back when I was in university doing my CS degree, I enjoyed slumming it with humanities people when I had the opportunity. A friend of mine was doing her philosophy degree at the same time, and every now and then I'd sit in on some of their discussions if it was something I found interesting. (Having grown up with a philosophy major mum sort of predisposed me to this, I guess).

And this is perhaps why, when I read all the many discussions about programmer misery at the moment, I feel like there's an important term (with its supporting body of theory) missing. For example, there was a bunch of talk about how a lot of ongoing programmer misery is not *really* burnout, though people certainly are exhausted - it's more about a feeling of loss of meaning. That it's getting harder to care about what we work on, and on our work itself, because we keep being increasingly removed from the purpose of the work; it's hard to feel your work has meaning if you're only abstractly aware of what it's for and what it's about. Perhaps we're all lodged into "administrative sediment" (a term coined by a medical professional; it might well describe life in their discipline) rather than "burnout"?

The word we're grasping for is "alienation". A dead old German guy wrote a bunch about it; he's currently unfashionable, but we'll be hearing about him again soon; his corpse tends to be exhumed every time there's a big financial crisis.