People like to claim burnout and call it some noble thing.
Like they're a victim of this mysterious force that descended from the heavens and ruined their life.
And I do think, somewhere over the last decade or so, the world has gotten a little too soft about this stuff.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of it is my generation.
Millennials.
Everything is burnout.
Everything is trauma.
Everything is exhausting.
Sometimes life is just…hard.
You deal with it.
That said:
Burnout is absolutely real.
You can get completely sick of your job.
You can get sick of your career.
You can wake up one morning and realize the thought of doing the same thing for another five years makes you want to crawl back into bed.
I don't dispute any of that.
What I do think has changed is something much simpler:
Nobody ever actually LEAVES work anymore.
I talked recently about getting older and realizing that I don't think the biggest change is that my body suddenly fell apart.
It's that I lost a lot of the recovery time I used to have.
When I was racing bikes seriously, I could go ride 60 or 70 hard miles on Saturday morning, come home, eat an entire pizza, turn on NASCAR or football, and lie on the couch for five hours. That was it. The day was basically over.
Now?
You finish the workout and life starts.
Soccer practice.
House stuff.
A four-year-old.
Work.
Maybe somebody wakes you up in the middle of the night.
There just isn't as much margin.
And I think technology has done the exact same thing to work.
Twenty years ago, when you left the office…
You mostly…left the office.
Sure, your boss could call you.
But he wasn't sitting in your pocket all night, one message away.
Your coworkers weren't mixed into your social media feed.
You weren't lying in bed checking Slack or Teams.
LinkedIn wasn't showing you endless posts about how everyone else is getting promoted, making more money, building a personal brand, using AI better than you, and apparently waking up at 4:30am to meditate and cold shower and become a millionaire and run a marathon all before their 9am start time.
You could actually be OFF.
Now you leave work physically and bring the whole thing home with you.
Email is on your phone.
Slack is on your phone.
LinkedIn is on your phone.
Your coworkers are on Instagram.
And then, even if nobody from work contacts you, you spend your evening consuming content about…
Work.
Careers.
Money.
Productivity.
Success.
And then everyone wonders why they feel like they never recover.
Gee, not that hard when you really break it down, eh?
Maybe one reason people talk about burnout so much now isn't simply that everyone became softer.
Maybe we built a world where you have to deliberately create something that used to happen automatically:
Being off.
Where I lose sympathy is when people act like they have absolutely no control over this.
You do.
Turn the notifications off.
Stop checking Slack at 10pm if your job doesn't require it.
Don't spend your entire Sunday doom-scrolling LinkedIn and convincing yourself everyone else's career is going better than yours.
At some point, recovery is also your responsibility.
Now, obviously, sometimes the job itself really IS the problem.
If your boss expects you to be available constantly…
If you're getting messages every night…
If you have a brutal commute eating three hours of your day…
If the culture makes having boundaries impossible…
Then no amount of turning off notifications fixes the underlying problem.
Maybe you actually do need another job.
But I think it's worth separating the two.
Are you burned out because your career genuinely doesn't fit your life anymore?
Or have you simply forgotten how to stop working?
Those require two very different solutions.
A better career isn't always just more money or a better title.
Sometimes it's getting enough control over your work that when the day is over.
The day is actually over.
If you're looking for a job that fits your life better, hit the link below: