It seems like AI to me as well. “That’s the gap” is a familiar Claude-ism, as are the references to a “pivot” and the use of “touch” to mean “affect”.

To be fair, I’ve reached the point where most random blog posts I read on the internet seem AI written, so it could just be confirmation bias on my part.

Hard disagree on “not worth the read”.

It doesn’t sound too AI generated, and the stories flow well without much text that mean nothing. (Also, she’s a consultant, so writing this content is meant to signal some professional skill. There’s not much spam, just 1 blog article a month.)

Even if it had AI help to edit, the content still matches my lived experiences of people mgmt.

That means we are crossing the line and people can't tell anymore.

Most likely this is the author's story enhanced with AI and then edited. That is the future I think.

Not hard data: ChatGPT and Gemini both say that the article sounds like written by a human most likely with AI assistance.

Doesn’t mean it’s not an ad for coaching. I share your sentiment. (So do ChatGPT and Gemini, they also agree that the article sounds like an ad)

Interesting. It would seem to me to be a piece from someone who made a role for themselves and enjoys it enough to write about it, which was the kind of “truth marketing” we thought would win out in the Age of Blogging. It absolutely functions as an ad, but it was also worth a read.

>It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you

Over the last five years ago I finally realized that is an issue for me. A combination of that plus having far too much of my (low) self-esteem bound up in needing praise from work. I chased my way to a senior role at a big SaaS that would look grand on my resume and paid quite well. After a little over two years, I simply resigned because the crippling feeling of not being useful at all was killing me. And I knew it wasn’t fixable, because my role was a “bullshit job”. So I took the summer off and that was wonderful, but when I started looking for work, for the first time in decades I had to chase it instead of it chasing me. Wound up at a startup that was a perfect fit: my chosen technology stack, still really small and needed fires put out.

It turned out they couldn’t live without the fires and thought the disaster they kept enlargening was good (VC money is a hell of a drug) and they severed me (along with a bunch of other firefighters they had hired) and finding a new gig wasn’t easier that time. Plus the one I found went under 6 days before I was to start.

I wound up taking on a QA role at a huge, old-school company and it is theoretically mind-numbing drudgery, but there was so much room for improvement that I started to dig it. Somewhere in there, two decades of depression eased all the way up. Now they’ve transitioned me into inventing their QA for AI and I am over the moon, digging into research papers, butting into high-level academic discussions and feel like I’ve found a fit. So I do think there’s something to what the author is saying.

In my case, my work is being devalued by AI.[0] The same effort nets smaller and smaller returns every month, even though the work is _still_ necessary, because AI does not do original investigative work. It's hard to put work into something that might vanish in a few months.

I'm starting to feel something a lot like how people describe burnout. I need to do a bunch of different things to stay afloat, but I ain't got any gas left in the tank.

I find pleasure in other aspects of my life, but I still need to put a roof over my head.

[0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person

That maybe your own opinion. The older I get the more I realize that the ignorance is bliss - the less I know the better, nothing drains my energy more than human connections and I don't have to be better or worse, I'm just perfect the way I am and if anyone doesn't like that, it's their problem and not mine.

Ironicly, in these cases more work can help the burnout. When you work 80 hours per week you are so busy you never notice you are not making meaningful human connections. When you only work 30 that leaves plenty of time to look at your own life and realize it isn't meaningful.

That shouldn't be taken as a sign that working more is good. It is a sign you need to fix your personal life which isn't easy. Work can be a useful part of making and keeping personal connections, but it shouldn't be the only part of it.

Burnout is learned and/or imposed helplessness. When your agency is missing it's like part of you is dying.

There is no singular “purpose of life”, different people are built differently and experience the world in their own way.

Some are lucky enough to get meaning from the default path of those around them, some have trouble finding a way that works for them.

Every person should consider what their own purpose is (and why, and what “purpose” even means for them) or they will be held in thrall to the social forces around them. If they don’t fundamentally align with those forces, they will have a bad time, and they may blame themselves rather than recognizing that they should seek a different path.

> The purpose of life is to make meaningful human connections, become wiser, become a better person.

