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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like the beginnings of burnout or depression... do you find joy in anything else? Does anything motivate you?

I went through this for about 3 years after my divorce. I couldn't find motivation or joy in anything. I turned to helping other people solve their problems because at least I was helping others to get through what I couldn't figure out how to get through myself. There was a lot of time spent in reflection and introspection and about a million cups of tea drank while looking out of the window trying to will myself to do something, anything. It was a tough run, I was just dragging myself out of it when COVID hit and kicked me while I was already down. I think I'm just beginning to be back on the rise again now. I can't promise I've got any advice that can help, but it certainly sounds like you are where I've been.

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I’m in a similar boat myself. I told myself I didn’t have any energy for things outside of work because of my job, though I never found the workload that overwhelming. I could get lost in the puzzle of the technical work and I’m good at it, but I ultimately found the work to be meaningless. At some point enterprise SaaS feels so abstract that even if in some sense it’s improving the world (helping companies work more effectively or what have you) I just can’t connect with it. Finally I quit and I’ve been fortunate enough financially to be able to take a long break. I found that even without a job I had no energy to do much and spent the better part of 2019 doing squat. Did a little freelancing at the beginning of the pandemic but was feeling the same old frustrations sink in (I can only learn so much from working on Node-backed web applications over and over).

Still figuring it out. I’m dipping my toes back in to programming a little learning Rust and embedded programming and it’s nice to feel the thrill (and frustration) of being clueless. I’m trying to get in touch with my creative side more with music. But mostly just taking it a day at a time, hiking a lot, cooking, and trying to find peace in the day-to-day rather than trying to push myself to be “productive” (whatever that means).

Hang in there.

Having been in your position, I know sometimes all you can do is hang in there and not much else.

You can never predict when the upturn will come...but it sounds like with some restorative activities (your hiking, cooking, music) you are on the right track even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Finding peace in the day-to-day is a great way to find your way back to a good place. Allow yourself to do anything or nothing at all and not feel guilty about not being productive or even checking stuff off your to-do list. In fact, look at your to-do list and ask yourself if it's critical to your existence or happiness. If it doesn't bring you joy or ensure your continued existence - i.e. pays the bills, delete it from the list.

100% agree about this sounding a LOT like burnout. I'd strongly recommend the OP go though the list of symptoms listed here. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/high-octane-women/20...

most people who are suffering have no clue how badly they have it.

I felt very similarly. My wife and I were both VERY burnt out. Quit work and just lived on savings for far too long. We just couldn't find _any_ desire to do the hobbies we loved for like 7 months. Even then it was just _barely_ beginning to get the spark again.

Burnout sucks.

Wow that was me at my last job. I wanted so badly to perform but I couldn't. I thought I was a terrible programmer and a terrible person for not being able to deliver. Looking back it wasn't a great environment and after a change I can think and learn again. It's great.

Diagnosed burnout here. It takes WAY longer than months to get back to where you once were (if you ever get there). Its been 7 years for me. (Thanks, Academia.)

> I turned to helping other people solve their problems because at least I was helping others to get through what I couldn't figure out how to get through myself.

Do you consider this to be a good thing? Doing the same now, and wondering if it’s okay.

Ultimately you won't really know if it's a good thing until after the fact. I think just following my nose and doing what felt good in the moment was a big help. I guess it helped that I'd been trained as a youth counsellor early in my career, and I've been helping people my whole life as a by-product of who I am. A lot of people over the years have told me I should be a counsellor because apparently I'm really good at sucking the drama out of situations, calming people, soothing their nerves and helping them to get to a point that they can solve their own problems.

Like I say though, often you won't really know if what you are doing is a good thing until you look back on it and you see that the person you helped has moved forward. Some people just don't want to be helped and no matter how much effort you put it, you're not helping. But it's really difficult to see that while you're in the midst of it.

Just keep doing what you're doing while you have the motivation to do something. Get what you can out of the experience - the energy I got from helping other people even just to find their smile in the midst of something they felt they couldn't get out from under was enough to say that today I did good.

And take it day by day.

Man, I really hope things turn up for you. Just on the basis of your attitude, it sounds like you deserve it. Depression's a bitch and I know burnout all too well, but it sounds like you have a good idea about the work it needs to overcome it

Appreciate this comment very much, thank you!

If there's anything I can do to help, hit me up. I think my email is on my profile. If not, it's my username at gmail.

> Do you consider this to be a good thing? Doing the same now, and wondering if it’s okay.

It probably does, but not in the way you might expect - takes you out of despair, but not out of the burnout.

I keep this cartoon in my bookmarks, because it says it better.

http://www.lunarbaboon.com/comics/miserable.html

Not the one you asked, but I want to offer two things:

How good it is depends on a person and their ability to understand help as opposed to owning other peoples problems. It can be easy to get sucked into all that and make things worse.

Assuming all that is reasonable, I find helping others energizing. And it exercises skills that may be getting dull or increasingly hard to relate to.

FWIW

Yep, those are definitely signs of burnout. This happened to me this time last year. For me, I stopped coding and started building things with my hands (I renovated a house). The biggest problem with coding is the feedback loops. The endless minutiae of problems/bugs that must be fixed, the large holes (metaphorical) you must deep dive into to that make you lose sight of the origin and the end of the project.

Really if I think about it, the movie Office Space nailed it. Go do something else, coding will always be here.

I second this.

I'm nothing close to a trained psychologist or counselor, but maybe a good first step is to determine if it's only programming that excites you, or seemingly unrelated parts of life as well.

I suspect that finding a worthwhile path forward depends a lot on that detail.

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