The Phoenix Is Not Burnt Out, It Is Just Rebooting

I feel a lot of this as well. It&#x27;s deeply troubling, when you attach so much of your self worth to work, and the work erodes you so strongly. What&#x27;s left?<p>I wish it were more accepted so that we could sort it out without having to be so drastic. I don&#x27;t know how to tell my boss &quot;I can&#x27;t really do this right now. I need at least 2 months. Maybe 10. Dunno.&quot; I&#x27;m just going to leave, and....<p>and then what? who knows.<p>When you stop working yourself to the bone you get to... not have health insurance? Wonder how long you can coast before going under? San Francisco, and I imagine most of America, is a tough place to just <i>be</i>.<p>It sucks.

I know you stated you don&#x27;t like editing in your post, but I&#x27;d highly recommend passing your posts on to a friend who _is_ willing to edit them, before they&#x27;re public. I appreciate the sentiment and resonated with many of the remarks. I could have gotten the same message in about 30% of the words.

&gt;I’m not a jerk, I just care too much and want other people to care the same amount.<p>I don&#x27;t know the real situation, but based on this rationale it sounds like you were being a jerk. You&#x27;re not even really denying it, just trying to excuse your behavior because it was in service of some higher goal.<p>That said, acting like a jerk is a behavior, not a permanent attribute. The feedback from your boss should have been about the behaviors you engaged in that negatively impacted the team.

That was long and rambling but I think the summary is that when you try to make the world a better place it does not yield all to easily. And sometimes you are ok with that but sometimes your stamina is running low. Managing stamina is important and just as important is managing hubris - I am reminded of the anecdote about Plato told by NN Taleb. Plato was offended by the fact that most humans are naturally right-handed and not ambidextrous because that is woefully asymmetric. I guess even the most able people are often offended by the wrong things.<p>Michael has made the world (well at least a small part of it) a genuinely better place. I think he deserves to chill out a bit before returning to his attitude of caring too much.

Beautifully written. This is sleepy stream of consciousness, but I&#x27;ll add that the conscientious developer internalizes their discipline and then sees new problem spaces everywhere, some realm of actual or potential responsibility. Most otherwise good folks in the world don&#x27;t - can&#x27;t really - easily reciprocate. I turned 50 today, and it&#x27;s in the last year that I learned so many otherwise qualified professionals all around me just don&#x27;t ever really study the manuals. Creative systematic development must cease being needlessly sacrificial. There&#x27;s some emerging awareness of its occupational hazards that needs to be addressed if we want to transfer wisdom successfully over generations to better thrive. A few chapters of Shrage&#x27;s &quot;No More Teams&quot; refer to software languages as a legitimate standard for what collaborative innovating literacy might someday mean.

Get a dog. You have to walk it and it treasures your time. It forces time to relax outside of computers. You get fresh air. It loves you for just being there...<p>Either that or children.

Narcissist