Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

I think your choice of words "spectacular" & "crawl back to reality" shows that our society is still not ready to fully accept mental diseases. This is not personal but why would you think they have to crawl back to reality? I don't think they ever left.

So, it all started last year. My mother who has been suffering from lung cancer for three years was doing pretty well - given the condition she has to deal with.

Then, all of the sudden, my brother has died in an accident. My mom took that with the pain I guess only a mother can feel, but to my surprise she was braver than I thought.

I, however, pushed all the pain away and started to work as hell. Within weeks I took new responsibilities at work place, travelled a lot and to make things even worse, fell in love with a co-worker of mine. This ruined my years lasting relationship, but at that moment, I thought, it was worth it.

Turned out, it was not. My new relationship became a nightmare. Passive aggression all over, paired with depression, illegit accusations and stark disputes all over. Of course, all of this happened only when we were alone.

I have always been a very "stable" person, but at this time, I began asking myself what am I doing here. My mother is about to die, my brother had passed away, I left my girlfriend, who was my partner and my best friend for years for a girl who is so full of negativity. And the few moments I have for myself, I am doing hard work.

It was too much for me. I collapsed and could not do anything. Thanks to a good friend of mine, who brought me to the hospital. I went to a private clinic specialised on trauma and depression in a very nice area.

I had sports, psychological sessions, creativity and relaxation all over the day for a while.

I came back stronger than ever before. For me, key was to really enjoy every single moment. "Love it, leave it or change it", has become my slogan more than ever. Contrary to my situation before, I just applied it also to the very small parts of life. And, my focus changed from "leave it" to "change it". I am thankful for what I have, even if this is something I currently struggle with. But when I am really thankful from the deepest of my heart, I find the strength to change it. I started giving a fuck what people I don't care about think about me and instead started to reveal true feelings to the people I really want to have in my life. I learnt to say "no". I have never been overloaded with work from mean co-workers or managers who just piled their shit on my table. It was more I actively searched for work that somehow sounded "interesting" or a meaningful CV bullet point. I have been the mean manager of myself. I stopped that. Saying no to a thing that just sounds "pretty cool", but is actually not meaningful in my life, is the best lesson I ever got taught.

And, best of all: I quitted my job and just agreed to to stuff for the company as contractor until they find another person to work on it. I joined the company of a good friend of mine, which is outside the tech world, doing half of the hours I used to do and get the same amount of money. And the best thing, I can now learn and play with technology with no pressure which makes me more productive. And with that knowledge I feel I can help my friend surviving with his non-tech company in the storm of digitalization.

I find it especially difficult to deal with the mismatch between my sense of what I can do, which is calibrated to my former self, and what I can actually deliver. I desperately need to believe that what I am going through is a temporary perturbation, so I keep trying to "shake it off", and I make plans and commitments from a sense of self that is still stubbornly calibrated to who I was then and not what I am today. As the months turn into years, that sense of competence seems increasingly fantastical and dubious. Was I ever good at my job? Did I suck then, too, and just fail to realize it?

These doubts are compounded by the fact that I have changed employers and change teams multiple times so no one I work with now is acquainted with that former self. But he really did exist, at one point. I swear he did. At least I think he did.

> When you are playing really well ... you can’t even imagine playing badly. And when you are playing badly, you can’t even remember what it felt like to play well.

(Tiger Woods: How Low Can He Go http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/tiger-woods-how-l...)

It was clear that the work was impossible, but the committee wouldn't budge on the fact that I had to finish it. I was working around the clock and then laying in bed for a few hours worrying before working some more, and I absolutely couldn't take it anymore.

I decided the only solution was to drop out, which meant the postdoc would rescind my offer, and I'd have to break the new lease, cancel the move, etc. I went into the admin office to let them know I was simply not coming into the lab anymore and they could do whatever they wanted to do about it.

Suddenly the "must do" list evaporated and they said I could just write up my work and graduate. So I did, and I got the phd and went off to the postdoc and it all turned out fine-- it turns out all I needed to do was decide to throw my life away and really mean it, in order to call their bluff.

I think the experience gave me a better sense of when I'm approaching the burnout zone, so that I can better avoid it. I've also never experienced anything even close to this in a work environment -- if my job was like that, I'd quit in a hot second and go work somewhere not-awful. It was only the fact that they were holding the degree hostage that caused me to feel forced to overwork myself into an unhealthy state.

