For a portion of 2025, I was physically trying to be sick before I started the day. It was extreme stress or clinical burnout; I am not going to try to medically define it. I’d maybe find a handful of hours here and there during the week as the only time I seemed to exist as my complete self. Throw in losing Daisy Dog around Easter that year, and 2025 became the worst year I’ve had since my divorce ten years ago.
My entire life, I’ve prided myself on navigating complex situations. On finding a way forward and communicating through chaos, no matter how complicated things got. So how did someone whose whole sense of self is built on solving problems end up completely trapped by one?
Welcome to the Void
Shutdown. Physical illness. Sleep that’s a form of hallucination for your brain in that it only pretends it’s doing it. Being unable to enjoy anything else because your brain wants to just exist in the most cognitively unchallenging world it can live in as a form of escape. You fall into a void, except in this reality, Florence Pugh isn’t going to jump into your trauma as a Russian superspy to pull you out of it.
So, you’re trapped in a situation you feel you can’t escape.
I’ve never felt trapped before. In all other situations where I’ve felt things were edging to this level of unhealthy, I’ve metaphorically told the situation to shove it, and I exited stage left. I prided myself on always being able to do that. Anything I’ve chosen to do, I was there because I wanted to be, not because I had to be. This was one I felt more trapped in, and it wasn’t good.
When Daisy Dog didn’t make it past Easter, I was just done.
I was off sick twice for around three days total purely for mental health reasons. I used my private health care to ring a psychologist. She recommended anxiety meds and a form of therapy I can’t remember now. I wasn’t in favour of the meds. I’m from a generation that wants to solve the problem, not permanently mask it with drugs (apparently the psychologist took them all the time, which was interesting). The paperwork for the sessions just never triggered for some reason.
People in the generations behind GenX probably can’t even imagine what it took to get me to do that. Even during my two years of underemployment after the financial crisis, which was pretty hard to deal with, I never got this far. I think I benefited from my wife and me navigating it together.
I guess I did have my Florence Pugh then.
So, how did I get to this point?
No Sign of Rescue
I tried; I really did. My GenX, metacognitive brain, and high locus of control wouldn’t let me believe there weren’t lanes I could engineer or find to exit the road I was on. I tried all the advice from the established narratives.
I tried applying all my usual skills, tactics and experiences to shape my environment back into something that didn’t expose all my triggers. I think I’m pretty good at that, but it never worked. I tried getting more rest, but as stated, this was hallucinatory and, yes, people suggested sleeping tablets, but this seemed to be masking the problem rather than dealing with it.
I tried to get more distance from things, but this isn’t really possible when you find yourself operating in structural conditions you don’t align with.
Take a break, come back refreshed. I took a couple of two-week breaks, which were great while I was on them but didn’t cure the problem. Nothing worked because nothing changed the fact that it was a temporary break from the trap, like a sort of extended-release that you knew was only short-term and the cell always waited.
It’s not all negative, as I’ve come to realise now, with some distance from it, that the things I didn’t believe helped at the time built a sort of subconscious momentum. The conversation with the psychologist, either because of its content or just because I’d tripped over the line into doing it, contributed. My trip with Havila Voyages up and down the Norwegian coast was so different from my everyday life that something started happening, even though I can’t consciously describe what.
I realised the true problem was that the environment in which I succeeded was taken away.
When Life Support Fails
One of the worst things that can happen on Star Trek is the imminent failure of life support, because you’re in the void of space, completely hostile to the human condition, and it’s the life support that keeps those intrepid explorers alive. It’s the same in life. If elements of your life support are stripped away, or the systems around you decide to change it to one more amenable to an alien species than you are screwed.
What I realised is that elements of my life support had gone. Unlike last time I experienced a trap I couldn’t easily escape, I’d lost my Florence Pugh literally a decade ago, then I lost my Krypto, and all this happened when my environment shifted so much it might as well have been for someone from Alph-Ceti-4.
So, what actually went wrong? The short answer is I’ve never operated in an environment where I lacked high context, architectural autonomy, and control over how things were undertaken, built and communicated. Take those away and my surrounding life support is altered to the point it verges on unsettling and stressful.
This creates a situation many people don’t understand, but it explains why established solutions don’t work.
People don’t get that existing in a low-context environment doesn’t give you the simplicity advantage it gives others. It makes things harder because you’re constantly seeking context to make sure you’re doing it right, rather than just doing what’s asked. My brain is excited about the internal map of how things relate to each other, often seeing things other people don’t; it’s the constellation that’s interesting, not the individual stars. I’ll burn energy like a dying star trying to see the constellation.
Everything I do in life is driven by authorship and agency. Everything. I don’t even have a single hobby that doesn’t involve literal authorship, and I abdicate it if agency is removed. It’s foundational. I can’t just do whatever I am told and have rarely had to.
As all life support settings are set to lower context, an inability to shape the chaos, a reduction in agency either directly or indirectly, my world shrinks, the walls of the metaphorical prison take shape, and my system goes into DEFCON 1.
There was only one solution.
Nuke the Site from Orbit
I came to the conclusion that the only solution was the one Corporal Hicks presented in Aliens: nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.
As time allowed me to chip away at the reality of things, I came to the conclusion that when your environment becomes sufficiently different to the cognitive life support that keeps you breathing and engaged with life, you can’t go all Star Trek style and negotiate or mindfulness your way out of it.
You go Corporal Hicks.
It’s not a failure of your ability to persevere. It’s not that you’re failing at what you feel you’re good at. The only solution is total removal. The journey to this realisation was slow, and I’d say it’s even changed how I think about the future.
While I speculated in the title that resting more doesn’t fix burnout, I would say the right rest - the type you can have with considerable psychological distance for an extended period - may not solve the problem, but it can put you into the right frame of mind to understand what action you need to take.
If you’re watching this and you feel you’re in a similar situation, don’t let the standard narratives that you need more resilience or just need to recharge keep you in the trap. Sometimes you do, in a sensible, well-meaning and non-destructive way, need to nuke the site from orbit. As it may be, you’re operating in an environment where something has changed your life support.