I don’t think I really know when it happened—the “burnout”. It’s not something that happens all at once. Maybe you see it coming, you start to spot the signs. Or, if you’re like me, you don’t know it’s happened until months or years after being mired in the after-effects. I would slip… in… and out, of the conscious realization that I was indeed burned out. There were times I found myself very lucid, entirely aware of how burned out I had become. Through other spans of time I managed to disassociate entirely. How long was I there? I can’t honestly say. The entire lifecycle from burning out, to burned out, to realizing I was burned out, to recovery, is not a straight path, and not one that has some known, or widely-accepted timescale. Come to think of it, I really haven’t seen many accounts of severe burnout. I suppose that’s because those who experience it are likely too burned out to write about it. So, am I back? Hah! It’s not that simple unfortunately. But I am in a place where I feel that I can share my experience.

Notice: This is a particularly personal accounting of my real-life experience with burnout, and everything that comes with it.

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I haven’t come here to say that I’ve unequivocally “recovered from burnout”. A nasty thing about burnout is that it isn’t some obvious, precipitous decline. It isn’t necessarily marked by some singular, triggering event. What causes burnout from one person to the next is never the exact same, and each of our paths can look wildly different and result in varying levels of burnout—the manifestations of which can also be quite variegated. Similarly, the path out is not straightforward. It is not an extrapolatable line upward and outward. This is an upswing for me, sure—writing this post. But I’ve been here before. I first thought about and started drafting this post nearly two years ago, around early May of 2024. This too would have been sometime well after I first realized I was “burnt out”—when I finally had enough energy to even give the notion of writing about it some thought. I can’t point to a day, or to a moment, or to a thing-that-happened and say “that’s when the burnout began”. However, I suspect that my own case of burnout began accelerating in early 2022, with “full burnout” finally happening in mid 2023 when my daughter was born, at which point I stepped away from it all on leave. I’ve been torched ever since.

How did it happen? Gah, I don’t know. There’s any number of things I can point to and say were contributing factors. The pandemic, too much work, not enough recognition at work, friendships lost, parenting stress, stress from the world at large, stretching myself too thin with side projects, the list goes on… We’re all conditioned to work, work, work. Reach higher, stretch into that role, stretch for those goals, get a better title, get more money, post our travel photos online, more, more, more! It’s just kinda… exhausting, y’know? In those 18 months from early 2022 to July 2023 I was pretty busy. I was in a demanding role at well-known big tech company, I had some side projects going on, I was publishing this blog + my podcast—all while doin’ the parenting thing. I pushed and pushed to do more and more, and did so in a way that was in hindsight, entirely aimless. Yes, I did a lot of things, but to what end? Were they in pursuit of something specific? Did those things make me happy? When my daughter was born I was just, tired. It was time to step away from the work and focus on those early months with a new baby. Eventually, I came back to work. But I didn’t really come back—not entirely. I had lost the drive and the motivation. Things that once interested me no longer did, and I’m not just talking about work stuff. I wasn’t as active on the blog, a lot of my hobbies just completely died, I was in battery-saving mode—just doing the bare minimum. I did what I had to at work, I ate, I went to the gym, I played with my kids and I slept. There were other hours in the day, but I’m not sure what I did with them.

I don’t want to misrepresent things here either. I didn’t spend my days doing “just the essentials”, keeping the lights on, and doing them well. No, no, no. In my haze, I’m not sure I did anything with the focus and enthusiasm that it deserved. My time spent at work was unfocused, often unproductive, and from my perspective, entirely meaningless and unfruitful. I got things done sure, but they didn’t seem to matter. No one said “good job”. I never felt accomplished. I could go days, or even a week or more without talking to a single person. I didn’t feel like I was learning anything. I felt that what I did there didn’t matter. That I didn’t matter. No one needed me and I had nothing to offer. While I stood alone and still, everyone else seemed busy, effective—happy. I would see proud messages of others in my team and across the company achieving promotions, or completing highly-visible, impactful projects. Sometimes I was jealous, but more often I felt nothing. I wasn’t inspired, I just continued on. At first it was just a month lost, or a quarter lost. But eventually it became this awful gap. A year or more where I’d been entirely stuck. Even if I could get moving again, look how far I’ve gotten behind.

