2022.
I’m burned out. And I’m frustrated at being burned out: Why are my emotions so irrational!?
Women I like aren’t responding, ‘boundary-setting’ is creating more conflict (??), and I have no idea what I want in my career. It feels like whenever I do stuff, stuff goes wrong.
Now.
Back then, I thought burnout was preventing me from achieving my goals. I was wrong. Burnout was a strategy.
After all, if ~everything is going poorly, then one way to avoid more stuff going poorly is… to avoid doing anything at all. And one way to do that is to feel burned out.
Looking over my journals from 2022, there were actually a few days where I felt totally normal—and I quite enjoyed those days! The problem came in the days that followed: as I acted more brazenly again, I got into conflicts with friends, family, and people I was living with.
So, to avoid that, “burnout” returned.
Eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and (a lot of) time, two patterns got unlearned: that which made me get into so many (honestly, dumb) interpersonal conflicts, and that which made even the good conflicts feel horrible. After that, conflict became fun, interesting, even beautiful.
I haven’t needed this burnout since.
Suffering is a feature
Any longstanding internal bottleneck, like burnout, can be understood from two different points of view:
The classical view: “Past bad experiences (traumas) caused your burnout.”
The Locally Optimal view: “Burnout is often a strategy for steering towards desirable futures and away from undesirable futures.”
What’s nice about the classical view is that it absolves you of responsibility: Because you can’t change the past, your dysfunction isn’t your fault. There’s no need to feel ashamed.
What’s nice about the Locally Optimal view is that it bestows you with responsibility: Because your current strategies aren’t globally optimal, you can find even better strategies!
My burnout wasn’t globally optimal (it sucked), but it seems to have been the best strategy accessible to me at the time.1 Locally Optimal!
My emotions were never “irrational”—they were just locally optimal.
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It’s like efficient markets: If simple steps in ↗ direction created Pareto improvements, then why hasn’t your system implemented this already? Like bro, it’s been years and you still have this bottleneck. Answer: Given enough time, you’ve already settled into local optimum/ equilibrium—meaning that ~all local steps actually increase loss and make you worse off!
Adler?
Very cool insight. I came up with a similar idea after I had worked in psychiatry for some years. I think that's exactly what happens to many people that are stuck in depression, anxiety, addiction etc. ...and you are right, realizing that is not just a comforting explanation (like the classical explanation is, at least in the beginning) but brings hopefulness with it, too. Finding the new way of seeing, thinking, and doing can be quite a challenge, though.