that could improve your situation, then you're right. You're stuck. Best just learn to accept what you've got.
But that is almost certainly not true. You are playing a high-dimensional game with a few hundred degrees of freedom and imperfect information. You already know how to play this game: make a move, see the result, adjust your strategy and make another move.
Of course, it's not easy. Maybe you don't know which move to make. Maybe you don't know which moves are available. Try the following: Ask HN. Describe your current situation, describe your goals, and ask HN for advice. I guarantee there are lots of smart people here who will answer. One of those answers might even be helpful to you. You never know.
Me. Personally, no. I'm not out of moves. I'm making moves but I do have much less options than a few years prior. I'll make it through one way or another
But that's just me, as a late millennial that had some professional experience before the rug was pulled from under me. I have value to show to the few companies looking for actual labor. People a few years younger than me are absolutely thrown on a chess board with 2 pawns and told "good luck, I did these moves when I graduated... (with a bishop and Knight)". I don't know what actionable advice I can give outside of "survive until the market improves. Work on your portfolio and network if/when you can to prepare for that". But it's not great advice.
My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
>My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
But that mentality is part of the issue. "they" can't do much about it. "we" as a collective can. have our representatives at the very least penalize ghost job postings and that's already a big step. And then from there we could make disincentives for outsourcing and reel in the abuse of the H1-B program. You'd be surprised how quickly things can change when politicians have a fire under their butts to do something.
But all that first requires awareness, and then empathy. Something that some of this community clearly lacks.
>I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
I feel issue #2 is that there is such thing as "toxic positivity". Giving hope instead of recognizing that things are bad only enrages those who feel bad. People don't like having their lived experienced invalidated, especially by those who haven't lived it themselves.
Advice needs to be tailored as such too. Saying "just keep interviewing" is technically realistic advice, but not one that gives much agency if the issue of burn out is applying for jobs.
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.
I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
400,000 US soldiers/marines never came home. Another 600,000 came back wounded. That's at least a million families affected.
And by 1950, only five years after the end of the war, millions of men were sent overseas again for the Korean War.
And after that, the children of the returned WWII soldiers were sent off to Vietnam, unleashing the greatest civil unrest in the US since the Civil War.
And you think it was a great time for all because the dollar was worth a lot?
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.
They don't want just a house though. They want a house in a "cool" area. Look at median home prices in rust belt cities. Mortgages around $2k a month or so. Very doable for a lot of people but you never hear a drum beat about this. You never hear about people moving to these cities unless they have family there already to remind them that, hey, this is in fact a great deal.
>They don't want just a house though. They want a house in a "cool" area.
I'd just like a proper job again, thanks. Just like I had before the tech industry shit itself 2-3 years ago. My current "cool" ideas are not being in debt and not worrying about a 3000 dollar catalytic converter replacement.
Now my "really cool ideas" is being able to take a bus around town without being stranded if I miss the last bus at 8pm. But that's blue sky thinking right now.
Are there jobs in those cities who sit in an area named after their economic collapse?
Do student loan costs go down if you move to a low cost of living area?
We had some movement in the direction of people immigrating to low cost areas like that with the rise of remote work, but then execs decided they didn’t like not having control over their workers live and did RTO. To their offices in the cities with high rent and home prices.
You never heard about people taking that “great deal” because it’s not a great deal. Like really, you think there’s money left on the table like that and there’s not at least some low double digit percentage of the population that would have sought out the benefit? Or is it more likely the market evaluated the option and it’s not good
It's very rich when people who are likely 15-20+ years in their career in San Franscisco are telling the modern youth to just "move to Alabama". As if they can just find a cushy tech job in a market that is using RTO's to force layoffs.
People this detached really need to spend a few days on linkedIn applying to jobs. Not with their connection, but through those horrible workday portals and thousands of apps turned in after an hour of the post.
Perhaps you were unaware but there are good jobs in industries outside technology. And if you want a tech job, well there are quite a few in Alabama. Some of them are centered around the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Cool. So lemme just take 4 more years of school for 3x what I paid for back in the day and I'll be good to work at those non-tech jobs. Tough luck to those new grads who didn't have 4 years of foresight (or me who is already a decade into my career).
>if you want a tech job, well there are quite a few in Alabama
Hiring or "had a job up for 2 years but seemingly can't find nobody"?
Seriously. Try applying to some of these jobs and see how far you get. It's tough out there. it's not like 2015 where half your apps get a response.
I am nearly 15 years into being a tech professional and competing with these kids for jobs and the thing that is horrifying me is that I am being told I am not qualified enough after getting through the filter where these kids are all washed out for not having 10 years of experience in a 4 year old field.
Even looking at retraining into a different career, every single US corporation has completely shed their training costs to put onto their labor force, but we've gotten to the absurd point where 4-8 years of training is needed for an entry level job while corporations wont guarantee that the field even exists in a year.
The people I've spoken to in the field who have the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps, everything's better than in the past, why are you all complaining" mentality are the same ones who have verbatim told me that having a job in charge of a technical area at a faang that pays only mid 6 figures and has 5 peers on the planet, is a non prestigious job because their father is a near billionaire.
A lot of people on this forum are going to be shelling out for security in the next decade or finding out that they are made of meat, and hungry people don't really care where the food comes from.
I didn't say move to Alabama. Try Shaker Heights, Ohio. Believe it or not, there are jobs in a metro area with 2 million people in a variety of industries.
Of course there are jobs in these places. Some of these metro areas have 2 million people. They aren't just digging though the mud in the midwest like peasants in monty python. Student loans aren't so high if you went in state.
Exactly. Do people want to live in desirable areas? Absolutely. The much bigger draw to expensive metros, however, are the vastly more robust job prospects that come with those areas.
In a city, you have both much better chances of finding employment suited to your skills specifically, better chances of being paid well for it, and better chances of upwards mobility. Plus, should it become necessary you're more likely to be able to find something to keep the bills paid with even if it's not what you'd like to be doing.
Low CoL areas by contrast come with scant employment that's generally poorly compensated and almost always has a low ceiling.
In some cases one can commute into the city for work and live in LCoL area, but then you're burning time — multiple hours each day, usually — that you'll never get back on your employer instead of yourself or with your family, plus the myriad expenses that come with driving that far and often.
Which skills do you mean? If you're talking about skills in software development or investment banking then that might be true. But skills in welding or nursing can be applied anywhere.
Being capable of being applied everywhere doesn't mean they are compensated the same when comparing any two locations.
Even if that wasn't a factor and both locations paid the same, a dense city with many employers gives you a much better chance of finding a job when needed or seeking out better opportunities if you are being ambitious.
I grew up in one of these "great deal" towns with 2-3 employers that had more than 10 employees. Anyone who had a bad interaction with a single employer, which included asking for a raise, was blacklisted from employment and effectively homeless if they didn't leave town looking for work.
Whenever I visit my parents back home I notice how there appears to be no one in the town in their 20s to early 30s. Its either retirees or older parents who moved there to give their kids a country experience.
The few people I've kept in contact from growing up who are in that town currently make less money than an entry level McDonald's does near the city, and are only able to survive due to the help from their parents either in the form of free room and board or direct subsidizing.
Smaller areas have less hospitals and defense contractors. Nurses and Welders will be affected from the move too unless they already line something up.
Yep. I come from a rural area and my hometown has little to offer to nurses or welders. Be prepared for both a long commute and high chance of needing to switch to a different (likely longer) commute periodically to be able to stay employed without becoming hostage to a crappy employer. This is why all the young people (including myself) end up moving out and why the town is approaching being entirely elderly.
