[HN Gopher] Is our definition of burnout all wrong?
___________________________________________________________________
Is our definition of burnout all wrong?
Author : pmoriarty
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-11-19 22:30 UTC (2 days ago)
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| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think what the author is seeing is the human reaction to
| prolonged stress. Trauma can create this, but so can many other
| things.
|
| Source: Bipolar... my body is overreactive to stress.
| legitster wrote:
| I still think this is largely wrong.
|
| I've worked some tough jobs in my life. Physically laborious. I'm
| talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line working
| under complete psychopaths. I felt overworked, abused, frustrated
| - I turned off my brain, chatted with coworkers, and did the job.
| But never once did I feel "burned out". No matter how much I
| hated the jobs, I could always stand there and do another day.
| And the end of every shift felt _so good_.
|
| In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice jobs
| - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads. I don't
| even know why. Something about staring at screens all day -
| something about that "unplugging" feeling you get after locking
| in on some code all day - maybe constantly thinking about how
| other people think.
|
| Honestly, the closest non-work simile I have found was signing up
| to do a video game marathon. After hour 8 I had a _distinct_
| feeling of burnout for that game - as bad as any terrible job I
| have ever had. For doing something I should otherwise find
| enjoyable.
|
| So I think there can be some amount of trauma involved, but I
| think the core of "burnout" has less to do with actual negative
| experiences and more about the type of work we engage with. And I
| specifically think it has to do with our capacity to either do
| continuous creative problem solving, or engage with large
| varieties of different people - both activities that humans have
| not historically had to engage in for extended periods of time in
| previous eras.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| lkrubner wrote:
| I strongly agree with this:
|
| "In contrast, I have felt very burned out in relatively nice
| jobs - thoroughly pleasant environments with minor workloads."
|
| For me, I feel the most intense burnout when I see stupidly
| wasted opportunities. For instance, if a startup has a great
| idea and plenty of funding, but the leadership is hopelessly
| stupid and engages in self-sabotage (and perhaps I try to save
| the situation but I'm ignored) and millions of dollars are
| wasted, then I get burnout. I felt burnout in 2016, after
| witnessing the insanely self-destructive leadership at
| "Celelot" destroy a brilliant idea, which I wrote about here:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998997617?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...
| _trampeltier wrote:
| For me also, there had been times I worked several weeks from
| 7am to 23pm and on weekends. This was no problem. The task was
| clear, it was possible to do (with much overtime) and it had an
| clear end. Later in my career, on a different job, different
| position I almost got a burnout, because I thought I could
| solve some problems with much work. But the problems there had
| been endless. So there was no chance ever for me to solve all
| the problems. I asked my boss for a different position in our
| company. I just realized later how close I was to a very bad
| burnout. I guess I had also a bit luck and good people around
| me.
|
| [Edit] The job, where I almost got a burnout. The job was empty
| and they asked me for it, because the person before left with a
| bad burnout. The person now in this job is now also close to a
| burnout.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I suspect decision fatigue is a real thing. Especially the
| harder should/should not decisions, rather than the clear quick
| chat to the group then no-brainers.
| FooHentai wrote:
| Perhaps more like... 'engagement fatigue'? When it's truly
| rote or mindless work your brain can disengage and be
| somewhere else. With knowledge work you don't have that
| luxury, even when the work itself isn't what we could
| consider 'engaging', you nevertheless are obliged to be
| engaged mentally to carry it out. Do that long enough without
| deriving any satisfaction, it seems a perfectly sane reaction
| to want to escape the situation, or just plain shut off. It
| makes sense for our brains to realize we're spending a lot of
| brain focus and time on something that isn't activating any
| reward centers, and insist we stop doing that. That really
| seems like a fundamentally sensible and healthy response from
| a brain functioning properly.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've noticed a similar discrepancy in my life: Mental burnout
| wasn't present in my early, physical-labor jobs. It also wasn't
| present in my early coding jobs. It only started to appear
| later in my career when my pay was highest and my actual time
| spent producing tangible output (whether physical labor or
| code) was lowest.
|
| One theory is that I became less physically active over time.
