Interesting, I always thought of burnout as just working too many hours under too much pressure, with too little personal time.
I take the view that we live in a bizarre situation, alas. One in which we fought tooth and nail against the capitalists (owners of the capital) when they deprived us (our forebears) of independent pursuits in favour of working on big powered machines that only the rich (capitalists) could afford. They then displaced all the basic trades and eventually much of agricultural labour through increasing powered efficiency, that they owned, and we were employed to drive (staff). Shortly thereafter, people were working crazy all the time, and the seeds of the coming rebellion laid. In some places they erupted violently, in others as work place reform and what emerged famously was the 8-hour day 5-day week, or 40 hour week.
That was seen as a huge win. To the point that it's celebrated across many many nations as either Labour Day or 8-Hour Day in places.
But then efficiencies kept growing and displacing even more staffing needs and unemployment grew, and we began to demonise it (forsooth).
Then against all dreams, and much speculative fiction (a genuine genre of fiction) and science fiction (another genuine genre) as the tide of time passed we did not distribute the gains of this automation among all, no, we pocketed as much as we could individually with shameless greed, present in abundance to this day of billionaire philanthropy threatening to succeeding to outstripping government goodwill. The consequence of which is we saw work hours rising again, either the salary men who set the standard of over-hours and working to get the job done, or the increasing poor who needed two or more jobs to survive.
And so folk with passion who want to succeed, work their @sses off and this, I have always understood to be burnout.
But we can fight back. For example, as a manager I denied my staff working over hours, irrespective of our deadlines and commitments without recording it all honestly and taking it as time in lieu later when we could (collecting it essentially as leave). This was especially important with senior staff with whom I had conversations as they set the expectations that junior staff would emulate. And I myself reduced my work hours by negotiation step by step and today work only 25 hours per week for a salary, and have according more time (doubly so as I have not had a television since I left home having grown up with that beast and wanting no more of it) for my children (3 from 6 to 20 years of age), community (I manage treasury for two clubs and administer some Facebook local community groups) and following my community passions (provide web hosting out of my basement for one club, and I am developing on so many fronts in between times - mostly Python, JavaScript, and on GitHub). And yet I need my downtime, my rest, my family time, my sleep, and more - else, burnout.
Seems however that burnout means something else in other quarters. Good to know. Perhaps though it's related, that the understandings of burnout as a form of depression for example find their root in what I have described. In a sense of working crazy hard, for nothing ultimately in the hope of making it big perhaps, and then realising it's really a treadmill helping others get or maintain wealth?
My advice:
If you can, move. Move to a place where work hours are regulated, and you get and have to take annual leave, a place where the work culture sees you flower not burn out.
Focus on balancing your life. There's a myth of 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep and 8 hours recreation. There are memes spouting this myth across social media. In reality, it is 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 7 hours chores (shopping, cleaning, commuting, cooking, ablutions, the list goes on) and one hour of downtime. No wonder you burn out, and you blow that hour and another one or two per day in front of the TV or streaming services now. Piffle. There's your burnout right there. Two solutions a) hire people to do your chores - not bad, but they still need management, and b) reduce your work hours or both, now get cracking ... and don't burn out.
That was quite the take on burnout. The lifestyle you've crafted for yourself is something we all strive for!
Good description of reality. Don't forget the 1-2 hours of coding in our free time for the average developer to keep up. But the family/chore responsibilities are actually limitless so finding the coding time, let alone downtime, is difficult.
I actually do a fair bit of coding in my unpaid time, not to keep up, so much as because I have community project ideas and things I need/want in my life. I have a growing number of repos on GitHub and can't keep up with it all, but because it's not paid, no-one's life depends on it, and it's only got very understanding stakeholders (usually also time strapped FOSS contributors) it potters along without "burnout" per se.
I do sometimes lose sleep though, because I love solving problems and it just captures my spirit and I occasionally end up trying to solve one and getting stuck, so two things can happen:
On one of those evenings I'm coding (and I suspect that's 5-10 evenings in any given month as a 90 percentile band) I might end up staying up much later than intended (and my morning rise demands, as I typically walk kids to school and need to make lunches, and have them breakfasted and dressed beforehand, not to mention myself showered, er woken up, and hopefully with some fluid intake if not breakfast too) .
Regardless of when I do retire, the problem is racing around in my min, which is thinking of all the things I've tried, have to try yet, and so on what I've learned thus far.
This little project consumed my January nights from memory:
Learning how to capture and process the Tyro sensor data, and then present it. I had equipped the street library with door sensors in December but December is rather busy on the social calendar so only got so far with working out how to read the Tyro data. Actually building that library was an on and off jobs the year prior. And even a little project like that is never quite done. Just one of the community projects on the go.
Interesting, I always thought of burnout as just working too many hours under too much pressure, with too little personal time.
