Burnout is Real

I've faced few things more distressing than having my brain go on strike.

I didn't understand what was happening. How could I? Everything just got a bit too fast to keep pace, a little harder to parse. I started making simple mistakes, forgetting key details. I'm fine, I thought. I just need to lock in. But something was clearly wrong.

Burnout, I thought, was caused by working too hard, but I was hardly working at all. How could I be burned out? My boss, temporarily the CTO while we hired a new EE team manager, was similarly incredulous. He himself had only known me for a few months.

But it wasn't the work itself, it was the people. I had made an enemy out of a coworker by poking holes in his (egregiously bad) proposals, and now he was out for blood. He made himself the only person who could meaningfully review my work, and he would demand revision after revision only to change his mind the next day. At the time I attributed this to incompetence, but in retrospect it's hard not to see malice.

I grew so resentful, not just of him but of the rest of the team for letting him do this, that I could not bring myself to work for more than an hour a day. I would go into the office and click around randomly to seem busy. On work trips, I would fantasize about my plane crashing into the Pennsylvania countryside, freeing me from the nightmare of ISO 13849-1 certification.

So I quit. And from what I hear, many others did as well. Recovery took several months, doing nothing at first and gradually ramping up activity again. Like a sports injury.

Data point of one, but burnout is real. Do not ignore psychic damage.