Burnout.exe

I haven’t written anything about my personal life in the past two months or so. The last time I sat down to write one of these monthly reflections was after February. I did post a few blogs from Feb but the two were closely tied in to work and did not delve on personal life (as if I have any, lol). Also, had deleted one for - idk, whatever reasons.

So I thought of writing this, It’s May now, or at least it was May when I first started writing this. Technically, I had opened this draft a week ago when I was feeling slightly sick, body aching like crazy, mind spiralling for no clear reason, and the only reason I even started writing that day was because I genuinely had nothing else to do. Great origin story for a blog, I know. Peak creative process.

But then I wrote a few lines and left it there. Didn’t post it. Didn’t continue it. Just let it sit like most other thoughts I pretend I’ll return to later.

I don’t know what exactly I want to talk about this time because apparently a lot has happened while also, somehow, nothing has really happened. That sentence makes no sense, but that’s exactly how the last couple of months have felt. A lot of movement on the outside, very little clarity on the inside.

Burnout is real, and I think I’ve been feeling it properly for the last month or so. Not the kind where you dramatically collapse and take a life-changing break. More like the boring, annoying version where you keep functioning, keep showing up, keep replying to messages, keep working, keep trying to fix your routine, but everything takes more effort than it should.

Breaks from my daily routine have been a lot more frequent recently. Probably the most I’ve taken in the past two years. Mentally, physically, emotionally - it has been tough to keep up with the version of myself I’ve gotten used to being. And that sounds slightly stupid because who even asked me to maintain that version every day? Nobody. But that’s the problem with building a life around discipline and ambition. After a point, even resting feels like you’re disappointing some imaginary board of directors inside your head.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to ramble about in this one. Let’s see.

Work

Work has been chaotic.

A lot has changed around me in the last few weeks. A lot of updates, a lot of discussions, a lot of shifting ground. I’ve spoken about some of it in my recent work log which I wrote for the company, so I won’t repeat everything here.

But even apart from that, there has been this strange uncertainty in the air. Like at one point, I genuinely wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to be working on from Monday. And for someone like me, who overthinks even what to eat for dinner sometimes, that’s not exactly a peaceful setup.

And then there’s AI. God, the AI discourse. Something happened recently where our company, or more specifically our founder, seemed to have a strong realisation about AI after being in denial for a while. And as expected, once that switch flipped, everyone around seemed to suddenly enter panic/hype mode. Use AI. Use agents. Move faster. Everything will change. Everyone is doomed. Everyone is saved. Software engineering is dead. Software engineering is more alive than ever. Pick your favourite headline based on your mood.

The funny part is that AI has been around for a while now. It didn’t fall from the sky last Tuesday with a “breaking change” label. Most of us have been using it for quite some time in some capacity. I’ve been using it too, but I think the way I use it is different from how a lot of people around me seem to think it should be used.

I mostly use AI as a thinking tool. Tab assist, brainstorming, plan mode, ask mode, rubber-ducking, understanding unfamiliar code, getting a second opinion when my own brain is throwing 500 errors. I like it for that. It is genuinely useful. Sometimes insanely useful.

But I don’t like relying on agentic programming. I just don’t. Maybe I’m old-school already, which is a little tragic at 26(fcuk I am 26??!), but I don’t enjoy handing over the steering wheel completely and then pretending I’m still driving.

The code that AI spits out can be decent, sometimes even very good, but it can also be utter garbage if not reviewed carefully. And more than correctness, what bothers me is taste. Taste somehow does not go through easily. Intent does not go through easily. The small decisions that make code feel like it belongs in a system do not magically appear because the model generated 800 lines in three minutes.

Maybe part of the reason is that existing codebases themselves are often messy, and AI learns from that mess. Maybe part of it is that we are asking probabilistic tools to make decisions in systems where ambiguity already exists everywhere. Maybe I’m just too attached to the process of writing and thinking through code myself. I don’t know. But I definitely don’t agree with the idea that AI is suddenly god-tier and will do anything and everything if you just prompt it hard enough.

I recently read a blog called Agentic Coding Is a Trap by Lars Faye, and it articulated a lot of what I had been feeling. The article isn’t anti-AI. That’s what I liked about it. It doesn’t do the usual “AI bad, real programmers type everything manually in Vim while drinking black coffee” routine.