I take the view that we live in a bizarre situation, alas. One in which we fought tooth and nail against the capitalists (owners of the capital) when they deprived us (our forebears) of independent pursuits in favour of working on big powered machines that only the rich (capitalists) could afford. They then displaced all the basic trades and eventually much of agricultural labour through increasing powered efficiency, that they owned, and we were employed to drive (staff). Shortly thereafter, people were working crazy all the time, and the seeds of the coming rebellion laid. In some places they erupted violently, in others as work place reform and what emerged famously was the 8-hour day 5-day week, or 40 hour week.
That was seen as a huge win. To the point that it's celebrated across many many nations as either Labour Day or 8-Hour Day in places.
But then efficiencies kept growing and displacing even more staffing needs and unemployment grew, and we began to demonise it (forsooth).
Then against all dreams, and much speculative fiction (a genuine genre of fiction) and science fiction (another genuine genre) as the tide of time passed we did not distribute the gains of this automation among all, no, we pocketed as much as we could individually with shameless greed, present in abundance to this day of billionaire philanthropy threatening to succeeding to outstripping government goodwill. The consequence of which is we saw work hours rising again, either the salary men who set the standard of over-hours and working to get the job done, or the increasing poor who needed two or more jobs to survive.
And so folk with passion who want to succeed, work their @sses off and this, I have always understood to be burnout.
But we can fight back. For example, as a manager I denied my staff working over hours, irrespective of our deadlines and commitments without recording it all honestly and taking it as time in lieu later when we could (collecting it essentially as leave). This was especially important with senior staff with whom I had conversations as they set the expectations that junior staff would emulate. And I myself reduced my work hours by negotiation step by step and today work only 25 hours per week for a salary, and have according more time (doubly so as I have not had a television since I left home having grown up with that beast and wanting no more of it) for my children (3 from 6 to 20 years of age), community (I manage treasury for two clubs and administer some Facebook local community groups) and following my community passions (provide web hosting out of my basement for one club, and I am developing on so many fronts in between times - mostly Python, JavaScript, and on GitHub). And yet I need my downtime, my rest, my family time, my sleep, and more - else, burnout.
Seems however that burnout means something else in other quarters. Good to know. Perhaps though it's related, that the understandings of burnout as a form of depression for example find their root in what I have described. In a sense of working crazy hard, for nothing ultimately in the hope of making it big perhaps, and then realising it's really a treadmill helping others get or maintain wealth?
My advice:
If you can, move. Move to a place where work hours are regulated, and you get and have to take annual leave, a place where the work culture sees you flower not burn out.
Focus on balancing your life. There's a myth of 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep and 8 hours recreation. There are memes spouting this myth across social media. In reality, it is 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 7 hours chores (shopping, cleaning, commuting, cooking, ablutions, the list goes on) and one hour of downtime. No wonder you burn out, and you blow that hour and another one or two per day in front of the TV or streaming services now. Piffle. There's your burnout right there. Two solutions a) hire people to do your chores - not bad, but they still need management, and b) reduce your work hours or both, now get cracking ... and don't burn out.
That was quite the take on burnout. The lifestyle you've crafted for yourself is something we all strive for!
Good description of reality. Don't forget the 1-2 hours of coding in our free time for the average developer to keep up. But the family/chore responsibilities are actually limitless so finding the coding time, let alone downtime, is difficult.
I actually do a fair bit of coding in my unpaid time, not to keep up, so much as because I have community project ideas and things I need/want in my life. I have a growing number of repos on GitHub and can't keep up with it all, but because it's not paid, no-one's life depends on it, and it's only got very understanding stakeholders (usually also time strapped FOSS contributors) it potters along without "burnout" per se.
I do sometimes lose sleep though, because I love solving problems and it just captures my spirit and I occasionally end up trying to solve one and getting stuck, so two things can happen:
On one of those evenings I'm coding (and I suspect that's 5-10 evenings in any given month as a 90 percentile band) I might end up staying up much later than intended (and my morning rise demands, as I typically walk kids to school and need to make lunches, and have them breakfasted and dressed beforehand, not to mention myself showered, er woken up, and hopefully with some fluid intake if not breakfast too) .
Regardless of when I do retire, the problem is racing around in my min, which is thinking of all the things I've tried, have to try yet, and so on what I've learned thus far.
This little project consumed my January nights from memory:
montagu.street-library.info/
Learning how to capture and process the Tyro sensor data, and then present it. I had equipped the street library with door sensors in December but December is rather busy on the social calendar so only got so far with working out how to read the Tyro data. Actually building that library was an on and off jobs the year prior. And even a little project like that is never quite done. Just one of the community projects on the go.
I think you're spot on about the reality of the 24 hours. + even getting 8 hours of sleep can be a challenge for most.