Please Leave A Message After My Ride
There’s a thing about white-collar work: you can never go home from it. When I walk to the parking lot, work walks with me, asking “is it possible you could optimize some of your database calls away?” Or when I cook dinner on Sunday evenings, work hands me the salt and says “More documentation would be a good idea and might help streamline some pull requests next week.” And more than anything, when I lay down to go to sleep work says to me “you’re not done yet, get up.”
Burnout is a common occurrence in many white collar jobs, and software engineering sees a particularly high rate due to the long hours and the frustrating and unpredictable nature of the work. Any computer science undergraduate can tell you that an unresolved bug can ruin an entire day as your mind swirls around the problem, crashing into it again and again. Being a professional makes it no better. Engineering students lie to themselves and say that everything will be so much easier once they graduate, and the reality that hours can sometimes get even longer and work even more demanding than their grueling BS programs can, and does, trigger depression, panic, and yes, burnout.
It took me about 6 months to get burnt out. I was working 80 hour weeks, working weekends and holidays, eating all my meals with my coworkers. When I showed up to work I was exhausted and struggled to motivate myself. The endless miasma of DevOps work, low-quality demo code that needed to be rewritten and bugs to be sorted out sprawled in front of me as a wall of confusion and panic. The long hours were compounded by work coming home with me: I had nowhere to turn but work in my life, and eventually I was consumed, digested, and tossed out. I quit and got a new job.
After a move that put me only a few miles away from my new office, a friend suggested I buy a bicycle and we could ride together. I bought a 1997 Diamondback for $50 from a graduating university student. The frame was covered in grease and rust and both shifters were seized. I only successfully managed to ride it one or two times before the saddle clamp loosened and one of the pieces fell into a sewer drain. The remains of the seatpost were firmly lodged in the frame and no bike shop I found could remove them. It was a rocky start to my adult self’s relationship with bikes, but nevertheless it foretold a relationship that completely changed who I am.
Growing up I was mediocre at sports. I tried just about everything but was never better than average. This was compounded by the fact that I was overweight, both as a kid and as an adult. So even biking a handful of miles to and from work each day was not so easy. But even after my first bike fiasco, I did enjoy it enough to keep going. My same friend who suggested I purchase a bike in the first place wanted me to go on a ride with him for fun. This wasn’t really what I had in mind at first: I figured I would ride to and from work, or the grocery store, or the post office. Riding for fun sounded nice but a little too much for me. I tried going with him anyway, and halfway up the first hill I got so exhausted I threw up. I went back home.
The next weekend I returned to the hill alone. In my lowest gear, I crunched myself and my bike up to the top. I nearly collapsed when I made it. The hill is about 1/4 mile long at a 9% gradient.
I came back to that hill many times over the next several weeks. It was odd that I wanted to go back, because every time I made it to the top I felt physically terrible. My lungs hurt, my stomach felt sick. I improved plenty over that time: I could go up the hill faster, I hurt less, and I even lost some weight. But that still wasn’t what was driving me to go out and intentionally cause myself pain in the name of scaling an objectively small hill.
It didn’t hit me till much later on, after I had purchased a proper road bike and all the geeky trappings of a cyclist: I was riding because work didn’t come with me when I walked out the door. When I reached for the gear shifter, work didn’t slide its hand over mine and say “have you considered a visitor pattern?” I moved in silence. I was able to pedal, to breathe, to shift in total solitude, with my true inner thoughts to accompany me and nothing else. It was a freedom from StackOverflow thought prison that nothing else could offer me. I felt fucking amazing.
Since then I’ve started running, swimming, hiking, camping, anything that pumps dopamine and endorphins into my addled and exhausted brain. I feel justified in escapism because everyone deserves escape from their grind. Nobody belongs to their employer. People don’t always accept “I’m inflicting pain on myself” as an excuse to why I miss weekend Slack messages, but when I look to work as I grind my pedals up whatever ridiculous hill I’ve chosen for that Saturday, work looks back at me in silence.
