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My burnout story

The beginning of the problem

I graduated in the summer of 2024 with a BSc in Computer Science. Although I achieved a first class, I was not particularly happy with the process of achieving that result. My final assignments were all at a level below the standard I had set myself, and the reason you might ask?

Burn out.

I believed I was immune to burn out and when it finally happened to me I didn’t even realise it. It really did hit me like a truck and even now, almost a year later, I find it hard to pin point the cause behind it.

From January 2024 (when my second semester started) I experienced a drastic decrease in general productivity and motivation. This was a really strange period, for the first time in a really long time I didn’t have the desire to learn and explore new things.

Without a clear direction anymore, I ended up just taking the first job in tech that knocked at my door. So in November 2024, I started a role as a technical project manager in a start up, focused on CRUD applications.

The problem gets worse

The role turned out to be a good fit for me. I was given a lot of autonomy and independence early on so I was able to explore and get involved in various parts of the project. I was starting to feel more focused, but I still lacked a clear long term direction.

However, when I thought things were fitting back into the right places January 2025 came around and that’s when the problem got worse for me. My health started to deteriorate and it just derailed me off the path of recovery from my earlier burn out. I was having issues with my digestive system and my immune system weakened. I was getting sick more often, first once a month, then twice, and eventually almost every week I had something going on.

Even if at first I did not feel interested in the role, overtime I became attached to the project and wanted to see it succeed. But now that my health worsened, I had to take more days off. I knew I needed an extended period of time away from work to only focus on recovering.

At the same time, the company was entering a downsizing phase. As one of the more recent hires I was informed that my position may be impacted in the short term as well. Unfortunately, they also didn’t have the resources to support a flexibile arrangement that would allow me to focus on recovery.

After a discussion with management, we agreed that it would be best for me to resign. I was disappointed about leaving the project so close to the completion time but I knew I had to do this and focus on the bigger issues at hand.

So in May 2025 I resigned.

Solving the problem

So what did I do after leaving?

Nothing.

In the last few months of the role, things got more foggy. Trying to focus on doing anything mentally taxing was difficult and honestly I can’t recall much of what happened during that time other than a few key moments.

So yeah, the first month I literally did nothing. I didn’t start looking for a new job right away, I was not updating my linkedin and CV. I was just focusing on getting better.

June 2025 is when the real journey begun.

Out of pure chance I stumbled across a video about CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). A lot of the things in the video went well above my head, but one thing I did understand is that it looks really cool.

Suddenly I felt a spark, a surge of motivation came to me, the first time since what felt like forever. I started to imagine how I would feel about working in these complex domains, and again, I just thought that it would be super cool.

On the same day I found out about a CERN career workshop that was taking place the a few days later and I immediately signed up. This was a great session, it’s not that I found a job I could apply for at CERN but that I finally begun thinking again. The best way to describe it is that since January 2024 I started to see the world in greyscale, but now colors were coming back and everything just started to look a lot more interesting.

For the entire month of June I spent time rekindling my passion for Computer Science, I explored different domains where I could possibly dedicate my time to and just kept on exploring. It was in this moment of self-rediscovery that I realised something, I want to live a more meaningful life.

A life of learning.

Goodbye to the problem

Starting July 2025 my health became stable, with the only problem now being that I will have ongoing issues in the form of IBS.

I begun to open the terminal again, brush up on my programming skills with C++, and just doing things again. I had to start slow of course, it hadn’t been that long since I last wrote some code but after everything that happened it all felt new to me in a way. I didn’t completely forget how to code, but things felt stuck and I needed some time to get the ball rolling again.

But there was a pivotal moment that I will always remember now - July 19th 2025.

I had a ticket booked to go to the heavyweight title fight Usyk vs. Dubois (it was an amazing fight), and a few hours before I had to leave I started watching a video on pointers in C to jog my memory (pun intended).

The first time I was learning pointers during my degree, I was more focused on the syntax and how to use it in the programming language, this being C. I was not focused on what goes under the hood at all. I was leaving that layer of abstraction be and moved on with my day.

Had I tried watching this video back then I would have clicked away right away and looked for something more simple, something that abstracts away the nitty gritty stuff.

But this time something was different. I stuck around.

The first question that he asked in the video was:

What is a Computer?

My answer was littered with abstraction layers and when he went on to answer the question, albeit in very simple terms, I realised I really didn’t know anything.

The more I watched the video the more frustrated I was getting at myself for not knowing the things he was talking about. Before things went south during my degree I was telling myself I was interested in low-level programming but it became clear all I was really doing was hiding behind the abstraction layers and saying I know things.

Now that my lifes goal was to learn, I decided that I was not going to hide behind abstraction layers anymore.

So I left that video and went down a massive rabbit hole, I looked at several things like:

Amongst many other things.

This is when I felt that the problem was finally gone.

So what’s next?

At the time of writing this, it’s been just over 2 weeks since then, and I continue to research things removing abstraction layers to really understand how things work from the ground up.

I am more excited than I’ve ever been. Every day feels new and I feel grateful that my world came back more colorful than ever before.

If you are interested in a more in-depth breakdown of what I am doing now check out this page.