The countryside gets romanticized a lot but reality is not so rosy.
70k goes a lot further in these places than 170k does in a high cost of living area that is for sure. And 70k jobs aren't so hard to find in these places if you are college educated. You can easily pull that in sales. In management. There are consulting offices in these places. Yes, some tech. Jobs where you can make a whole lot more than 70k. Healthcare. Law. Consulting. Real estate. Finance. Accounting. Yes even manufacturing is still present at a certain scale. There are still a few steel mills and these days they employ mostly high skilled engineers. Still a need for pretty much all disciplines of engineering in these places in various sectors.
People think all there is to do is work in a waffle house in the shadow of a closed steel mill, but really these are cities that by definition need a somewhat diversified economy to even function as a city at all. They have all the various pieces that make a city a city and a region a region. Sorry, not much startups, but that's about the only exception, truly, and may not even be the case adjacent to the state flagship universities.
Affording a house is totally within reach if you want to make it a priority. Quite a few US states have both a low unemployment rate and a high homeownership rate. Try Vermont, Alabama, Montana, New Hampshire, Maine, Wyoming, etc. I understand that failed progressive policies have ruined opportunities for youths in some other states and that sucks but nationwide the future is still bright.
1. unemployment rate is low because people unemployed Doordash to make ends meet. This is not "a house is within reach" money.
2. saying "move to a state with less job opportunity" to afford necessities really shows how out of touch people are with the youth. They moving to another state with what money? How are they getting approved without a job in tow?
3. "I understand that failed progressive policies have ruined opportunities for youths in some other states" is a doubly loaded sentence. a) it was not "progressive policies" that enabled zoning laws, lobbied out workers rights and unions, and made women lose agencies of their bodies. b) This isn't a "state by state" thing. Tell me how the job market is in Kentucky and why it's thriving compared to New York
4. "nationwide the future is still bright" The nation is bright when old people prosper and the youth suffer (which you half acknowledge)? So what's happening in 20 years when most of those people die? Is it gonna finally trickle down this time?
Do you seriously believe that a lot of people in Vermont and Wyoming are working DoorDash? Young people are literally buying houses in those places. Put your prejudices aside and look at the actual economic data. Or keep whining, your choice.
>Side hustles account for 43% of the average hustler’s total income. That share climbs to 57% for Gen Z consumers and a striking 76% for those earning under $50,000 annually — turning what was once a cushion into a core source of liquidity.
Okay, your turn. Where's your economic data instead of "I know a young rocj dude who bought a house". Or is it easier to blame everyone else instead of taking a look at the reality around you.
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 oldest Baby Boomers came of age in the late 1960s. What about the world is worse now than then? I'm not here to defend the Baby Boomers but let's have a sense of perspective.
Certainly the world’s climate is worse. Wealth inequality is worse. I try hard not to be nostalgic, and even so I have to admit lots of things are not as good as they were in the 60s.
It’s not even like the physical infrastructure is all that much better. I live in a house built in the 50s, and clearly the people living in it then led a pretty similar life to mine. It just cost me a lot more money.
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.
Thats a bit of a strawman. Will religion pay your rent? Probably not. But focusing on a simple life around family and charity and not chasing material possessions or luxury might. Changing priorities from hip neighborhoods to family friendly neighborhoods may.
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.
Maybe this post has a narrow intended audience. Not every post has to be targeting all readers. If it's not true for you then it's not, y'know? Absolutely no need to lash out and HN is not a place for venting. Besides I think they're basically writing about themselves. By the upvotes and comments, it looks like some people do relate.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is literally my first time hearing this. All the stuff I see from china is about lying flat, giving up because no matter how hard you work it won't make a difference? Is this a Shenzhen attitude?
There is probably something to be said about living someplace that is actually investing in itself. Seeing new development actually rise to meet the demands of the population. Seeing new transit expanded. People uplifted out of rural poverty. New technological developments. The whole bit.
The US probably felt a little like that in the immediate post war period. The enthusiasm coming out of a terrible war and a terrible depression and seeing actual changes take place in the scale of weeks before your eyes must have been something else.
But today, most cities seem to have been content with solidifying into amber over the last 50 or so years. No investments into society. The poor are still poor and objectively have worse opportunities given the buying power of the jobs available to them. Development isn't happening on a scale to actually meet the population's needs. Transit and most public good efforts are an afterthought because of no direct business profitability angle. It becomes hard to get excited about medical advances when you understand the realities of our healthcare system and that many who need these medicines or treatments won't ever get them. No enthusiasm for anything. A large population of people against anything changing. Young people and young ideas stonewalled out of positions of power in favor of people who ought to have retired by now maintaining the status quo. Technological advances seemingly solely focused on establishing new ways to rent seek, gouge, police, control thoughts, versus things that are simply beneficial to others. "no brainer" ideas facing pushback. Common sense not being valued. The optimism coming out of the civil rights era dashed away against the realities that hate towards your fellow human is a position that will carry popularity in this country. Profit above all. Control above all. Blatant corruption and cronyism by the ruling elite. Awareness that we haven't taken off the shackles of feudalism.
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.
Not to dismiss child labor laws. But kids until some 100 years ago were useful, free labor to help around the house or even with your business. The financial incentive of having a kid now is an astronomical investment.
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.
> I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
I should have made that part clearer but my comment was solely on the kids part of their statement. I don't think marriage is inherently different from any other long-term partnership when it comes "existentially starving".
> As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
That's not what I meant at all. The article is about how burnout is a catchall that hides that at our core we actually struggle for meaning. "When facing the existential vacuum, there's only one way out - up, towards your highest purpose". Children do in a lot of way give meaning to your life, suddenly you have a reason for suffering. It's a hell of a stretch to call that happiness, but it's definitely something.
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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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.
There is only a sentence worth of interesting in the entire post, and most of that is the quote at the very beginning. The rest is a massive BS cloud. Everything after the word "vacuum" is hogwash.
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.
That’s because you’ve become so accustomed to politics as tribalism and sports-like entertainment that you’ve completely forgotten why we even started the political systems we have today in the first place. Divestment of power, not accumulation. Serving others, not ourselves. You can still embody those things. But it’s better to admit to ourselves that we aren’t selfless enough to do that, than hide behind a learned helplessness.
I feel that people who are “into politics” as such typically lean in deeper in on the tribalism/‘sports team resembling’ style of engagement.
I bet if you stop watching national popular news outlets and instead focus on local politics you'll find them much more tame. Of course this depends on where you live.
IMO People focus way too much on national politics and not enough on local.
From the inside it looks different and is noway near as hostile as media and especially the internets make it look like.
Politics is like sex. Watching it feels quite different from actually taking part.
Politics can be so much more than elections!
Focus on one issue and one bill, like you would with a startup MVP.
You can solve some of these problems in weeks!
Raising my family and building lasting things for the world are my positive sources of energy too!
I'm just saying that after 15 years founding three startups, I've found my building instinct works incredibly well in politics!
join a party that you care about. The tides are changing, they always do.
A plague on both their houses. Two major cults shouting past each other and a bunch of minor looneybins.
Both parties would cast me out for heresy for some of my beliefs and opinions. Why volunteer for that?
im in Canada, we have more than 2 parties
In the US we have a couple hundred; structurally, though, only at most two are usually meaningfully competitive at any given time (both locally and nationally, though historically not always the same two in every area as nationally), and which two are nationally conpetitive is very stable (though one of the two has changed at two different times in US history, one of which involved a significant period of only one national competitive party with internal factions.)
