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I see you.
You’re not burned out because you’re weak.
You’re burned out because you’ve been relevant, valuable, over-functioning for too long—inside systems that reward your ability to endure dysfunction and call it leadership.
You’ve spent years in roles that were never meant to hold your whole self.
Making it work.
Keeping the peace.
Delivering, exceeding, performing.
I am not currently burned out. I love that I can say this because it’s something I’ve felt at various times in my life and career. But for that very reason, I needed to post this so I can find it again someday.
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Also, when we’re willing to ask for help we’re letting people know that they can ask us for help as well. You’re establishing it as a new norm. A new habit. Which can take the place of the old painful habits we both grew up with.
Also calling myself out here: I expect friends and family to ask me for help. I am poor at asking others to help me.
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This excellent piece by Jon-Kyle is making the rounds. It’s on my radar thanks to his interesting project, Cycle (think: “what if RSS, but you don’t see everything at once?”).
How I work today looks very different than it did a year ago. Or even a month ago. I’ve always been a generalist. Design was the gateway—making visual things. Making things interactive lead to a technical proficiency and learning how to program. This is now called “design engineering,” but the motivation was to do whatever necessary to see an idea through from conception to completion.
The essay resonates with my own professional experience and general meandering around my work identity: designer, sure, how else will we know what to build? Software engineer? Yes, it gets the job done. But what’s really the job? I want to build things for people to use; things that they enjoy using.
My current open-question: “how can AI help me build things?”, which he gets into from his perspective.
Also:
I don’t believe being a cog in the machine is sustainable. That detached phone it in mentality. The places where it’s possible will not exist much longer. Maybe that is ok. I don’t think it’s good to feel detachment from what you’re doing. It’s good to care. It may be difficult, and you may experience disappointment and pain by doing that, but it’s real. It’s important to be hopeful, and that involves risk, as does anything good.
This is the bit where I think I diverge—tbd. I absolutely agree that it’s not good to detach from what you’re doing and it’s good to care and it’s worth the risk in work and in most things in life. I work with people who care and it’s what keeps me in the job.
But when you listen to interviews with some of the folks who build AI companies and really boost an AI-forward mentality, there’s a disconnect for me: if AI can help generate the ideas, if AI can do the creative design, if AI can do the creative imagery, if AI can do the creative coding, if AI can do the creative marketing, and if AI can build it all, what is left for the human but to be the cog—either in greasing the wheels of needless consumption or connecting the dots between various AI agents to get the work out the door in order to be consumed?
I’m not saying Mohr’s assessment is wrong, but more directly: I really, really hope it’s correct and the signals I’m picking up on are more related to the AI boosterism that necessarily surrounds the culture of a hot, new technology that hasn’t quite found its place in society, yet.