'Is that normal?': Reddit's answer to a software engineering master's graduate with no job after a year

MALAYSIA: A post on Reddit’s r/MalaysianPF from a young tech worker who resigned due to severe anxiety and burnout has drawn an outpouring of recognition from people who have been through something similar.

The original poster is in their 20s, has enough savings to sustain themselves for about a year, and has returned to their kampung to rest. They are unsure whether they can return to the same type of work. Their tentative plan: a barista job for a while, to let their brain heal.

“The anxiety got so bad that I can’t even go to work without crying, or feeling like there’s a huge brick on my leg to get in the office,” they wrote.

The edit at the end of the post says something about how common this experience is, and how rarely it gets talked about openly. “Wow it's so unexpected to see so many people have somewhat similar experiences,” the post stated.

What the thread said

One commenter described leaving an audit firm after months of relentless overwork, sleeping in meeting rooms on national holidays while others watched fireworks, and bursting into tears when handing in their resignation letter. “The day I came back home from my last day felt more liberating than the day I was released from prison,” they wrote.

Another had quit their tech job a year earlier under similar circumstances, returned to their kampung, and rested for months, only to realise midway through that something was still wrong. Their contribution to the thread was very informative:

“Rest doesn’t necessarily heal a burnout. You need to actively sit and work on your feelings. What caused the burnout? Is it self-expectations? Is it expectations from others? Why is letting others down so stressful? Is it hidden trauma from your childhood? In other words, therapy is necessary, and it’s what I’m doing nowadays,” their comment read.

A third commenter resigned on one day’s notice seven years ago after a manager refused a single day of family leave weeks in advance. They took two months before starting a new job in a different field, and now manages a team of six. “So far it has not affected performance one bit,” they noted.

The original poster is doing something that takes more courage than it sounds like: admitting that a situation has become unsustainable and choosing to stop before it gets worse.

Talking to a mental health professional is not about being broken. It is about understanding what happened well enough to make a considered choice about what comes next, rather than waiting for the rest to somehow resolve questions that rest alone cannot answer.

The fact that a Reddit post created space for people to say so out loud is, in its small way, part of what healing looks like.

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