I have been writing software for six years. I started at twelve, during a lockdown, because there was nothing else to do and a screen was the only window that opened onto something larger than my room. Now I am eighteen, and the window feels smaller than the room.
I do not know when it happened. There was no single moment. No dramatic failure, no burnout episode, no crisis. Just a slow, quiet dimming. The terminal is open. The code is there. I can still write it. I just do not feel anything when I do.
Tired is not the right word, though it is the one I keep using. Tired implies rest as a remedy. Sleep more, take a week off, come back refreshed. I have tried that. The feeling remains. It is closer to something I do not have a clean English word for. In Turkish there is a phrase, "canım sıkılıyor," which translates poorly as "I am bored" but actually means something between restlessness and suffocation. The soul is being squeezed. That is nearer to it.
I run a company with four divisions. I have shipped twenty-five projects. Fifteen million people have used something I helped build. I am eighteen years old, and I feel old. Not wise-old. Just worn. The kind of old that comes from doing one thing for a third of your life before most people have started doing anything at all.
Lately I have been thinking about handing the chairmanship to someone else. Not dramatically. Not publicly. Just finding someone competent, handing over the keys, and stepping back to a position where my only interaction with HMD Corporation is checking a bank statement once a month.
The thought scares me and excites me in equal measure, which is probably a sign that it deserves serious consideration.
What would I do? The list assembles itself faster than I expected. Literature. Philosophy. Linguistics. Mathematics, the kind done with paper and a pencil, not a compiler. Poetry. Novels. Not reading them for productivity, but reading them for the sake of the sentence, the paragraph, the argument. Learning a third language. Travelling without a laptop. Playing sport without checking my phone at half-time. Getting a pet. Spending an afternoon with my family where I am actually present, not half-present with the other half reviewing a pull request in my head.
Art. Hobbies. People. Love.
The fact that I can list these things so quickly, and that none of them involve a screen, tells me something I have been avoiding hearing.
I will probably study computer science at university next year. Not because I am passionate about it right now, but because six years of work have accumulated into something, and abandoning it entirely would feel like waste. A degree formalises what I already know. A master's in machine learning extends it into territory I have not yet explored. It is a rational plan. It makes sense on paper.
But I notice that the arguments I make for it are all negative. Not waste. Not pointless. Not throwing it away. I am not running toward something. I am trying not to run away from something.
That is a different kind of motivation, and I am not sure it holds.
I do not have a resolution for this. If I did, it would not be honest. The people who write about burnout always seem to arrive at a tidy conclusion. They took a sabbatical, rediscovered their purpose, came back stronger. I do not think that is what is happening here. This is not burnout. Burnout is a response to overwork. This might be something quieter: the realisation that the thing you built your identity around is not the thing you want your identity to be.
I started coding because I was twelve and curious. I kept coding because I was good at it, and being good at something when you are young earns you a kind of attention that is difficult to let go of. Somewhere along the way, "Umut who codes" became "Umut, the chairman," and the chairman became the whole person. Which is a lot to ask of a single activity, especially one you chose before you were old enough to understand what choosing meant.
I am not quitting. I do not think I am capable of quitting even if I wanted to. The instinct to build is still there, underneath the fatigue, like a pilot light that has not gone out. But the flame is low, and feeding it more of the same fuel is not going to raise it.
What I need, I think, is not rest but range. Not a break from work, but a wider life to bring back to it. The best code I have ever written came after reading something that had nothing to do with code. The best decisions I have made at HMD came from thinking about problems that were not business problems. Narrowness is what is suffocating me, not the work itself.
Six years. A third of my life. Enough to know what I am capable of. Not yet enough to know what I want.
I suppose that is what the next six are for.