I understand. In Canada we have only had two parties create a federal government. But 5 separate parties have formed government provincially. 5 parties have federal presence. And if we didn't have first-past-the-post voting, we would easily have Greens, NDPs, and others in seats of federal power.
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
A good place to start is OSINT (open source intelligence) for your city/municipality because it requires little commitment, is scoped with regards to complexity and amount of information, and usually risk-free. Gather publicly available information about the companies in your area, who owns/runs them, your city council, any ongoing projects, the processes of funding stuff with public money and so on. Don't bother finding the best collection method or way to structure all the data, just start, you will figure things out on the way. Also be aware of your personal bias, which might make you dismiss important information or affect your judgement.
The next steps highly depend on where you live. Your HN profile says Australia, so at least safety-wise you are in a better spot. Connect to people in your area (preferrably offline), for example by organizing a local meetup, maybe there is one already. Activities can range from exchanging ideas to spreading awareness in your community to actively going against corrupt affairs. Make sure you know what and who you are up against, or you will have a very bad time.
Anticorruption is a group effort because it requires a lot of work and often special knowledge (info tech, law, finance, opsec, public relations and propaganda, ...) and, more importantly, a group provides safety from corrupt actors. On your own you will not be able to deal with lawsuits, misinformation, character assassination and worse.
I'd argue that the trend - that seems now deeply, deeply embedded - of alternative facts and straight lying is more important. As it opens the door to all manner of corruption.
I love your “clean source of sustainable energy” metaphor. This is a great example of “eudaimonic” well-being, or the idea of “doing well.”
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).
Perhaps it’s also the definition of meaningful work changes for an individual over time?
What I once found meaningful 20 years ago largely no longer feels that way. Both due to a lack of novelty and personal growth, and seeing how I was so naive regarding the outcomes and future I was supposedly building.
Those daily grinds back then for purpose were great - but sometimes the purpose never materializes since others (customers, business partners, society as a whole, etc) disagree with that purpose.
At least that’s how I tend to feel my life largely went. I thought I was building towards a different goal than what ended up happening, which makes me feel I wasted my life. Now it’s questioning whether or not I will ever find something that gives me that sense of purpose again without it ending up being a lie in the end. Why bring my “whole self” into a given task if it’s not going to end up with any sort of mental payback later?
Well in my personal opinion, there's extremely few material goals that have any purpose whatsoever, life is short, matter is ephermal.
Usually, I find, one has to invest an enormous effort to just find that purpose in the first place. And trying out paths/goals is part of that journey too.
I know I did a lot of soulsearching, in fact I was privilledged enough to save up for a couple of years to do JUST that, and I can report that it was a resounding success (with a sample size of one!).
However, as we're discussing this in the context of burnout, it's obvious that having a higher meaning did not take me out of my suffering. I still experience life as any other human being, I just feel like my life is not wasted - and the side effects of always striving for a goal - like focus and discipline - and other virtues - are a pleasant bonus. So I do sincerely think, that having a crystalized idea of my purpose creates a happy life for me.
There's nothing wrong with NOT having a goal, I just couldn't do it, even though matter IS ephermal, I believe that every action that we take, ultimately does have meaning.
In Positive Psychology, the science of meaning in life (not of life) breaks meaning down into three dimensions: coherence, significance, and purpose. If your job isn’t affording you significance (because your actions don’t “matter” in your organization) then your ability to find meaning in that work is threatened.
Your work may have coherence and purpose, but if it doesn’t have significance then it isn’t the source of meaning you thought it was.
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.
Go pay for the book then!
But founders aren’t a big enough target demographic to make money on I guess.
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!
If you vote with your feet, you can solve many structural problems with a time investment of only 2-5 years.
Fine, just don't masquerade your canvassing as something that's supposed to help with your mental health.
Depends if you behave like some current canvassers and/or candidates. Of course, I mean those who are straight forward corrupt liars.
And the problem is there seems to be no shortage of canvassers who'll advocate for such candidates.
So, your 'highest potential' argument is somewhat poisoned.
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.
Same for me. Its so odd having an illness, and taking medicine against that illness, and mostly reading an "universal truth" that the medication that helps you is bad someway. As you say, therapy but also getting a better sleep hygiene, better nutrition and exercise is so much easier with medicine.
Note what I actually wrote:
> 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.
It’s very well possible that you, and the person you answered to, are solidly part of the “needs medication” fraction. I do not believe that medication against depression is bad in general.
I know a surprising number of people who take ibuprofen daily but will avoid stretching and exercising.
Ive read from people having written more than 600-700 applications and are still without _any_ job - and those may have a mortgage.
How shall "proven and safe medication" help here?
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 :)
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.
> There’s little reason to avoid prescribing medication alongside other approaches.
There absolutely are downsides and risks. There is a reason the SSRIs carry a "blackbox" warning for youths due to increased suicide risks. There's a reason they should only be used under supervision of a doctor and need to be tapered off of.
That is not to say they aren't useful and necessary for some/many people but they aren't and shouldn't be a catch-all treatment.
A very specific edge case: If you ever think you might want to become a pilot, even just to fly small airplanes, the FAA still considers ADHD, depression, social anxiety, and other conditions where you are prescribed medication, to be disqualifying. And this is a "have you ever in your life" question on the medical form. So if you're prescribed ADHD medicine, even as a child, I understand that while it's not impossible, you are going to have a major uphill battle if you ever want to fly airplanes.
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.
Yes, I believe thinking can be hampered by depression...
>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.
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
you took amphetamine and weren't depressed suddenly? in my experience, that lasts a bit, but give it another decade or so. it tends to bite in other ways.
Going to depend on your dosages. I try to stay low and will take breaks to help reduce dependency. I actually really dislike the feeling of a high dosage and it does have negative effects at that end.
Also remember that everyone reacts differently to things. SSRIs work great for some people, but not for me. So it's worth trying different classes of medicines too but also to make sure that when having more dangerous ones. I made sure close friends knew too
What ways?
> 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.
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.
I'd encourage both of you to go and try talking to a therapist, based on my experiences.
You absolutely can start by saying "I don't seem to have the joy of life that others have" and see where that leads you.
It might not help, but it also might.
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.
Ah, yes, low wages and precarity are just mental imagery people have constructed in their minds. If only those fools stopped lying to themselves! /s
A personal prison can mean many things, and if low wages automatically mean precarity, then that's a type of stress that would be worthwhile to try and create a lesser draw on, imo.
For me, I'm always framing whatever I currently earn as "right now". Right now I'm doing ok, but it's fairly likely it won't last longer than 2 years, because it never has, and I have no reason to think it will this time. That means that even if a bank were to give me a long term loan, I'd be stupid to commit to anything but the most manageable terms, which means I'd have to consider what I'd be able to make in a part-time laborer position when layoffs come around or something.
If I can theoretically make myself liable for a 3.5k a month tiny condo mortgage, even if it's less than half my take home, I'd be uncomfortable doing so unless it was half that amount. Therefore, either a miracle needs to happen on the career side or the housing market needs to finally crash before my partner and I move out of this basement, no kids, used car etc.. and that's fine for now. If I lose a job, I need to have at least a year if not more of liquid or close to liquid assets available to cover living expenses, and for that to be possible, I need to have relatively minimal fixed liabilities
Ive come to realize that there is very little that would make me truly comfortable with big risks, so I decided to just start taking them. If they dont work out, I will have the consolation that I tried, and so far, it has been working out well. I Got myself liable for a 7k mortgage, about 80% of my take home. Nervous about commitment but married my wife. Nervous about kids, but have one on the way.
If it all comes tumbling down tomorrow, I would be out a ton of money, but basically where I was 5 years ago. I wish I had taken the plunge on each of these things 5 years earlier.