| Exercise is well known to have a protective effect against
| burnout, and physical labor jobs are a lot of exercise all day.
| I was also going to the gym much more when I was younger.
|
| Another theory is that my later career burnout came from what
| studies would call "social defeat stress". I was most burnt out
| when I spent most of my job time trying to navigate
| dysfunctional companies, deal with incompetent bosses, and
| fight against dirty office politics.
|
| Changing to a job where my boss was more demanding but also
| more competent unexpectedly reduced my burnout symptoms rather
| than worsening them. Something about being in a socially
| consistent environment makes everything easier to stomach. On
| the contrary, being in weird office politics situations where
| Bob in management gets to insult your work and upend your
| priorities every week just because he's got a certain title
| leads to burnout. It's like the burnout is a response to dampen
| your expectations and efforts in response to situations where
| more engagement will only produce more stress and frustration.
|
| Physical labor jobs, on the other hand, have a property that
| more input will usually result in at least some tangible
| forward progress.
| eastbound wrote:
| > I'm talking 100+ hour weeks on an ice cold production line
| working under complete psychopaths.
|
| <s>Testosterone</s>
|
| I've worked cutting trees under a literal psychopath (just out
| of jail for murder), a guy had died of dehydration on that job
| the previous year. It was strenuous and I mourned/cried the
| loss of my girlfriend while sawing branches like a madman.
|
| It was also the best time of my life.
|
| See, using my body, requiring agility, quick varied
| microdecisions and physical strength, it _makes use_ of the
| body I was given by mother nature. Compare that to working in
| front of a computer all day, using only the logical part of my
| brain, no emotions, gray screens everywhere: As much as I love
| being an entrepreneur and I love using my IQ 136, well, it uses
| 8% of the body's capabilities - the brain and the fingers,
| period. It's unnatural.
|
| So I suspect hard physical work with actual people and
| emotions, triggers hormones (testosterone being the caricature
| of it) that regulates everything including motivation, a clean
| mind, and happiness. Of course I wouldn't wish to work on a
| field all my life, but programming or Excel spreadsheeting may
| have a negative impact on the mind.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I do BJJ and once you get into it, it is extremely fun and
| rewarding. Strenuous physically. Mentally, extremely deep,
| popular with tech folks because although you have to be in
| shape skill development dominates. Strength will always be an
| asset. So will cardio, but skill dominates. Plus close human
| contact releases oxytocin and other hormones. And the
| physical activity does the equivalent of a runners high. And
| the mental activity gives you intrinsic learning rewards. I
| suppose you can burn out on it, it can be very frustrating at
| times, but once you get past the first humps it is golden.
| eastbound wrote:
| I loved judo for this reason, although BJJ might be less
| dangerous. Exhausting; You take hits (unvoluntarily...
| maybe); You learn gestures. And more importantly: You learn
| with your body. I think our bodies demand to be used ;)
|
| Socrates was right! There's no mind without a strong body!
| (for a man at least).
| bitexploder wrote:
| Test is definitely a factor in working out and feeling
| good for all men, but especially young men. Plenty of
| women enjoy BJJ for many of the same reasons men do
| though. BJJ is relatively safe. You will end up with
| injuries, but it is worth it for me as a desk jockey. :)
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Now try doing that job for 20 to 30 years, your entire body
| will be totally broken and riddled with arthritis.
|
| For somebody proudly touting their Mensa membership, you seem
| to have fallen into the same transcendalist trap that
| everyone does who waxes poetic for natural and "Mother
| Earth".
|
| Natural is one in three women dying in childbirth, natural is
| contracting rabies by being bitten by a rabid animal and
| having 100% mortality rate, natural is dying at age 50 to 60.
| cpsns wrote:
| > Now try doing that job for 20 to 30 years, your entire
| body will be totally broken and riddled with arthritis.
|
| I see this a lot on HN, but never forget that sitting for
| eight hours a day has long term negative health
| consequences too, some that are very very serious.
| golemotron wrote:
| It might have a lot to do with expectations too: illusory ones.
