Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.

Throughout the day, I’ve had to deal with the mixed burnout from the state of the world invading life (parts shortages, price changes, tariffs), work sucking (trying, and failing, to track down what happened while I was gone, one of my coworkers spending an hour in my office trying to get me to teach him how to use Copilot to make his testcase writing easier, and the mixed sensory overload of a generator’s high-pitched whine and the various lubricants from the various machines we’ve dismantled in the past three months), and feeling like crap phsyically (my throat is in rough shape from last night, I have a strange pain in my left shin that comes and goes without warning, and the muscles from my neck to my shoulder blades are in terrible shape for some unknown reason–I suspect it was my video editing on Friday, which had me hunched over my desk quite a lot as I stiched audio and video tracks together). I am so tired of all this. I hate that my job sucks and that I can’t seem to find any joy or satisfaction in any part of my job anymore, even when I’m doing good work. I hate that I feel trapped here because two and a half months of looking and more applications that I’d care to count haven’t even yielded a rejection. I feel like I am throwing so much of my effort into a black hole these days between so much of my income going to student loans and rent, and all my job applications just vanishing into the ethere where they’re probably being weeded out by some automated bullshit tool that decided I didn’t have the right keywords in this time of too many tech workers and not enough jobs. It just all feels so wasteful… I can’t stand it.

And the worst part is I also realized that I really like, intellectually and emotionally, working where I do. I get to be a part of a life I was forced to leave behind by practical necessity, even if largely tangentially, and the work I do is a significant part of improving that little niche in the world, often indirectly but sometimes incredibly directly. Sure, the project I’ve spent three years and counting working on is a garbage fire currently, but it’s only a matter of time until we get it working right and then the honestly quite revolutionary product we’ve made can spread its wings and remove some of the most dangerous work involved in the amateur-to-small-time-professional portions of the niche. Everyone in that niche either has or has heard first-hand accounts of horror stories and this product can eliminate so many of them entirely. It’s a big deal! It’s huge! I am not kidding when I’ve written that this is significant change and improvement in a technology that has largely remained unchanged for over a century. This is going to slowly change the world of this niche in the US, one testimonial at a time, until there will be generations born that never hear the kinds of horror stories we passed around to make sure we all took this work seriously.

And yet I hate my job. I hate the work I’m doing. I feel so proud of what I’ve been a part of that I ache to just spell it out, to throw all anonimity to the wind and just crow about what I’ve accomplished, consequences be damned, and yet I can’t stand it. I can’t stand being here. Being a part of this. Trudging through the absolutely devastating day-to-day shit that has turned work that the me of a decade and a half ago would be so incoherently happy to be doing into something that is grinding my soul to dust. Maybe this is the true price of burnout. Maybe this is what happens when the fire of passion cools and leaves you warped in its absense, thanks to the uneven heating and cooling of its last sputtering gasps. I don’t know. I can’t even begin to imagine how I can untangle this. I can’t think of a single way to make a change that doesn’t involve leaving work I love and would have once been so happy to be doing or learning to accept the day-to-day misery of this existence. Neither is what I want, but I have to pick one of them. Even trying to avoid making the choice is making a choice… I don’t know. I have to figure something out, though, since all five consecutive days off has done is highlight just how bad this place makes me feel.