You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.

I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.

Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!

Hedonic treadmill only applies to hedonia, not the eudaimonia that meaningful work typically brings. “Doing well” doesn’t have the same elastic snap back that “being well” does, and there’s some evidence it can provide a buffer on the hedonic treadmill effect.

> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.

This seems quite wrong in my experience. Meaningful work stays meaningful and exciting, every single day.

"Politics as a zero-sum game" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's only true if you see it as "competing over who gets all the power". In a more sympathetic perspective, politics is just how communities self-organize, make decisions and build compromise between the needs and interests of their stakeholders. Especially at the local level (where the feedback path between "make a decision" and "affect peoples' lives" is the shortest and most accessible), that can mostly involve people being available to do the work that needs to happen to build consensus and get anything done done to improve the lives of the community members.

I agree that the piece does feel incomplete, but it is a large topic to fully cover in a blog post. The author is stating that with purpose, life is a joy, not a chore. I feel like this is a message that many people need to hear!

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It didn’t catch me in the widely cast net.

I didn’t match the 1) nice place, 2) family and friends.

Apparently an ad huh.

There's so little meaning (other than "Buy My Book!") in the latter part of the post that I thought I read the same paragraph 20 times

Worse, it's canvassing for a political movement.

Made some edits last night. But I think the post still stood up 95%+.

The middle is full of stories of how I failed for years.

I think I can help you, here's how I failed, then succeeded, you can too!

And my book is truly the next step.

If you liked these ~2,000 words, there's 20x more in Positive Politics!

I specifically believe Positive Politics can best utilize the ambitious optimism of e.g. YC founders to solve the world's biggest problems!

yes, felt like one long humble brag after that. how tiresome.

I don’t know. Doctors nowadays (especially in the US, it seems to be less prevalent elsewhere) seem very quick at prescribing medication.

And while I don’t doubt that there are serious physiological conditions that warrant, even necessitate, medicating, my impression is that the first response to “depression” in general shouldn’t be medication.

I’ve been depressed in the past, in my 20s even severely. Clinically, you could say. But in the end, every one of those depressive episodes were because something was not right in my life.

Whether I acknowledged it or not, whether I even realized that there was a problem, once I figured the issues out and took the sometimes very painful and exhausting steps to sort them out, the depression faded away.

Over time, I’ve become better at introspection to figure out what’s really bugging me, and also in recognizing a budding early depression as warning signs.

Burn out is the second or third year of non-stop fires and you are the one to solve all of the problems. Meanwhile the company is busy creating more fires because they haven’t finished burning that sweet sweet engineer candle.

For sure! I've written a lot about depression too! But I do think a lot of what people otherwise blame on burnout or depression is really this existential hunger to make more positive impact. Finding that highest purpose can change lives!

My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.

I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.

Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?

Medical assistance is not going to help when the thing that is making you depressed is the non negotiable 9-5 you have to do 5 days a week.

You’re not in the right field you say? Then you’ll be depressed from the poverty that comes from abysmal wages and the complete lack of job security.

I don't think it's quite that binary. Depression can cause burn out and burn out can cause depression. They're inextricably linked.

And burn out isn't "I hate my job and don't enjoy it more". It's fatigue so hard that you feel like you haven't slept after waking up. I hate that burnout is thrown around so easily. It's something that should be moved to therapy and a long time off, not "switch jobs". If that fixes your burnout, it's early stages or not burnout.

I had burnout this year and was too dumbfounded in the supermarket to buy what I always buy or drive a car. I didn't have any mental capacity anymore. Like an IQ of 20 and the physical energy of a 100 year old.

And the money to pay for it. So better get to work.

Be unkind to yourselves, people. I find the best way to prevent depression and burn-out is to be brutally, ruthlessly frank with myself. There's nothing positive in accepting weakness and failure. I always feel better when I hold myself to the highest standards and don't make excuses. Of course, I don't always manage to fully do that but it's something to aspire to.

My advice would be to keep up with a schedule that still keeps you pretty busy and ideally waking up early at regular hours. Once you hit actual rock bottom burn out, you know sleeping in until noon and scrolling message boards for three hours before you realized you haven't eaten yet all day and the sun is already setting, it feels almost impossible to turn the switch back on when you need to. Even something like folding your clothes starts to feel like a monumental task pretty fast.

For all the yammering in this thread you’ve centered on the real problem no one can admit here.

You burn out creating value for others that you end up either not owning or it not materially contributing to your immediate community.

We evolved to work for ourselves and our tribe again immense satisfaction from that. Cleaning your house, pulling weeds volunteering locally. Etc.

But endlessly serving shareholders (ownership class or not) while giving up way more value then you out in yields a deep sense of happiness because we can’t express the unfairness woven into our life so deeply.

