In short, depression, to me, was total and absolute hopelessness.
Burn out, on the other hand, brought me dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of being trapped in a pointless but never-ending cycle.
If I were to dive into more details, depression gave me a rock-solid certainty that I could never be happy, or meaningfully enjoy life in any meaningful way.
There might have been some joyous and light-hearted moments in the past, and perhaps the future held some in store for me. I could smile if prompted or expected to. But these moments always were and always would be the accidents. And so was any past or present progress. Insignificant.
I knew that no matter what I would always revert to my norm: apathy and a deep-seated, always present, lingering painful despair. All while somehow remaining alive, without understanding why or how. Going to bed each day, half hoping that this time there will not be a tomorrow.
It also totally crushed any sense of self-worth I had until then.
The kicker being that this certainty and the blindness to anything positive that comes with it enabled a wonderful feedback loop.
Burning out mostly involved permanent and crippling stress and anxiety, accompanied by a permanent doubt on the usefulness of anything I did.
Anything merely evoking work, such as catching a glimpse of my IDE’s icon, evoked fear.
Nothing felt straightforward anymore. Everything required focus and attention, all the while stressed and anxious. Every task felt like it would be complex and difficult. Before I even started.
Simple things became difficult. Average things became exhausting. Difficult things? Insurmountable.
Anything less than absolutely straightforward made me feel as lost as a junior on his first day, unable to even figure out where to start. Except I knew had done these things before, harder ones even, and this had been my codebase for nearly a year.
Each day felt like pointlessly climbing a mountain, for no reason, good or otherwise. Each day was too short for me to get everything done. And yet too long. All while knowing that the next day would only be worse. With no end in sight.
No break ever was long enough. And each break’s end came with the slowly intensifying dread that came from knowing I was going back to that. And yet each break was always too long. There just was too much to do. All of it urgent, important, critical. Most of it pointless because, although finished, ultimately never released.
Needless to say my sense of professional worth was in shambles, and I often joked about changing careers and moving to the countryside to grow dandelions.
> Feel free to decline if it's too personal or you just don't feel like it.
I have to admit I hesitated. So thank you for your thoughtfulness.
Yes you could summarize them as having almost opposite effects.
Depression - it's hopeless, there's nothing I can do..
Burnout - it's hopeless, but there's so much I can do, let me burn myself out trying to do all of it at once, even though it won't move the needle more than 1%. Almost like "Sunday scaries" but all the time or months nonstop. Just a constant mid-level anxiety & panic.
> I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement.
Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things.
This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be.
Once you commit to spending some time every day/week simply to enjoy yourself and have fun, now you can choose an activity.
At first it may seem difficult because everything may seem pointless or discouraging. Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. They may be easy and tempting, but really must be avoided. The best choices are social, such as team sports, board games, ballroom dancing, etc. Outdoor activities are also great: walking in nature, riding a bike, etc. Artsy stuff like painting or embroidery are okay, but being neither social nor outdoorsy means they won't be as beneficial.
If you are particularly industrious you may be tempted to learn a new skill like a new language, or going to the gym. Beware: your actual goal is to lighten up your mood and enjoy yourself, not to "be productive" or "be the best version of yourself". Your obsession with productivity is probably what got you in this mess in the first place.
Simply allow yourself to be a kid again. Do fun stuff that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
> This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be.
The act of "scheduling" fun makes it hard for me to actually have fun - it feels like a chore. Fun is only fun (to me) if it's spontaneous.
Obviously, that creates quite a vicious cycle... I'm stuck in one right now, actually. I'm just grinding, hoping something's gonna change. I doubt it will, though.
I bet they are, but they are also sedentary. Exercise and the outdoors are great at reducing anxiety, and depression is often caused by chronic anxiety, which is why videogames would not be my weapon of choice to combat it.
I am not entirely sure that I have. And often wonder if I ever will feel it is truly, once and for all, all behind me.
A few things have been helpful though.
• First, the obvious
Quitting the jobs that burned me out.
Avoiding, like the plague, hyper-political or hypocritical work environments. I’ve got better things to than play Game of Thrones or The Young and the Restless.
• The usual
Finding a good therapist. Most will be utterly useless. Competency aside, one that works for one person will be completely unhelpful to someone else. But one that works for you will help you identify and change patterns, in both your everyday life and your "macro" life. They won’t do the work for you, but they will be of tremendous help.
Started doing what I wanted to do as a kid but never did, or not enough. In my case it was surfing and skating. As a child I used to watch those people surfing and skating in movies and wanting to do it too. Turns out, it’s quite fun. Tedious (surfing), and sometimes painful (skating), but really pleasant. It won’t change your life, but in the moment it might just make going through the rest feel like it was worth it.
