I don't know who I am anymore and I can't tell anyone

Anyone recognizes this?

I do recognize this, though not anywhere near as severe.

I keep telling myself that if I ever were to get so bad that my non-work life and health quality drop significantly, I'll drop everything and become an Alpaca farmer (that was a running joke when I was in uni, but nowadays I feel like perhaps someday I'd like to do that for real).

I don't have as much experience with high pressure work and burn out as you do, but a few years ago, before I quit my job to work on startups and contract stuff, I was getting pretty burnt out working in telecoms. Similar deal, though not as severe (I didn't work as long hours, for example, but I rarely used my holiday time). Also, some personal stuff made the burnout all the worse. I quit my job and took a month to relax before starting contract work and other projects. Looking back, I think its very important to make sure you use your holiday time and to disconnect yourself completely from anything work related (which for me means to stay away from the computer altogether as much as I can).

But it's important. My girlfriend and I just spent all Saturday walking around downtown Boston window shopping because the weather was so lovely. It was a great, relaxing day - it felt like vacation.

So do that. Hell, use up some of your vacation days. Your company will survive without you for a week or three.

And stop working so much. Seriously. Set a time and go home regardless of if you have "finished" your stuff for the day. It's a hamster wheel of work and you'll never go home if you have just one more thing to finish.

You have no down time, I dont mean time working on your open source pojects, i mean time when you watch movie, read a book, walk the dog, go to the cinema or for a meal or soemthing. 3 hours in the evening is barely enough time to wind down from a day at work and get ready to sleep.

hope you get good advice that helps you. All i can say is try to re-prioritise your life rather than your work.

Well, the quiet town bit and the no stress bit, anyway. I like what I do, I just don't feel like doing it every waking hour of my life. I have years where I just want to move to someplace quiet and slow-paced and spend as much time as possible with my wife. (And when we have kids, that's exactly what we'll do.)

Your skill set is so sought after these days. My current company would surely jump at the chance to give you some contract work.

If I were you, I would leave the job, take a year, and rent a place in that quiet town. I would line up a little contract work, which frankly, won't be hard. I would bill by the hour and work less than eight hour days. I would drink beers with my friends and hang out in backyards. After the year, I would reevaluate - quiet towns have their pros, but they also have their cons.

It's not your skills that are causing you pain here, it's what you're doing with them. Your abilities can be used to make you happy.

So fix the problem... scale yourself back to eight hours a day. Make it a point to leave the office by 6:30. After a month of this shift this up to normal closing time. There is no need to ask permission: if someone asks say you have something in the evenings after work. If this is a problem waltz into a more reasonable position.

That said, one practical suggestion is that if you're changing your work hours, you need to get into the office at or before 9:00am, since it is common for managers to perceive staff as coming in late, but very rare for them to recognize the sheer amount of time put in working late. You also don't want to spend a lot of time at the office talking about your new evening activities while you're getting people conditioned to your working non-insane hours. You want the only noticeable shift in your behavior to be the fact you leave at a reasonable hour. After a month or two you won't need to worry about this, but if you give into the temptation it might be perceived as flaunting authority.

You mention having a bad back; try finding a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu studio; it will definitely help your strength and is more low-impact at the beginning grappling stages (look for a smaller studio). Make sure you tell them about your back and they should help you work on it and will make sure you aren't being hurt more.

Give up open source; at-least scale it back for awhile. You need to be worrying more about you when you're this worn out.

-Don't- give up that girlfriend.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000076.html

I've considered taking a "normal-job-as-sabbatical" several times (e.g., being a welder for a year).

(also, consider that humans tend to adjust their problem-severity-sensitivity knob to their current level of input. e.g., the bus driver in your home town is probably really stressed out about this "problems". this puts you in the rare position of possibly being able to truly achieve 0-stress in one of those "normal" jobs, as long as you can keep your current perspective on what "real" stress is).

I'm still lost and fairly unhappy on most days so obviously I don't have much figured out. The only thing I can suggest is that you need to discover your hobbies, and it cannot be anything work related. I love to draw, design, sculpt, etc; I even got a full ride for art which I gave up and paid for an engineering degree. After working for a year, I managed to convince myself that programming was my hobby and left no time for anything else.

Recently I have committed to an 8-9 hour work day. I give myself time to draw and to read and I've been happier since. The hardest part is to allow yourself to work less and take those vacations, to recognize the little things you've always wanted to do and actually follow up with it... like work remotely for a month in a random city, take a glass-blowing session with your girlfriend.

You probably don't nee d a permanent break from your career, just a better balance in life.

How did you went from thinking that solving problems is nice and fun (ok), to thinking that the way to go about it is to work as a expandable human slave to your bosses benefit (not ok)?

Even the problems you get to solve are not that much impressive in the grand scheme of things. Scaling some service to 100M users != solving cancer. Yours and 1000 other companies already do it.

Don't get tricked into the whole company culture --except if you have a share of the company. And even then, your life is worth more.

Where would you be in 50 years? Exactly.

I just wanted to add that, since you seem very commited to the company you work for, why not try to learn to delegate?

I'm sure there are some very bright and ambitious younger professionals in your company you could take under your wing (or ask for staffing) and delegate some non-critical work (or even critical if under your supervision).

It might be more work short term, but it'll be better long term. And it always pays to get backup - if you're indispensable, you can't make career choices, scale down on work as suggested or go on vacations.

Why do you work so much? Do you need the money? Are you too timid to say no? Are you looking for a promotion? Do you love the game?

