Infinite Treadmill: A Endless Journey
03 Feb 2025Am I Enough? Burnout, FOMO, and the Infinite Treadmill
Today, I realized something: I’m either burned out or trapped in a cycle of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). There’s a question that’s been haunting me for a while now: Am I enough?
This blog post is about that question. It’s not a “From Burnout to Google” success story. Instead, I hope it helps someone out there who feels the same way I do.
The Struggle: Am I Even Good at Coding?
Let me be honest: I don’t think I’m that good at coding. Sure, I’ve written a lot of code, but there’s a lot of pain behind the scenes. I’m not a great student, either. But there’s one thing I believe I’m good at: learning. I can pick up topics relatively quickly, even ones that others might struggle with.
I’m in my senior year of university. I’ve done Google Summer of Code (GSoC), built various apps, and contributed to projects like FFmpeg, ScummVM, and VMAF. In all of them, I struggled which is normal, right? But here’s the thing: even when I achieve a milestone, I don’t feel satisfied. Before reaching it, I tell myself, If I can do this, I’ll finally feel good enough. But once I do it, it suddenly feels easy, and I’m left thinking, Is this all there is?
This is the infinite treadmill I’m stuck on. I keep running faster and faster, but there’s no finish line. No matter how much I achieve, it never feels like enough.
The Job Hunt: Picky and Exhausted
I’ve been looking for jobs and internships for months now, but I’m very picky. I want to work on things I genuinely care about: compilers, optimization, GPU programming—basically, low-level stuff. Even though I’m not great at math, I love the fundamentals. But here’s the problem: I keep getting sidetracked.
I’ll see someone who built something groundbreaking at 16, and suddenly, I feel the need to prove I can do it too—even if I have no experience in that area. This is insecurity, I guess. It’s exhausting, and it drains my enthusiasm for the topics I actually care about. I end up knowing buzzwords from a bunch of different fields, but that’s not important, is it? What matters is depth, not breadth.
I think social media platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter make this worse. They create Shiny Object Syndrome. Every day, there’s a new trend: Web3, LLMs, diffusion models, quantum computing. And I feel this constant Fear of Irrelevance: If I don’t learn this, I’ll be left behind. So, I keep jumping from one thing to another, learning horizontally instead of mastering anything vertically.
It’s not scientific, but I believe all this context-switching drains my cognitive skills. I feel like I’m spreading myself too horizontal.
The Reality: Skills That Don’t Fit the Market
Building skills is important, but what if those skills aren’t valued in your location? I need internships and a job, but I’m not sure I can find one with my current skills (of course you can go abroad or do another things, I am more general in this part). Even though I have some experience in GPU programming and compiler stuff, it feels like the market here doesn’t care. This might be another reason I keep learning horizontally I’m trying to fit into a mold that doesn’t suit me or I’m trying to catch the trends. But people are not good of catching trends. There is a image that shows “the real trend” vs “Reality of people”.
As you see there is a phase shift between trend and reality. So this means properly you are late if everyone talks about that, learning that stuff might not worth in short term. But of course building strong fundamentals going to worth when the foam is gone.
The Plan: Staying Vertical in a Horizontal World
From today, I want to focus on a few specific topics, even if the market isn’t interested in them. I want to push my limits in areas I care about, like GPU programming and low-level optimization. I believe this will help me grow vertically instead of spreading myself thin.
I know that learning new things is my fuel. I’ll still work on small side projects, but I want to stop chasing every shiny object. I want to build depth, even if it means saying no to trends.
Final Thoughts
If you’re feeling the same way, know that you’re not alone. The tech world is full of noise, but your path doesn’t have to follow the crowd. Focus on what excites you, even if it’s not what everyone else is doing. And remember: you are enough, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.
If you want to talk to me you can contact me at yigithanyigit35@gmail.com