| If one gains meaning from their work with the idea that they
| are "changing the world" in some Utopian sense they might be
| more prone to burnout.
|
| It's nice when a job is just a way to make money and support
| yourself.
| choxi wrote:
| I've always thought burnout is the same thing as learned
| helplessness, which is a pretty well studied phenomenon in
| psychology. It doesn't seem mysterious to me that if you
| repeatedly do a task that is unrewarding for long enough, you no
| longer want to do it. Then the COVID burnout can be explained by
| a large scale reduction in the rewards that typically keep people
| going.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I can see the reasoning here but I think it's a little
| different. Learned helplessness is the phenomenon where people
| stop trying to change their situation or circumstance because
| they feel ("learn") that nothing will help. Burnout is a little
| different. Burnout is more like when you simply don't want to
| do something any more, but often people with burnout still have
| the capacity to change their circumstance. Often people with
| burnout will quit or take time off and seriously reconsider
| their situation, whereas that is not the case with learned
| helplessness.
|
| In my opinion burnout is actually more of a natural phenomenon,
| which is the mind simply needing to do something totally
| different and perhaps more meaningful. I believe it is also due
| to the unnatural tendency for people to work in the same or
| similar field of expertise for far too long, which is simply
| not natural especially for highly intellectual fields.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| I spend most of my 15 year career working at startups I've
| worked long evenings, weekends, dealt with stress, tense
| situations (both commercial and social) and deadlines and never
| had any symptoms of burnout. I switched to a large enterprise
| company and enjoyed the relaxed pace for a year. The first 6
| months took some adjustment but I quickly figured out that
| getting things done in a large company just required a bit of a
| different skill set. Sometimes it took weeks to get a simple
| configuration changed but when I finally talked to the guy I
| learned that he had 5 kids, three of them who were sick,
| instantly made me realize that my frustration about the pace
| was uncalled for.
|
| Fast forward to the second year, I got a new manager who turned
| the office politics to 11, put people in positions that they
| were absolutely not fit for and in general made a huge mess out
| of everything, ignoring the advice and suggestions of the team
| while doing it while continuously reminding us engineers of our
| low place in the picking order. If there was a way to rank
| managers this guy would be in the bottom 5%, I've worked with
| about 30 managers (in one way or another) in my career so this
| was bound to happen at some point.
|
| However, I was totally not prepared for the effect it had on
| me. Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated
| 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping
| poorly and my physical health was suffering. It took an
| enormous amount of energy just to sit through online meetings
| without lashing out, the rest of the team was feeling the same
| so you can imagine what kind of environment it was. I was lucky
| to get a new job very quickly and after getting out of that
| toxic environment I was my old self again in mere weeks.
|
| I can totally imagine how burnout can be modeled as learned
| helplessness. If, I, as young, healthy guy can be reduced to a
| wreck, in months, in a toxic environment, I can only start to
| imagine what people have to go through that don't have the
| luxury of switching jobs quickly (for whatever reason).
| clnq wrote:
| I have been through the same. No burnout in startups, then a
| period of boreout in a large company, then a political
| manager, then depression, and then resigning. Although my
| company did retain me in the end.
|
| There's nothing worse than a clueless political manager.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Within months I was reduced to someone who was frustrated
| 24/7, unable to do even the most basic task, I was sleeping
| poorly and my physical health was suffering.
|
| Always remember that it's jsut a job, and that your manager's
| opinion - outside of that org - is no more important than
| anyone else's opinion in the world.
| planetsprite wrote:
| It's hard to get out of that mindset, especially as a young
| new hire.
|
| In the United States, your job is very closely tied to your
| livelihood due to high rents, few social support
| structures, health insurance often tied to your job, etc.
|
| There's a model of thinking taught in schools and
| universities that teaches individuals to defer helplessly
| to their superiors, to be subservient to a fault and
| respect hierarchies as sacrosanct. When someone abuses that
| hierarchy, one either has to unlearn their programming, or
| assume the burden of the imposition of value on their
| psyche.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Related to this: one thing I saw somebody here say one time is
| that responsibility without authority is a key to burnout.