Nothing risked, nothing gained.
I've actually started taking the same approach—despite the content of my comment—just not with huge amounts of debt for things that only offer tenuous personal value. So, for me I've decided that it makes way more sense to fully commit to my long term relationship, and if it fails eventually, it won't be because I was trying to keep one foot out the door. That said, aside from automatic common law designation, marriage is not something I'm planning atm, even after many years.
> I Got myself liable for a 7k mortgage, about 80% of my take home.
That is... spicy. I guess context matters though, if you're already financially secure and the ongoing income would otherwise just be added to other investments, and the remaining 20% is enough to cover you, and if you're in a place that locks in your interest rate for the whole mortgage, then I could see that being less dramatic. Likewise if you're both working or stand to inherit something.
Additionally, a mortgage is one of those things where if you've consistently earned whatever income it is, then it's more a matter of being excessively cautious. I've probably only ever earned an income for half of my working life; year on year I might make zero or full-time income, and the economy (in Canada) is indeed tangibly precarious right now.
Broadly I agree though. I wouldn't be in the relatively good position I'm in now without a series of scary bets earlier, moving to a new city, trying harder at more ambitious career moves etc..
It's just that there have been multiple times where I've lost a job, couldn't find _anything_ to pay bills with for long enough that I've literally dropped all the way to zero financially, losing the rental, and needing to live out of a car, so those kinds of liabilities just don't (yet?) make any sense. My hunch is that for people who haven't had that experience, it's more of a major milestone that they're eventually going to do without a doubt in their mind, they just need the raw salary number
9-5 5 days per week sounds wonderful.
"You don't work that hard, I do".
Don't gatekeep.
Don't let antiwork enter the conversation either.
I’m not anti work but I do hate working in an office setting.
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.
If you're sad just don't be sad. Easy peasy just like that.
Nah, I'm good. You have no clue how brains actually work.
How do brains actually work?
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.
Burnout, anxiety disorders, panic attacks. One of them.
Lol spare us the pop psychology and concern trolling. Your lame analogy has about as much scientific validity as phrenology.
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.
I felt similarly before, my take is to gradually add social structure to life. direction can funnel and catalyse energy.
e.g. pottery, crossfit, book club. for me, it was bjj, a world of warcraft group, and a "beer club".
regularly watching and chatting in a small twitch stream could be a start, but beware its parasocial nature
solo activities add structure but social bonds reinforce discipline and motivation. "someone will notice my absence".
In my opinion, what you need is a person (or three), not a book :)
Someone who relies on you, whatever the context, is some of the greatest motivation out there.
Can you elaborate? Do you mean getting kids? I just got out of a relationship that felt too close for me...
As a widower who just sent his kid off to the grandparents to visit for a few days, and is now missing his person, his kid, who relies on him and feeling the effects of missing purpose...
Sure, it could be kids, a partner, a spouse, or a friend or family. But it could also be the rest of the team on the weekly bowling league, the puppies at the shelter who need playtime each week with a volunteer human, the community one serves as a volunteer firefighter, the homeless shelter where one helps serve the weekly dinner, the neighbor who needs help with yard upkeep, or any other parts of the village where one lives that relies on you, and makes you feel included, involved, and fulfilled inside by having that purpose.
I think they mean you should commit yourself to something that you have to show up for regularly, because someone you care about is counting on you.
Not kids. Maybe start with a gym or workout buddy. Then work your way up to projects or volunteer work, with people you can't blow off.
Not sure if you're single, but go on some dates. Getting excited about another human being can be a huge boost. You don't need to replace work with other intellectualism (though you certainly can!)
Thank you.
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.
Yeah I’ve got three teens headed out the door so I’ve been there too.
My un at icloud is best.
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.
There is danger to that as well. Work can be an addiction. It is often solitary and removes you from focus on your actual self, friends, family, or community, in favor of "the work."
I'm in exactly this place. Looking for help (books) to get out. Care to reend anything?
Ah, to have any real amount of time to work on something. Sounds surreal.
It’s great!
I bet
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.
Yeah but work isn't all there is to life, at least for me. There are way more fulfilling things. If you like your work more than anything else in life, good for you. Different strokes for different folks.
I don't think that's possible for the vast majority of working people.
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.
It could be just getting older. I don't have any kids, but I care less about work now. It's just a job. Life is out there.
This! It's much healthier this way.
If you don't have a zen attitude around a three year old you're going to have a bad time
Zen about kids and warrior about work!
And work = highest purpose!
LOL! Totally!
Anyone can develop a Zen attitude by committing to Zen meditation, or other forms of meditation. It may sound trite, but depression can come from managing the past, anxiety from managing the future. But the past is gone, the future is just a fantasy, what is real is what is happening now. The more time spent in the present, the less anxiety and depression. This is one of the benefits of meditation.
I don't have kids but I'm learning to be more zen at work. I think its a learnable thing. I can see how kids would accelerate that though
Agreed! Being more Zen is awesome and you don't need kids for that.
> the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing.
Depends. At 3am it's not.
That's a pretty short period in the grand scheme of things. Before you know it they'll be driving and just a year or two from leaving the nest and you'll wish you could have had more time with them.
Yup, but when you’re sleep deprived the months feel like years, and if unlucky and you got a bad sleeper the years can feel like decades
Sometimes the years feel like ... decades. Some bad sleepers are bad sleepers for a longer time than others.
There’s a lot more to having kids than the relatively short window when they’re very young and waking up a lot in the middle of the night.
Before having kids I read so much about this difficult period and thought it was going to be the defining feature of having kids.
Then you go through it and one month you realize they’re sleeping through the night. Then you have an entire lifetime.
So yeah, it’s not fun. But it’s also such a tiny segment of parenthood that the emphasis on it feels pretty excessive.
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)
I am hardware developer and certified electrician as a hobby. I have regularly clients that are buying time while I do really simple things on the property. It’s really cringe to be asked to vacuum their dirt for couple hours. I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money. I tried politely ask to do rudimentary things by themselves, but it never worked out. I grew in poverty and have hard time understanding this.
My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.
> I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money.
This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.
It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.
This is a core reason for my own burnout - why should I work for a culture that seemingly promotes lazy/hypocritical behavior? Reminds me of "Idiocracy" or "burn after reading" the "league of morons"
Hello, I am a little confused about your post. Why are they having you vacuum things if you are an electrician?
Separately, what is a certified electrician - are you licensed in your state?
Yes. Not only that, but I can work with electricity meters and put seals. It’s in Germany and very complicated and best unemployment insurance I could find.
Glad you brought up your friend in the 2nd bit there as it seems to have become relatively common for some people to make food delivery services a very regular part of their lifestyle without really paying attention to the staggering amount of saturated fat they are ingesting even from the majority of "healthy" options available on these services (nevermind the even worse fast food options)
Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.
Saturated fat is not the demon we've been lead to believe for the past 30-40 years. Sugar is. And there's a lot of sugar in prepared food too.
I think you'll find scientific consensus isn't on your side here. The American Heart Association certainly doesn't agree with your assessment
The American Heart Association has a huge investment in a narrative they've been pushing for 40 years.
Randomized controlled trials show LDL consistently drops with lower saturated fat intake, and randomized controlled trials show LDL strongly correlated with coronary risk. It’s one of the best-established causal relationships in nutrition science.
The American Heart Association’s narrative is based in observed clinical relationship between saturated fat intake, LDL, and coronary events.
Excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both bad.
There’s been a big social media push to turn saturated fat into a good thing, but everything I actually read in the research still points to excess saturated fat being a bad idea.
