Demystifying burnout – A deep dive into its symptoms and remedies
Listen, I&#x27;ve gone very very deep down this rabbit hole, let me summarise my lessons:<p>1. Fluffy pieces like this abound, and they are worthless. It may help you to draw similarities between articles espousing the urgency and importance of tackling climate change and the deafening silence of actions and consequences that follow. Why is this so? Because talk is cheap, and feigned concern is much cheaper than expensive change.<p>2. Why is there burnout? Because corporate incentives are antagonistic to human needs and corporations are more important than we are. This manifests every time some over-elevated micro-despot demands deadlines and urgency from their underlings. Much as banks lending against fractional reserves is the true source of money creation, emotionally stunted &#x27;leadership&#x27; making misguided plans for the future is the true source of stress. Remember always that their goal is to be promoted into a higher strata of distance from effort, and your toil will be forgotten the moment that happens.<p>3. Gaslighting you into thinking more yoga will improve your working environment further increases the problem, as it recontextualises the problem from one of their making to one of your failing. If you&#x27;re stressed or burned out, it&#x27;s obviously your fault.<p>4. Meaningful change _was_ possible, but is likely no longer as the labour market has shifted back in favour of the corporations. Most people are currently more interested in keeping their job than causing a fuss. Unions are an obvious fix here but until they become more palatable by a) improving their significantly outdated image and practices and b) overcoming the stigma imposed on them by corporations, then they&#x27;ll be forever waiting in the wings.<p>5. Cross-timezone work is fundamentally inhumane. There is no right to one&#x27;s circadian rhythm but to suggest it&#x27;s not important is a biological fallacy. However as corporations do not sleep it is inconvenient for their workers to do so. Conference calls from PT to India are common, no one is happy in that arrangement. This could be solved by partitioning work into same or very-similar timezones but that would be a burden to the leadership so it does not occur.<p>6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company&#x27;s benefit and your personal detriment. A quote I read recently said it best &quot;In ten years, the only people who will remember that you went above and beyond for your job are your kids.&quot;. If you are working for yourself or have a &gt;10% equity then this does not apply, you do you.<p>6a. Given the above, your reachability outside of working yours is a direct attack on your life, yet we all install the corporate messaging app on our phone and check it like a drug habbit. Slack repackages your availability as a product and sells it. If any company was serious about work-life balance then they would simply turn off slack at the end of the work day.<p>I have more of course but these are probably the best.<p>Coda:
If you want to learn about the actual science, then I suggest listening to Dr. Maslach who literally created the field (and was responsible for stopping the Stanford prisoner experiement)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oQy1Zc37Bd0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oQy1Zc37Bd0</a><p>Edit 2: Here&#x27;s the timezone overlap between SF and Mumbai, in case you were not aware: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timeanddate.com&#x2F;worldclock&#x2F;meetingtime.html?iso=20230626&amp;p1=224&amp;p2=44" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.timeanddate.com&#x2F;worldclock&#x2F;meetingtime.html?iso=...</a>