Burnout - The Dream Thief
Everyone knows how burnout takes away our time, energy, and focus. More nefariously however, burnout can steal from us something more value: our dreams and ambitions
“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
For modern day professionals, burnout is inevitable. It’s reported that more than 80% of millennial workers will experience burnout at least once in their career. I know that I’ve experienced it. What’s most concerning about burning out was I didn’t even see it coming; it crept up on me slowly. By the time I realized what had happened it was already too late.
Burnout started for me around the time that my startup was failing.
After I officially decided to leave my startup (inevitably killing it), it wasn’t like I could completely walk away. What followed was a very frank, a very honest, and a very scary conversation with my co-founder. There were a few bugs and general quality of life issues that needed addressing before my departure, but afterwards the whole thing would be put on maintenance mode while my co-founder looked for another technical lead to take over. Realistically, however, me leaving at this stage was a death sentence for the company.
Quite honestly, at that point I was elated with joy to stop working on my startup. Coming out the other side, I had grown used to working on my startup 10-12 hours every day, no weekends and few holidays. Just before I had started working on my startup I also started a podcast called “The Peterkins Podcast”. Originally they started out with me just rambling into the microphone, but over time it evolved into me taking time to write a script, edit it, and doing multiple audio takes to make sure I got everything sounding correct. I would wake up early in the mornings to get the podcast out before starting the rest of my day living the startup life. Needless to say, I was stretching myself pretty thin.
Despite being happy to finally have some rest, I didn’t give myself a lot of down time. Almost immediately after quitting my startup I made the poor decision of working on another project. Around this time another project I had worked on before approached me to work on an exciting new project they were starting. I had done some prototyping of what they wanted to build before, so I was incredibly excited to push forward and build it fully with the blessing of the founders.
Though obviously I was excited to work on a new project, it was a mistake for me to jump into something so quickly. I genuinely needed some rest after working so much and having it amount to so little. People can work hard, and they can sustain that hard work for a very long time. What starts to wear you down is the hard work with little to no results. The first few times you do that, you might shrug it off, try to interpret some grander meaning from your failure, adjust your strategy then give it another go. But you can’t do this forever. If you fail to make any outstanding progress on your goal, at some point it no matter how much you enjoy doing something, you’re not going to be able to sustain it. We need to see the fruits of our labour to justify the effort of planting the seeds in the first place.
It took me a while to figure out that I was “burned out”. I still have trouble recognizing it to this day but there are some signs. The original motivation and inspiration that I once had has left a long time ago. Routines and habits start to break down. It takes more energy to do the same tasks. I “briefly” stopped doing the podcast during a trip to Florida last year and I haven’t made an episode since. The regression happens little by little, until you’re left doing the bare minimum.
But worst of all, after doing all of these projects I had realized I didn’t have any “dreams” left in me. When I had created my startup I had hoped that it would be a thriving SaaS company. Before that, when I had worked on a project called Saito I was hoping that I would get to see it become the next big crypto platform. I had dreams of being impactful, of making my impression on the world. But afterwards, I didn’t really have much desire to do anything. I couldn’t even understand how I had once felt so strongly about acting on my ambitions, to the point where I moved away from my home country to do so. My dreams had left me behind. For someone who has been ambitious their whole life, it felt strange to be left with a void.
But given enough rest and time to recover, eventually things start to return to normal. While I haven’t returned to the podcast, I’ve started writing here. I work for a new company called “Zapier” doing work I enjoy, I have a new path to follow there. But I don’t dream the way that I used to. I have lost some of my naivety, as I know fractionally more about the sacrifice required to achieve greatness.
Maybe my dreams weren’t what I really wanted in the first place. Perhaps I inherited what I was “supposed to do” from the time and environment of my interests. Every young white male in tech wants to create a startup, and a lot of them want to achieve this in trendiest and quickest way they can and I was no exception. Perhaps these desires were incepted into me by powerful VCs and market makers. Who’s to say where ideas come from? I can’t tell you where my dreams originally came from, only that they’ve left me and gone somewhere else.
Thankfully I still have my impulses. I still want to build meaningful things. I still want to make art. I still want to share my experiences with others. These desires still exist within me, and knowing now these can be stolen from me I’ll be sure this time to guard them with my life.