I am focusing on one day at a time, one week at a time. Seeing a psychotherapist and attending various groups when I have the energy.
Burnout for me is a deeply physical experience of contant tension and utter exhaustion, with mental overwhelm and low stress-tolerance. So I find that I have to take things on the moment-by-moment level to see what I'm good for, and give myself permission to cancel everything if need be.
I'm also taking small, but practical and tangible steps towards a difficult life transition and health goal. Each step I take (there have been many) has lifted a bit of weight off me and put wind in my sails, because I've been on the fence about it for so long. I really enjoy and appreciate these 'small wins'.
Even on that personal journey side of things, I am not planning much, if anything, beyond the next day or two at a time (even while I have longer-term projects I am working on).
I have put my business on indefinite 'tickover', servicing existing clients but not doing any work of expansion at this stage. I have communicated with all staff about that as well and let them know that I am not available for any kind of meetings, calls or creative work.
I have 'uncommitted' from various projects (whether personal or shared/group) for which the ball was in my court. This alone gave me a lot of headspace to move forward in other ways.
I'm sleeping a lot, mostly at night, with some daytime naps.
I've been enjoying playing RuneScape again, spending time tidying up and decluttering at home, sitting in cafes, going for short walks, doing self-care stuff.
People say to read books, but part of my burnout was information overwhelm. The one book that's been helping me a lot is Essentialism by Greg McKeown. GTD is also helpful but only when I have the energy to follow its guidelines.
For me the trick is to just really not expect anything much of myself for now. It's also Winter where I am, so I can call it hibernation, which helps.
One general thing that has really helped is being honest about where I am at, coming out to other people about it, and treating this burned-out stage of life as seriously as if I had pneumonia. Treating it as a friend rather than an enemy.
In my mid-to-late-twenties, I remember thinking "Damn, why are hotels so expensive? I'll just stay in this Airbnb, which is so much bigger anyway. This is the new way and it's disrupting hotels."
Now at the outset of my thirties and a more settled phase of life, I will gladly pay a premium to stay in a hotel.
In the same way, it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.
There's a reason why some business models and establishment types 'just work' throughout history and it's not entirely because of well-funded lobbying and conservative lawmaking, as we were maybe led to believe in the early Airbnb/Uber days when anything disruptive was shiny.
I wouldn't say they 'just work', but rather that what we see is the steady state they've arrived at, warts and all. The startup industry has this obsessive focus on looking at the steady state and thinking they can fix all the warts, without really looking into why they formed in the first place.
>it's becoming more likely for me to flag a London black cab than book an Uber via the app.
Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get, the points of interest for example, if you spend that much time just trying to get licensed you're probably going to be more professional than random soccer mom trying to make money while the kids are at school. That's not the case with taxis in the US or many other countries though.
>Those guys know what they are doing and that's an incredibly hard job to get
Indeed, the dedication required to acquire The Knowledge [1] is incredible, at least to me considering how the job of taxi driver is considered a fairly low-end, unskilled one here in the States.
"The London taxicab driver is required to be able to decide routes immediately in response to a passenger's request or traffic conditions, rather than stopping to look at a map, relying on satellite navigation or asking a controller by radio. Consequently, the "Knowledge of London" is the in-depth study of a number of pre-set London street routes and all places of interest that taxicab drivers in that city must complete to obtain a licence to operate a black cab. It was initiated in 1865, and has changed little since.
It is the world's most demanding training course for taxicab drivers, and applicants will usually need to pass at least twelve "appearances" (periodical one-on-one oral examinations undertaken throughout the qualification process), with the whole process usually averaging 34 months, to pass."
I was really enjoying this article, which is intelligently written (even though it's obvious the author has made up their mind and is trying to convince me, I happen to agree with them). That is until this line:
> From its inception in the mid-1800s, margarine had always been considered creepers, a freakish substitute for people who couldn’t afford real butter.
When did "creepers" become a word journalists can use in a non-ironic way?
I first got a PlayStation (1) when I was about 9 years old, and we got Road Rash 3D with it. Looking back the graphics were pretty shocking (though cutting edge at the time). But my main memory is how liberating it felt to leave the race route and just ride around aimlessly for hours and hours, exploring the countryside and the towns and cities you'd discover. I got a lot more out of that than trying to keep up with the race. Now I think I might try RDR2 some time if it offers a bit of that buzz again.
This is similar to what I remember from playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. I wasn't very good at the actual game, but there was a post-credit sequence I would skip to where you could just walk, drive, and fly around quiet, rural, and sparsely islands. The simulation is pretty unremarkable by todays standards but being able to explore a huge open world at my own pace was incredible at the time.
One encounter that stands out in my memory was of driving along a remote road in the middle of the night and coming across a bad traffic collision where a truck had completely crushed a small car along with its driver. Something about the brutal and almost mundane nature of the encounter has stuck with me.
For you and the GP I would recommend picking up Horizon Zero Dawn. The environments are gorgeous and vast, with lots of "story" in the placing of props and such. The actual story of that game was prettt darn good too, but if all you want to do is roam around a beautiful landscape – and occasionally come upon murderous robots, but they can typically be avoided rather easily – it will certainly hit the spot.
Gosh, I wish that game had been popular enough to fund continued development. (Last time I checked in on it, it looked like it had stalled out.) I remember following the developer on Twitter and they had SO MANY good ideas. I bought the game and found it very fun, but:
- It felt like a 1.0, and really made me want a 2.0
- The difficulty ramped way too quickly. It started out as "Sir, you are being hunted.", but every time I played, after about 15 minutes, it seemed to ramp up to "SIR, YOU ARE BEING HUNTED!!!!!"
- Imagine the multiplayer possibilities. Like, if there were different teams being hunted. Some players are on your team, and some are your adversaries. Like imagine PUBG in this universe, but instead of a plasma wall closing in, there are ever increasing numbers of hunter robots spawning near the edge of a dwindling circle.
I really enjoyed this article. It really captures the weirdness of this kind of event, and rings true to the bandwagon-crypto people I've met, with a bit of good-natured caricature added. She also writes very well about the role of women during the event.
I'm really enjoying Gabor Maté being more in the spotlight recently. I've been following his work for about 6 years and wished he would get more attention. Such a good human being.
For those interested here's a fascinating discussion between Gabor and Aaron. It's a candid talk between father and son in which they address real feelings of concern, anger, resentment, and disappointment with each other. I remember thinking about how most relationships of that nature go unexamined and unaddressed for an entire lifetime. I still haven't picked up the phone myself.
One of my worst, and final freelance web development gigs was for a foot worship events website. Not porn - this was an event website featuring a calendar of upcoming foot worship parties/nights in London. I was a bit naive at the time and didn't really know what it was all about, or really anything about the BDSM scene for that matter. Definitely not kink-shaming here - everybody should be absolutely free to express their sexuality however they see fit as long as it is consensual and does not cause any actual harm - but I honestly felt really weirded out after doing it. It didn't pay well at all, and I needed the money.
The client was really flakey (bad choice of words perhaps) and late with responses and payments. The website was nothing special but was a bit of a bore to design and code.
I think it was the final nail (again, poor choice of words) for my freelancing career, and I went to join a startup which ended up working really well for me.