Last July I ran a migration (SaaS CRM company) that should have taken 3-4 weeks with 1 week of downtime, but the client insisted on 1 week with 4 days of downtime. It was the first major migration moving this platform out of beta and I loved that product (and that client) more than anything, so I said fine.

I made it super clear to my boss that this was going to fucked up and this was a bad idea, but I was down to try. Long story short I work 20+ hours a day for 7 days (heavily helped by, in retrospect, pretty dangerous amounts of adderall/provigil/Ritalin/caffeine/ambien for when I actually did need to sleep) and we got it down.

During the last day of QA I clasped in my office from exhaustion and went temporarily blind, ended up in the ER. That didn't matter though because the migration was a resounding success - client was happy, executives were happy, product was stable.

My boss was incredible (truly the best boss I'll ever have) and was ready to give me anything I wanted... except a budget for more staff, which was really the issue here. This product was my baby and I was going to ensure its success no matter what happened.

Put in my notice three weeks later. They told me to name my price and title bump to stay, but weren't willing to let me hire the two or three staff I knew I needed. I offered to stay as long as they needed to help with the transition but turned down all their bonuses because I didn't want to be beholden to them.

I finally left 6 months later to make slightly less money with a slightly higher title at a company that gave me the team I knew I needed. I still miss that company more than anything, getting to see a mission criticalcproduct go from idea to being used by massive multinational companies was incredible and an experience I doubt I'll ever have again.

FWIW I'm still in touch with people from my old team and the company has since hired three more staff (plus the two existing staff the team already had) and a VP to manage the team. By not giving me to staff support I asked for and letting me burn out the company has "lost" somewhere around $800k in new staff costs alone.

Lost major supplier responsible for about 1/2 our gross profit at about the same time our broad market entered recession, two key employees were mired in divorce proceedings, and another key employee left to fight CNS lymphoma. Three years and about three soul crushing false recoveries later we emerged with a lot of work ahead to rebuild and reduce debt.

The advice... expect nothing. Don't let the highs carry you or the lows crush you. Recognize circumstances outside your control and shut the door on them when it comes to your opinion of yourself. Earthquakes rock the brilliant and dullards al the same and sometimes having survived the experience is accomplishment enough.

I poured everything into that role, shunning personal relationships with all but a few very close friends.

I made the calculus that, like others in the same company before me, I'd put my time in and after 5-7 years I'd downshift roles. Write some papers, some patents, put everything I'd learned into product and service development.

Thing is, I didn't appreciate how much the company and company culture was changing even as I was helping drive that change.

The company changed from focusing on experience to certifications. Personal loyalties were almost frowned upon. If you were a technical professional you had to demonstrate that you filed for multiple patents per year (in my role I was actively discouraged from filing patents for corporate politics reasons…I could always file later).

In very short order I lost my team and lost my role. It turned out that while I was excellent at "internet stuff", I sucked at corporate politics. Once real money started being spent on infrastructure and applications I grew a target on my back large enough for its own corporate task force.

Multiple executives pulled me aside to tell me bluntly that I had no future at the company, but I didn't listen, I'd been there close to a decade, doing "internet stuff" most of that time, how could they throw that all away?

I got a consolation role in another organization at the company which lasted a year and then the entire organization was disbanded.

In parallel in my limited personal life, both of my parents were dying, with their deaths bracketing 9/11 by months on either side.

9/11 destroyed the neighborhood I had been living it.

By 2002 I walked away from all of it.

And I've mostly stayed away since then. I made quite a bit of money in the 1990s, not enough to be a VC, enough to semi–retire.

Every now and then I resurface and work with a startup for awhile, but I just can't pour myself in anymore the way people expect. It's just a job. I hope the startup does well, but I've become too jaded.

I briefly tried raising money, but found VCs were turned off that I walked away from the 7x24 lifestyle and my conservative approach to growing a business did not comport with their goals for portfolio returns.

So, yeah, it was a meh experience. I remain surprised that I survived the final year of working insane hours for the company even as I knew that they would jettison me as soon as I was no longer capable of working 18 hour days 6 days a week.

I'm in a much better space mentally, but it took over a decade after that experience before I "felt better".

