rud.is

Before digging into this post, I need to set some context.

Friday, May 13, 2022 was my last day at my, now, former employer of nearly seven years. I’m not mentioning the company name¹ because this post is not about them².

This post is about burnout and the importance of continuous monitoring and maintenance of you.

Occasionally, I mention³ that I’m one of those Peloton cult members. Each instructor has a pull-list of inspirational quotes that they interject in sessions⁴, and I’ve worked pretty hard across many decades curating mental firewall rules for such things, as words can have real power and should not be consumed lightly.

Like any firewall, some unintended packets get through, and one of Jess King’s mantras kept coming back to me recently as I was post-processing my decision to quit.

My biggest fear is waking up tomorrow and repeating today.

Many events ensued, both over the years and very recently, prior to giving notice, which was three weeks before my last day. Anyone who has built a fire by hand, by which I mean use a technique such as a bow drill vs strike a match, knows that it can take a while for the pile of kindling to finally go from docile carbon to roaring flame. For those more inclined to books⁵ than bivouacs, it’s also a bit like bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That’s how I’d describe finally making the decision.

Personal Observability Failures

Observability is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs.⁶ I’m using that term as many folks reading this will have come from similar technical backgrounds and it has been my (heh) observation that technically inclined folks seem to have a harder time with emotional language than they do with technical language. I certainly do.

The day after officially giving notice, I went — as usual — to the DatCave to begin the day’s work after getting #4 and $SPOUSE ready for school(s). After about an hour, I looked down and noticed I wasn’t using my wrist braces.

I should probably describe why that was a Big Deal™.

For the past ~2.5 years I’ve had to wear wrist braces when doing any keyboard typing at all. I’ve had a specific RSI⁷ condition since high school that has, on occasion, required surgery to correct. Until this flare-up started, I had not needed any braces, or had any RSI pain, for ages⁸.

But, ~2.5 years ago I started to have severe pain when typing to the point where, even with braces, there were days I really couldn’t type at all. Even with braces, this bout of RSI also impacted finger coordination to the extent that I had to reconfigure text editors to not do what they usually would for certain key combinations, and craft scripts to fix some of the more common errors said lack of coordination caused. I could tell surgery could have helped this flare-up, but there’s no way I was going for elective surgery during a pandemic.

Seeing full-speed, error-free, painless typing sans-braces was a pretty emotional event. It was shortly thereafter when I realized that I had pretty much stopped reading my logs (what normal folks would might say as “checking in with myself”) ~3 years ago.

Fans of observability know that a failing complex system may continue to regularly send critical event logs, but if nothing is reading and taking action⁹ on those logs, then the system will just continue to degrade or fail completely over time, often in unpredictable ways.

After a bit more reflection, I realized that, at some point, I became Bill Murray¹⁰, waking up each day and just repeating the last day, at least when it came to work. I think I can safely say Jess’ (and Phil¹¹‘s) biggest fear is now at least in my own top five.

Burnout, general stress, the Trump years, the rise of Christian nationalism, the pandemic, and the work situation all contributed to this personal, Academy Award-winning performance of Groundhog Day and I’m hoping a small peek into what I saw and what I’m doing now will help at least one other person out there.

Personal Failure Mode Effects And Mitigations

There’s a process in manufacturing called “failure mode and effects analysis”¹² that can be applied to any complex system, including one’s self. It’s the structured act of reviewing as many components, assemblies, and subsystems as possible to identify potential failure modes in a complex system and their causes and effects.

Normal folks would likely just call this “self-regulation, recovery, and stress management”¹³,¹⁴.

My human complex system was literally injuring itself (my particular RSI is caused by ganglia sac growth; the one in my left wrist is now gone and the right wrist is reducing, both without medical intervention, ever since quitting), but rather than examine the causes, I just attributed it to “getting old”, and kept on doing the same thing every day.

I’ll have some more time for self-reflection during this week of funemployment, but I’ve been assessing the failure modes, reading new recovery and management resources, and wanted to share a bit of what I learned.

