Hi! Posting on a throwaway account because of the admissions in this post, this is a post about my burnout: I moved to SF to dive into rails and eventually startups.
I've actually done decent for myself; but not good enough that I can take a few months off to recover from my mental exhaustion. In fact, I'm currently founder at a startup that's about to make it big.
On the flip side; I was once a passionate person, created passionately and created often in the arts. I'm that type of person who's passions for everything led me close to failure, because I could never focus on one thing.
So then I made choice: I moved to SF, zero'd in on my tech skills, got hired as a lead at a killer company, did well and left to start a startup. Now in my 30s, I am truly great at something: tech.
The problem is that I'm bordering on clinical depression (so my doctor tells me). The reason is that I'm hyper-focused on tech: I'm glued to my iPhone, read HN all day, read books on programming, hack on nights and weekends. I don't feel there's room in my head to really understand what's going on in the news, politics, economics, philosophy... anything else really.
I've also surrounded myself with technologists. We discuss CSS, javascript, python, the latest stack, the latest startup, the latest growth technique, etc. When we discuss politics, it's in the context of enabling the startup community.
When I try to break out of it, I turn to my tools; pulse, reddit, magazines, etc. This does nothing more than burn me out further; I get too interested in things and try to absorb 100 articles a day, trying to overcompensate for 4 years of hyper-focus.
I'm tired of it, I'm burning out. I don't want to invest 100% of my brain in tech anymore. I want to feel well rounded again, I want to be able to have something insightful and intelligent to say when I hang out with non technical people. Hell, I want to learn to smalltalk again (see what I did there?) without being so analytical and literal about things.
What I really need is people like me to hang out online with. Anybody else here just fracking tired of talking about this tech stuff? Does this story resonate with you?
I don't know what to do about it, but I'm thinking of starting an online community/mailing list in case that I can find [even 2 or 3] people in the same place as me in life. I'm hoping that together we can help each other out.
We'll brainstorm some ideas to get out of it, but I'm thinking choosing a weekly or monthly topic and sharing limited, high quality, carefully thought out ideas, articles and discussions on a given topic will be key. I would also like this community to be intelligent, keen on humility and have a strong desire to be unpretentious.
This is not a startup; it can be as simple as a mailing list, I just need pleasant, positive like-minded people to chat/email with that are no longer interested in investing 100% of their brain cycles in tech. If you think you're a good fit and have 10% of your brain cycles to spare, email the address on this profile. I chose to hide my identity and use a fake email, but you are free to pick either route; I like the freedom of expression that comes with anonymity.
I'm also open to ideas... thanks. -Michael :)
I relate to this and agree with jttam. Don't fight tech burnout with more tech. I would recommend going fishing.