My family and personal relationships take priority, and I actively turn down gigs and new work if they conflict with that choice.

I don't really have any advice. I feel like I wasted a decade creating capital value for a company way out of proportion to my compensation. And another decade wasted "recovering" from rejection from that company.

I guess my only advice would be, when you do burn out figure out an acceptable cover story if you decide to ever return to tech. Recruiters & head hunters, let alone hiring managers, will avoid at all costs anyone who admits to having burned out.

Then when burnout struck me hard, I realized that I just don't want to open my laptop anymore. Also, even side project started to feel like a burden to me.

Then I decided, enough is enough and I need to do some changes to my life.

- I did join a gym near my house.

- I stopped coding in evenings. I would wake up early and code for 2-3 hours in morning and be content with whatever I achieve during that time.

- Evening hours after office would be only for gym, relaxing, having dinner and watching TV.

Believe me, it was the best decision I did for myself. My health both mental and physical improved drastically and I started loving coding again.

I was burned out, not only from the work, but from spending my entire life following orders - from school to the workplace. So I quit my job after 5 months despite the fact that that's considered sacrilege, with maybe $13k in my bank account.

I spent the next 3 months pursuing nothing but my hobby at the time (music production). The first month was possibly the best month of my entire life. It was the first time I truly felt free - no homework, no stress of finding a job, no having to be in an office from 9:30-5:30 M-F.

Then I ran out of money, so I had to start applying for jobs again. Ended up getting a much better job (both pay-wise and quality-wise), so it worked out.

Now I'm burned out again and completely sick of working in this industry. The day-to-day work is boring as hell, and I couldn't care less about Javascript frameworks. I hate having to spend the bulk of my waking hours in the prison of an office.

But I continue working because I'm saving a lot of money every month. Currently have almost $100k in the bank. After this job, I'm going to take at least a good year off to do what I want to do, not what the labor markets force me to. I have a lot of passion in certain areas that I'm not able to devote full attention to due to work. I want to have a much greater positive impact on the world than being some menial code monkey working on proprietary software or a corporate Kool-Aid drinking cock sucker.

I've realized that I will never be happy in a traditional job. Being subservient and following orders is not in my nature.

10 months into the job, CTO #3 had been forced out, DoE #2 had just turned in her resignation and we were completely unable to attract experienced engineers of any quality. COO assumed direct control of the engineers while marketing and sales kept themselves busy as "product people." I was looking for a new job and getting ready to jump ship when marketing and sales, giddy as children, came up with the idea of pivoting into EdTech. I was offered the chance to lead a small team in building out these new products and because I was a young engineer with ambitions wildly out of proportion with my experience and skills, I accepted. What resulted was the most stressful 10 months of my life. The hours (14-18 M-F and 10-12 on weekends) were doable but I was constantly second-guessed and undermined. My engineering teammates were all incredibly supportive and I would turn to the more senior guys for advice on navigating the technical landmines but it was a war everyday with everyone else. We had market research from parents, students, teachers and school administrators that would be ignored by the product guys in favor of "instinct." We had UI/UX designs that we paid for that were ignored in favor of "I like this better though." I can't even count the number of times I had "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse" quoted at me. I had marketing guys bully their way onto our sprint boards so they could move their half-baked, pet features onto the top of the pile. I had sales guys promising clients features that weren't even possible given our budget and deadlines.

I finally broke and set up some rules, some bullshit and some good, so we could make some progress. For starters, my team took over our main conference room and kept it locked. I told them to ignore any form of communication about the project from anyone that wasn't based out of the conference room. I would cancel or skip all internal meetings with sales and marketing and would only attend meetings one-on-one with the COO. I made sure that no one went on a sales call for the product we were building unless one of the team was on the call with them. I would monitor our sprint boards to see what features were being pushed up on the sly. And then I would delete them. In the end we managed to push out a fairly polished product (really nice beta) with about a quarter of all the promised features. Our clients did end up buying it but no one really loved it and no one really hated it. I quit 4 months later when I was asked if I was interested in leading the team to build out more features.

The entire experience was terrible during but I kept going because I thought it would look nice on my CV (it does). I took six months off to "crawl back to reality" as you put it and realized halfway through that there was no reality to crawl back to because I had lived reality in all it's HD, 4K shitty goodness. Sometimes when people are assholes you can be a bigger asshole back and win and sometimes you can't. That's all there is to it.

