I gotta say even though not having kids seems like the most economically sane thing to me, it often makes me wonder, what will be the point of life after retirement. I have no wife, g/f or kids. Right now my only 'why' is to not disappoint my family and cause a couple of them could use my help financially. Other than that, I don't see a long term 'why'. My only compelling short term 'why' is that I don't want to be homeless. But that's pretty much a working to live and living to work type of reason to exist.

Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.

I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.

In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.

Feelsgoodman.

Key sentence

Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work.

Damn true. I figured it out by myself a while ago, when I was in the middle of a crisis after my son was born. TBF I’m still in the crisis on and off, but now I feel better.

What worked is:

- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.

- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.

I am condensing down a much longer thought here but I would argue that this is the result of consumerism.

You work to earn, you earn to buy.

But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.

When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.

Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.

Etc etc

Overcomplicated take. Burn out comes from lacking a feeling of forward progress and tractability to your problems, regardless of current objective state.

I don't know if this article is for me:

>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.

I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.

If you come from immense privilege (growing up in an 8 figure household), have good health, and rich relationships and that isn't enough to curb your existentialism that's ok, but I find it hard to take this piece seriously as this is written like it's targeting the average financially stable worker. It strikes me as out of touch at best.

For the first time in a long time, I can look at a title like this and not feel like it necessarily relates to my current situation. The past few months have been the happiest and most satisfied with life I have been in many years. Grateful.

No, trust me, it is burnout and working too much for too little gain.