On top of all that work, why do you spend even more time on open source projects? Do you still have something to prove? Is this a source of entertainment or anxiety?

The fact is, you're extremely talented and could create almost any work arrangement you fancy. There's no need to quit IT and become a bus driver.

But again, what you should do now depends entirely on why you're currently working so much.

For what it's worth, I've been there before. I almost sold everything and moved to Costa Rica. Instead, I sold everything and made less radical changes.

One of the reasons I worked so much was because everything I owned had monthly payments. Selling everything solved that. Once you don't need to make a lot of money to pay your bills the world opens up for you.

Suddenly you can walk into your boss's office and say, "look, this is how it's going to be...". If she says no, then you walk. I really can't express enough the difference not needing money makes. Most people are desperate for money and it shows. The confidence you get from not needing a paycheck for the next year shows even louder because it's so unusual.

Now, I typically do consulting work 4 days per week and work on my start-up at nights and on Fridays. On the weekend I hang out with friends, surf, snow board, skate, and sometimes do more work (if nothing else is available). I also take a ridiculous amount of vacations, some just a few days and some for a week, but typically about every 3 months. That's what keeps me going.

The problem is your relationship with your job.

While others will suggest that you take a vacation (and I do agree), it wont fix the underlying problem which will just re-occur when you resume work (or another type of work).

You need to learn to be still even when your external circumstances are chaotic.

For this reason, I would highly recommend you take up meditation.

Start with 10-30 minutes per day in the morning where you still your mind. It will be difficult at first, but after 2-3 few weeks you'll get the hang of it and you'll notice that your mind will start to go back to the quiet space in your developed during the morning meditation.

You don't mention which city you are in, but I can personally vouch for Kadampa Buddhist centers as good teachers where the general classes are very light on doctrine and heavy on practical skills. You should be able to find them by searching for "Kadampa <your city>". You may also find other teachers, but I wouldn't be able to give you any idea of the quality. That said, it's likely that any class will be better than no class.

In a practical way, this will enable you to make better decisions and see the bigger picture. After a shorter time that you would think, you'll start to feel like you are the driver, rather than just a passenger stumbling from one chaotic and intense situation to the next.

Good luck!

I'm not a doc, and so if someone here thinks this is horrible advice please let it be known.

I think several members here have suggested taking a vacation. Take one, a long one, go see fam, spend it traveling with your GF, or both or neither...whatever you want. Take one as long as you can 4wks, even if a week is unpaid, if you have the option.

Start with that, it doesn't rewrite your life, and let your mind calm down and then start evaluating what you think might work. Talk to people who care, talk to your parents, girlfriend, a buddy, me if you need an ear. Get it out first, then look for a ideas to make your life happier.

Maybe you need better hours and need to tell your employer, maybe a new 9-5 job, and hack away on some side project, or just maybe that bus driver job and to hell with this all, but being hunger-over, crying, stressed, you are in reactionary mode. I've been there for one reason or another, don't make an extreme change in this state.

Nah, just take a really long vacation. Like a year or two.

This may be silly, but are you keeping up with the basics? Do you make time to exercise? To write down your day in a journal? To recreate somehow daily? Simple things like this I've found are essential for my personal mental well-being.

Another point a prof taught me--take time to celebrate small accomplishments. Fix a particularly nasty bug? Go for a short walk, or shoot some hoops in the hallway trashcan. That way you aren't deluded with problems like a bad day of rain.

Good luck, friend.

but then you say:

> Of that I allocate 1 hour to my girlfriend daily.

...?

I really did give up my life, leave the city and try to go do something else. Let me tell you - everyone has a stressful job, even the bus driver or the photographer (imagine dealing with screaming kids or bridezillas for a job- that's where most photographers income comes from).

You mention writing this hung over and I have an observation, with no judgement attached - drinking on a regular basis screws up a lot of stuff in your life, and often causes depression. This part of your life might warrant some deep self-examination?

In the end, I got a job I absolutely love (no longer self employed, and happy about that), in a place I love. I don't love every minute of it, nobody ever does, but on whole there's more love than hate. I've also deeply examined and changed my drinking habbits, and that has literally changed my life.

My email is in my profile. Feel free to contact me if you ever want to talk.

[edit]Others have talked about vacation. Vacation is good and important, especially if you travel, but if you don't change your life you're just coming back to the same crap you left.

I do:

After a really crappy end (for me) at a start-up in 2005, I took a look: Divorced, burnt, stressed, unresolved personal problems. I quit, dropped out, threw in the trowel. Studied yoga, learnt green home building, bought ground in Arizona and Baja, Mexico to create eco-villages. Deliberately did NOTHING in IT.

Well, the Housing collapse killed my eco-villages, at least for now. And I found that my brain, which was used to full-stack one-man-army development, was succumbing to the "devil will find work for idle minds to do" paradigm. Which was mostly dwell on what I missed working 70 hr weeks. All bad.

Now I'm getting back in the game, albeit slowly (my brains, they is a mush; and the tools are way diff than 2005). It's hard but exhilarating. My advice, which I am implementing, is:

May I suggest a long walk? Like a month? The Appalachian trail, or that walk in Spain featured in "The Way" movie.

Then go back to work on something YOU CARE ABOUT, and do your work using the eight hour burn. Forget about being a hero - no one remembers and no one pays for it. Do more than your fair share, and do it with integrity.

You'll need to schedule activities that will make you put down the mouse and get out of the house.

Life is a marathon - you will die trying to sprint the whole way. Maybe not if you're a skinny Kenyan.