Some of you may have noticed I disappeared a bit from the community over the last couple of weeks. Well, first of all, I've been on holiday. I was travelling through Iceland, admiring its breathtaking landscapes, enjoying nature (I saw whales, reindeer, and puffins!), trying local food, and bathing in hot lagoons.

During this road trip, I caught myself thinking that I did not want to go back. That maybe I would feel much more satisfied if I just stayed there and lived a simple life, herding sheep and admiring landscapes that look like the set of The Lord of the Rings, maybe doing some artwork in my spare time.

Since coming back, I've had this feeling that I do not fit in anymore. That the work I'm coming back to is not the work I used to love. Instead, I'm coming back to the work I started to hate; to the tasks I do not want to touch and that do not have anything in common with what I used to do.

Burnout in the age of AI

I've seen many articles about burnout since I joined the DEV community, and I've always been aware of the problem. I thought I was doing a pretty good job keeping a healthy work-life balance. But I think AI has introduced a completely different kind of burnout that I wasn't prepared for.

I discovered that I am exhausted by the amount of low-effort content around me. Most of what I read now feels generated at the lowest possible cost, barely reviewed, and nowhere near the quality I used to expect.

I don't think I'm tired of AI itself. I'm tired of how quickly we've started accepting "good enough" instead of craftsmanship. And how we've started prioritising the chase for AI tools, putting AI everywhere, while forgetting that we are creating products for humans, not just generating work for the sake of working.

I miss the times when work felt real; when work was something authentic and tangible; when I had to go to an engineer colleague and work together on documentation, to grasp the point of how the feature works and explain it in plain language to the audience. I want to feel that someone still really cares about the content before publishing it, not just generates it to tick off the Definition of Done.

Redefining myself

Lately, I've been asking myself whether I still enjoy technical writing, or whether I just miss a version of it that no longer exists.

I used to architect documentation structures, build documentation from scratch, think about information architecture, and carefully review every change to make sure it helped people achieve what they came for.

What I enjoyed the most wasn't simply writing documentation. It was solving problems. Finding better ways to organise information. Cleaning up messy structures. Making documentation easier to navigate.

Now I'm supposed to work on an AI agent that writes documentation for us. Ironically, it pushes me even further away from the part of the job that I actually love. It's not that I dislike technology. I enjoy docs-as-code, information architecture, and working with technical systems. What doesn't align with my values is replacing thoughtful work with generated content that often feels disposable.

This makes me question myself.

Should I stay in this profession and hope things change? Is it technical writing itself that no longer fits me, or just my current environment? Would changing jobs help, or is this simply the direction our industry is heading?

Discussion

Have you experienced burnout yourself? Have you ever considered a total career change? Is there a way out of burnout? Or do you simply need to live through it and wait until things get better? Or maybe it's really time for me to move out to some desolate, godforsaken place in Iceland and herd sheep 🐑