2022. I didn’t understand why I was burned out. Why are my emotions so irrational!?
Socializing wasn’t going well, women I liked weren’t responding, and setting boundaries was somehow creating conflict. Taking actions hurt.
I thought my biggest bottleneck to achieving my goals was unlearning my burnout. In reality, burnout was actually a strategy to an even bigger bottleneck…
Because if everything feels like it’s going badly, then one strategy is to do almost nothing at all. Ie: to be burned out.
So with courage, 1:1 help, and time, eventually I unlearned what made these situations feel so terrible: how they had me feel about myself.
I haven’t needed the burnout strategy since.
Suffering on purpose
Any longstanding personal bottleneck can be understood from two different points of view:
⛓ The classical view: “Past bad experiences and traumas caused my burnout—so there’s nothing I can do.”
🔴 The Locally Optimal view: “The futures I want to see and avoid are incentivizing burnout as a present strategy—so I can find better strategies.”
The classical view asks you to ruminate on the past: past events caused your “dysfunction”, but the past can’t be changed… so at least it’s not your fault.
The Locally Optimal view asks you to look into the future: what do you want? and what do you want to avoid? which strategies safely integrate these?
The locally optimal view is a hopeful view: your suffering is functional, but with more resources and better guidance it’s possible to find strategies that require less suffering and perform better.
My burnout wasn’t globally optimal (it sucked), but it seems to have been the best strategy locally available. (Efficient market hypothesis: If there were zero downsides to a local step, why hasn’t that been implemented already? Answer: You’ve already settled into the nearest local optimum, so in the limit all local steps increase loss!)
Therefore, my burnout was (probably) Locally Optimal. Integrating a significantly better strategies required more resources and better guidance.
So it seems my emotions were never “irrational” after all—I was just ignorant of the incentives.
V2.3. 2024 Nov 23 – 2026 Sep 13.
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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.