Also resonates with me. I helped my previous company scale and get acquired and then helped scale the new team some more. Then decided I wanted to go into a high-caliber start-up because I was kind of burned-out and after a year I did. I work with brilliant people, building a product that democratizes investing in my small EU country and seeing a company grow again is fun. The problem is we lack excitedness and the feedback loop is bad so my motivation hasn't picked-up. What helped me is a new hire that brought some emotions and excitedness to the team.

I have also been thinking of giving my notice for a while now, but I'm also struggling with finding a purpose so that part also hit me hard. I'm actually scared of leaving my job in case I find out it was the one thing that gave me purpose and I won't be able to find something better.

Congrats on doing it, and please do send a message if you do find something that gives you more purpose, it will greatly help me.

Congratulations on breaking out and good luck, it’s real powerful work ahead for you!

I did that a few years ago and it’s been transformative.

HMU if you want help.

Thanks! And congrats on giving notice! Excited to hear what you do next! Cheering for you!

damn bro having a billion dollar company and your own family must be so tough to deal with , happy to take them off your hands if you want to feel the drive to live again ;)

I was hooked by the first few paragraphs but the immediate switch to focus on work was disappointing.

The happiest people I know treat work like the necessary evil to be endured to fulfill all other facets of life.

I think this is, in part, what the article is arguing. Community, and multi-generational culture and tradition, were a technology which helped populations thrive in what we now consider abject poverty. As the world gets wealthier, due to more recent technologies like widespread markets, staying in the same place and interacting with only the same 100-500 people for one's whole life is no longer something that almost everyone has to do, which explodes the basis for those earlier techs.

With TFR rapidly falling, current and future children are much less likely to even have any family other than parents, which cuts out another pillar supporting community and tradition, too.

I don't have a pat answer or know where this is going, but--assuming humanity survives--unless we want to turn into Asimov's Spacers, we'll have to find something to care about.

I feel the same way. That I'm just put through the consume more and more treadmill and it's on social media, news feeds, YouTube, tv and so on.

So, don't condense your thought here, I would love to read everything.

> Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it".

And people sit around stupidly asking why everyone is pissed off and angry.

> Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia

I know I'm burnt out (increasingly severe burnout at that) and I ask myself that question daily. The truth is there is no point and I can't motivate myself anymore. I don't see any solution to the problem and I expect I will lose my job sooner or later at which point I'm not sure what I'll do.

I've largely come to the conclusion that what I need to be mentally healthy and what society needs from me are fundamentally incompatible things.

I think you need to rework some definitions or vocabulary if "overwork" is solved by "raise".

Maybe in extreme cases where a raise translates into big time savers like a maid, but those are not the type of raises you while keeping the same job.

For sure. That's why I focused on the Monday morning meaning problem.

Dreading work is very different than overwork.

I'm arguing we replace the "what's the point?" question with a "what's my highest purpose? exploration.

In that second answer is the solution to what many are calling burnout.

> Maybe other people relate more to this post because they more money and no kids.

I have kids, but I don’t think having kids or even a lack of money is necessary to experience the type of burnout you’re describing.

While everyone and every situation is different, my personal experience is that having kids led to less burnout for me over time. I expected the opposite after reading comments online, but it turns out that for me the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing. The job no longer felt like some isolated drudgery without purpose because it played a clear role in my family’s well being. I also learned how to manage time and prioritize better after having kids.

But I will never gatekeep burnout or try to differentiate burnout based on having kids or money. I can even think of someone who was clearly experiencing burnout despite having neither kids nor a job and while not having to worry about money. Burnout isn’t a simple function of life circumstances, personal circumstances and mental well being play a large role. In some cases, certain personality types can seemingly become burned out under any circumstances. It’s a heavily personal reaction.

I'm like this but four kids. The kids are my life, but in another way the two hours when they're in bed are my life. I try and get household shit done in tiny increments throughout the day - cleaning the kitchen in the morning before I start work, doing laundry at lunch, cleaning away dinner stuff while they brush teeth, so that I squeeze a little more self time in the evenings. In those hours, I have side projects I work on. And I do WAY too many. People would look at my life and say I need to focus on one thing to finish it, but I've learned (for me at least) that happiness comes from having lots of options when you have that free time. I forgive myself for not making major progress on things, not being productive outside of work, and I try to just enjoy my time whether it's writing fiction, building board games, hobby coding, messing with unity, reading, building models, casual gaming etc. lately I've been doing needle felting because I picked up a cheap Halloween decoration of a needle felt cute vampire. Halloween is long over but I'm not beating myself up about it. All my hobbies follow a pattern of things that I can pick up where I left off with minimum fuss. I don't do anything that takes an age to set up or has a minimum time commitment.