It's not about buying time though, it's about what you do with the bought time. I see a lot of people using these expensive services and then wasting the extra time - or worse, filling time while they wait for the completion.
Time is time. If one values doing nothing more than doing house chores, then they are buying time by paying a cleaner.
It is about spending your time doing what you want (including doing nothing if that's your thing), and outsource the things that you don't want to do.
I was with you until...
> and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.
I _really_ wish I could find a contractor that didn't suck up more time than they save every single time!
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.
That’s the best improvement to my life ever. I migrated from a normal-person rental to a million-dollars house, but to me the true luxury is, having someone to set the house back to impeccable state. I should have done that in my 42sqm flat.
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.
X0–X127, easy.
Ah so their names are just ARM64 registers. Now I get it.
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.
I decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up.
It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.
But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.
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.
Heh, so I oversimplified that part of the story in my original post, for the sake of brevity.
You're right, one shouldn't DIY the foundation of ones house, unless you really know what you're doing(and honestly, not even then: it's too much work!)
I'm not sure it was clear in my original comment, but the 1840 I wrote in there is the original construction year of the house. The technique my foundation was built with hasn't been used for a little over a century: Not a lot of construction firms around with experience in it! And it's not easy to replace a foundation, because, well, it's under the house! Luckily repairing turned out to be possible(simplifying again, sorry!), and not particularly difficult in technical terms. It just wasn't easy either, but in physical terms.
I did have a professional "building conservationist"(rough translation) over for consultation. Basically he looked over what was, I told him my plan, and then he told me what to do instead. (I actually wasn't far off - I had spent a lot of time reading up on it before he came - he just added a few (possibly vital) details I hadn't thought of)
The conservationist did have a construction firm and offered their services, but we had budgeted for a kitchen upgrade, and while we had some margins in the original plan, with the extra work we got surprised with, we were strained to afford the materials. Just the ground insulation material cost almost as much as the new IKEA kitchen furniture!
The good thing in all this is that the new construction should, in theory, according to the conservationist who actually does know these things, probably last a couple of centuries!
Not everyone has the means to call in a “professional” and pay the fully loaded price without trying to trim some fat. It sounds to me like they were taking the fat out of the foundation job by mining out a space for the repair. What he’s describing is probably between the mid five figures and the low six figures to get a professional to do. I don’t know many people who could come up with the down payment for a construction loan on that.
I also took on a remodel under similar conditions and I think that the decision they undertook was likely very reasonable at the time. The outcome, in retrospect, would be obvious as well. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and finish something.
Why didn't you just pay someone to take over out of interest?
3 factors. Biggest one the aforementioned stupidity. I'm also very stubborn, so that didn't help either.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the planned changes, combined with the unplanned ones (which were like 90% of the work), put the project well outside our budget unless we did it ourselves.
"just stop being poor!"
Tbf, I did start the comment with "I have more money and no kids". I don't fault anyone for discarding poverty after that point on!
But yeah, in the end even my budget was stretched to it's limits! Not that I was in any way poor, pulling around 3x the average salary in my area. Shit just got crazy expensive. Had I known the condition the house was in when I bought it, I would've lowered my offer by around 25%. But it was impossible to inspect the foundation without first breaking up the floor, and I don't blame the seller for not wanting to do that. I don't think they knew the condition either tbf. Based on the bottled message I found, nobody had looked under those floorboards since shortly after Kennedy's assassination!
Look, I have kids - and no money.
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.
Even if you reach that point, you're likely now at the age where fertility problems become a real issue.
If you want to have kids do it when you're in your early 20s.
This sort of "hurry up or it'll be too late" attitude is a great way to figure out that you don't want to have kids after it's too late to make that choice.
This is factually false :) and if you’re really worried, there are many options available to you to preserve what you will need or consider adoption - there are so many humans being born without a family after all.
I agree with you on a factual basis, but you understand that a large amount of people have a deep emotional instinct to not be ok with those options, right?
Indeed, that’s what I mean by raising awareness. It takes time to change such deeply rooted beliefs. I think if humans are to prosper and resolve planet-wide challenges like global warming, we need to be better at managing resources and we need to work together as a species, not separate counties fending for themselves.
Well, I'm not sure I agree with convincing people to not feel this way, but its admirable that you are putting in effort to change the world in a way that fits your morals
Most people I know realize they should have had kids sooner once they have them. Adoption is also not that easy, there are plenty of cases where adoption causes kidnapping.
How does adoption cause kidnapping?
There have been a lot of cases where adopted kids where not abandoned but rather taken from their parents. There is a market in adoptions and not everybody involved has been "clean".
Birth parent has regrets and wants "their" kid back?
> you'll never have kids
Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.
If {some subset of the government, rich people, people who control the economy} want more people to have kids, which is something I keep hearing from that class of people: They need to collectively figure out how to put more money into the pockets of people. Higher salaries, drastic tax cuts, cheaper housing, more people will be financially ready and more kids will happen as a result. Also, work hours need to be standardized at 4 hours/day per person OR costs of living need to be designed that 1 parental income is enough.
I think those people realize this, but it's a bit like global warming. They like their lifestyles.
i agree with most of your points, especially the reduction of work hours, but cost is not the issue that keeps people from having kids. it's actually the reverse. the more money people have, the less likely they have kids.
the problem is lifestyle and career demands.
I think it's also because high middle class earners are financially smart (don't buy things if they don't have the money), AND health-smart (realize their body's needs, including sleep) so they choose logically not to have kids, because they do not have the resources for it, and will not sacrifice their own well-being just to have kids.
The upper class is financially smart, AND has the resources (20+ years of child rearing costs already secured upfront, ability to hire night nannies, ability to take a few years away from work without income, own a home and not at the mercy of rent increases), so they have kids.
The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to sacrifice themselves and buy things they cannot afford. They are given insufficient resources and told that they should have kids, so they do.
The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to buy things they cannot afford, including kids, so they have kids.
i don't believe that is true.
raising kids is not that expensive. what is expensive is the high expectations for what you should spend on your kids with that middle class and high earners have. like sending kids to college.
> raising kids is not that expensive
Huh? In a world where people have zero job security, could get put on some layoff or 15%-per-year PIP quota any time and lose their income at the whim of some politics 5 levels above, and any random health issue could cost hundreds of thousands due to insurance not paying, I'd say as a self-proclaimed financially literate person, that you'd need to save up a couple million in cash and set it aside to even begin considering kids.
I could be on the chopping block tomorrow at work and then have to downsize my lifestyle next week, but I'm prepared to downsize as a child-less person. If I didn't have the entire course of child-rearing costs saved up in cash I wouldn't consider starting the process. If children cost $2 million over the entire course of their life, I need to have $2 million now. In cash. That's the financially smart way in an income-uncertain world; you don't ever assume things that you don't already have.
20 years ago, job security was pretty good, you could relax and saving up the full cost in cash was not a prerequisite. You could throw your money into a mutual fund and get rich, because the US had sane economic leaders. You were virtually guaranteed a job if you had skills. None of this is guaranteed anymore. Nowadays, you either have it or you don't; the system guarantees you nothing about the future.
And if one wants to avoid that chopping block in today's corporate work environments, working nights and weekends is a good start, but then you'd have no time for kids.
2 million? how do you even come up with that number? you are proving my point.
food, clothes, school materials, a bike. maybe a computer. also a bed and a few square meters of space in your home. everything else is optional. that doesn't cost 100,000 per year. not even 10,000.
sure, with less money you have less to offer or your kids. no or only cheap vacations, no expensive toys. no fancy brand name clothes. no expensive extra curricular activities. and certainly no money for college. but none of these things are necessary to have and raise kids. and it is not irresponsible to have kids and raise them that way either.
