Burnout often doesn’t look like lack of motivation / lack of focus / fatigue as people usually describe it. At least in my experience, it’s often better described as a set of aversive mental triggers that fire whenever a burnt out person goes to do a sort of work they spent too much energy on in the past. (Where ‘too much energy’ has something to do with time and effort, but more to do with a bunch of other things re how people interface with their work).
‘I get surrounded by small ugh fields that grow into larger, overlapping ugh fields until my navigation becomes constained and eventually impossible’ was how I described one such experience
Thing I currently believe about what the core interface failure is, possibly just for me:
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Burnout is not a result of working a lot, it’s a result of work not feeling like it pays out in ape-enjoyableness[citation needed]. So they very well could be having a grand ol time working a lot if their attitude towards intended amount of success matches up comfortably with actual success and they find this to pay out in a felt currency which is directly satisfying. I get burned out when effort ⇒ results ⇒ natural rewards gets broken, eg because of being unable to succeed at something hard, or forgetting to use money to buy things my body would like to be paid with.
Moreover, it’s when the work that used to be satisfying has stopped being so, but the habit of trying to do the work has not yet been extinguished. So you don’t quit yet, but the habit is slowly dying so you don’t do it well …
Burnout often doesn’t look like lack of motivation / lack of focus / fatigue as people usually describe it. At least in my experience, it’s often better described as a set of aversive mental triggers that fire whenever a burnt out person goes to do a sort of work they spent too much energy on in the past. (Where ‘too much energy’ has something to do with time and effort, but more to do with a bunch of other things re how people interface with their work).
‘I get surrounded by small ugh fields that grow into larger, overlapping ugh fields until my navigation becomes constained and eventually impossible’ was how I described one such experience
Thing I currently believe about what the core interface failure is, possibly just for me:
Moreover, it’s when the work that used to be satisfying has stopped being so, but the habit of trying to do the work has not yet been extinguished. So you don’t quit yet, but the habit is slowly dying so you don’t do it well …