u/Echo_9Paradox

i have been watching all these posts about people fighting with their parents over sterilization or just the general choice to be childfree and honestly i think the "silent" approach is the only thing that keeps me sane . my parents are the classic type who think their only purpose in life was to pass on their dna and they start every single holiday dinner with some comment about how they are getting older and want to see a "little version" of me running around . it used to get under my skin and i would try to explain my logic about financial freedom and how i actually enjoy my quiet life as a freelancer but it is like talking to a brick wall . they dont want a logical debate they just want to project their own expectations onto my life because they cant imagine any other path being valid . so lately i have just stopped fighting it entirely and started the "smile and nod" strategy while i am actually in the process of getting a vasectomy scheduled for next month .

there is something incredibly liberating about having a huge life changing secret that you know would absolutely break their brains but you also know they have no right to the information . i sit there eating dinner while my dad rants about "legacy" and i just say stuff like "yeah i get what you mean" or "who knows what the future holds" and then i go back to my apartment and enjoy the silence . some people call it being dishonest but i see it as setting a boundary that they are incapable of respecting if i were to state it out loud . they have proven over and over that they dont view me as an autonomous adult but as a vessel for their potential grandkids so why should i give them the opportunity to start a war in my living room . by the time they realize it is never happening i will be long past the point where their opinions can do any damage to my mental health . it is a weird kind of peace you find when you realize you dont owe anyone an explanation for what you do with your own body or your own future especially when those people have already shown they wont listen anyway . plus the thought of them eventually figuring it out years from now while i am relaxing on a beach somewhere without a care in the world is a pretty decent consolation prize for having to sit through their boring lectures today .

I've been in IT for 5 years now. Started as a junior dev, worked my way up to a mid-level position at a company that's honestly not bad, decent pay, flexible hours, no toxic manager breathing down my neck. On paper everything looks fine. In reality I open my laptop every morning and the first thing I feel is this low-grade dread, like I'm about to do something I really don't want to do.

It wasn't always like this. First two years I actually liked it. Solving problems, building stuff, learning something new every week. Then at some point it just stopped clicking. Now I sit down, open a ticket, and my brain just kind of goes flat. I still do the work, I'm not slacking, my performance reviews are fine. But I feel nothing. Like I'm running on autopilot and the autopilot is also tired.

The thing is I can't figure out if this is burnout or if I've just been doing the wrong thing for five years and I'm only now admitting it. Because burnout sounds like something you recover from, right? You take a break, reset, come back refreshed. But I took three weeks off last summer and came back feeling exactly the same way on day one. That was kind of a wake up call.

I've tried switching domains within IT. Moved from backend to more of a product-adjacent role for a while. Helped a little, then stopped helping. I keep reading that "passion for your work" is overrated and you just need it to be tolerable, but at what point does "tolerable" just mean you're slowly grinding yourself down.

What I'm actually asking is, how do you tell the difference? Is there a point where you knew it was burnout vs realizing you picked the wrong career? Did anything actually help, not in a self-help book way, in a practical way?