• 08 Nov, 2025 *

You can’t really tell from my current unhinged development schedule, but I spent a good 3-5 years with burnout so intense I could not write a single line of code.

This did not impact my income (quite the opposite, which kind of annoys me), because I transitioned into something orthogonal where my knowledge is necessary but I don’t have to write code all the time. That this was doable for me while I told no-one what was going on was pure luck. I shudder to think what would have happened if I did not have this option. It would not have been fun.

I started programming when I was quite young and it is one of my great passions. My entire life I have had a challenging time forming deep connections with a lot of people (I do form them, but with only two to three people at a time). When I was little, most of my peers had no trouble with this.

Now that my peers are older everyone is the same, which means I don’t stand out in that specific way anymore. Still, this means that for a large part of my life I had to entertain myself with a hobby that stretched to serious amounts of time.

Like any child this meant videogames and Lego, but for me it also meant programming. So when I say it was frustrating to lose the ability to do it, you now have some context for what that means for me. It was devastating.

Because I felt so bad I also mostly did not enjoy videogames all that much. Those years were mostly filled with playing with pets and watching TV outside of work. Pets are easy - they find something fun and so even when you feel bad you can feel nice about them having a good time. TV is... Well it’s okay. I like it to decompress even when I’m feeling good but it isn’t a solid way for me to spend my time.

In hindsight, those 3-5 years were horrifically boring. I’m amazed I got through them at all.

My burnout got to the point it did because I went from an extremely fulfilling career with people I like into one that was absolutely not fulfilling with people that were awful. I won’t go into the specifics of how they were awful because it would dox me, but suffice it to say it’s probably a lot worse and a lot more systematic than you think.

Right before this started to happen, my personal life also went through something of a crisis. This led to me not really having anyone to talk to about this that I could trust.

My career stopped being fulfilling because it was no longer clear why I was doing it (other than to make my boss money, which only fulfills them), the tasks were no longer well defined and the people that were supposed to know how to remedy those things did not do so (bad roadmaps, bad refinement of tasks, micromanagement).

If you recognise those things and you’ve noticed you get a little bit more tired every day, figure out something to change that works for you. Nearly nothing is worth going through something like this (barring real hunger or homelessness, depending on where you are).

Saying “find something” is easy to say and super vague, but in my defense I don’t really know you. You know what things make you happy and which activities you’d do even if you had no responsibilities at all. Find a way to structure your life so that those are highlighted more. It doesn’t have to mean you allocate more time to doing them, it could mean spending more time at the end of your day thinking about them (and less about what makes you unhappy). Or something else. I don’t know, and maybe you don’t either. Try things, even if they’re small.

#health #illness