It’s never done

i didn’t believe in “burnout” until experiencing it myself. in Spring 2020 i was so over my day job that i quit everything and moved to Korea. after putting bills on autopay i didn’t open a laptop for months. soon i was a full time media personality, but that’s a story for another time.

it wasn’t until years later that i pulled off a post mortem. and it wasn’t stress or “competitors keeping me up at night” that contributed to my burnout moment. rather it was (still is) the nature of technology itself: it is never done.

if your job is to fix a leaky pipe or erect a skyscraper, 2 timestamps govern The Work. a process keeps things moving from start to finish. authors have an idea, draft some chapters, write, publish. investment bankers gather financials, create a pitch deck, share with prospects, close the deal. caterers set a menu, load the van, cook and serve the courses, clean.

in each of these fields a project might require ongoing maintenance or upgrades. but those are defined as new tasks, and usually completed by new people.

in software however, each deploy is just another Tuesday. whether version 123 introduces incremental or exponential improvements is irrelevant. good technology may be art, but its painter will never step back and say voila. (or could they?)

thus my roundabout approach to an increasingly obvious truth: humans are not wired for complex systems. we need a steady feedback loop of start/finish to stay sane. successful tech founders develop an unnatural ability to keep pushing as if the finish line is around the corner, all the while knowing it doesn’t exist.

this also exposes why calling exiting founders a “sellout” lacks context. if working on Fomo every day felt like an accomplishment i might have run it for 50 years. but one day while reviewing my inbox and GitHub Issues, all i could see was a fancy treadmill. well paid and going nowhere.

one thing i’m doing differently at TRMNL is trying to celebrate releases as “done” moments. our firmware is versioned, each product has a model name, each month a sales figure and theme. new support articles reduce weekly tickets. new hires relieve me of a responsibility.

but this is not advice or necessarily even true. i just find that spoofing my lizard brain with finished_at timestamps makes a difference. you can have a bottomless todo list and still feel “done.”