Life costs a LOT more than you estimate.
Start with housing. A few more square meters costs ~$1000 more on top of what I pay now, per month.
That's $200K in today's dollars or $500-700K over their childhood (0-18 years) if you include inflation, rent increases over the next 20 years.
If you want to sleep 8 hours a day AND work demands 12-15 hours a day, you absolutely need nannies, add $500K for that.
Because today's work environments demand that many hours a day, you evidently don't have time to cook anymore so you need to buy all your food, add $20K/year for that, or $350K.
Costs add up pretty quick.
you seem to be living in a very expensive area. (where, if i may ask?). those with lower income are not going to be living there, so your constraints are not going to apply to them.
and your math only works for middle to high income earners.
2k/month for a nanny to compensate for 5 hours lost per day means that you have to earn 20$ per hour extra. in a minimum wage job that only pays $15 per hour you would be financially better off to work less, so you don't need that nanny.
so you simply aren't going to work 15 hours per day. same for the food. 20K per year is more than $50 per day. again, you are going to work less in order to make the time to cook because the extra money earned does not make up for the higher expense of eating out.
are you suggesting that there are no jobs that demand less than 12 hours per day? so your choice is either work 12-15 hours or be unemployed? i do not believe that.
> Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.
It's sad to see people so deep in the consumerist rat race that giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet.
Weirdly enough people who actually don't have money are the one having the most kids. And people who lived pretty much from 300k years ago until the ~1950s had it worse than you yet they had more kids. People making 1m a year have less kids than people working in fucking coal mines 100 years ago.
We don't have less kids because we're poorer than 50 years ago, we have less kids because we drunk way too much capitalist kool aid and put traveling, buying shit, careers, money in front of everything else on our list of priorities: https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values...
> giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet
It is, though. My own food, water, housing, heating, hobbies and things that make me happy, are all cells on that sheet as well. The numbers add up now. Money for kids would absolutely obliterate all the other cells on that sheet, and the numbers wouldn't add up.
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.
Stop looking it country by country. Globally, the trend is that of an increasing population. And fast. Humans are reproducing at unsustainable level.
The number is still rising but the growth rate is plummeting.
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2016/03/ourworldin...
It’s a trend and it’s slowing down not plummeting. And even if it is, there are already more of us than we know how to sustain.
The problem at hand is not growth rate slowing down, it’s humans divided in tiny pockets of countries burning through what little we have left of natural resources.
People who have kids today, do so knowing that their children will most certainly be displaced by natural disasters.
there are already more of us than we know how to sustain
what is the evidence for that? if that were true then we would have lot's of people going hungry, but that's simply not the case. poverty is getting reduced world wide. if we could not sustain the current population, we should have lots of people dying from hunger and the population should stop growing. but the reason why population is growing especially in africa is exactly because the growth is still sustainable. if it wasn't, then it could not be growing.
In 100 years, "us" is going to be Elon Musk's grandchildren, people from Niger, etc. and none of them are going to think like you whether they have to move or not.
here is a more current graph that predicts the growth rate to become negative in the 2080s:
https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=900&type=Probabilis...
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.
Can you elaborate more on what you mean by that?
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'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.
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.
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.
Well, then, as a Millennial it seems like I had it the best. The ‘90s were fantastic. Then 9/11 and those wars weren’t great but didn’t affect life except in those countries. Started uni just before the GFC, only to finish grad school just as startups were picking up in the early 2010s and then when 2020 hit had lots of money already that work wasn’t critical. Then modern generative AI showed up and I have so much experience it just accelerated me.
My life rules hahaha. Only problem is that the older generations are going to parasitize my kids for disability money and shit but I’ll just move them to where humanity is growing if it comes to that.
Bizarrely my parents also feel like their generation had a great time. So who can tell. Maybe I’ll make it so that Gen Beta says the same story.
The 90s WERE fantastic, with the usual caveats (location etc). I think we should take a closer look at that decade for future reference.
And our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Gen X was called the Slacker Generation because we didn't think it was worth trying very hard. We didn't want the life of our parents: working all day at a job they hated just to buy stuff to impress neighbors that they didn't like. [Yes, Fight Club was about Gen X--or at least that's what we tell ourselves.]
But it got better. For me, computers were a salvation. I found that all that time I spent writing PC video games resulted in skills that companies valued. We were the first digital natives. I remember having to teach 50-something year-old CEOs how to type ("Hold down the shift key for uppercase").
I don't know what unique characteristics will save today's Gen Z. They be able to take advantage of the wrenching change that AI is about to unleash. They'll be in the thick of the changes, but still young enough to adapt. Us older generations will have a harder time.
> I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Their words implied they were a member of your generation.
There is some difference between real struggles, and uncomfortable fear for things which didn't happen. Were you unable to afford a home because of fear of nuclear war? Or for fear of AIDS?
I was unable to afford a home because of fear of bouncing checks. I lived in an apartment with 3 other roommates.
And we all knew people who had died of AIDS, and I wasn't even in an at-risk community. Gay men I knew felt that they had gone through an apocalypse, like they were the survivors of a secret war that no one talked about.
Home ownership when I was growing up was around 50%. Not owning a home was extremely normal, not a sign of deprivation.
Not ever in your life being able to afford a home is the new normal, and to me it's a sign of deprivation. That's the reality younger generations are dealing with, not only temporarily renting, but renting for life.
Which isn't anything new. It's feudalism, and the way things usually are. But that's a far greater concern for those in that situation, than AIDS or nuke scares.
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.
Sure, but I also make ~6x as much as I did 15 years ago. Despite that I still think everything is too fucking expensive.
I make 5x less than I did 2 years ago. Everything is indeed, too expensive.
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.
real shame because dating apps were meant to actually optimize matches 15 years ago. Now it's normalized and maximized for "engagement".
This is a such a cop-out. We millennials had it easy compared to zoomers.
That’s true, graduating into my “once in a lifetime” economic meltdown made the second one barely even register.
I only felt the empathy someone can have when they have also lived through the same events, for all the zoomers graduating into the post Covid job market.
Millennials and younger are all fucked for the same reasons and are going to continue getting fucked over unless some revolutionary change happens.
We’ll also be in this together as we watch our boomer/genx parents burn up the last of any existing generational wealth sitting comatose in a nursing home because they refused to accept that they will actually die some day, and so made no plans for it
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.
If you believe that there is no action that could improve your situation, then you're right. You're stuck. Best just learn to accept what you've got.
But that is almost certainly not true. You are playing a high-dimensional game with a few hundred degrees of freedom and imperfect information. You already know how to play this game: make a move, see the result, adjust your strategy and make another move.
Of course, it's not easy. Maybe you don't know which move to make. Maybe you don't know which moves are available. Try the following: Ask HN. Describe your current situation, describe your goals, and ask HN for advice. I guarantee there are lots of smart people here who will answer. One of those answers might even be helpful to you. You never know.
Me. Personally, no. I'm not out of moves. I'm making moves but I do have much less options than a few years prior. I'll make it through one way or another
But that's just me, as a late millennial that had some professional experience before the rug was pulled from under me. I have value to show to the few companies looking for actual labor. People a few years younger than me are absolutely thrown on a chess board with 2 pawns and told "good luck, I did these moves when I graduated... (with a bishop and Knight)". I don't know what actionable advice I can give outside of "survive until the market improves. Work on your portfolio and network if/when you can to prepare for that". But it's not great advice.
I get that.
