People talk about burnout like it's a battery problem. Sleep more. Take a vacation. Touch grass. Sure, okay — that's cute.

What wrecks me isn't that I'm tired. It's that I'm doing work that doesn't mean a damn thing to me. The fastest route to burnout is spending your days on things you don't care about, for reasons you don't believe in, under the illusion that you're “making progress” because a ticket got closed and a graph looks green.

That's not rest deprivation. That's soul deprivation.

Putting Out Fires Is a Slow Death

When I'm stuck in reactive mode — firefights, pager pings, surprise meetings, the “quick” fix that mutates into a seven-headed Hydra — I never feel like I did anything. I move the pile from the left side of my desk to the right side and back again. Everyone thanks me for “unblocking,” and somehow I'm the one feeling like a cog jammed in a machine that's grinding itself to dust.

It's perverse: the more fires I put out, the more fuel shows up. Half the time the fire wasn't real — just someone's anxiety wearing a badge with my name on it.

And at the end of the day? Empty. Not tired. Empty. Like the part of me that actually builds things had to sit in the hallway while my calendar ran the meeting without me.

The Last Feature That Nearly Broke Me (And Then Saved Me)

The last real feature I shipped almost had me saying “fuck it” and walking away. I was right there — hands off the keyboard, fantasizing about the sweet relief of not caring anymore.

But I stayed with it. I carried it over the line. And two days later I felt like someone had plugged me back into myself. I was waking up early on purpose. I wanted to get to my desk. I felt that pulse again — that “I'm building something real” feeling.

Tell me that's a “battery” problem. It wasn't sleep. It wasn't a weekend hike. It was meaning. It was momentum. It was creation.

The Gaps Between Peaks Are Shrinking

I'm trending down again. Not falling off a cliff — just that long, familiar slide. What's messing with my head lately is how short the peaks feel. The window between “this matters” and “why am I even doing this” keeps shrinking. It's like I'm sprinting peak to peak over a valley that keeps getting wider.

It's not that I want to do less. It's the opposite. I want to do more. I want to do better. And when a day goes by where I didn't move something I deem worthy, I start spiraling into the dread zone. The “oh great, another day I existed but didn't create” loop.

That loop is how burnout actually shows up for me. Not in a dramatic collapse. In a steady erosion of meaning. Death by a thousand “important” nothings.

Reactive Feels Productive. It Isn't.

There's a lie that reactive work tells: urgency equals importance. The Slack scroll, the incident thread, the “got a sec?” DM — they all have a smell of necessity. They trick your nervous system. You feel useful. You feel needed. You feel like you're holding the line.

Then you look up and realize you didn't move anything that matters. All your “work” evaporates the minute the thread goes quiet. Nothing compounds. Nothing remains.

It's like running on a treadmill with a fan in your face. Feels like motion. It's not movement.

What Actually Refuels Me

• Shipping something end to end. Not a slice. Not a subtask. The whole thing with my fingerprints visible in the corners.
• Deep work without apology. Headphones on. Door shut. Calendar silent. The kind of time that lets complexity unwind instead of being hammered flat.
• Ownership. Not “you own this doc.” Actual ownership. Stakes. Choice. It's mine if it fails. It's mine if it works.
• Saying no without writing a ten-paragraph defense brief. Just “no — not now — because I'm doing this.” Full stop.

When those show up, I don't need a vacation. I need a pen. I need an early alarm. I need less coffee because my brain is already awake.

The Dread Zone, Named Out Loud

The dread zone is the place between “I want to do something worthy” and “I didn't.” It's not dramatic. It's just sticky. You sit down, and your hands hover over the keyboard like they're waiting for permission that isn't coming.

The dread zone whispers: “Why bother? You’re just going to get pulled into someone else’s urgency in ten minutes.”

The way out isn't motivation. Motivation can't fight entropy. The way out is structure that protects meaning.

Guardrails (So I Don't Burn Out Doing Work I Hate)

I don't need slogans. I need rules that make it harder to abandon the work that matters and easier to ignore the noise.

• Carve a daily “builder block.” One non-negotiable chunk of time where I move one meaningful thing forward. No alerts. No meetings. No Slack. No apologies.
• Define “worthy” in writing before the week starts. If I don't name it Sunday, I'll be chasing mirages by Wednesday.
• Limit firefighting to a window. If the world is actually burning, it can burn until 2–3 pm. After that, I build. The end.
• Say no faster. “Not this week” is a complete sentence.
• Ship smaller. Not because “agile,” but because small releases mean frequent proof that the work exists in the world.
• Track joy, not hours. Did I do something that made future-me proud? Yes/No. Everything else is accounting.

None of that is fancy. It's just a fence around the garden so the goats stop eating the seedlings.

What I'm Afraid Of

That I'll get good at being “reliable” in ways that make me miserable. That the system will reward my ability to put out fires so aggressively that I forget how to start one on purpose.

That I normalize dread.

That I wake up a year from now and can list 200 “critical” things I did… and not a single thing I care about.

A Thing I'm Willing to Believe

Burnout isn't solved by pampering the part of me that's tired. It's solved by feeding the part of me that's starving.

Feed it with ownership, with deep work, with actual creation. Feed it by telling the truth — to myself first — about what matters and what doesn't. Feed it by refusing to confuse adrenaline with meaning.

And when the slide happens — because it will — treat the dread like a weather report, not a verdict. Adjust the day, not the identity.

If You're Here Too

If you're in the dread zone right now, I'm not going to tell you to meditate or drink water or buy a better chair. You probably already did all that.

Pick one thing that matters and move it one meaningful step today. That's it. Not because hustle. Because momentum. Because proof. Because you deserve to end a day with something real to point at and say: I made that.

I don't want fewer hard days. I want fewer empty ones.