| Having the responsibility to complete a large amount of work
| without the authority to make the decisions needed for that
| work can be incredibly disempowering, which can make you feel
| helpless.
|
| More reason to have small teams, cut out middle management,
| hire good developers, and trust them to make decisions. Being a
| code monkey is a recipe for burnout.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think there is a lot to this. Burnout is somewhat poorly
| defined. The more specific "learned helplessness" would cover a
| lot of the cases and would be a useful guide for treatment.
| breck wrote:
| Yes. Don't even need to read it. Anytime you read the sentence
| "our definition" it's wrong. There is no such thing as "burn
| out". It's a marketing term. Practice root thinking
| (https://breckyunits.com/root-thinking.html). Ignore marketing
| buzz words, especially if they come from social sciences like
| psychology, psychiatry, et cetera.
|
| Obviously fatigue is a thing and you need rest, but don't believe
| anyone who tells you you have some easily labeled condition--it's
| almost always B.S.
| rzzzt wrote:
| > All ideas are trees. All products start as ideas. Therefore
| all products are trees.
|
| The conclusion or the second premise should be changed to make
| the former a true statement. So either "Therefore all products
| start as trees" or "All products are ideas".
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| You need to hold in your mind two completing concepts. One is
| that you might have a condition, and that condition may not be
| fully understood by medical science, and need some self-
| experimentation (for example, meditation, diet, blood tests,
| psychotherapy, drugs). The other concept is that it might blow
| over with rest, time or a change in thinking patterns and there
| is nothing to fix. Since you can't know which is true, both
| need to be nurtured!
| breck wrote:
| Agreed. I think the problem is we have 100 "conditions" for
| every 1 actual physical condition.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This article went from "everyone was stressed during the
| pandemic" to "everyone actually has complex PTSD now" alarmingly
| fast.
|
| The author writes as though they're in a bubble with other
| extremely-online people. People who can't unplug from the 24/7
| news feed and instead adopt the world's stresses on to
| themselves, manifesting as a never-ending cycle of stress and
| doom:
|
| > The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might
| actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we
| headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown,
| before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues
| started expressing a relationship to time and the future that
| alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn't
| exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no
| future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and
| getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe
| at large.
|
| I hope it goes without saying that this author is not qualified
| to be diagnosing themself or their peers with C-PTSD as defined
| by the ICD-11. We should all be cautious against articles trying
| to apply serious mental health issues to broad swaths of the
| general population. Furthermore, it's not really fair to people
| suffering from severe PTSD or C-PTSD to start watering down these
| terms such that everyone has the same condition.
|
| I don't think we're doing anyone a favor by redefining everything
| as trauma these days. The pandemic was more stressful than
| average and many people certainly did acquire trauma through the
| loss of loved ones and other extreme events. However, if we're
| getting to the point that merely _existing through_ the pandemic
| is a traumatic experience producing C-PTSD, the real issue likely
| lies in one 's inability to handle stress and unplug from the
| 24/7 news cycle.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| This is not a rebuttal of what you are saying and I think your
| caution is valid, but your post prompted a musing about
| observations of my elders (all whom have now passed away.)
|
| All of my grandparents and great aunts/uncles who lived through
| the great depression and ww2 (some actively fighting and some
| not), all the men and women seemed to be quite traumatized and
| in fact much of their personality seemed permanently defined by
| the great depression, even more so than ww2 (with the exception
| of one uncle who was in a foxhole during the battle of the
| bulge.), often to the point of irrational and even harmful
| decision making, including hoarding in a couple cases.
|
| This was true even though none of them were financially ruined,
| forced to move, destitute or food insecure during either
| period.
|
| I think cultural contagion, existential worry and trauma/coping
| mechanisms/adaptive personality change existed prior to the
| plugged in life and 24/7 news cycle (though those two things
| exacerbate it for sure.)