My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
But that's just my opinion.
>My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
But that mentality is part of the issue. "they" can't do much about it. "we" as a collective can. have our representatives at the very least penalize ghost job postings and that's already a big step. And then from there we could make disincentives for outsourcing and reel in the abuse of the H1-B program. You'd be surprised how quickly things can change when politicians have a fire under their butts to do something.
But all that first requires awareness, and then empathy. Something that some of this community clearly lacks.
>I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
I feel issue #2 is that there is such thing as "toxic positivity". Giving hope instead of recognizing that things are bad only enrages those who feel bad. People don't like having their lived experienced invalidated, especially by those who haven't lived it themselves.
Advice needs to be tailored as such too. Saying "just keep interviewing" is technically realistic advice, but not one that gives much agency if the issue of burn out is applying for jobs.
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.
I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
I find this almost comically revisionist.
400,000 US soldiers/marines never came home. Another 600,000 came back wounded. That's at least a million families affected.
And by 1950, only five years after the end of the war, millions of men were sent overseas again for the Korean War.
And after that, the children of the returned WWII soldiers were sent off to Vietnam, unleashing the greatest civil unrest in the US since the Civil War.
And you think it was a great time for all because the dollar was worth a lot?
All problems that you've listed seem pretty minor compared to what was happening in the rest of the world at that time, reinforcing my point.
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.
They don't want just a house though. They want a house in a "cool" area. Look at median home prices in rust belt cities. Mortgages around $2k a month or so. Very doable for a lot of people but you never hear a drum beat about this. You never hear about people moving to these cities unless they have family there already to remind them that, hey, this is in fact a great deal.
>They don't want just a house though. They want a house in a "cool" area.
I'd just like a proper job again, thanks. Just like I had before the tech industry shit itself 2-3 years ago. My current "cool" ideas are not being in debt and not worrying about a 3000 dollar catalytic converter replacement.
Now my "really cool ideas" is being able to take a bus around town without being stranded if I miss the last bus at 8pm. But that's blue sky thinking right now.
Are there jobs in those cities who sit in an area named after their economic collapse?
Do student loan costs go down if you move to a low cost of living area?
We had some movement in the direction of people immigrating to low cost areas like that with the rise of remote work, but then execs decided they didn’t like not having control over their workers live and did RTO. To their offices in the cities with high rent and home prices.
You never heard about people taking that “great deal” because it’s not a great deal. Like really, you think there’s money left on the table like that and there’s not at least some low double digit percentage of the population that would have sought out the benefit? Or is it more likely the market evaluated the option and it’s not good
It's very rich when people who are likely 15-20+ years in their career in San Franscisco are telling the modern youth to just "move to Alabama". As if they can just find a cushy tech job in a market that is using RTO's to force layoffs.
People this detached really need to spend a few days on linkedIn applying to jobs. Not with their connection, but through those horrible workday portals and thousands of apps turned in after an hour of the post.
Perhaps you were unaware but there are good jobs in industries outside technology. And if you want a tech job, well there are quite a few in Alabama. Some of them are centered around the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Cool. So lemme just take 4 more years of school for 3x what I paid for back in the day and I'll be good to work at those non-tech jobs. Tough luck to those new grads who didn't have 4 years of foresight (or me who is already a decade into my career).
>if you want a tech job, well there are quite a few in Alabama
Hiring or "had a job up for 2 years but seemingly can't find nobody"?
Seriously. Try applying to some of these jobs and see how far you get. It's tough out there. it's not like 2015 where half your apps get a response.
I am with you 100%.
I am nearly 15 years into being a tech professional and competing with these kids for jobs and the thing that is horrifying me is that I am being told I am not qualified enough after getting through the filter where these kids are all washed out for not having 10 years of experience in a 4 year old field.
Even looking at retraining into a different career, every single US corporation has completely shed their training costs to put onto their labor force, but we've gotten to the absurd point where 4-8 years of training is needed for an entry level job while corporations wont guarantee that the field even exists in a year.
The people I've spoken to in the field who have the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps, everything's better than in the past, why are you all complaining" mentality are the same ones who have verbatim told me that having a job in charge of a technical area at a faang that pays only mid 6 figures and has 5 peers on the planet, is a non prestigious job because their father is a near billionaire.
A lot of people on this forum are going to be shelling out for security in the next decade or finding out that they are made of meat, and hungry people don't really care where the food comes from.
Could you export a few of those to Louisiana?
I didn't say move to Alabama. Try Shaker Heights, Ohio. Believe it or not, there are jobs in a metro area with 2 million people in a variety of industries.
Of course there are jobs in these places. Some of these metro areas have 2 million people. They aren't just digging though the mud in the midwest like peasants in monty python. Student loans aren't so high if you went in state.
Exactly. Do people want to live in desirable areas? Absolutely. The much bigger draw to expensive metros, however, are the vastly more robust job prospects that come with those areas.
In a city, you have both much better chances of finding employment suited to your skills specifically, better chances of being paid well for it, and better chances of upwards mobility. Plus, should it become necessary you're more likely to be able to find something to keep the bills paid with even if it's not what you'd like to be doing.
Low CoL areas by contrast come with scant employment that's generally poorly compensated and almost always has a low ceiling.
In some cases one can commute into the city for work and live in LCoL area, but then you're burning time — multiple hours each day, usually — that you'll never get back on your employer instead of yourself or with your family, plus the myriad expenses that come with driving that far and often.
Which skills do you mean? If you're talking about skills in software development or investment banking then that might be true. But skills in welding or nursing can be applied anywhere.
Being capable of being applied everywhere doesn't mean they are compensated the same when comparing any two locations.
Even if that wasn't a factor and both locations paid the same, a dense city with many employers gives you a much better chance of finding a job when needed or seeking out better opportunities if you are being ambitious.
I grew up in one of these "great deal" towns with 2-3 employers that had more than 10 employees. Anyone who had a bad interaction with a single employer, which included asking for a raise, was blacklisted from employment and effectively homeless if they didn't leave town looking for work.
Whenever I visit my parents back home I notice how there appears to be no one in the town in their 20s to early 30s. Its either retirees or older parents who moved there to give their kids a country experience.
The few people I've kept in contact from growing up who are in that town currently make less money than an entry level McDonald's does near the city, and are only able to survive due to the help from their parents either in the form of free room and board or direct subsidizing.
Smaller areas have less hospitals and defense contractors. Nurses and Welders will be affected from the move too unless they already line something up.
Yep. I come from a rural area and my hometown has little to offer to nurses or welders. Be prepared for both a long commute and high chance of needing to switch to a different (likely longer) commute periodically to be able to stay employed without becoming hostage to a crappy employer. This is why all the young people (including myself) end up moving out and why the town is approaching being entirely elderly.
The countryside gets romanticized a lot but reality is not so rosy.
70k goes a lot further in these places than 170k does in a high cost of living area that is for sure. And 70k jobs aren't so hard to find in these places if you are college educated. You can easily pull that in sales. In management. There are consulting offices in these places. Yes, some tech. Jobs where you can make a whole lot more than 70k. Healthcare. Law. Consulting. Real estate. Finance. Accounting. Yes even manufacturing is still present at a certain scale. There are still a few steel mills and these days they employ mostly high skilled engineers. Still a need for pretty much all disciplines of engineering in these places in various sectors.
People think all there is to do is work in a waffle house in the shadow of a closed steel mill, but really these are cities that by definition need a somewhat diversified economy to even function as a city at all. They have all the various pieces that make a city a city and a region a region. Sorry, not much startups, but that's about the only exception, truly, and may not even be the case adjacent to the state flagship universities.