My podcast fell to the wayside. My blog lie unupdated and dormant for months at a time, gathering cobwebs. I had aspired to a great many other things in the larger world of “shellsharks”, but I forgot about all of them. I announced >Shark Week in multiple years only to completely ignore it when the time came. I never conciously “gave up” on the blog… I just stopped. This wasn’t a purposeful attempt to reclaim time for work, or for parenting, or for my sanity. I was no longer in the drivers seat. I had simply, unpurposefully, disconnected. Sometimes I would remember it was there. I would think about writing something. Or I would catch up on a few things I wanted to update—breathing a little bit of life into the site. But for a long while, it didn’t amount to more than that. Folks who I came to know through my site, or through social media reached out to me. Wondering where I had gone. Wondering if I was OK. Eventually I saw the messages. I let them know that I was fine. Things were just busy. This was true. But it wasn’t the entire truth.

Even as a parent, and a full-time job-haver, I still have hobbies. Or I did. Through these darker days I still tried to go to the gym… but those sessions never got my full focus. I had projects in the yard, or around the house, but I never really got to them. If there’s anything that I managed to still be kinda “good” at, it was playing with and having fun with my kids. But even while doing that, I still often worried about work, never being able to fully be happy in the moment. Too often I sacrificed time I should have spent with my wife or family because I felt guilty about work. Then at work I felt circularly miserable about a perceived degraded home life. Vicious, some say.

That feeling of being behind on things, of feeling unfocused, of feeling unneeded, of feeling unimportant, bled into every corner of my life. I wasn’t just useless at work. I also started to see myself fail at home—and forget about my friendships, these had seemingly entirely disintegrated. I felt at this point, universally alone.

Burnout is one of those things that you try to shrug off. Everyone is burned out right? Everyone has any number of things stressing them out at any one time. Sure I may feel “burned out”, but it isn’t anything especially problematic! I found myself routinely ignoring or trivializing these feelings. I chalked them up to the routine stresses of the world, rather than fully appreciating the gravity of the state I was in. Because the difference between chronic burnout and run-of-the-mill stress is that with burnout you just can’t find your way back to a healthy “normal”. You stay unproductive and uneffective. It takes a more concerted effort to pull yourself out of the rut.

You see, I knew I was “burned out”, and looking back now, it’s easy to see I had become depressed too, thanks in part to the burnout. Some days I would manage to pop my head above the clouds with proclamations of how I was going to “get serious”, or “lock in”, or some other way of crawling out of this quagmire. But as some of my friends and family can attest, those words were either empty or simply did not provide adequate propulsion. I fell right back into the bad habits—that same fog. In some ways, I’m still trying to really understand what I want. I think having a clear idea of what you want is key. Only then can you try and reverse engineer the steps to get there, prioritize, and make time for everything. As it turns out, there’s just not enough time in the day for everything. Compromises, or full-on sacrifices have to be made. This is the reality.

So am I through it now? Am I OK? Am I no longer “burned out”. I don’t know. Probably not. I’ve been kinda here before to tell you the truth—“seeing the light”. I have clearer vision these days I’ll give you that. My hobbies have started to return, my outlook on work has improved dramatically, I’m using my time much more effectively. I think I’m happier these days. But it’s easy to slip back. I try to catch myself, to right the ship and to stay on course, but some days it seems the margin for error is just too thin. To lose a day in pursuit of everything is to knock myself off track indefinitely. But I remind myself that I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t need to operate at 100% efficiency. I need to understand my goals and work towards them, and not be discouraged when I falter. Success is a grind—a lot of little steps that in aggregate move us to a target destination. A step backwards, or a rest day doesn’t mean I’m back at the beginning.

Oh, and as if burnout alone wasn’t enough, there’s a lot of other career-related blights I (and I’m sure many readers of this post) experience—often manifesting into a devilish syzygy of occupational dilemmas. Let me talk about those for a minute too…

Demonology for the Professional World

There’s more to the fiendish nature of our “careers” than burnout alone. We the workers, tend to be plagued and posessed by a great many evils. Consider the list below a Lanterne of Light—traditionally a classification system for (actual) demons, but in this context, the hellions of the working world.

Burnout
Impostor Syndrome
Climbing the Ladder
Professional Vitality (i.e. boredom, finding interesting work)
Finding Meaning/Purpose
Maintaining Relevance & Skill Erosion
Isolation (e.g. remote work)

I’m sure there are more items to include on this list, but these are the ones I’ve observed most, at least in my own career history.