These are nice things. But let's be honest, there is no objective purpose in life beyond the biological imperative. Purpose is subjective, and people will find that on their own. Or not.

The purpose of life is to make more life (children). Life forms that do not do that die out. Having children give you so much fulfillment and purpose.

There is a good book on this topic "Selfish reasons to have more kids" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...

"Create shareholder value at my current startup" obviously isn't going to scratch that itch in the same way.

I would add a little nuance. One thing is your job isn't advancing Humanity Progress in a very direct and unambiguous way, say you work for some Very Important Organization that Does Good All the Time. Another thing is your job is totally useless or even harmful to society.

Maybe most of us are in between?

I've worked at dysfunctional companies that made me personally unhappy (busyworks, company politics, waste, bad bosses, bad teammates...) that somehow made some good things in the grand scheme of things, other that made me very happy with more neutral results.

Someone has to do mundane things, even to raise children and give a chance to the next generation to improve the world.

I don't believe putting too much thought in purpose is healthy.

Oftentimes it's undiagnosed health issues, such as vitamin deficiencies and/or malabsorption conditions such as gluten intolerance preventing proper vitamin levels, that can present much like "inexplicable" burnout, imho.

Do you think it could be a combination of things? Like, in order to avoid burnout you need some degree of meaning but also some degree of success and positive work environment.

I'm coming at this from the perspective that I've been struggling with a lot of burn out and I'm mostly proud of who I am and what I do but I'm stressed because I constantly have to compensate for society's failure to reward people's contributions.

That could just be me though. I definitely agree that I think that meaning and purpose is a big thing that people are missing now.

> not really an issue with the specific work environment.

I’ve contributed some time in a mentoring group. Many of the cases people would call “burnout” had little to do with their work. Once they started talking details about their life situation it would become obvious that their problems ran deeper, but blaming work was an easy way to externalize it and place the blame on easy villains: Corporations, capitalism, managers, coworkers.

There were a lot of situations like this where someone would get a new job, take fewer hours, or even some people requested demotions and took a pay cut. Then when nothing changed about their well-being, they’d shift to blaming something new at work. I talked to people who could seemingly find ways to “burnout” in every situation they’ve encountered from high school through job hopping. It’s really hard to get someone to accept that maybe the problem is running deeper than their environment, and maybe something they’re doing (unintentionally, I’m not trying to place blame) is actually leading to this outcome over and over again.

I agree that work coaching is not the solution. It presumes the diagnosis and anchors blame to work, which starts obscuring possibilities outside of that pre-chosen explanation. Regular old therapy from a trained therapist is probably a better place to start. Might be cheaper, too, especially if insurance is involved.

It's not as easy as that though; most people I know that ended up burnt out were the opposite, where they were actively doing everything that they fundamentally did believe was worth the time. Saying "yes" to every new responsibility, getting really enthousiastic and excited for every new opportunity, wanting to be involved and engaged with everything that comes in their path. Burnout starts (for these people) when they start to take work home, when they do extra in their free time, when they keep busy with work or something work related right up to the point where they go to bed.

This is where employers fail them. I get that employers actually want dedicated, committed, enthusiastic employees, and that these employers (and managers) do the same thing, taking their job home, living for the job, etc. But it's their job to protect their employees and themselves. If a manager finds out one of their employees is taking their job home, they should intervene.

But this is the double edged thing that managers - and lawmakers - have to deal with.

two new words / terms learned today, correctio and epanorthosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanorthosis) - thanks, it's worth millions⸻no, morbillions!

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I would never advise anyone to get mental health advice from a computer, but if you're contemplating using the service of those 'life coach', yeah, consider using an AI. Even Emacs' therapist.

That "just" is doing a lot of work though; the jobs market is... challenging right now. Cost of living has exploded, demand for software developers is unstable due to the advent of AI assisted coding. (for the latter I'm sure the market will correct itself over time but still, short term it's an issue)

Can you expand on this? Your current message could be interpreted either to mean that Gen Z is prone to complaining or it could mean that Gen Z is particularly screwed.