A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.

In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.

Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.

But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.

Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.

I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.

Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.

I'm a C++ dev, but last month I was working in the vegetable fields to help my young brother and his business. And right now I'm going to sleep outdoor after my birthday party looking at the stars.
Free spirit is a good point dealing with free languages like C++ you know :D
Sweet dreams btw :p

How do you do it fellow developers? How can you stay productive for the whole day? I've tried and best I can do is 6 hours without feeling my brain mushing. Why do management insist I need to sit in front of the computer for the whole 8 hours...

Fuuuuuck yooooou, flu! I'm too tired to go to sleep and too hazy to get any learning done. I feel like a bloody vegetable :(

downside of being magically healed by people is I don't have the brain to learn magic (maybe it's the drugs honestly...) so I'm ravenously dependent on this guy to do another round so I can gain more brainpower

fucking hell

I don't like dependence

also every time he does this I feel like I've been sutured for 1-3 days. and I gotta be careful and not pull at them. how the hell do you do that with a brain? that's gonna be so fucking bad. "just don't think at 145 iq horsepower" tehe.

AND he says it's experimental. and what the fuck he says he's only this good at healing due to past mistakes... I might end up a vegetable. but I'm already a fucking vegetable. fuck

upside, he fixed my nervous system back to having endurance for emotions and stress so I'm not fucked up from thinking all this. yay some resilience for once after 3 years of hell

one guy thinks I survived a paradoxical collision of time magic. that doesn't make sense why the shit would I have hit a fucking time traveling universe. then he changed his mind thinking failed possession. this makes more sense to me but who the fuck would've wanted to possess me. fucking Christ. and could they not have melted my nervous system having tried to do so. mean as shit.
I still think it was a hex. I think it was a death hex actually.

thanks for coming to the weirdest shit ever Ted episode

my tarot cards basically say good luck, too. nothing happened. you had a bunch of energy, you made a bunch of money, now you can sit at home and think about stuff, effect the world with yourself as you see fit, and either be a judgemental prick or a righteous prick. this is basically a retirement plan.