Lately I’ve been reading a lot about burnout in the age of AI and somewhat been recognising the symptoms : the FOMO ("I could be building stuff right now"), the brain that doesn’t turn off, the context switching pushed to its maximum that makes evenings feel like a slow re-entry (when I haven’t had any issue with leaving work at the door for a good 8 years) and I am still hesitant to call what I’m living burnout.

The campsite, not the fire

I keep noticing people around me look at the last 12-18 months and say oh god there’s a fire, someone put it out. I see the fire too, but from where I’m standing it looks less like a forest going up and more like a campsite I used to go to a lot in my 20s, at least for now.

I think that for someone who had a stable, well-defined identity at work (or at least as much define as it can be), the disruption is existential and it feels to them like the ground under their feet is on fire, not the firewood. I see that especially in colleagues who never really had to delegate that much before, and who built a sense of accomplishment around being the one who wrote and shipped the thing. Watching an agent draft what you used to draft when your identity is the drafting, is the fire. I happen to have made peace with delegation earlier in my career (with actual humans, not agents of course) and so the same flames hit different.

Maybe I’m in a flow state, or maybe I’m in a hot bath at the stage where the bath still feels nice and I haven’t noticed the temperature rising.

The boreout I’m climbing out of

The year before this one was a bumpy one for me professionally (the kind that made me feel like I no longer belonged in the place where I worked) and by the end of it I was numb. Routine had rounded all the edges off, and if anything I think I might have been in some kind of boreout, and didn’t have a clean way to name it.

What’s happened since hasn’t felt like a slide into burnout, more like an exit out of boredom and a sudden rise in engagement after a long flat stretch. Which is exactly the problem I’m trying to write about : the relief of feeling engaged again is loud enough that it masks the fact that my newly-found engagement doesn’t seem to have an off switch.

My fear is that I might be overcorrecting.

Shipping more than I have in years

At work my managers are noticing, and I’m only getting good feedback from the direct and indirect effect my work has on the team drlivery, engagement and AI tooling adoption.

Outside of work I haven’t been this passionate about shipping things in a long time. Small things, things I actually use, things that make a difference to me and the people around me, things that amuse (only) me. I’m finishing personal projects at a rate I didn’t believe I still had in me and it feels reinvigorating, in a way that maps almost exactly onto the first years of my career, when I was breathing work and loving it.

I keep talking about feeling like I’m in my 20s, because I am, indeed, not in my 20s anymore (let’s say late 30s atp). I have a wife, two young kids, a non-trivial geographical relocation underway, a house to take care of. So should I be as wired into my work as I am (or even can I maintain the long term)?

The honest answer is that I have a framework now that I didn’t have then. My kids and partner are a hard floor preventing me from diving too deep, as the tools would have let me. My sleep schedule has slipped a bit, which is a habit I thought I’d put behind me a decade ago, but I haven’t fully come off the rails and I feel like this structure is doing its job.

This makes me worry for the people who don’t have that structure yet, because if I’d had access to these tools in my 20s, without the floor I built in my 30s, I think I would have broken something. The push for 996 in parts of the silicon valley reads to me as exactly the wrong message to send to people in exactly that situation who will lose themselves inside the work and not notice until it’s too late for them and they are severely burned out.

Passion or compulsion ?

Is what I’m calling reignited passion actually a hyper-fixation based on the constant availability of AI tooling (inside and outside of work) which these past few months has made our phones an even more effective productivity tool ? I used to have a real context switch to get out of work mode, but now there’s no friction, and the same tools that make me productive at the office are sitting on my phone, on my laptop at home, ready to help me ship the next side project at 11pm.

There’s a piece by Armin Ronacher on what he calls agent psychosis that uncomfortably mirrors parts of what I am describing here, and while I’m not ready to put myself in that category, I’m also not ready to claim I’m definitely not on that path.

The water is warm : I’m shipping, my managers are happy, the personal projects I care about are landing.