On burnout, overthinking, and loneliness

(A heads-up: This is a long-ish blog post)

The social aspects of tech

I've been working completely remote since late in 2020. The last time I stepped foot in an office was almost 6 years ago. For me, this felt like the most incredible change in my life - quite literally living the dream. For the longest time, that's been true. In recent times however, I'm starting to re-assess whether it's the right thing for me.

Let me set some background. I'm the sort of person who has been frequently 'alone' for most of my life. In context, 'alone' means that I have family around, but that friends were missing for large parts of my life. Most of this is down to the way I am. Some would say weird, others would say quirky. Truthfully, due to experiences in my younger years, I am often just afraid to speak up. I don't reach out to people because I feel like I'm bothering them. Over the years, I grew inwards to places I should have outgrown.

This mindset is why remote working felt wonderful. I no longer had to deal with the stress of commuting, or 'forced social interaction'. I no longer had to try to be heard, because almost everything was async and text-based. Beyond that, it enabled me to be more productive at unconventional times. 9PM, 11PM, even 3AM many times in my younger years.

When I started working remotely, I discovered flexibility with work hours. It wasn't quite 'work whenever' initially, but not having to wake at 6am allowed me to drift into what I long-considered my natural sleep pattern. This too felt wonderful for the longest time. Suddenly, I could sleep as much as I felt I needed and the tiredness of life would disappear and I'd actually feel like I was in the room again and everything would be incredible and--

(* takes a long, deep breath *)

It didn't work. Life did feel easier. Less stress. More freedom to use my free time as I wanted to. But that tiredness I felt didn't disappear. I'd focused on my career so much, then headed into that thing that happened in 2020, and by the time the world had settled, I had forgotten to move. To catch back up. I was living in my head more than ever.

To try and cut down on babble, let's say that I focused on fixing my sleep pattern. 1:30PM wake-ups were no longer acceptable, and I felt that if I fixed those, I'd feel less anxious. I started taking supplements.

Rejuvination

My sleep pattern slowly changed. 2PM or 1:30PM wake-ups, I started pushing back to 1PM. This became 12:30PM, then midday. Then 11:30AM, then 11AM. My goal was to get to 8AM wake-up within a month. I woke up and actually felt like I could wake up without feeling like it would take me 2 hours to feel ready - yeah, that's what it felt like if I'd woken up before midday previously.

My anxiety lifted little by little, but it still took me around 5 months before I could say I was comfortable. This brinds us to around February 2024. I'd managed to get my sleep pattern back to 10AM at this point, and I was pushing for 8AM. That was too far, so I settled on 10AM for a long time. The big difference was that I could wake up, and actually feel awake quite quickly on most days. This allowed me to actually try to address the situation.

To cut forward a bit, I started attending MeetUp events, and things seemed great, but there is still that voice in the back of my head that's something's not right. Lately, it's been shouting at me more and more, and I'm finally listening to it telling me that the socialisation while working is a crucial part of what's missing.

What's next?

I'm exploring options of co-working. Not with colleagues (but only because we're spread across countries), but with strangers. Maybe developers, maybe not. My thinking is that networking is the biggest part of it.

The side-issue of this is the cost of co-working. I respect the need to ensure that the rent is paid for such places, but the price of many of them makes it prohibitive to even consider, meaning that even discovering if it's right for you can be expensive. Also, many of these such places tend to be aimed towards small businesses and teams. They do business support. That's fine, good even, if that's what you're looking for. I'm not. I'm looking for something different.

There has to be a better way

How do we solve this? There has to be a middle ground. Does it sit in collaboration via social platforms, leading to in-person at some point in the future? MeetUp and similar sites offer something, but it's costly - not to mention you're also doing the organisation.

Bluesky and similar are great for finding people interested in similar topics, but it's a mix between the folks posting for 'grindset mindset', and folks who genuinely use the platforms to be people who happen to be interested in such topics.

LinkedIn is the 'work platform', but I would be lying if I said that I like the platform.