The results till that day were modest at best, and that's because stabilizing the transition state is only part of what a real enzyme should do, and even though the professors are supposed to teach you this in your biochem/chemical biology deep-dive courses in grad school YMMV, and it's easy to sell a starry eyed grad student, especially when the prof doesn't know any better, too.

Anyways my buddy's project was even worse - he was supposed to make a protease (an enzyme that degrages proteins). And if you look at proteases, their clefts wrap around the protein even more than an antibody ever could (they have shallow clefts), because burying the reaction away from water is a critical aspect of their function.

He spent three years working in a lab that demanded 80+ hour workweeks. Towards the end his sleep cycle had flipped, he was playing around making geometric designs with his pipet tips, and spending much of his workday playing a flash website gameboy tetris, and many days going to the casino to play poker instead of work.

finally his boss modified his project, instructing him to graft a metalloprotease domain, onto the antibody in an attempt to get it working. A breath of fresh air! Suddenly he was invigorated with a new approach to the project. But not long after that, he was back to the old routine of being burned out, and totally unproductive, spending hours on trivialities, like trying to strip metals from his water supply to really get it right and get it working. In the end, it never worked.

It turned out that the metalloprotease domain was designed by Homme Hellinga. Years after this, the scientific community discovered that Homme Hellinga was faking his enzyme design work.

I was working at a consulting agency as a linux sysadmin pulling crazy hours for two years. I ran support for a client that had an app that in house devs had 'modified' and a mission critical file transfer service. I was on a team of two with 24/7 on call support. Thing was, no one ever called the other guy so I was always the one getting 5am phone calls on Saturday mornings. Weekly late night (8pm - 3am) deployments were common and considered successful in the eyes of the company.

After about a year of this my lifelong struggle with depression started to reemerge. Feelings of loneliness and doubt began to crop up and I would cry uncontrollably on my commute back home from work. It was around this time that the daily suicidal thoughts took a turn for the worse. It was all I could think about, every minute of the day.

One day I was chatting with a co-worker and my boss when they complimented me on some recent weight loss. I was in a mood that day and told them the truth: I was having trouble eating. I wasn't eating breakfast or lunch and most nights would trade dinner for whiskey. After my weight loss was noticed, I decided to hide the fact I couldn't eat by telling everyone I was on a new diet. Side note: I had gained a considerable amount of weight over the time I spent at that company. I recently celebrated my 100 lbs weight loss.

I continued to lose weight, though not entirely by choice. The suicidal thoughts were deafening, blocking out any hope or joy in my life. I had become my job and saw no way out.

Eventually the client I was working for no longer needed my services and I was removed from the contract. I tried to celebrate but was so numb inside I didn't feel any happiness at all. I took a week off but still had the same feelings of dread and depression. I did a lot of reading on burnout and realized I was on that slippery slope.

After returning from my sole week off, I was placed 'on the bench'. For those who have never worked at a consultating agency, this means you still get a paycheck but have no work to do. It also means you are in a constant state of fear for your job until the agency finds you a new billable position. That didn't help much to lighten my mood.

I made the switch from sysadmin to webdev during this 'bench' period. I was able to secure a position as an internal React.js dev and for a few weeks started to climb out of burnout. I thought I could start being happy again with my new role but my company had different plans for me.

As I was still 'on the bench' and not billable, the company decided to move me to a new contract doing dev work for M$ sharepoint. The project was in shambles, had no tech lead, and the only other dev had decided to format the site with tables (!) as he didn't know any other way. I expressed how displeased I was but my complaint fell on deaf ears. I decided I couldn't take it anymore.

After convincing the manager to make me 'lead sharepoint dev', I put my two weeks in. I had setup a job at a boat rental I had worked at in summers past. I now work the same hours but get paid for every hour, which is great.

I took a full month off after my two weeks. Spent the time laying around the house and playing video games. One of the best months of my life. I thought a lot about where I had been and where I was headed. I started hanging out with friends & family again and realized I was on the right track.

I can now saw I've never felt better in my life. I lost a bunch of weight, met a girl, and genuinely enjoy every hour of every day. The choking thoughts of dread and suicide are gone, replaced by the joy and happiness I thought I would never have again. I recently started my own consulting company and have vowed to never let myself dip back into burnout again. Every day is a new journey; you just have to find a way to make it work while not wanting to die every day.

