Burnouts, Comparisons, Layoffs
I don’t know if Tech jobs have the prerogative on these three toxins. But since I am of this industry. I always have been. Or at least mostly associated with it in some capacity. So this is my main observation ground. And I have observed again and again — especially lately — that these three ingredients make up the bigtechschmuck sandwich. Order at your own peril.
Burnouts
I’ve known it. It is very likely you’ve known it too. The rampant rash on the rear-end of our modern tech industry.
What’s a burnout? Imagine a candle, lit with love. At first, it is burning bright and cheery. So festive. Warming the cockles of your heart. Beautiful to behold.
Then, imagine lighting it up on the other end as well. The end where it is not supposed to be lit up — the non-wick end. Now it’s burning fiercely. Doubly brightly. Still beautiful to behold? Maybe. For two seconds. After which, it buckles, burns, melts down whatever soft meltable thing is holding it into a miserable hole and pop! — falls into the self created hole and blacks out. Nice.
I hear about it a lot more these days. Or maybe it was always there and we didn’t talk about it as much. I don’t know. Whatever the truth, it is here to stay. Too many hours of work, too little sleep, too little relaxation, too much stress, too many milestones to reach, too many things to accomplish, too little connection, too much ambition, too much stupidity.. a mix of all of this? In any case, we have created a nice recipe for this burn out. Together we light our candles on both ends — no we actually stick wicks in multiple places of the candle and light them all at once. And then we cry that it melted down faster and left a hole in its place.
Comparisons
Ooh. What can I say. The shortest, stupidest way to personal hell. The most convoluted rollercoaster ride we love to hate. Yet we buy the tickets to it and beg to ride. Destination depression.
In theory, we all know. I mean, what’s not to know. Social media worsens comparisons. Social media only shows the bits of everyone’s life that’s wearing the nice swim suit and bobbing above the water. What’s underneath — the mucky algae, the clinging reeds, the dragging currents- we all know. No one’s life or job is perfect. We know this. Still, we loove pretending that we don’t. Because. Why bother being sensible when we can be totally stupid and drive ourselves into anxiety? We are in good comapny too. Everyone is anxious. About salaries, jobs, glamour quotient of the company that employs us, the number of people that seem to follow and like our thoughts, speaking gigs, audiences, books and on and on and on. Everyone compares unfavorably to everyone else in this equation. Where’s the math in this madness?
Layoffs
My God. This one is the latest. Especially this year. Every few years it happens this way. Things that have gone up come down. By gravity. By nature. By stupidity. Who knows. But it happens. Everyone sees the signs, yet no one thinks it will happen. Everyone knows it happens and yet when it does we are shocked and taken aback. We are caught utterly unprepared. And when it passes, we get up, dust ourselves off, and move on. Lessons learnt zero.
There is a math to it. When we dip more than we put in, things deplete. When we spend more than we earn, loss happens. When we over project, over hire, over do — based on really baseless data and bloated ideas and wishful thinking, we tend to drive business into ground. Very simple math. A child of four could be taught this math. Still, we don’t learn. We fall into the same traps again and again.
For some reason, we, the brilliant humans cannot fathom the simplest solution. When we can’t disconnect, we don’t try to actually disconnect. We write apps so we can connect to the app to help us disconnect. When we can’t sleep, we don’t try to do what it takes to make us warm and cozy and relaxed enough to drop off. We do dumb things to wake ourselves up instead.
Our brilliant, amazing, code-writing, app-creating, idea-generating, fund-raising, people-finessing minds, cannot seem to take the shortest path to solving the problem of balancing, resting, relaxing, letting go and learning to say enough.
The paradox is lost on our smart ass, excuse-giving minds.