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| They're called life-changing events, right? :)
|
| The daily experience you have today of being able to walk
| into Walmart or whatever and just buy whatever you want means
| that you have a certain level of confidence in life.
| Generally, people buy dishwashing liquid when it runs out,
| not weeks before with a buffer. If you had to live through a
| period in which you could go to the store and not find
| anything, or perhaps no money, or perhaps you can't go out
| because it's dangerous outside, etc, then you're going to
| treat that differently, perhaps for your entire life.
|
| Before coronavirus happened there were a ton of things that I
| had planned to do during my life. They all seemed so certain,
| like, provided I'm in good health, I can do all of that stuff
| over the next few decades.
|
| But then it was all ripped away. Not all of it came back. Not
| all of it _is_ coming back. And so that experience has made
| me far more short-termist in my outlook. Do it now while you
| can, etc. I think many people feel the same way.
| dkarl wrote:
| I also think it was somewhat appropriate not to have a concrete
| idea of the future early in the pandemic. We didn't know what
| was coming. Lots of speculation turned out to be false. One
| scenario that was suggested very early on was a low single-
| digit percentage of young healthy adults being hospitalized,
| which could realistically have caused interruptions in basic
| municipal services in some places. Other scenarios were too
| optimistic. We really didn't know the future and couldn't make
| firm plans about it. Feeling that way all the time, no matter
| whether it's appropriate, is a symptom. Feeling that way when
| it makes perfect sense is not a symptom.
| ogoparootbbo wrote:
| > People who can't unplug from the 24/7 news feed and instead
| adopt the world's stresses on to themselves, manifesting as a
| never-ending cycle of stress and doom
|
| The adopting the world's stresses seems to be something I've
| observed with the newer generations. No actual problem solving
| but merely adopting the stress which I wonder is a symptom of
| being overly empathetic but I can't understand why the adoption
| doesn't progress into actual problem solving? Is it because the
| average joe regardless of the generation is a bad problem
| solver and more unrefined free stress is bound to paralyze said
| joe. Or is it something else?
| legitster wrote:
| I tend think the problem is that the world is _under-
| stressed_.
|
| Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for humans.
| Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths before the
| year 1800.
|
| If you are a generation that has been raised in a world with
| few diseases, famines, foreign invasions, and even fewer
| things like verbal abuse or bullying - by the time you reach
| adulthood you are probably much, _much_ more sensitive to any
| sort of negative emotion anywhere.
|
| It's like growing up in a zero-G environment and coming back
| down to Earth - you have no emotional muscles.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I agree. In prior generations, if you survived childhood
| you probably went to fight in a war as a young adult (if
| you were male) or you had a loved one who did and you had
| to struggle to keep things together at home. If you
| survived that, you had a hard life working in fields or
| factories until your body was so broken you couldn't do it
| anymore. You didn't have time to worry about the types of
| things that many young people have as their big concerns
| today.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I tend think the problem is that the world is under-
| stressed.
|
| I'd say that it isn't the world that's under-stressed, it's
| upper-middle class NYC/London feature writers. Other people
| still suffer plenty.
| bob1029 wrote:
| In my experience, intentionally stressing yourself in
| controlled ways (i.e. with exercise) is an incredibly
| effective way to counteract this issue.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Personal tragedy used to be unbelievably common for
| humans. Just consider the sheer number of childhood deaths
| before the year 1800.
|
| While the troughs of that sorrow are undoubtedly deeper,
| childhood deaths in your family weren't a 24/7 stressor.
|
| I think the issue is that people can log in to Reddit,
| Twitter, or even any news website and receive a constant
| stream of tragedy, bad news, and worry. It's no longer an
| exception, it's the everyday experience available on
| demand.
|
| I see this come up in extremely online young people I work
| with: They're always invested in a new tragedy or
| catastrophe or drama or concern somewhere in the world, but
| those worries disappear and get replaced with a new one as
| soon as the news cycles shift. They weren't actually
| invested in it, they were just reacting to what they put in
| front of their eyes for hours per day.
| MrLeap wrote:
| This probably depends on the parent. One of my brothers
| died when I was in 3rd grade. After that, the head vice
| was pretty much constant until my mom kicked me out at
| 14. Things rapidly improved after that.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I would say it's because they are stressed about problems
| that are much too big for them. A single person has
| essentially 0 influence over politics, climate change, and
| social issues, yet people spend hours a day getting fed news
| and hot takes over these issues, on any side of the political
| spectrum. Surely ingesting so much of this content will
| impact your mental health. If it turns into some sort of
| productive action, that's great, but that may not be the
| natural response for everyone.
