Burnout: Not what you think

A picture I clicked in Switzerland

TLDR: If there’s one takeaway from this post, it’s this:

Burnout isn’t caused by too much work. It is caused by the absence of any meaning to it.

So if you’re burnt out, I would suggest first assessing “what” you’ve been doing rather than “how much” you’ve been doing.

The feeling of not being able to type one more line of code, the feeling of not being able to gather the mental capacity to think through the most basic decisions to be made.

You look at the screen, confused, and all of a sudden, a strong gush of feelings hits your mind: “What’s the point of all this?” “Why am I doing this?” “I wish I were doing something else right now!”

Sounds familiar? If it doesn’t, I’m really, really happy for you. These exact feelings struck me half a year ago, and I had no idea where they were coming from.

Some call it the start of a quarter-life crisis (the “what’s the point of all this?!” part, for sure), while others call it burnout. I prefer to call this fatigue mixed with having a terrible day on most occasions (I tried to rationalize it, to give it a name that made it less terrifying). This one, however, was different. I’ve had times when I didn’t feel like coding, but it was never a strong feeling, and I’ve usually been able to push through it and continue into a zone where I’ve ended up concentrating and coding for hours on end.

But as I said, this time, it was different. My hands were almost as if they had frozen and not seen the light of day for a while. I got off my computer and went out for a walk, something that had seemed to fix a lot of these feelings in the past for me. I went out for a couple of hours.

When I came back, I still couldn’t get myself to work. Mind you, I was not at all tired; I was fully recharged from a good night’s sleep that day and was performant in almost every other aspect, including talking to a few people I stumbled upon during my walk. So I did the natural thing and shut down my system and went to sleep.

Fast forward to a week later, and I still hadn’t finished what I had set out to. Every time I opened my laptop, it felt like a burden. And that’s when it hit me: “Is it one of those things people call burnout?”

Every morning, I told myself, ‘Today I’ll get back to it.’ Every night, I’d close the laptop feeling guilty for not having gotten anything done.

For me, being passionate about my work has been a point of pride since the beginning, and the possibility of me having lost that drive, even temporarily, was a terrifying one. So I checked in with a couple of doctors, both of whom told me to “chill the f*** out” for a while. So it was confirmed that it was indeed me burning myself out, but I still had no idea of “why?”

The workload was less than what I had been exposed to at the beginning of my career, and yet, this was taxing to the extremes on my soul.

Every part of me wanted to rest. But how could I rest? Isn’t resting for the weak? Isn’t taking a long break the trope of someone who’s not interested in doing what they have to? Isn’t being tired a good thing? Isn’t being busy everything about what life is today?

All the thoughts that were cemented in my mind since the very beginning of my life just surfaced and were against everything I needed to do (I realize today). We’ve been told to be busy, that having your schedule packed and having your work consume your day is something to be proud of; we’ve been told to find meaning in the work we do so we never have to take a break, and that whoever doesn’t take a break ends up ahead of everyone else who does.

Sidenote: I feel the world has such a bad memory; it was just 5 years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic that we were all in on work-life balance. Today, the dynamic has completely shifted back to full-time, back-breaking, mentally-tiring work schedules, and being available all the time to your work has started to become more of the norm and an expectation from employers.

This mentality has been so deeply hammered into our minds that it has prevented me from taking a break for years. It made me feel great about being busier than everyone else. But this mentality only benefits one group of people: the people receiving your output (notice that I’ve NOT mentioned “your activity’s outcome” because output generated when you’re not at your best is not going to be impactful). This is such a big problem that people don’t stop to question, “Is what I am doing even meaningful?”

Coming back to my story. The feature I had set out to build at the beginning of this post was almost 80% done, and this whole episode was during the last 20%. And then came a message: “Devesh, we’re cancelling that feature; we don’t see the scope for it to work.” And just like that, a month of work, down the drain.

That’s where I struck the answer I had been searching for for a long time. It wasn’t about how much I was doing; it was just that, however much I did, it didn’t amount to anything. Entire projects I had worked on before this? Cancelled. Entire features I had built with late nights of work? Didn’t hit product-market fit even closely after several iterations.

Turns out the startup I had been so passionately lured into building for did not need tech at all for its operations, and half of their customers had never used the things my team and I were told to build.