My advice is to recognize the signs of burnout ...

Lessons learned: 1) money does not make you happy. If you don't know how to be happy with little, you won't be happier when you have a lot. 2) job and career is not everything. Healthy work-life balance means a lot.

.. Actually kinda hard to put all the thoughts, feelings and experiences of turbulent 7 years in only some sentences.

The CEO of the startup I'd just blown-off a job at (showed up the first week, "worked at home" for another couple of weeks, then stopped showing up entirely) drove over and knocked on my door to find out what was going on. Drunk off my ass, I told him, and that I'd get some help. So I made That Call and got some help. Did about three weeks of inpatient care (Stanford recovery unit, and then a place in the Santa Cruz mountains), then moved into a halfway house and spent a lot of time in AA meetings [AA is controversial, I know]. Never spent another night in that townhouse, wound up selling it. That CEO hired me back as a consultant a few months after I got out of inpatient.

I've got 18 years sober now, much of which I've spent working on software at great companies on products you've almost certainly heard of and probably used. Married, with a teen-age son, and doing better financially than I ever would have imagined. Still going to AA meetings, though nowhere near as often as I probably should.

Took the decision to start from a blank canvas around last September, and up until February I only recall having several days off (Christmas, NYE etc). Worked in the day, the evenings and weekends. Impending sense of doom only seemed to subside when I made progress - this feedback loop kept me hooked and driving forwards.

Launched the site (https://www.construct.net) a couple of months later, but it burnt me out. Had to take a fairly significant amount of time off to switch off. I was waking up in the night with a horrible twisting in my chest and random bursts of adrenaline. Not healthy!

The site has been up and running and selling now for months really well, so I am proud and relieved.

Benefits:

* Learnt how to make a scalable site

* Re-writes are always significantly better written

* Learnt a LOT

Downsides:

* My health!

Also, you can't retrofit scalability which is a lesson I learnt the hard way. Seems obvious but I had a years work at stake so had to give it a try and having the guts to scrap everything and start again was incredibly painful but has worked out well long term. Feels very comparable to learning to backup.

When I look back at those several months - I honestly remember very little of it. As our startup has grown we've also learnt than I'm now becoming a significant bottleneck as my bandwidth isn't unlimited and it's a huge relief that we're now taking steps to address this.

I'm also not someone who can easily ask for help and leave it until it's too much to handle. This was a big contributing factor.

Not a "spectacular" burn out story but I teetered very close on the edge of something quite negative - I'm not exactly sure what but I'm glad I avoided it.

Last job. Unremarkable but comfortable corporate job in web/backend development. Longest stint I had done in my life, at least going back to elementary school. Been there over 5 years. Got promoted to senior. My boss got bumped up a step and another developer on the team got promoted to his role as my new boss. Long story short, my new boss had it out for me. I started to get reports from fellow team members that my boss was dumping on me to others.

I ignored it until the annual review came up. After years of positive reviews, I got a minimally acceptable review. I challenged it and a couple weeks later I was slapped with a PIP. The allegations in the PIP were complete nonsense. (In one instance, they actually cited a bug I had fixed at the documented request of the project manager on one of our major applications as evidence I had been working on unassigned tasks.) This is when the burnout started.

I talked to a few people whose knowledge and advice I trusted on the subject and they said basically the same thing, "This is a battle you can't win. Get out as soon as you can." I heeded their advice. I put my head down and continued to do my job (more carefully and scrupulously than I ever had) and started looking for a new job. I don't regret this. Actually, I had already been actively looking by this time. But I started broadening my standard. There is one other thing I wish I had done at this point. (Spoiler: this is when I should have talked to a lawyer.)

As I had come to expect being a regular HN reader: finding a new job as a senior developer of a certain age nowadays can be tough. Especially when you're outside a major tech hub and not able to easily relocate. After six month and a couple frustratingly close calls, I still didn't have a new job. Six month review comes around. New PIP. New bogus allegations. I was fuming. This is when my burnout peaked. It was affecting my sleep and I developed a weird hives-like rash on my the back of my legs.