I went back to activities I used to like but had stopped. For me, it was snorkelling, hiking, and scuba diving. I had entirely forgotten the sense of wonder and excitement that came with it. Scuba diving with a stubborn one year old otitis wasn’t the best of ideas, but we didn’t go below 6m, so it was fine.
• The less obvious and slightly unrelated:
Letting go of high-maintenance friendships and relationships, and letting them die off. It’s incredible how much cognitive and emotional bandwidth these things can take.
• Others
But what has really stuck with me is experimenting. Freeing up some time to experiment with new things. Trying out new things, making new things. Seeing what gets me excited, what sticks, what tickles my brain, and getting back that sense of play in my day to day life.
Lately for me, it’s been stable diffusion and LLM applications, but it can really be anything. The important part is that it should feel more like play than work. The kind of thing that makes you feel so excited you genuinely want to tell everybody about it.
Which unexpectedly reminds me of two people.
The first, a pilot. I wanted to be one at the time, and had somehow gotten a job at the airport so I could see planes all day, meet some pilots, and ask them everything that came to my mind. One of them told that most people didn’t understand that when they (the pilots) went to work, they weren’t going to work. They were going to play. It stuck with me. I obviously didn’t become a pilot, but it stuck.
And the second is Feynman, or more accurately his autobiography ("Surely you’re joking M. Feynman", which I can only wholeheartedly recommend), when he somehow grew bored with physics.
It’s a rather long excerpt, but having looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making it up, here you go:
> Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
> So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
> Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
> I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?”
> I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance… I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
> He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
> “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
> It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
All that being said, I don’t really know wether I am truly out of depression, for good, or if it’s just an exceptionally long relief. While it feels okay now, I can regularly see patterns that I wish were long gone creeping back. And I honestly can’t tell wether it’s just me just overreacting, or if it means it will be a life-long struggle.
But it does seem to get easier with time. It takes some effort, every day. But it gets easier
You need to build a steady trickle of small wins outside of your work environment. These can be anything as long as they can be broken down into small, timeboxed, digestible, repeatable, and rewarding bits.
For example: find a local plant store, pick up some pothos[0], and get some roots going. Get two: one that's a little more established in soil and one that's just a bare cutting. All you need is a jar/glass/mug/bowl of water and a sunny spot.
Do not plan! Stop making plans and checklists and calendar events! Feel free to block off time on your calendar for self-care, which is your plant-tending experiment. No more lists or plans after this. You can plan this all in your head:
1. A plant piece (money optional)
2. A humid container (plastic lunch bag? old yogurt tub? something out of the recycling bin? use trash)
3. A sunny spot or a bright light (sun is free)
Just get some vines get the things to grow some roots[3]. Ask the friendly plant store person for some light nutrient solution, or get a tiny amount of Miracle-Gro and dissolve it in water. You don't need anything fancy, this is just an experiment.
Eventually the vine will start growing. After it forms roots and a few new nodes, you can cut it apart[1] and grow more roots. Keep repeating this process and propagating your vines. Do not stress about messing it up. There is an infinite amount of pothos vine out there. It propagates itself. Try rooting small sections until you can do it confidently.[2]
Take more cuttings, root them, grow them out, gift them to friends, give them away, etc.[3]
Alternatively: ask your plant store for leafless scraps of pothos (or philodendron, or similar) and try propagating from nothing[4]
Yes, your work output will suffer, and it should suffer considering the amount of suffering you've done for it!
What helped me was accepting that there was an infinite amount of work to be done in the world, and that working generated more future work. There is no shortage of pending work, and the overall to-do list is endless much like a river is endless. You don't need to tame the river, but it is useful for navigating the environment. Don't hyperfocus on the river, don't fetishize the river, and stop trying to rapidly get to somewhere else via the river. Splash around, do the basic chores, and hang out by the riverbank and watch things happen.
This probably sounds very stupid right now. Feel free to email me. There are some chemical shortcuts one can take, but that's outside the scope of this post.
I want to thank you for sharing and to return the favor by sharing some of myself. Don't feel like you have to respond or even read it. I just feel bad for asking you to share without providing you with anything back. I'm a afraid I'm going through something similar myself, and it's incredibly valuable for me to read what you've gone though and relate that to myself. I honestly have no idea how I'll handle this or what I'll do.
I'm working on somehow getting a new job (although the self-doubt, fear, and guilt is making is really difficult), and I'm hoping that getting a whiff of something new will at least provide some hope for something worth living for. I don't know if I even like software anymore. I don't know if I was ever good at it, if I'm even good at anything, but I have to believe, because what's the alternative?
