Every HN burnout post brings out people who think burnout is a bit of exhaustion. Burnout breaks something inside you, like a mini stroke. I burnt out four years ago. The absurdity of lockdowns saved me - I made the most of that to rest and recover - no guilt, the company owed me. Initially my todo list had one item per day. I'm back to getting a bit of enjoyment from programming, but not a lot, and only doing maybe a third per day of pre-burnout, there's no gung-ho, no rocket drive. I take a long while to get started, and probably won't do any personal project work after hours. I have to ignore recruiter emails knowing I couldn't keep up in the described roles. So, it improves, but very slowly, and I don't yet know to what degree. It doesn't help that as the years or decades pass the work becomes less interesting, but occasional mindless grunt work does enable some effortless productivity wins.