For now, this post will be limited to my experience with burnout alone. Perhaps one day I’ll expand it with tales of other such things, or maybe they’ll end up as separate posts sometime in the future. The fact is, everything in that list can contribute to burnout, and in turn, burnout and other things on that list can equally contribute to impostor syndrome. See where I’m going with this? That cursed list of professional afflictions can all feed into each other. So be weary!

Burnout

I told my story about burnout at the beginning of this post. Here, I want to be a bit more technical/scientific in terms of defining what burnout is, what causes it, how it manifests and how to mitigate or address it.

“Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.”

Burnout is interesting, and scary. A lot of things can cause it, it can be hard to see it happening in real-time, and it’s even hard to tell if you’ve reached some form of final-stage “burn out”. Like, what does that even mean? How burnout can manifest itself, the symptoms themselves, can easily be attributed to other things, non-burnout related. How one experiences it, and what effects they experience can vary greatly from person to person. Similarly, treating, or recovering from burnout is not a known science. Some even suggest that you might never recover from burnout. So much about how you treat it, can probably be mapped to how it happened in the first place, which again is hard to understand as burnout tends to creep up on you slowly, over a great span of time.

Burnout Causes

There’s a lot of things that can trigger or ultimately contribute to “burnout”. Here’s a list… ^{1, 2}

Unclear mission & expectations
Lack of control
Opaque management
Resource starvation
Lack of agency / autonomy
Overwhelming scope
(Lack of) job security
Long hours
Dwindling pay
Lack of recognition or reward
Excessive workload
No sense of community, kinship or camaraderie
False urgency
Unfair treatment
Relentless change
Limited growth
No work / life balance
Micromanagement
Performance pressure
Toxicity
Lack of support
Bad communication
Monotonous work

There’s more to this list to be sure, but that’s a lot already.

Burnout Symptoms & Manifestations

Burnout manifests itself in a myriad of ways. Each person will experience it differently and at varying levels of severity. Some things you might experience are listed below…

Exhaustion
Activities, particularly social ones, drain you faster than usual
More venting / complaining
Hopelessness
Demotivation
Disengagement
Over-sleep
Feeling of never being inspired
Craving to work on projects but can’t
Stress
Depression
Laziness
Depersonalization (i.e. loss of sense of self)
Physical health issues (e.g. gastrointestinal, cognitive decline, heart palpitations, pain, etc…)
Guilt
Job switching
Procrastination

Treating and Mitigating Burnout

Probably the least understood thing about burnout is how to actually recover from or treat it. Sustained triggers are simply not easy to reverse and not easy to do a root cause analysis for. And even if you could identify everything that ultimately led to being burned out, is it realistic to expect that each of these things can be removed? How do we treat burnout while often having to continue being exposed to some subset of the same triggers that caused it in the first place?

One study attributed burnout, and in reverse, treating burnout to 6 main sources: workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. Another study suggested a framework known as “I Believe, I Belong, I Matter” as a path towards avoiding burnout. ^{4, 5}

In both cases, we are directly treating the initial triggers or feelings-caused by said triggers. I don’t know what works. I think these things all sound great, but what actually works—who knows.

I think time is important. Sometimes you just need to step away. But time alone isn’t enough. I for example spent quite a bit of time away. Sure, I wasn’t able to completely shield myself from the burnout triggers, so maybe that time away wasn’t “pure” in the recovery sense, but I feel like the time I had was as good as anyone can really expect. Afterall, if you’re a parent, or if you live in the real world, it’s just not overly practical to step away from your kids, or from your job, etc…

An important step is (and I mentioned this earlier) to think about and solidify what matters to you. What makes you happy? What do you really want to accomplish? Once you have this down, you can start to put together some semblance of a plan for getting there. Your goals need to be the composite of tasks that are realistic and actionable which amount to achieving said goals. You also need to give yourself room to fail, so you won’t be entirely discouraged if you aren’t perfect. Because you won’t be. You’ll never be—and thats OK.

The Way Forward

So what’s next? Well I’m still working on climbing out of the burnout hole. I have some ideas for how to kickstart myself professionally, and I am working on a more defined plan for the other things in my life. It’s not going to be a straight shot up and out, and burnout isn’t something you “defeat”. It’s something you manage. I’ve seen how it can manifest, I understand some of my triggers, and I know a few things that can help me treat and mitigate it. That’s enough for now.

Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself out there!

Conflagration