I would say hang in there, and once in a while give yourself permission to prioritise the "care for myself" over the "maintain a household".

Do things in little increments and don't torture yourself about not being full of energy all the time

When kids were added to the family, it actually improved my life. I actually had motivation then for making money—and making time.

Now, empty nested, I can see that I was both rudderless and identity-less before the kids. I'm wandering now (and retired) trying to find a replacement identity.

I'm still a father of course (and husband) but with less input and less to do. In fact I feel inclined to step back and let the girls have their lives now. So I road-trip, come up with projects to keep me busy, try to be an "educator".

Sadly, having more money doesn’t buy time. At least, not until you have enough money that you can hire assistants, but that’s pretty extreme.

I have more money and no kids, I still relate to your comment.

I burned out basically because I'm stupid and decided to work a demanding full time job while also remodeling my house by myself. Like all renovation jobs, it ended up being bigger than planned (I actually expected it to grow from us discovering something that had to be done during the renovation, I just never expected the thing we found to be as large as it was: we had to redo the whole foundation of our 1840 house, and because a machine wouldn't fit through the doors, we ended up digging out around 16m3 of hard packed dirt by hand and carrying it out of the house, also by hand)

What was supposed to be a kitchen upgrade turned into roughly half our house looking like something out of tomb raider for a year. 8 hours of intellectually demanding office work followed by 8 hours of grueling digging in "the mine" as came to nickname the ground floor really did a number on both me and my wife.

She crashed out first, which left me with no choice but to keep pushing long past what I felt I could handle. Saw a doctor who diagnosed me with burnout and told me to rest for 6 months,I instead held out for another ~6 months until my wife was back on her legs before allowing myself to rest.

The 6 months of sick leave the doctor prescribed wasn't nearly enough.

But hey, my kitchen is fucking gorgeous, so there's that, at least!

It's so simple it's hard to really appreciate. Accepting what is and acknowledging that all you can do is your best and other mindful practices can really help. Easier said than done. I'd highly recommend the Healthy Minds app as a nice, no cost place to start learning. It grew out of a University of Wisconsin program and, as far as I know, is funded by donations and grants.

Healthy Minds https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app

> because I have to raise two young children

It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.

Both of my parents worked full time. Neither of them seemed burnt out. Have plenty of friends where both parents work, neither seem burnt out. I'm always curious what makes it work for some an not others. Some of these couples are not high paid tech workers either. I'm even more amazed that some still find time for hobbies some how.

Appropriate responsibility. Let the kids assume even the most minor appropriate responsibility. maintain an healthy neutrality.

I feel you. The answer is that you need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Also, it's good for kids to be spending time with other good people, too. Continuing in the way you describe is bad for you and you know it so the only thing left now is to figure out how to change it. I hope everything goes well with you.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

I relate so much to this comment. We love our kids but it's hard to balance various demands.

Often times ourselves get the short end, but others find a way to give each their due including themselves

interesting, there's the burnout where you love what you do but there's too much, and then there's the burnout where you cannot love what you do no matter how you spin it. both uphill battle but different scenarios

good luck to you though

Kids and work definitely increase the degree of difficulty! I'm juggling three young kids while going full-time in politics and publishing my first book this year. What I've found is stretching to launch Positive Politics now is absolutely more work and I could be relaxing instead of writing on a Sunday but this truly gives me more energy. One big unlock was finding a job in politics doing investigative journalism fighting corruption truly lights me up. It's less money and a nonprofit, but this work plus my book truly have me chasing me my highest purpose and Positive Politics grow to be huge on its own too.

How can you have a sense of culture if you cannot build relationships? One person cannot have a culture.

Love how you highlighted your morning excitement now! That's what I was going for in this post!

What are you trying now that you actually want to do? Cheering for you!

(And please let me know what you would've liked to see in the second half! Blog posts are easy to edit!)

I think the "you" here is an obvious self-insert by the autor which is fine in my book. It's only about you if you choose to read it that way.

Work for an unproven startup and odds are no one is getting rich!

On the other hand I find that the real value of such posts are in the comment section here on HN, especially with posters who don't agree with the article.

15 years ago this exact comment would have been written swapping out millennials for gen x and gen z for millennials.

Don't give up--it gets better.

Yes, housing, education, and medical care are way more expensive now than in my era. There's no sugar-coating that. Education, you already have, don't try to buy more unless the math works out. You're young so hopefully you don't need much medical care. Housing is a big problem, I agree. If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.

The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus. Are there any AI matchmakers yet? [Just kidding, maybe]

But don't worry about the world. The world has been broken ever since we discovered fire. My parents were born literally in the middle of World War II. Somehow it all worked out.