Meanwhile I just keep showing up, attending meetings with people yelling at me. Blaming me for the technical problems they didn't want to allocate resources to fix. Even then I can't convince myself that It's not actually MY fault. Maybe i truly didn't communicate how poor the technical state was. Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at. Maybe I'm just fucking useless. What's more likely, a whole layer of middle managers being wrong, or that I'm just fucking useless? Wisdom of the crowds and such.
At least I know that my struggle is actually a struggle, and not just me being a weak baby about it, So thank you for that comfort.
PS: It's also quite a coincidence that you started skating. I too recalled how "cool" i thought the skaters looked when I was young, the happy days of playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and how I longed to be cool like that. After riding an electric long board for a year I decided that maybe skating an acoustic skateboard would be fun, and it is. When skating I feel like I'm doing something. I don't feel like i need to be good. I feel cool. Maybe you don't have to be good at your job, maybe you can just be cool.
Just wanted to say this is similar to what I experienced the last time around: shit management decisions that cut corners everywhere and left us, the engineers, to take the blame for it and spend our time dealing with the constant fire fighting that resulted with no resources to actually prevent it from reoccurring.
I also felt useless, like it was my fault, like I suck, like I don’t ever want to do software for money ever again, and like I’m a wimp because others have been working this way for decades… I’m now on my 18th month of avoiding to work again.
All this to say: don’t ignore the warning signs. This is a toxic job, nothing good will come out of it anymore, and delaying your resignation (or months long sick leave if you can get any) will only make the problem worse while requiring an even longer recovery period.
I don't normally comment in threads, but I really empathized with your post.
> Maybe I did actually deserve to be yelled at.
Almost certainly not. Even when someone has done a bad job and it causes frustration, yelling doesn't solve the problem; it typically only makes things worse for all parties.
You have value outside of your job. Believing and remembering that can help make the challenges at work less depressive. That's often lost on a forum like this where technical prowess is highly valued.
> I don't know if I even like software anymore
That's fine. Some people might consider that impeccable timing before an LLM replaces our software jobs anyways. If you've succeeded in software to any degree, you've probably learned how to learn. I bet you can do it again in a different field.
> I'm working on somehow getting a new job
I run a small company - link in profile. We make high performance CAD software in C. Reach out if you're interested or just need someone to talk to.
Incredible comment. Thank you for writing this. In a world of toxic positivity, such honest open blunt dialog about mental health is not only refreshing, but crucial.
Burn out, on the other hand, brought me dread, anxiety, exhaustion, and the feeling of being trapped in a pointless but never-ending cycle.
If I were to dive into more details, depression gave me a rock-solid certainty that I could never be happy, or meaningfully enjoy life in any meaningful way.
There might have been some joyous and light-hearted moments in the past, and perhaps the future held some in store for me. I could smile if prompted or expected to. But these moments always were and always would be the accidents. And so was any past or present progress. Insignificant.
I knew that no matter what I would always revert to my norm: apathy and a deep-seated, always present, lingering painful despair. All while somehow remaining alive, without understanding why or how. Going to bed each day, half hoping that this time there will not be a tomorrow.
It also totally crushed any sense of self-worth I had until then.
The kicker being that this certainty and the blindness to anything positive that comes with it enabled a wonderful feedback loop.
Burning out mostly involved permanent and crippling stress and anxiety, accompanied by a permanent doubt on the usefulness of anything I did.
Anything merely evoking work, such as catching a glimpse of my IDE’s icon, evoked fear.
Nothing felt straightforward anymore. Everything required focus and attention, all the while stressed and anxious. Every task felt like it would be complex and difficult. Before I even started.
Simple things became difficult. Average things became exhausting. Difficult things? Insurmountable.
Anything less than absolutely straightforward made me feel as lost as a junior on his first day, unable to even figure out where to start. Except I knew had done these things before, harder ones even, and this had been my codebase for nearly a year.
Each day felt like pointlessly climbing a mountain, for no reason, good or otherwise. Each day was too short for me to get everything done. And yet too long. All while knowing that the next day would only be worse. With no end in sight.
No break ever was long enough. And each break’s end came with the slowly intensifying dread that came from knowing I was going back to that. And yet each break was always too long. There just was too much to do. All of it urgent, important, critical. Most of it pointless because, although finished, ultimately never released.
Needless to say my sense of professional worth was in shambles, and I often joked about changing careers and moving to the countryside to grow dandelions.
> Feel free to decline if it's too personal or you just don't feel like it.
I have to admit I hesitated. So thank you for your thoughtfulness.