I am so f&*%ing burned out

It's day 9 of 2025, and I am already feeling burned out. And I'm not alone.

What is burnout?

To me, it’s a persistent feeling that no matter how hard you work, you aren’t making meaningful progress. It’s when the internal pressure to be productive and exert control bumps up against the immovable wall that is modern life.

There will always be more emails, your house will never be clean enough, your work will never be meaningful enough, and no matter how many “productivity hacks” you subscribe to, the situation at hand can never be mastered.

And even on days where you feel highly productive, every day starts a new cycle of productivity debt that, at best, can be brought back down to 0. But most days we aren’t perfectly productive, so the debt grows day after day, week after week, leading to those inevitable feelings of being overwhelmed.

“We produce against the feelings of lack” - Byung-Chul Han

Where do your feelings of lack come from? Mine come from the feeling of needing financial security. Of wanting to provide for my family. Of needing to feel like there is some deep meaning to the work I do every day.

And I measure my mastery of this lack in dollars. In likes on social media.

I measure it in dopamine.

Because in modern society, dopamine is the antidote to lack. No wonder escapism like “brain rot” has become so popular. It’s a way to get those dopamine hits without running on the hamster wheel of productivity.

Chasing dopamine is a zero-sum game

We chase dopamine because our brains are wired to. Without dopamine, we would never set goals or have curiosity. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels the search for information.

But when our goal is a nebulous feeling of satiety - an impossible feeling of “enough” - we will never reach it. So we continue searching, chasing those hits of dopamine along the way to tell us we are on the right track.

Every day starts a new cycle of dopamine chasing. An ill-fated attempt to hack away at our productivity debt. Yet the debt grows day by day, and the search for dopamine continues.

So what can I do?

If I had the answer to that I would sell it as a class and get rich. My “How to Stop Feeling Burned Out” course would be a huge hit and every productivity junkie would take it and instantly feel better.

See? Even when I write about this issue I find myself fantasizing about doing more.

The weird truth about all of this is that overcoming a feeling of lack means you have to accept that there is some inherent meaningless to work. There is some inherent meaningless to life. There is no destination.

Living your life in debt means you will always be holding your own happiness hostage. The same thoughts that make us high achievers in school - “I will allow X as soon as I accomplish Y” - make us unhappy adults. “I can have a snack as soon as I clean my room” turns into “I will allow myself a vacation as soon as I finish this project.”

I am sorry I can’t offer many solutions yet. I am still sorting them out myself.

Maybe the best we can do is to recognize we are on the hamster wheel, and it is our choice to keep running.