<story><title>Burnout</title><url>http://kristinn.ghost.io/burnout/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agentultra</author><text>My theory is that &amp;quot;burnout&amp;quot; is a symptom of the endemic &amp;quot;hero&amp;quot; meme of our culture. Think about all the movies you&amp;#x27;ve seen since the 1980s, the shows you&amp;#x27;ve watched, the books you&amp;#x27;ve read. Embedded in the majority of them is the simple idea that there&amp;#x27;s something special inside you that can set you apart from everyone else. It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique passes through our scrutiny without a second thought. We want to believe it&amp;#x27;s true even as we examine our motivations for doing so because it&amp;#x27;s hard wired into our brains.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that this weakness is easily exploited. Writers, motivational speakers, game designers, poets... they&amp;#x27;re all in the business of hacking our brains. We&amp;#x27;ve been doing such a good job of it since the sixties that our popular culture is unconsciously driven by it.&lt;p&gt;And it manifests as burnout when it clashes with other popular memes like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you just put in a little elbow grease and work harder you will stand out. If you write that amazing library to make programmers&amp;#x27; lives easier they will shower you with praise on the Internet and invite you to speak at conferences so that you may shower the masses with your brilliant message. Burnout happens when all of the rewards of those fantasies fail to materialize despite all of the effort and hard work you&amp;#x27;ve put into chasing them.&lt;p&gt;Worked 60 - 80 hour weeks for the last six months and still got overlooked for that promotion? Burnout.&lt;p&gt;Put off investing time with your family in order to work on that semi-popular open source library and pimp it out at every conference you can submit a proposal to... and you STILL aren&amp;#x27;t getting the accolades and recognition you deserve? Burnout.&lt;p&gt;My advice for avoiding burnout? Figure out where your desires and ambitions are coming from. Why do you want to work so hard for recognition? Why do you feel you need to be recognized? What&amp;#x27;s so important about it? Start from there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamegoblin</author><text>Hanging out on sites like this definitely doesn&amp;#x27;t help. In every thread it seems like there is someone who is a perfect expert on whatever being discussed.&lt;p&gt;Need to diagnose a problem in a defunct modem using only an oscilloscope? Someone can. Strange behavior of the JVM? Oh, someone has implemented their own JVM on a 4kb machine as a hobby project.&lt;p&gt;Then you get username delineation and there is this idea of some abstract &amp;quot;hacker&amp;quot; of hackernews (or whatevertechsite.com) that can do everything with ease.&lt;p&gt;Because after seeing all that I think if I can&amp;#x27;t debug modems with oscilloscopes or implement the JVM I&amp;#x27;m behind and subpar.</text></comment>
<story><title>Burnout</title><url>http://kristinn.ghost.io/burnout/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agentultra</author><text>My theory is that &amp;quot;burnout&amp;quot; is a symptom of the endemic &amp;quot;hero&amp;quot; meme of our culture. Think about all the movies you&amp;#x27;ve seen since the 1980s, the shows you&amp;#x27;ve watched, the books you&amp;#x27;ve read. Embedded in the majority of them is the simple idea that there&amp;#x27;s something special inside you that can set you apart from everyone else. It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique passes through our scrutiny without a second thought. We want to believe it&amp;#x27;s true even as we examine our motivations for doing so because it&amp;#x27;s hard wired into our brains.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that this weakness is easily exploited. Writers, motivational speakers, game designers, poets... they&amp;#x27;re all in the business of hacking our brains. We&amp;#x27;ve been doing such a good job of it since the sixties that our popular culture is unconsciously driven by it.&lt;p&gt;And it manifests as burnout when it clashes with other popular memes like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you just put in a little elbow grease and work harder you will stand out. If you write that amazing library to make programmers&amp;#x27; lives easier they will shower you with praise on the Internet and invite you to speak at conferences so that you may shower the masses with your brilliant message. Burnout happens when all of the rewards of those fantasies fail to materialize despite all of the effort and hard work you&amp;#x27;ve put into chasing them.&lt;p&gt;Worked 60 - 80 hour weeks for the last six months and still got overlooked for that promotion? Burnout.&lt;p&gt;Put off investing time with your family in order to work on that semi-popular open source library and pimp it out at every conference you can submit a proposal to... and you STILL aren&amp;#x27;t getting the accolades and recognition you deserve? Burnout.&lt;p&gt;My advice for avoiding burnout? Figure out where your desires and ambitions are coming from. Why do you want to work so hard for recognition? Why do you feel you need to be recognized? What&amp;#x27;s so important about it? Start from there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>&amp;quot;Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;--temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who, I might add, all know that it is their &amp;quot;destiny,&amp;quot; their Heroic Tale to tell, to &amp;quot;regain&amp;quot; those millions through Hard Work, Grit and Stick-To-It-iveness. (But not Cunning. Cunning is for villains, like that guy who got the promotion instead of you.)</text></comment>