This was a turning point for me, realizing that I had given over a year of my life to something that meant so little and was probably just a footnote on a slideshow for investors, meant I needed to rethink my entire path till and ahead from that point onwards. This crushed me emotionally, but mind you, it was not evident to even me that I was going through this - It was more a slow realization that kept setting in until one day I realized, “Holy shit! What have I even been doing?!”

What even is meaningful work?

Everyone’s definition of what makes their work meaningful is different, simply because everyone’s definition of “meaning” is different.

Some people like the feeling of helping others out in the real world, and that’s where people can derive value, even out of being a bus driver, a repetitive but respectable profession. Another set of people find meaning in destroying the financial system by over-leveraging assets and cooking the books - I’m not judging (but most likely the “meaning” in that activity comes from the life one would live by extracting more and more money from that situation).

In essence, your definition of meaning is subjective and specific to you, and that’s the point. It determines what you’re passionate about and what you’re more driven by. People find meaning in the most mundane work possible (Ikigai revolves around this concept).

It’s when you go against this principle that your work becomes a burden on you. Do a bullshit job long enough and you burn yourself out, not even from doing it too much, just from doing it for long enough that your mind doesn’t have anything interesting or exciting to focus on.

Bullshit job: Analyzing spreadsheets just so the management can include them in a presentation footnote, which no one will ever read, but they have to be there because you need something to assert what you talk about during the presentation.

The lack of meaning in these jobs can be compensated to an extent with “balance” using the life you live outside of work.

The big debate on work-life balance today fundamentally originates from the fact that most work can be categorized as “bullshit work,” where you’re working to fix problems created by a long chain of other problems or processes that no one knows the reasons behind. But if you’re making decent money doing this job, which gives you the means to live a comfortable life you like, then congratulations, you’ve found meaning via the life you have outside of work.

A quick note

Of course, lack of meaningful work is not the ONLY reason why one burns out; you will burn yourself out doing something you’ll love if you do it way too much too.

It’s the threshold for burnout to set in, and the length of the recovery period from the burnout will be different in both scenarios.

Someone doing what they’re truly passionate about burns out much more slowly because there is meaning and drive to what they’re doing, and in most scenarios, they’ll also recover from that much quicker. Chances are that if you’re passionate about something, you can’t really get that out of your system in one go; you just learn to take it easier the next time.

Meaningful work can become meaningless very quickly if you lose sight of why you did it in the first place.

My journey out of burnout

At my lowest, even opening a blank editor felt like staring into a void. I didn’t hate code; I just couldn’t feel anything for it.

I’m not going to lie; to come out of burnout takes a different journey for everyone. Mine took a lot longer than I had anticipated. From the moment of realization to the moment of “Okay, this isn’t so bad; let’s get back to work” took over 6 months.

A few things that helped me come out of this phase:

Not to forget, I still don’t code as much as I used to, born from the realization that my value came from my ideas and impact rather than the lines of code I pushed; more lines of code do not necessarily mean more impact, and it’s for every engineering leader to also understand. I wrote an entire blog post about this.

There’s a meme noting that as you get more and more experienced, the number of lines of code you push goes down and eventually becomes negative. You deliver impact and value by removing lines of code from a codebase rather than adding them.

The drive to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and spend hours in front of my screen has died out; the urge now is more to explore the world and come up with more ideas or come up with a solution to a problem someone has tasked me with.

I might not be the same brute-force Devesh as earlier. But I’ve come to realize that the “meaning” I derive from work has changed in that direction, and I do not need to brute-force my way through work the same way as I had to before. Earlier, I was paid for my output rather than outcomes because the outcomes were decided by others, and I was the executioner. Today, I have to be both the decider and the executioner, so there’s a lot more thought and time that is naturally required for my work - and it needs me to be in top mental shape to be able to do so. I.e., I am being paid for outcomes and not purely for output.

I have seen a major shift in my perspective towards living life, one far from the busy hustling young early-twenties version of me, to a more balanced but equally or more productive version of me today. I think everyone needs to go through this phase once to really comprehend what is missing from their life and work through it to understand there’s more to life than just work and money, no matter how important those aspects may be.

So, remember: Burnout does not come from doing too much; it comes from doing too much of what doesn’t matter.