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

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.

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 funding 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.

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.

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!

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 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.

Looks more like a vector than a matrix to me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.