I’m a 20 year old who perceives myself as the kind of young founder you’re probably talking to in this post. And I’ve noticed a lot of older guys have similar sentiments to you about younger guys and the perspective often annoys me. I do everything I can to learn from other people, but in the context of giving and receiving advice I believe that a lot of information is typically not considered. For example, you talk about a lot of mistakes younger people make that could be easily avoided if they had the older generation’s wisdom, but as conveyed by this post, your knowledge/skillset of communicated complex ideas in a way that can be understood by someone with different knowledge/experiences appears limited to me. Additionally, I’ve written over a thousand documents and am thinking every hour of every day from the perspectives that I value and want to improve in. Someone who doesn’t have any context with which to understand me or even what I want can seldom give good advice aimed at observed circumstances in my opinion. The best advise I’ve received tends to be advice not directed at me because of reasons like this.
I don’t believe burnout is real. I have theories on why people think it’s real, but I think the phenomenon people label as burnout is more complex than people understand, and advice about burnout is consequently not very helpful. I know you’ve said you don’t typically try to argue/explain yourself around this belief, but if I’m wrong and you have some insight that can only be gained with experience I’m not privy to, I would be thankful if you would correct my false belief.
I agree with most of what I’ve read in this post, I mainly disagree with some of the perspectives you take.
I read through most of the beginning of this post. Then started skimming by my perception of header relevance to the original idea of the post. I’m not really sure what goal you were trying to achieve by branching off into so many different topics in a single post instead of creating separate posts, but I’m still pretty green to the LessWrong community and the norms here, so maybe you can enlighten me. I’m also very biased towards practical texts, so I believe I just am not the target audience for most of this post. I liked the statements about trigger#1 and trigger #2 in the practical section, and its given me some insightful tips I’d never thought of on how to be a better listener. I recently made a note to myself that people say what they mean, so take them literally instead of translating their words into something you already understand. Admittedly, I have not been following my own advice. And this post has served as a valuable reminder for me. I’m really interested in communicated and learning about complex, soulful ideas so maybe you could direct me to some good practical posts on the topic. I’ve had to navigate this skillset entirely alone, so I’d rather not reinvent the wheel if someone has already publicized their work around this.
I don’t believe burnout is real. I have theories on why people think it’s real
More interesting would be to hear why you don’t think it’s real. (“Why do people think it’s real” is the easiest thing in the world to answer: “Because they have experienced it”, of course. Additional theorizing is then needed to explain why the obvious conclusion should not be drawn from those experiences.)
I will say I think there are a few different things people mean by burnout, but, they are each individually pretty real. Three examples that come to mind easily:
“Overworked” burnout.
If I’ve been working 60 hour weeks for months on end, eventually I’m just like “I can’t do this anymore.” My brain gets foggy. I feel exhausted. My body/mind start to rebel at the prospect of doing of more of that type of work.
In my experience, this lasts 1-3 weeks (if I am able to notice and stop and switch to a more relaxed mode). When I do major projects, I have a decent sense of when Overworked Burnout is coming, and I time the projects such that I work up until my limit, then take a couple weeks to recover.
“Overworked + Trapped” burnout.
As above, except for some reason I don’t have the ability to stop – people are depending on me, or future me is depending on me, and if I were to take a break a whole bunch of projects or relationships would come crashing down and destroy a lot of stuff I care about.
Something about this has a horrible coercive feeling that is qualitatively different being tired/overworked. Some kind of “sick to my stomach”, want to curl up and hide but you can’t curl up and hide. This can happen because your boss is making excessive demands on you (or firing you), or simply because I volunteered myself into the position. Each of those feels differently bad. The former because you maybe really can’t escape without losing resources that you need. The latter because if I’ve put myself in this situation, than something about my self-image and how others will relate to me will have to change if I were to escape.
“Things are deeply fucked burnout.”
This feels similar to the Overworked+Trapped but it’s some other kind of trapped other than just “needing to put in a lot of hours.” Like, maybe there’s conflict at work, or in a close relationship, and there are parts of it you can’t talk about with anyone, and the people you can easily talk about it with have some perspective that feels wrong to you and it’s hard to hold onto your own sense of sanity.
In some (many?) cases the right move here is to walk away, but that might be hard either because you need money/resources from the group, or you’ve invested so much of your identity into it that letting go requires reorganizing how you conceptualize yourself and your goals and your social scene.
This can cause a number of things other than burnout, i.e. various trauma responses. But I think a “burnout” flavored version of it can come when you have to live in this state for months or years. I haven’t had this quite happen to me, but the people who’ve had “conflict based burnout” or “no longer really believe in their job/mission/relationship” flavor burnout can leave people struggling to do much-of-anything on purpose for months.
I’m not really sure what goal you were trying to achieve by branching off into so many different topics in a single post instead of creating separate post
I think in my ideal world this was a series of blogposts that I actually expected people to read all of. Part of the reason it’s all one post is that I didn’t expect people to reliably get all of them.
Partly, I think each individual piece is necessary. Also, kind of the point of pieces like this are to be sort of guided meditations on a topic that let you sit with it long enough, and approach it from enough different angles, that a foreign way of thinking has time to seep into your brain and get digested.
I expected people would mostly not believe me without the concrete practical examples, but the concrete examples are (necessarily) meandering because that’s what the process was actually like (you should expect the process of transmitting soulful knowledge to feel some-kind-of-meandering, at least a fair amount of the time).
I wanted to make sure people got the warnings at the same time that they got the “how to” manual – if I separated the warnings into a separate post, people might only read the more memetically successful “how to” posts.
I do suspect I could write a much shorter version that gets across the basic idea, but I don’t expect the basic idea to actually be very useful because each of the 20 skills is pretty deep, and conveying what it’s like to use them all at once is just necessarily complicated.
