Another burnout post

This is a bit of a mish mash of different ideas I’ve had around this topic at various times that I wanted to articulate and share. I knocked the post out in about 10 minutes, and it’s not my most well-judged or refined work. I was also in a bit of a strange mood at the time, and was looking for ways to drive traffic, hence the themed title, which doesn’t quite fit my actual mindset at the moment. I’ve kept the original text below.

I quit my last contracting gig in August with £40k in debt, no other income, and only a business idea (it failed).

It was still the right decision.

It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact.

Here’s how I might try to explain it to my Grandma, who has been a psychotherapist for 40+ years:

Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless. The patients are just hypothetical; every session is a simulation, of no consequence whatsoever, except that you still have to do successful psychotherapy in order to pay your rent. You stop receiving money as soon as you stop taking sessions.

How long would you last?

That is what professional programming is like. You don’t care about the goal to begin with, it doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the world once each Jira ticket moves over to the Done column, and you don’t have any ownership over the finished product. You just wait for the next Jira ticket.

Oh, and your clients also all have, or have had, multiple other psychotherapists who follow different treatment methodologies. You don’t know what these methodologies are; you have to figure that out from the client by asking them questions.

The phrase that came to my mind recently when trying to describe the feeling is “like pulling sandpaper through the very centre of my soul”.

Are you beginning to see why?

The flipside of this is that programming for your own purposes is a truly exquisite feeling—some of the most exhilarating and satisfying days I’ve ever spent have been in front of the keyboard, having ideas, bringing them to life, seeing them on the screen, refining them, and massaging the code into shape like a sculpture.

So I can understand how you might look at programming, see me as someone who enjoys programming, and think “isn’t that the perfect job then?” But no, programming is distinct from professions where the job itself is inherently useful. I could program a slot machine or a tabloid news site. Psychotherapy, to use the example again, is always valuable.

Programming is also fairly distinct from a lot of other jobs in that there is no doing it on autopilot. Another source of criticism I’ve had with regard to my attitude towards work—jesus, why don’t you just work for like 5 years and save up a bunch of money?—has been from a delivery driver. But delivery driving can be done on autopilot; it doesn’t require the full engagement of your entire person, like psychotherapy or software engineering. A long career would be soul-destroying, for sure, but a day of driving can be ploughed through much more easily by physical brute force than can a day of software engineering.

So what now?

I’m setting up a food delivery business, which is going well, in a small way at least. It’s based on ancestral health principles—eat mostly what our ancestors ate—and there is currently one item on the menu, sirloin steak fried in ghee on a bed of root vegetable mash with butter.

I’m also writing about another ancestral health-related topic, my ongoing jaw expansion treatment, and pursuing various strategies for correcting the misunderstanding of these issues in the mainstream.

Right now I’m sitting at my finely-adjusted desk setup in a warm & quiet home office, wondering with a mix of anxiety, anger, bitterness, resolve, and optimism about how all this will turn out. I genuinely don’t know. To life!