Some new resources linked-to in the footnotes, and found in annotated excerpts below, that I have found helpful in understanding and designing corrective systems for my personal failure modes are from Cornell.

• Don’t be afraid of change: For someone who is always looking to the future and who groks “risk management”, I’m likely one of the most fundamentally risk-averse folks you’ve encountered.

  I let myself get stuck in a pretty unhealthy situation mostly due to fear of change and being surface-level comfortable. If I may show my red cult colors once again, “allow yourself the opportunity to get uncomfortable” should apply equally to work as it does to watts.

  Please do not let risk aversion and surface-level comfort keep you in a bad situation. My next adventure is bolder than any previous one, and is, in truth, a bit daunting. It is far from comfortable, and that’s O.K.

• Take care of your physical needs: Getting a good night’s rest, eating well, and exercising are all essential to being able to feel satisfaction in life. They’re also three things that have been in scarce supply for many folks during the pandemic.

  I like to measure things, but I finally found the Apple Watch lacking in quantified self utility and dropped some coin on a Whoop band, and it was one of the better investments I’ve made. I started to double-down on working out when I learned I was going to be a pampa¹⁵, as I really want to be around to see him grow up and keep up with him. I’ve read a ton about exercise, diet, etc. over the years, but the Whoop (and Peloton + Supernatural coaches) really made me understand the importance of recovery.

  Please make daily time to check in with your mental and physical stress levels and build recovery paths into your daily routines. A good starting point is to regularly ask yourself something like “When I listen to my body, what does it need? A deep breath? Movement? Nourishment? Rest?”

• Engage in activities that build a sense of achievement: The RSI made it nigh impossible to engage with the R and data science communities, something which I truly love doing, but now realize I was also using as a coping mechanism for the fact that a large chunk of pay-the-bills daily work was offering almost no sense of achievement¹⁶. I’m slowly getting back into engaging with the communities again, and I know for a fact that the it will be 100% on me if I do not have a daily sense of achievement at the new pay-the-bills daily workplace.

  It’d be easy for me to say “please be in a job that gives you this sense of daily achievement”, but, that would be showing my privilege. As long as you can find something outside of an achievement-challenged job to give you that sense of achievement (without falling into the similar trap I did) then that may be sufficient. The next bullet may also help for both kinds of work situations.

  You can also be less hard on yourself outside of work/communities and let yourself feel achieved for working out, taking a walk, or even just doing other things from the first bullet.

• Changing thoughts is easier than changing feelings: Thoughts play a critical role in how we experience a situation. When you notice yourself first becoming frustrated or upset, try to evaluate what you are thinking that is causing that emotion.

  This is also known as cognitive re-framing/restructuring¹⁷. That footnote goes to a paper series, but a less-heady read is Framers, which is fundamentally about the power of mental models to make better decisions. I’d note that you cannot just “stop caring” to dig yourself out of a bad situation. You will just continue to harm yourself.

  Note that this last bullet can be super-hard for those of us who have a strong sense of “justice”, but hang in there and don’t stop working on re-framing.

FIN

I let myself get into a situation that I never should have.

Hindsight tells me that I should have made significant changes about four years ago, and I hope I can remember this lesson moving forward since there are fewer opportunities for “four year mistakes” ahead of me than there are behind me.

Burnout — which is an underlying component of above — takes years to recover from. Not minutes. Not hours. Not days. Not weeks. Not months. Years.

I’m slowly back to trying to catch up to mikefc when it comes to crazy R packages. I have more mental space available than I did a few years ago, and I’m healthier and more fit than I have been in a long time. I am nowhere near recovered, though.

If you, too, lapsed when it comes to checking in with yourself, there’s no time like the present to restart that practice. The resources I posted here may not work for you, but there are plenty of good ones out there.

If you’ve been doing a good job on self-care, make sure to reach out to others you may sense aren’t in the same place you are. You could be a catalyst for great change.