The core point was more nuanced: the skills required to supervise AI-generated code are the same skills that start atrophying when you stop practicing them yourself. That hit hard because it’s exactly the contradiction I keep thinking about. To review AI properly, you need strong fundamentals, taste, context, debugging ability, architectural thinking. But if you keep outsourcing the parts that build those skills, what exactly are you left with after some time?

The blog also had this idea I really liked: use AI like a secondary process, not as the main driver. Use it for plans, specs, research, interactive documentation, small delegations, but stay close enough to the work that you actually understand what is happening. Don’t generate more than you can review. Don’t ask it to build something you wouldn’t be able to build yourself.

That is very close to how I want to use AI. Not because I want to be slow for the sake of it, but because I genuinely believe there is value in the friction of doing the work yourself. Some of my best understanding has come from getting stuck, debugging, making wrong assumptions, reading bad code, fixing it, and then realising what the problem actually was.

If we remove all of that too early, especially for people who are just starting out, I don’t know what kind of engineers we are trying to create. This became even more obvious when I took a few interviews in May.

Honestly, taking interviews was fun from an experience point of view. It felt nice to sit on the other side and observe how people think. But it also made me feel a little sad looking at the current state of freshers. And I don’t mean this in a “kids these days” uncle way, although maybe this is how it starts. I didn’t ask difficult questions. I wasn’t throwing Leetcode hard problems or asking them to design distributed systems that survive three cloud regions going down.

I asked basic things. Write a program to count vowels. Design a simple table schema for a project you have already built. Explain what you did and why. Not being able to do that was concerning.

Because at some point, you realise people are not building projects anymore, they are producing token-shaped proof of work. Applications exist, GitHub repos exist, README files exist, screenshots exist, but when you ask one layer deeper, there is nothing there.

And that’s scary. AI has definitely had an effect on our cognitive abilities, and while it’s not surprising, it is still uncomfortable to watch. I feel worse for people who are just starting their careers now because they will be told to use AI aggressively before they have developed the fundamentals to judge its output properly. And AI is only as good as the person driving it. That’s probably the most boring statement in this whole debate, but it is also the truest.

The other side of all this is more personal. I feared the day when work would stop feeling fun. I had such a day recently. In fact, I had a few such days in the past couple of weeks. It didn’t feel natural. It felt like too much chaos, too much noise, too much shifting around for me to focus properly. Work has been one of the few stable parts of my life for the last few years. Even when everything else felt like absolute nonsense, I could still sit down, build something, fix something, learn something, and feel like at least one part of my life made sense.

So when even that started feeling heavy, it scared me. Because what do you do when the distraction itself becomes heavy? That’s probably the simplest way I can describe the last few weeks. Work has always been my way of dealing with things. If I’m sad, I work. If I’m anxious, I work. If I feel useless, I work harder. Very healthy, I know. But when work itself starts demanding more emotional energy than it gives back, the whole system starts wobbling.

I felt a little better yesterday though because I worked well last week and finally shipped something good like I had promised myself. It wasn’t some world-changing thing, but it felt good. That small satisfaction of building and shipping something properly still works on me. Like a tiny reminder that maybe I haven’t completely lost the plot.

Life apart from work

I keep spiralling, which is not exactly breaking news to people who have been reading these blogs. If anyone is really reading, that is. But May was a different kind of spiral. It was overbearing in a way I can’t fully explain. I was just tired of everything and couldn’t really keep going with the same intensity. I tried fixing my routine multiple times and failed miserably. Then tried again. Then failed again. Very inspiring stuff.

The problem is that work and personal life are too intertwined for me. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad anymore. Probably bad, but it has worked for me so far, so I never questioned it too much. When work feels good, life feels manageable. When work feels meaningful, the rest of the noise becomes easier to ignore.

But when work stops feeling fun, even for a few days, everything else suddenly becomes louder. The silence gets louder. The self-doubt gets louder. The boring weekends get louder.

I hate boring weekends, but I also don’t have the energy these days to properly plan something and go out. That is such a stupid problem to have. You don’t want to sit alone, but you also don’t want to make the effort required to not sit alone. So you just end up doing some half-hearted nonsense and then feel bad that the day went nowhere. Peak adulting.