| rocketbop wrote:
| > I would say it's because they are stressed about problems
| that are much too big for them.
|
| I have heard these described as gravity problems; problems
| that might be worth solving, if they are solvable at all,
| but which are almost certainly not the problems you should
| be concerning yourself with. Instead finding the right
| sized problems and solving them can be very satisfying.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to
| unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve
| the problem here.
|
| Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by
| law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us
| who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became
| incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about
| anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus
| became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the
| floor for christ's sake.
|
| Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd
| love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the
| China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I
| missed out on visiting it, potentially forever.
|
| I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those
| workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no
| longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely
| on it.
|
| These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge
| amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind
| of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society
| could simply decide to completely up-end the existing
| structures again.
|
| I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan
| for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner,
| and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly
| become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might
| disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you".
|
| I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like
| meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a
| bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019.
|
| > expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed
| me. They began talking about the future as if it didn't exist
|
| I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I
| trained for and built my life around disappeared.
| jpswade wrote:
| Burnout is the loss of momentum.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Interesting premise, but I'm having a lot of trouble with this.
| He says burnout is the default condition of a millennial. Various
| definitions I've seen seem to disagree on whether that includes
| me (birth year 1980), but I was in the Army before getting into
| software and am definitely part of the generation that joined up
| post 9-11 and served in a pretty horribly-paced environment of
| long, repeat deployments that continued forever because of how
| long those wars lasted. Echoing other comments, I've definitely
| worked under psychopaths, including a guy who bragged about how
| hard his dick got blowing up hospitals in Mosul. I've seen a lot
| of what this guy is writing about in terms of people who become
| totally trapped in the present, believing they have no escape
| from their current predicament, and also become so accustomed to
| stress that they lose the ability to live without it and can
| never adjust back to regular civilian life. This is certainly a
| form of PTSD, but I have a lot of trouble accepting that anyone
| working a regular office job in media experiences anything like
| this.
|
| On the other hand, I'll also echo other comments about the
| difference between this and what I would personally call burnout.
| Traumatic jobs can be quite thrilling and produce intense bonds
| and feelings of mission importance. On the other hand, a modern
| office job can often result in monotony and a feeling that what
| you're doing is unimportant bullshit that would leave the world
| exactly the same if no one ever did it. That tedium is like Bart
| Simpson being forced to write the same sentence on a chalkboard
| over and over again for hours on end. That feeling that you're
| being pushed for no real reason is what leads to burnout.
|
| Contrast the same intense bonds and feeling of mission that comes
| from being at a fast-growing startup in the early days, where
| every decision has a magnified importance because the difference
| between life and death for your organization is so razor thin, to
| something like the purely manufactured urgency happening at
| Twitter right now. Pushing yourself to the absolute limit for a
| real mission tends to be the kind of thing people eventually
| become tired of, but nonetheless look back fondly on and miss a
| bit when they're honest with themselves, even if you can't do it
| for a lifetime. But deadlines for the sake of deadlines and
| induced scarcity intended to extract startup-level productivity
| when your situation doesn't actually call for it is what sours
| people entirely on the very idea of work and capitalism.
|
| As for the pandemic, I think it exposed an uncomfortable reality
| that most people stuck in the rat race don't exactly appreciate,
| which is that a whole lot of what we spend our lives doing for
| work is not "needed" in the sense that consumers will be
| materially worse off because they have less to consume if we stop
| producing it, but because our entire economic system is
| predicated on a level of consumption and growth that can only be
| achieved through induced demand, fake scarcity, marketing tricks,
| and busy work. That is, entire industries like salons and barber
| shops just disappeared for a while and it mattered because those
| people lost incomes and maybe it also mattered because customers
| are using interaction with service workers to fill the hole left
| by the fact they have no real friends, but it didn't matter that
| anyone's nails and hair looked a little worse.
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