A yes, the rust belt, where folks are famously living like fat cats.
Detroit used to suck, but it seems like enough millenials took that deal that it’s way better than ten years ago.
Used to be you could buy a starter home in those cool places. I live in one today with a $1200 mortgage. Good luck buying that now, kids.
Per Atrioc
I've been got
Affording a house is totally within reach if you want to make it a priority. Quite a few US states have both a low unemployment rate and a high homeownership rate. Try Vermont, Alabama, Montana, New Hampshire, Maine, Wyoming, etc. I understand that failed progressive policies have ruined opportunities for youths in some other states and that sucks but nationwide the future is still bright.
https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm
https://www.statsamerica.org/sip/rank_list.aspx?rank_label=h...
1. unemployment rate is low because people unemployed Doordash to make ends meet. This is not "a house is within reach" money.
2. saying "move to a state with less job opportunity" to afford necessities really shows how out of touch people are with the youth. They moving to another state with what money? How are they getting approved without a job in tow?
3. "I understand that failed progressive policies have ruined opportunities for youths in some other states" is a doubly loaded sentence. a) it was not "progressive policies" that enabled zoning laws, lobbied out workers rights and unions, and made women lose agencies of their bodies. b) This isn't a "state by state" thing. Tell me how the job market is in Kentucky and why it's thriving compared to New York
4. "nationwide the future is still bright" The nation is bright when old people prosper and the youth suffer (which you half acknowledge)? So what's happening in 20 years when most of those people die? Is it gonna finally trickle down this time?
Do you seriously believe that a lot of people in Vermont and Wyoming are working DoorDash? Young people are literally buying houses in those places. Put your prejudices aside and look at the actual economic data. Or keep whining, your choice.
>Do you seriously believe that a lot of people in Vermont and Wyoming are working DoorDash?
Among the youth who cannot get into entry level work, or the displaced who can't find a new job: yes.
>Put your prejudices aside and look at the actual economic data.
https://www.pymnts.com/gig-economy/2025/gen-z-turns-side-gig...
>Side hustles account for 43% of the average hustler’s total income. That share climbs to 57% for Gen Z consumers and a striking 76% for those earning under $50,000 annually — turning what was once a cushion into a core source of liquidity.
Okay, your turn. Where's your economic data instead of "I know a young rocj dude who bought a house". Or is it easier to blame everyone else instead of taking a look at the reality around you.
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.
This presumes I'm thankful for being in this world they gave us, which is not a given.
Be thankful you have the intelligence to even have such thoughts at all.
I don’t know, less intelligent people often seem happier.
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.
People should be impressed. We're doing a terrible job of teaching history. "Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy."
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 oldest Baby Boomers came of age in the late 1960s. What about the world is worse now than then? I'm not here to defend the Baby Boomers but let's have a sense of perspective.
Certainly the world’s climate is worse. Wealth inequality is worse. I try hard not to be nostalgic, and even so I have to admit lots of things are not as good as they were in the 60s.
It’s not even like the physical infrastructure is all that much better. I live in a house built in the 50s, and clearly the people living in it then led a pretty similar life to mine. It just cost me a lot more money.
Life chances for each generation in the imperial core have begun declining whereas back then life chances were continually improving.
Are millennials the "older" generation now? Ooof, my bones...
Some of us turned 40 this year.
The youngest Millennials turned 30 this year; the oldest 45.
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.
Will Jesus pay my rent? Because His yoke may be light, but my landlord's isn't.
Thats a bit of a strawman. Will religion pay your rent? Probably not. But focusing on a simple life around family and charity and not chasing material possessions or luxury might. Changing priorities from hip neighborhoods to family friendly neighborhoods may.
Even my best neighbors didn't let me sit in their house when I'm in danger of not affording rent. A "simple life" is more expensive than ever now.
And yes. odds are that those who are going to church already have the "simple life" covered. So be careful of selection bias.
> 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.
That's the danger of assuming people's lifestyle in a post like this. You say
>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.
And people will lash out if they haven't even gotten that far. it's tone deaf to the wider realities of society.
Maybe this post has a narrow intended audience. Not every post has to be targeting all readers. If it's not true for you then it's not, y'know? Absolutely no need to lash out and HN is not a place for venting. Besides I think they're basically writing about themselves. By the upvotes and comments, it looks like some people do relate.
"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.
Agree to disagree. I don't appreciate that you glossed over the second worst economic crisis in US history.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really don't like articles that are just about plugging in the authors other real business. Nothing new, all truisms.
No, trust me, it is burnout and working too much for too little gain.
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.
Key sentence
Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work.
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...
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.
No, actually, I'm burnt out.
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.
this is a book ad. i ain't buying it
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.
This is literally my first time hearing this. All the stuff I see from china is about lying flat, giving up because no matter how hard you work it won't make a difference? Is this a Shenzhen attitude?
There is probably something to be said about living someplace that is actually investing in itself. Seeing new development actually rise to meet the demands of the population. Seeing new transit expanded. People uplifted out of rural poverty. New technological developments. The whole bit.
The US probably felt a little like that in the immediate post war period. The enthusiasm coming out of a terrible war and a terrible depression and seeing actual changes take place in the scale of weeks before your eyes must have been something else.
But today, most cities seem to have been content with solidifying into amber over the last 50 or so years. No investments into society. The poor are still poor and objectively have worse opportunities given the buying power of the jobs available to them. Development isn't happening on a scale to actually meet the population's needs. Transit and most public good efforts are an afterthought because of no direct business profitability angle. It becomes hard to get excited about medical advances when you understand the realities of our healthcare system and that many who need these medicines or treatments won't ever get them. No enthusiasm for anything. A large population of people against anything changing. Young people and young ideas stonewalled out of positions of power in favor of people who ought to have retired by now maintaining the status quo. Technological advances seemingly solely focused on establishing new ways to rent seek, gouge, police, control thoughts, versus things that are simply beneficial to others. "no brainer" ideas facing pushback. Common sense not being valued. The optimism coming out of the civil rights era dashed away against the realities that hate towards your fellow human is a position that will carry popularity in this country. Profit above all. Control above all. Blatant corruption and cronyism by the ruling elite. Awareness that we haven't taken off the shackles of feudalism.
"lying flat" and unemployment are a thing, but nowhere near as bad as media makes it out to be. My experience is mainly in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
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.
Not to dismiss child labor laws. But kids until some 100 years ago were useful, free labor to help around the house or even with your business. The financial incentive of having a kid now is an astronomical investment.
I think, until very recently, people had kids because the sex is good.
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?
Many religions still have pre-arranged marriages. Easy way to solve the issue of having to look attractive in an app.
Religion realigns order, people look up in the same direction instead of past each other when contemplating meaning.
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.
> I mean marriage is a global concept but it feels like the US makes a huge deal about it.
I should have made that part clearer but my comment was solely on the kids part of their statement. I don't think marriage is inherently different from any other long-term partnership when it comes "existentially starving".
> As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
That's not what I meant at all. The article is about how burnout is a catchall that hides that at our core we actually struggle for meaning. "When facing the existential vacuum, there's only one way out - up, towards your highest purpose". Children do in a lot of way give meaning to your life, suddenly you have a reason for suffering. It's a hell of a stretch to call that happiness, but it's definitely something.
Kids with two parents are far less likely to get into crime and have mental health problems, so there is that.
(Before anyone gets onto me I lived in a single parent household for years.)
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.
There is only a sentence worth of interesting in the entire post, and most of that is the quote at the very beginning. The rest is a massive BS cloud. Everything after the word "vacuum" is hogwash.
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.