I Don’t Think We Are Supposed to Be This Tired

On burnout, productivity, and the lie that rest is something we have to earn.

There was a period of my life when being exhausted felt almost indistinguishable from being successful. Not because I enjoyed being tired. I don’t think most of us do. But because tired meant I was doing something.

Tired meant I was needed.

Tired meant the calendar was full, the work was moving, people were calling, opportunities were coming, and presumably I was doing something right.

I have always been someone who can carry a ridiculous amount. I am ambitious. I care deeply about the things I build. I am very good at what I do, and I work hard at being good at it. I am also, as it turns out, extraordinarily capable of turning all of those beautiful things about myself into weapons against myself.

On purpose? No!

But….

Somewhere along the way, I, like everyone else, learned that there is something morally admirable about how much we can endure.

How much can you accomplish?

How little sleep can you survive on?

How many responsibilities can you hold without dropping anything?

How quickly can you answer the email?

How many people can depend on you?

How long can you keep going before your body finally forces you to stop?

And then we call the person who can withstand the most disciplined.

Driven. A beast. A machine.

The problem, for me at least, is that I don’t want to be a machine and I don’t want to live in a world that requires anyone to be one.

I would actually like to be a person.

A person who does excellent work, yes, absolutely.

A person with ambition. A person who builds things and contributes things and occasionally works very hard because something matters deeply to me.

But still a person.

When rest becomes another productivity strategy

Years ago, I realized that I had fallen deep into the spiraling vortex that is hustle culture; rooted in the union of rugged individuality and capitalistic exploitation that we are sold as the recipe for success and happiness.

Spoiler alert, IT’S A LIE!

Once I looked up and realized that I wasn’t actually practicing liberation in my relationship to productivity, I decided I had to start doing something differently.

I had to create an actual structure I could follow to save me from myself until I had fully embodied a more liberatory relationship with productivity.

I started with something called a seventh-week sabbatical, a concept credited to Sean McCabe.

I took the idea and swagged it out “According to Weeze.”

The premise was simple: work for six weeks, then deliberately create a week with significantly less work.

No meetings if I could help it. No clients. No expectation that my team stay plugged in. Fewer demands on my attention.

Sometimes I rested. Sometimes I cleaned my house. Sometimes I thought. Sometimes I walked my dog in the middle of the afternoon because it was beautiful outside and I would rather be there than staring at my laptop.

The point was never supposed to be to optimize myself so that I could become even more productive during the next six weeks.

Although, if I’m being honest, I have absolutely fallen into that trap too.

Rest so you can work harder.

Take a vacation so you can come back refreshed and produce more.

Meditate so you can manage your stress and maintain your output.

I had gotten incredibly good at turning even my attempts to escape productivity culture into productivity strategies.

At some point, I had to start asking myself a different question:

What if the rest is not there to make the work better? What if the rest is part of life?

That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Apparently, at least for moi, it was not.

Despite years of teaching this, practicing this and intentionally building structures around myself to prevent burnout, I have (and will) still backslid.

There have been seasons when demand increased and I convinced myself that this particular moment was an exception.

Just for now.

Just until this launch.

Just until this project is finished.

Just until things calm down.

You probably know how that story goes. Things do not calm down.

You become the person who is good at carrying more, so more things arrive for you to carry.

At one point, I was so busy that people around me were asking whether I had even eaten that day. Whether I had had water.

I also have ADHD and remembering to eat is already a whole thing. If you know, you know.

Friends were bringing me food because I had become so preoccupied with work that the most basic needs of having a human body were somehow becoming optional.

There is nothing aspirational about that story. I am not telling you that so you think I am hardworking. I am telling you because I knew better.

And I did it anyway.

That matters to me, because if knowing better were enough, most of us would have rested by now.

We have read the books. Bought the planners. Learned about boundaries (I literally teach them, hello “Protect Your Peace”). Taken the PTO. Put the phone on Do Not Disturb. Drunk the water. Taken the magnesium (glycinate of course).

And somehow an extraordinary number of people remain profoundly tired.

Which makes me wonder whether we are asking the wrong question.

Maybe exhaustion is information

Maybe burnout isn’t always a sign that we haven’t figured out how to take care of ourselves.

Maybe sometimes exhaustion is information.

Maybe our bodies are telling us something about the environments we are asking them to survive.

Because there is a very convenient story we tell about burnout. You are overwhelmed because you need better boundaries. Exhausted because you need better time management. Unhappy because you have not found your purpose. You need a better morning routine. A better calendar. A better attitude.

And certainly, sometimes those things help.

I believe deeply in boundaries. I believe in creating spaciousness wherever we can. I believe in turning off your damn email when you leave work. I believe that if someone sends you a message at 9:37 p.m., their decision to work at 9:37 p.m. does not automatically become your emergency.