If you’ve been following my inane tweets and non-technical blog posts for any length of time since 2015, you likely know the 2016 election cycle broke me more than just a tad, with each subsequent month of the Trump presidency adding a bit more breakage. My brain is constantly trying to make sense of the systems of the world, from the micro (small personal/home things) to the macro (global-scale things). There’s a Marvel character (no, this isn’t about “Cap”), Karnak, who’s chief ability is that he can see the flaws in all things, and it’s the closest analogy I can make to how deep down the rabbit hole my brain goes with this global-systems analysis. There’s always been a deep seated need to grasp the “why”, and “how” of any “what” (which, combined with being adept with silicon-laced glowing rectangles, explains the gravitation towards cybersecurity, though all my research scientist mates out there have that same Columbo-esque desire to get to the bottom of things).

I really thought I knew the histories and trajectories of a decent percentage of the “what”s in these world systems, believing that a slew of modern critial events, like Obama’s two-term presidency (to point to just one), were clear signs of the progress society had been making, despite the laundry list of overt divisions and inequities that remain. Even though we’ve lived in a rural Maine town for many years, I was blindsighted by the massive public support and normalization of hate, largely based on fear. For some reason, it was easy to dismiss partisan games in Congress as just the way things get done in a suboptimal system. It was too easy to compartmentalize the fact that supposedly decent folks, like my in-laws, hung on every word influencers like Rush Limbaugh and FOX News hosts spewed, thinking that it’s just a fringe element feeding off of such tainted information flows.

When signs of the then-impending pandemic first emerged, I naively thought it was going to be a catalyst for positive change. I thought even someone as narcissistic as Trump and his minions would see the need to unite folks under a banner of helping to ensure we protected as many people from the ravages of Covid as possible, and lead a coordinated, global effort to create and distribute treatments and vaccines as quickly as possible. I believed I knew how solid our CDC was, and saw so many talented scientists use their skills to model and explain various outcome paths, based on how we approached the handling of thie virus. I knew Bush helped orchestrate an initial modern pandemic playbook and that Obama built upon it, and that it was actually quite good.

Then I saw that we, collectively, just don’t care if scores of people are sickened and/or die. I heard so-called leaders say that the economy is more important than human life; heard entitled citizens that wearing a piece of cloth or paper over your mouth and nose was too much of a sacrifice to make; read countless stories from even so-called faith leaders that refraining from large indoor gatherings for a while, and periodically, to help ensure we don’t overwhelm our emergency medical systems and crush the healthcare workers in them was Nazi-like oppression. And, I saw the last leader of the free world (since we’ve now permanantly ceded that position to random agents of chaos) actively downplay and subvert the crisis, leading millions to follow his lead, which ultimately leads to the impending 1 million needlessly lost lives.

When those signals emerged in March of 2020, the break got a bit worse (picture one of those window or lake-ice cracks that spider out with each additional vibration), as it did with the drumbeat of terrible event of 2020 (of which there were many).

Like I suspect was the case with many readers (assuming there are many readers), I plain-up cried (the good kind) when Biden officially won the 2020 election. I foolishly thought, like so many others, that the sinking ship was at the start of being righted, and we’d be on a slow path towards sailing again.

Then, January 6th, 2021 happened. Since then, I’ve seen state, after state vie for the “Most Failed State” top spot. I’ve seen faith leaders and communities give their all to see who can be the worst possible verison of themselves. And, I’ve seen even the most stalwart among us declare the pandemic over because they’ve no stamina left to make any effort into caring for or about the least of us and those who provide medical care to our communities.

Talk about being broken.

We have this term in cybersecurity called “fuzzing”. It’s a technique where you send inputs into an application that it is not really designed to handle (e.g. imagine sending the entirety of Webster’s dictionary to a simple date field), and then doing this repeatedly to see if you can get the application to crash, change expected behavior, or end up in a state where you can compromise it. The events of 2015 through this very day feel like this has been/is one massive fuzz against the all the clear-thinking, decent members of society; and my human operating system just plain crashed.