There were a few good days though. One of the genuinely wholesome days was when me and my cousins went on a day trip to Vengurla, a small town in the Konkan/Sindhudurg area. It wasn’t some grand trip with a deep life lesson attached to it. It was just nice. Sometimes that is enough. Good people, decent views, some laughter, and a small break from the usual loop. I think I needed that more than I realised.

Another fun night was with my work friends. We went to some shady place in Mumbai and then to a karaoke bar. I don’t know what it is about karaoke, but once people cross a certain level of tiredness and shamelessness, it becomes genuinely fun. That night was chaotic in the best way. I had a lot of fun.

I also attended one of my close friend’s weddings recently. That was nice too. Met a few old buddies, talked absolute nonsense, laughed about things that probably made no sense to anyone outside that group, and just had a good time. It also had that familiar weird feeling I had in December when I attended another friend’s wedding.

Another close friend is now married. Another person has entered a completely different phase of life. Another reminder that life keeps moving even when you are still trying to understand the last update.

A few years ago, I think I would have sat with that emotion for longer. Now I mostly just laugh and move on. Maybe I have grown numb to such things. Lol. Or maybe after a point, you just accept that everyone’s life is going to keep changing in ways you cannot fully emotionally process in real time. People will move cities, get married, change jobs, drift apart, come back, disappear again. And you will keep standing somewhere in the middle, trying to act like you are chill about all of it.

I’m not always chill about it. But I am getting better at pretending.

Another random highlight from this month - my sister finally watched Attack on Titan. Anyone who knows me knows I've been running a cult dedicated to getting people to watch that show for years now. She, obviously, ended up loving it so much that I genuinely think she loves it more than I do now.

The best part was watching her slowly descend into the same rabbit hole that consumed the rest of us. Seeing the reactions, the theories, the emotional damage, the inevitable "What the hell just happened?" messages. Beautiful. Peak entertainment.

There is a very specific kind of joy in introducing someone to something you genuinely love and watching it click for them. My recommendations mostly stick, so I do have quite a reputation when it comes to recommending something, lol.

Anyway, Attack on Titan remains absolutely GOATed and I will continue my propaganda campaign until scenes from it become people's wallpapers. Some missions in life are simply too important.

The usual “not good enough” nonsense

Another thing that kept showing up this month was the same old feeling of not being good enough. I have written about this so many times now that even I’m bored of myself. But unfortunately, repetition does not make the feeling disappear. If anything, it just gets better at disguising itself.

Sometimes it looks like ambition. Sometimes it looks like discipline. Sometimes it looks like wanting to improve. Sometimes it is just plain insecurity wearing a productivity hoodie.

I keep thinking I’ll outgrow it. Every year I tell myself that maybe I have achieved enough, learned enough, survived enough, and now this feeling will finally calm down a little. But then something happens. Someone moves faster. Someone builds better. Someone seems more sorted. Someone younger has more clarity. Someone chooses someone else over me. Someone casually does something that took me ten breakdowns and a Google Doc to process. And suddenly, the whole thing starts again.

The worst part is that I’m self-aware about it. I know comparison is useless. I know everyone has their own timeline. I know people only show highlights. I know all the correct answers. I could probably give a TED Talk on why one should not attach their self-worth to output. Then I’ll come home and do exactly that.

Self-awareness is such a scam sometimes. You can see the spiral happening in real time and still not stop it.

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. I don’t think I’m writing this to arrive at some wise conclusion. I think I’m just tired of carrying this feeling quietly and wanted to document it again. Maybe future me will read this and laugh. Or maybe future me will still be dealing with the same thing with slightly better vocabulary.

So, what was May?

I don’t know. Messy, mostly. Heavy. A little chaotic. A little boring. A little fun in small pockets. A lot of burnout disguised as routine.

This is not a well-structured or deeply thought-out blog. I hardly knew what to talk about when I started writing it. I don’t even remember half the things that happened properly. But I wanted to write anyway because I don’t want to lose this habit. Writing is one of the few ways I can look back and understand what a phase actually felt like, not just what happened in it.

Turns out, this was a long one. So, I guess I had a lot to say.

So yeah, May was heavy.

Maybe June will be lighter. Or maybe I’ll just get better at carrying it.

That’s all for now.

Some recommendations (cause I am good at those?):

• The blog mentioned above by Lars Faye (excellent read): Agentic Coding Is a Trap
• Khasiyaat From Chand Mera Dil