By any objective metric the world is less broken than ever before. But people who want to be defeatist and cynical can always find a plausible sounding reason to justify their negativity regardless of the facts. I'm part of an older generation and not burnt out or existentially starving or whatever. And more importantly I'm not actually starving or dying of plague or being sent off to die for my king or any of the other horrors that were a routine part of human existence for most people before the modern era.

Are millennials the "older" generation now? Ooof, my bones...

The happiest Gen Z I see are the ones that go to Church. Being religious is a bulwark against nihilism. And Church youth / under 30 groups are basically marriage express lanes, which takes the App /hookup culture hell out of the equation.

> we're burnt out because everything we want is simply too expensive

Perhaps the problem starts with the fact that we continue to steer society in the direction where everything we want costs money.

Maybe don't want as much?

Man, posts like these always strike a nerve. I graduated in 2008. "Everything" wasn't just handed to us, we had our own share of horrible to deal with as well. And guess what? You'll get through it too.

I wasn't a fan of the article either but I think at any point in history you can make a convincing argument that the world is ending. I don't have any good advice as to how to defeat this perspective, but I am constantly reassured that because I'm not the only one that thinks things are shattered, there is a path to fixing it all.

Join some like-minded individuals and do something amazing. Fuck it, create a dating app without perverse incentives.

Looks more like a vector than a matrix to me.

If you don’t have hobbies you pour your free time into, you are robbing yourself.

The purpose of work (for most people), once you’re past comfortable survival, should be to buy time for you to spend living your life in ways you enjoy and that gives you meaning. If you don’t have something that gives you that feeling, find it!

That is part of it but there is also something to be said about what is going on biochemically IMO. Even if you are feeling forward progress and comfortable about the scope of your problems, if you give yourself no time to rest and get out of a subconciously anxious state, that isn't very good.

Anxiety is meant to have your senses heightened to perhaps hear the tiger stalking you and encourage you to seek out a safer environment where you can comfortably rest. You aren't built to be in an anxious state for such extended periods of time. The tiger would have gotten you by then, with the way this system was designed. You aren't built to constantly run from the tiger.

What were the main drivers?

Your greatness is still all here! And it can be earned precisely by fighting to fix bad things.

I found that working in politics, against corruption and for Positive Politics, is how I make the most positive impact and gain the most energy!

As Churchill said, Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else.

Last time it took a depression and intense widespread economic pain for them to pick up socialism-lite. I don’t expect it to take anything less next time around. Nobody was asking for universal healthcare during/after the pandemic, we need an actual depression.

Blogging has always required aggressive titles. My best posts for years all used this "you" or "we" focused framing too. Trying to solve people's biggest problems!

You're not being unfair. You're showing wisdom.

Even before AI, I think I've seen it used before in self-help books or therapy type stuff. It has always felt like an intellectually lazy attempt at reframing, painting things as black and white in the form of a thought-terminating cliche. "It's not X, it's Y" discounts X entirely, when usually the relationship between X & Y is more nuanced: "X and also Y", "X because Y", etc.

Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.

It definitely has a lot of signs of AI writing, but at the same time the flow doesn't really scream AI to me.

Unfair or not, same thing for me.

Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce.

Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays.

It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.

100%. “It’s not [x]. It’s [y].” is highly overused by ChatGPT in particular. I hope this article isn’t just AI slop, but that’s not a great start.

I've thought about moving to Asia. Then I read about the racism there and realize I'd be right back at home, but now with a language barrier to boot. Oh well.

Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.

I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.

Mh. Would like to hear the full story. My initial mental reflex is one of „es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen“, that is, „there is no right life in the wrong one“, as Adorno put it.

Are you still in China? If so how are you finding the work life? Should blog on it esp as a YC alum that’s a cool perspective

Work ≠ capitalism! It's about making your work the most meaningful thing possible! If that's a very pro-social politics, might be exactly what you want!

I don't think people should have kids because they otherwise lack meaning, but it's absolutely true that kids change you in ways you would never have believed. If you think you might want kids but aren't sure, just do it.

I'm married with three kids! And that's great! But like I say in the post, I still know I'm capable of making a bigger positive impact on the world, so that's how I focus my political work!

This solves it for most, but secular society has lost any structural capability to succeed in this.

Marriage rates have dropped over 70%.

There are extremely thriving sub-communities in places though. Graft on to those.

Cool, lemme just pitch on Tinder "30 and am between jobs, need happiness". Problem solved!

It's interesting that you get downvoted for what is, from a historical perspective, a very down-to-earth reasonable take.

I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts.

Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.

I'd argue "buy my book" posts, especially ones posted by the author, shouldn't make the front page of HN. Especially from YC alum. Is this an ad in disguise?

Same. I can identify with the subject matter, but the whole thing was just so off-putting. Trite, sound bites.

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