I’m a 20 year old who perceives myself as the kind of young founder you’re probably talking to in this post. And I’ve noticed a lot of older guys have similar sentiments to you about younger guys and the perspective often annoys me. I do everything I can to learn from other people, but in the context of giving and receiving advice I believe that a lot of information is typically not considered. For example, you talk about a lot of mistakes younger people make that could be easily avoided if they had the older generation’s wisdom, but as conveyed by this post, your knowledge/skillset of communicated complex ideas in a way that can be understood by someone with different knowledge/experiences appears limited to me. Additionally, I’ve written over a thousand documents and am thinking every hour of every day from the perspectives that I value and want to improve in. Someone who doesn’t have any context with which to understand me or even what I want can seldom give good advice aimed at observed circumstances in my opinion. The best advise I’ve received tends to be advice not directed at me because of reasons like this.
I don’t believe burnout is real. I have theories on why people think it’s real, but I think the phenomenon people label as burnout is more complex than people understand, and advice about burnout is consequently not very helpful. I know you’ve said you don’t typically try to argue/explain yourself around this belief, but if I’m wrong and you have some insight that can only be gained with experience I’m not privy to, I would be thankful if you would correct my false belief.
I agree with most of what I’ve read in this post, I mainly disagree with some of the perspectives you take.
I read through most of the beginning of this post. Then started skimming by my perception of header relevance to the original idea of the post. I’m not really sure what goal you were trying to achieve by branching off into so many different topics in a single post instead of creating separate posts, but I’m still pretty green to the LessWrong community and the norms here, so maybe you can enlighten me. I’m also very biased towards practical texts, so I believe I just am not the target audience for most of this post. I liked the statements about trigger#1 and trigger #2 in the practical section, and its given me some insightful tips I’d never thought of on how to be a better listener. I recently made a note to myself that people say what they mean, so take them literally instead of translating their words into something you already understand. Admittedly, I have not been following my own advice. And this post has served as a valuable reminder for me. I’m really interested in communicated and learning about complex, soulful ideas so maybe you could direct me to some good practical posts on the topic. I’ve had to navigate this skillset entirely alone, so I’d rather not reinvent the wheel if someone has already publicized their work around this.
More interesting would be to hear why you don’t think it’s real. (“Why do people think it’s real” is the easiest thing in the world to answer: “Because they have experienced it”, of course. Additional theorizing is then needed to explain why the obvious conclusion should not be drawn from those experiences.)
I will say I think there are a few different things people mean by burnout, but, they are each individually pretty real. Three examples that come to mind easily:
“Overworked” burnout.
If I’ve been working 60 hour weeks for months on end, eventually I’m just like “I can’t do this anymore.” My brain gets foggy. I feel exhausted. My body/mind start to rebel at the prospect of doing of more of that type of work.
In my experience, this lasts 1-3 weeks (if I am able to notice and stop and switch to a more relaxed mode). When I do major projects, I have a decent sense of when Overworked Burnout is coming, and I time the projects such that I work up until my limit, then take a couple weeks to recover.
“Overworked + Trapped” burnout.
As above, except for some reason I don’t have the ability to stop – people are depending on me, or future me is depending on me, and if I were to take a break a whole bunch of projects or relationships would come crashing down and destroy a lot of stuff I care about.
Something about this has a horrible coercive feeling that is qualitatively different being tired/overworked. Some kind of “sick to my stomach”, want to curl up and hide but you can’t curl up and hide. This can happen because your boss is making excessive demands on you (or firing you), or simply because I volunteered myself into the position. Each of those feels differently bad. The former because you maybe really can’t escape without losing resources that you need. The latter because if I’ve put myself in this situation, than something about my self-image and how others will relate to me will have to change if I were to escape.
“Things are deeply fucked burnout.”
This feels similar to the Overworked+Trapped but it’s some other kind of trapped other than just “needing to put in a lot of hours.” Like, maybe there’s conflict at work, or in a close relationship, and there are parts of it you can’t talk about with anyone, and the people you can easily talk about it with have some perspective that feels wrong to you and it’s hard to hold onto your own sense of sanity.
In some (many?) cases the right move here is to walk away, but that might be hard either because you need money/resources from the group, or you’ve invested so much of your identity into it that letting go requires reorganizing how you conceptualize yourself and your goals and your social scene.
This can cause a number of things other than burnout, i.e. various trauma responses. But I think a “burnout” flavored version of it can come when you have to live in this state for months or years. I haven’t had this quite happen to me, but the people who’ve had “conflict based burnout” or “no longer really believe in their job/mission/relationship” flavor burnout can leave people struggling to do much-of-anything on purpose for months.
I think in my ideal world this was a series of blogposts that I actually expected people to read all of. Part of the reason it’s all one post is that I didn’t expect people to reliably get all of them.
Partly, I think each individual piece is necessary. Also, kind of the point of pieces like this are to be sort of guided meditations on a topic that let you sit with it long enough, and approach it from enough different angles, that a foreign way of thinking has time to seep into your brain and get digested.
I expected people would mostly not believe me without the concrete practical examples, but the concrete examples are (necessarily) meandering because that’s what the process was actually like (you should expect the process of transmitting soulful knowledge to feel some-kind-of-meandering, at least a fair amount of the time).
I wanted to make sure people got the warnings at the same time that they got the “how to” manual – if I separated the warnings into a separate post, people might only read the more memetically successful “how to” posts.
I do suspect I could write a much shorter version that gets across the basic idea, but I don’t expect the basic idea to actually be very useful because each of the 20 skills is pretty deep, and conveying what it’s like to use them all at once is just necessarily complicated.