I was ready to quit but a friend recommended talking to an employment lawyer she knew. So I scheduled a consultation. I wanted to know if I could sue for defamation or something like that since the claims management was making about my performance were completely unfounded and I could cite documentation, code, and project management records to demonstrate it. He told me to get real. If I couldn't demonstrate flagrant discriminate on the basis of a protected class (race, sex, or age), I was wasting his time and my money. My company could fire me at will and the only reason they were keeping me around was to "paper my file" so they could quash anything as silly as I what I was dreaming up.

However, he also advised me not to quit my job. That's just what my boss and HR were hoping I would do. He said unless they fired me "with cause", for which poor performance does not qualify, I should stick it out. That way I wouldn't give up my claims for unemployment or COBRA. He said they might even offer my a minimal severance when they let me go. So I resolved to stick around until they fired me. I also started to push back against my manager's harassment. I tried to be polite but firm. But I started openly using the term harassment in talking with him.

Once HR got wind that I had used that term, they were involved. There were meetings with our HR reps and mediated sitdowns with my boss. They even initiated something called a 360-degree review for my boss.

This lasted for another 2 or 3 months. The whole time I knew I was doomed but at least I now had the satisfaction of feeling like I was sticking up for myself and enjoying the chaos that was swirling around the team instead of feeling like I was suffering the brunt of it. Finally, one Friday afternoon, my boss and I got into a voluble debate about s...

When I woke up one morning, everything seemed really blurred. I could not precisely get where I was in the room and, when I tried to talk to my parents, they seemed really far away. I was also deeply tired and just wanted to sleep.

After 2 scary days like this, we went to a neurologist. He looked at me and asked my parents to leave the room. Looking at me, he told me: "I know you take hard drugs. Tell me anything about it so I can help you". I have never taken any drug. When he realized this, he did a lot of tests but found nothing. He just asked me to rest.

After 2 long weeks, I slowly got better and finally fully recovered. The neurologist told us it was probably some kind of burnout. It happened 2 other times few years after but it was less intense and I am now able to feel more precisely when I work too hard or sleep too little and that there are some risks.

My burnout is continuing into year four. Working at a big name company for a year now and haven't written a single line of code. I feel so apart from the team I'm on. Still have periods where I can't think, but now nobody notices when I don't come in, sometimes for weeks at a time. The big salary doesn't count for much when loan payments and city rent take the majority. Haven't seen my family in three years, missed both my grandparents' funerals.

I still think it was the right decision to leave the Midwest, but I wish it didn't take so much sacrifice.

but maybe that's ok. sometimes life is more exciting than it needs to be.

I loved my job, programming and developing software was what I always wanted to do, and had been very successful doing it for years. My company was shooting for new areas, with underwhelming results so far, but trying nevertheless.

Then, at one point, my personal life took a serious blow, one that relatively quickly destroyed my relationship with my spouse, but without the ability to separate or divorce. Social and family-at-large life, which had never been intense but was always satisfying, vanished. During that time, my company's situation simultaneously degraded in quality of projects, budgets and general outlook, and my job increased in scope with a lot less hands on programming, less resources, more management, more teams and more firefighting (human and technical). Like in the personal side, I was professionally stuck without the ability to make drastic changes.

After a few months of this, with increasingly frequent episodes of stress and anxiety, I ran out of steam and blew up completely. I took a leave under medical supervision, doing therapy and working on coming to terms with all the various aspects of what I was dealing with. Despite the newly available time to do whatever I wanted (within reason), I couldn't do anything at all. My mind ached to do some coding for its own sake, but it took a long time before my body could again be able to keep focus on anything for more than a few minutes.

Time has passed. Therapy helped, coming to terms has continued to advance at a very slow pace but is still very far from complete. My focus came back, and I went back to work in pretty much the same circumstances, professional and personal, that I was before the blowup. Part of the anxiety turned into desire to overcome challenges, another part remained (and still does) as energy-draining anxiety.

I wake up every day knowing that I'm not over it. I remind myself that me and everyone around me wants, and to various degrees needs, me to go on. I hope that things work out, and it is quite possible that they will, although it is impossible to predict how, when or to what extent. I have learned to allow myself some room to, in the bad days, not be the nice and strong person I want to be, and instead let weakness take over while I try to rest. One weak day something bad may happen. Many days trying to stay strong may lead me down the hole again, hard. I just try not to think of, or control, the future much anymore.