In the spirit of “I can do this all day”, I may have been/be broken, but was/am not content to remain that way.

• I’ve read more tomes than you would possibly believe if I were to list them out.

• I’ve listened to so many podcasts that I was expecting Apple’s Health app to counsel me to, perhaps, shut off all audio devices for a month or two.

• I’ve filled my RSS reader with feeds from exceptionally gifted humans who, too, have been trying to make sense of what has happened and where we are going.

• (I’ve also prayed, walked, rode (bike), de-screened, socmed sabbaticaled, read more fiction than ever before, and intensified healthy cooking/eating to try to balance out all the bad inputs.)

I’ve done all this because I feel compelled to not only just understand (I actually need to understand), but also help fix this situation we’re in. Selfishly, a large part of that desire to leave a better world behind for my kids and our new grandson.

Of late, I’ve seen most of my input sources devolve into the same thing: chronicling the end of America as most modern folks know it. They’ve gone from working to make sense of why/how we got here and what can be done about it to doing the same thing we all pretty much did during 2016-2019: shaking our heads at every bad news item and noting how bat guano crazy the individual behind the bad news was. Not exactly hope-filling. In fact, I could sum up things up with two lines from Matchbox 20’s “Back 2 Good”

A recent entry into the aforementioned tomes was Jeremy W. Peters’ book “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted”. I’ve been a bit more choosy in what “Jan 6” analysis tomes I toss coin at, and was dismayed yet-another reporter was releasing a book, but I listened to the little voice, and dropped an Audible credit on it and I has been a literal Godsend.

A big reason for remaining broken is that there were many missing (key) system components. You can’t identify the failure modes without seeing the complete system, and Jeremy managed to fill in (most of) those gaps. He did an amazing job going back far enough, and walking through the event trees paintakingly enough that I could actually feel the puzzle pieces fitting into place. Where there were once clouds, there is now clear sky. Items with chasms between them now have bridges.

Having the systems functionally and nearly fully documented has been immensely theraputic. It’s astonishing to realize just how many personal mental processing cores had been dedicated to this problem. It’s also all kinds of amazing to have to have some of the cognitive processor faculties back to do things like code for fun, again.

Since this is not a book review (nor a book itself), I won’t go into each and every component that was made clear. That’s not really the point of this post.

I guess the first point is that if 2015-2022 also broke you in some way, realize you’re not alone. I don’t think anyone was fully (or even partially) prepared for what we all ended up enduring and continue to endure. Hopefully knowing you’re normal, and that there we broken folk are legion will help quell at least that part of being broken.

The second point is that there was a rhyme and reason to how we got to where we are now. It is, perhaps, more of a crass limerick than poetic rhyme, and the reasons aren’t great, but events weren’t random and they did not emerge from nowhere.

The third and last point is that knowing there are “why”s and “how”s to the “what”s means it is possible to work on forging compensating controls (i.e. there can be concrete actions we can take to make things better and setup hedges to prevent us from heading down similar chaotic paths). We’re still not on a great collective path forward, and there’s no magic wand we can wave to make things better. But, we all can make individual and incremental progress in our own ways. For some, like me, it may mean breaking out of some comfort zones to do things you would not normally do. For others, it may be applying aligned talents to triaged areasm, doing what you can to make even the smallest thing a tiny bit better. We’re not going to A-bomb our way out of this conflcit. It’s going to take a long period of incremental, positive change.

If you’re still working on figuring out what went awry, I highly recommend Jeremy’s book. You can also reach out if you need some personal reassurance that all is not, in fact, lost. Unlike the hopeless ending of the aforenoted Matchbox 20 song, I do, in fact, believe there is a way of “getting back to good” and, for me, that journey starts now.

I close with a heartfelt thank you for the patience and kindness many folks have shown and expressed over this period. You’ve done more than you can possibly know.