I believe in saying no when you are tired.

I believe in saying yes to the afternoon walk even when there is work you could technically be doing because sometimes you definitely need to just go touch grass.

I believe in building structures that protect our humanity.

But, and, also I think there is something profoundly dishonest about discussing burnout exclusively as a personal wellness problem.

A breathing exercise cannot compensate for intentional understaffing designed to keep labor costs low and profits high. A boundary cannot make rent cheaper. A gratitude practice cannot produce affordable childcare. A Sunday reset cannot transform a workplace that quietly demands sixty hours of labor while paying you for forty—or a culture that tells you to be grateful you have a job at all.

And no morning routine, however aesthetically pleasing, changes the fact that many people simply do not have enough money, enough time, enough support or enough power to create the kind of spaciousness wellness culture keeps prescribing.

We have individualized a structural problem.

Capitalism is nothing if not entrepreneurial, we created an entire industry to sell us solutions to the exhaustion produced by the system itself.

There is something almost impressive about it.

First make people exhausted. Then sell them things to recover from the exhaustion. Then convince them the recovery is necessary so they can return to producing.

Rinse. Repeat.

When productivity becomes proof that we are good

Somewhere underneath all of this is a much deeper belief: Productivity is not simply something we do. We have turned productivity into evidence of character.

Busy people are important. Overwhelmed people must be in demand. People who work constantly are committed. People who stop are lazy.

Even pleasure becomes suspicious when it has not been sufficiently earned.

This is why people will announce that they have not taken a vacation in five years with the same tone someone else might use to describe receiving an award. It is why we casually compete over who slept less. Why being “slammed” can become a kind of social status. Why people apologize before telling you they took a nap.

We have created prestige around being unavailable to our own lives.

Aaaaand perhaps the strangest version of this happens when we, like I, love our work, because then exploitation becomes even easier to disguise.

You love what you do. You care about the mission. People need you. The work matters. So what is one more hour? One more client? One more favor? One more unpaid responsibility? One more thing squeezed into a day that was already full?

“Doing what you love” was supposed to make work more meaningful. Instead, it often becomes the reason we believe work should be allowed to consume us.

But loving something does not mean it is entitled to all of you.

I love my work. I also love my friends and my family. I love laughing until my stomach hurts. I love walking my dog, lifting, and drinking really good coffee slowly in the sun. I love sitting somewhere beautiful with absolutely nowhere I need to be. I love doing ridiculous things that will never become content, revenue, impact, a deliverable or a line on my résumé.

Those things are not distractions from my life.

They are my life.

What if work isn’t the point?

Once we understand this, I think the conversation about work begins to change. We stop asking only:

How do I survive my workload?

How do I become more efficient?

How do I fit more into the day?

How do I prevent burnout so I can keep doing this?

And we begin asking questions that are far more inconvenient.

Why is this much work necessary in the first place?

Who benefits from my exhaustion?

Why does increased productivity so rarely translate into increased spaciousness for the people doing the producing?

Why, despite technological advancements that allow us to accomplish more in less time, have we not collectively decided to simply, oh, I don’t know, work less?

What is work actually for?

That last question interests me most. I do not think the answer can simply be more work. Surely the purpose of all this innovation, efficiency, production and wealth cannot be to create a world in which everyone is too tired to enjoy being alive.

Surely abundance should produce spaciousness.

Surely progress should mean that more people get to experience security, leisure, creativity, health, curiosity, community and rest.

Not just the people who can afford to purchase their way out of exhaustion.

All of us.

There is a difference between building a society around individual optimization and building one around collective abundance.

Individual optimization asks: How can you become resilient enough to endure this?

Collective abundance asks: Why are we requiring people to endure this at all?

I still believe in building the boundaries. Pausing when you can. Turning off the phone. Saying no. Going outside. Coming home to yourself in whatever ways are actually accessible to you.

Those things matter.

Sometimes they are how we survive long enough to imagine something different, but I no longer want our imagination to stop at becoming better-rested participants in the same exhausted world.

I want us to become curious about the world underneath it.

A world where rest does not need to be earned. Where care is not a luxury. Where being human is not something we squeeze into the margins after the work is finished. Where excellence does not require self-abandonment. Where ambition and spaciousness are allowed to coexist.

Where our worth is not measured by how much of ourselves we can convert into labor.

Maybe we were never supposed to be this tired. And maybe, just maybe, the exhaustion so many of us are carrying is not proof that we are failing at life but rather an invitation to reconsider what we have decided life is for.

Which leads me to a new question:

What would we build, as a collective, if human flourishing, instead of productivity, were the thing we organized our lives around?

While I don’t know exactly what that looks like, I know that is the world I want to live in, the one I am trying to build!

W/ curiosity & care,
Weeze