I quit my job about 4 months ago feeling the onset of burnout. I was completely useless for most of that time but have just recently managed to get back into creative work.<p>By the way, look up comments by the Hacker News user ahoyhere (Amy Hoy). It was her comment on the physical causes of burnout that motivated me to quit when I did. I think that nipped in the bud something that could have become much worse.<p>You mention you keep working because of &quot;shame&quot; and &quot;having to pay the bills&quot;. Hypothetical situation: if you had another medical condition, say a heart attack, and your doctor ordered you to take 3 months in bed, could you do it? Live off savings, move in with your parents, etc?<p>If you&#x27;re really living on the edge financially (no savings, in debt, no support network) then keep working. But, my theory is that people in that situation don&#x27;t feel &quot;burned out&quot; - they feel stressed and exhausted, maybe, but they&#x27;re motivated to keep moving. Burnout is when you&#x27;re pushing hard on something that feels ultimately pointless. For me, it was working on a project I knew was going to fail, a position I could have financially walked away from at any time, but I stayed because I felt it wasn&#x27;t socially acceptable to walk.<p>After I quit my job I had a background anxiety on what I&#x27;d do when my savings ran down and I needed to find something else. I honestly thought I&#x27;d rather Howard-Roark it and lug boxes around in a warehouse or work as a garage mechanic than write code for money ever again. (Funnily enough I&#x27;m also in SE Asia, Chiang Mai right now). What saved me was easing my way back into goal-directed activities, but goal-directed activities which I found intrinsically fun and rewarding - swimming, playing strategy games, riding a motorbike around. Eventually I wanted a more challenging project and took 2 weeks to research and write a long article for an online blog, unpaid but I treated it as a full-time job.<p>Just this last week I&#x27;ve finally got back into coding again, and realised that I enjoy frontend web coding, making something which looks cool and which you can show to people. I was a very good CS student and used to think I should work on something more challenging than HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS, but - frontend web dev is something I know I can well enough to be useful.<p>Engineers have a problem that we&#x27;re always &quot;failing&quot;. Our work is so complex and error-prone. In most other jobs its hard to tell how well you&#x27;re doing. Salespeople are one other group who also &quot;fail&quot; often, but salespeople also get a lot of social validation and buzz when they succeed. Engineers don&#x27;t, and combined with their low self-esteem end up feeling they need to hit 100% accuracy, everything done on time with no bugs, or they&#x27;re below par. Clueless and disinterested managers don&#x27;t help.<p>Having rediscovered my confidence in one particular specialism (frontend web dev) is very powerful. If in future I encounter another hairy, undocumented ball of PHP and JS - I&#x27;ll simply tell whoever&#x27;s responsible that I can&#x27;t fix it until they fix their workflow. On the other hand, if I find a good team, with technical (or at least technically-aware) management, realistic goals and a useful product, I know I can be valuable and useful to them.<p>I&#x27;m so glad I quit when I did. Had I stayed another 6 months by burnout may have lasted 3 years, not 3 months. But recovery wasn&#x27;t a linear process, it was more digging around in my brain until I uncovered my natural sources of motivation.