> A year isn't that long and a few years of tough work can make subsequent years more pleasurable.
Exactly this, prolonged gratification and robust coping mechanisms are skill sets you (can) develop if you've had to endure significant hardship in your Life.
I've burned out 4 times already (twice in tech), and people misattribute it to losing the will to live, but honestly, having worked so many manual labour jobs before I got into tech it's more like finally giving into the tedium of the job and the people more than it is an existential crisis. It's total prima-donna preening and you can tell much about a person when they behave like this.
As soon as I left my tech job as dev and consultant at a megacorp, I went knocking on a few restaurant doors to ask if I could stage that week as a cook as I had looked forward to coming out of retirement for one last tour in kitchens.
I didn't even go back to collect my last check (2-3 days worth of salary?) at the megacorp (they didn't want to DD it) and instead just started working on my knife skills again after having retired 4.5 years earlier from the culinary world.
It's all relative, really, and I think software developers live in such a cushy bubble where every accommodation is made for them that most will never venture out of it until they have years of savings that insulate them from the harsh realities of the World and they decide to leave for good and start a bakery or build a hobby farm or something and realize what real hard work looks like and that getting 4 hours of work done a day really doesn't work in either of those roles.
I didn’t start in tech, I know what working in “the world” is like. When I’m asking about the burnout I am not asking from the position of a delicate Victorian maiden who can’t entertain the thought of labor. What I am asking is how someone can live where every waking moment appears to be hell bent on growth without any sort of goal in mind.
Reading through the article I never got the sense the author was ever going to be happy. It seemed like ever getting comfortable in a position in life or work gave them some sort of dread that kept spurring them to move on to more work. That kind of constant fear based stress response causes most humans(and other animals) to just collapse at some point
> That kind of constant fear based stress response causes most humans(and other animals) to just collapse at some point
Add lower standards of living, and lower prospects over all and you're understanding the plights that most millennials and perhaps all of Gen Z have and will continue to endure.
It's why they've given into this level of pessimism and nihilism. As a Millenial myself, I know fundamentally that Capitalism is a flawed system, which entirely relies on perpetual growth models that are not just unsustainable, but are only possible if extinction is not a concern.
With that said, yes, I agree; it's still my contention that tech workers still give into this absurd idea that what takes place in their sheltered World and leads to 'stress or burnout' is in any way a reflection of anything other than triviality compared to the majority of what the World deals with.
What's crazy is when you see former tech workers go into conflict zones, like in the case of Ukraine where many in Kharkiv had their lives entirely destroyed are forced to pick up arms and excel in these endeavors.
It's few and far between, but when you see it it gives you hope (?) that whatever we've done to the Human Condition be undone, and my hope is that it can occur in a way that doesn't require outright total war.
