I believe I'm wired in a very similar way to the author, to need hard challenges that I can devote a great deal of focus to. And as someone who isn't burnt out but has been deeply disillusioned many times, I appreciated and enjoyed hearing that distinction made, which seems natural to me but which I had never heard framed that way before.
When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?
So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:
"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.
Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...
Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.
Thank you for this perspective, Mr Ecclesiastes. I hope this comment of yours will end up at the top.
OTOH the very fact that we (as a civilization) can still read cuneiform from 50 centuries ago, and still care to, contradicts somehow to your point that all we do is dust in the wind. We never know.
I listened a Jewish-focused podcast recently that essentially was about how Ecclesiastes was exhorting us to recognize that the time of (A/B testing: Reaping and sowing, embracing or not) was all taking place at the same, present moment. That every moment is the time for both - moments are finite but the human experience is not. That wasn't what I was thinking of when I wrote that comment about my own personal disenchantment and my need to soldier on, making things that are dust, but it's funny you mentioned it.
I've personally struggled over and over with the question of whether I'm making code or music or art for some kind of quickly-fading recognition or to prove something to myself, or just to have something to do. I see pros and cons both ways. And I wonder whether there even is such a thing as leaving a lasting mark in this world. And whether it's better to leave no mark at all, than to leave any kind of stain. An imprint in a clay tablet that lasts 5000 years certainly is a mark. But then you risk being reduced to an archaelogical specimen.
We can still unscramble some cuneiform, but we can't decipher the personal motives of the writers, and I wish we could. I'm concerned with what it means to be a good human and a successful one at the same time, but, I'm a drop in the ocean.
I think the point of these philosophies is not really to make you a morally upright person so much as to show you that you're a grain of sand, and let you draw your own conclusions.
When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?
So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:
"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.
Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...
Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.