After working almost every day for two years I felt burnt out. It was difficult to find the enthusiasm to pick up the phone let alone start a compiler and write some creative and ingenious software.
The feeling of lethargy never seemed to disappear, couldn't find anything to do except download new and exciting tracks from Napster (boy did it expand my musical horizons). My BMX and Mountain Bike lay dormant, the effects of nature slowly eating away at them. No more sloshing through mud and rocks on my Mountain Bike and no more ramps and flatland work for my BMX.
I was burnt out. It was at this time I bought BurntoutDotCommer but I was too burnt out to do anything with it. It's a sad way to be, if I were a horse then I would have been shot.
However, I had experienced it before. I worked for a few months at Redmond in the US and we had a tight deadline. I worked every day until I dropped. When I got back to the UK it seemed like a major anticlimax, everything seemed slower and somehow unimportant - this is despite the fact that prior to leaving for the US I had just days before moved into a new house (a very exciting time in itself).
I got over my burnout by doing nothing. I considered that the burnt out feeling was my body's way of telling me to stop for a while…so I did. Eventually I felt enthusiastic once more, my friends rallied around me and helped me out, made me laugh in the right places and ensured I didn't do the full hermit thing.