Burnout Is Real

Everybody says, "You'll get through this."

I know. I always do. That has never been the question. The question nobody asks is what it costs to get through it, again, and again, and again.

I am a former Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I spent a decade at one company building a credit monitoring platform that handled millions of queries a month, and I led the team that kept it alive. Then the role ended, the way roles do now, and I started over in my forties. I founded Eco Moving Utah, a moving tote rental company I run with my own hands and my own truck. I built Bin X, software for rental operators like me. I am job hunting at the same time. Some weeks I am doing all three before lunch.

People call that resilience. From the inside it feels like a bill that never stops coming due.

What burnout actually is

Burnout is not being tired. Tired sleeps off. Burnout is waking up tired after nine hours, staring at work you used to love, and feeling nothing about it at all. It is answering the customer call in your best voice while your own life is quietly on fire behind the scenes. It is performing at a high level because people depend on you, long after the tank that performance draws from has run dry.

I used to think burnout was a discipline problem. Work harder, organize better, push through. That is the advice people give when they have only ever been tired. Pushing through is what got me here. The engine does not care how strong you are. Run anything long enough without maintenance and it stops.

The year that taught me

This past year cost me a role I held for ten years. It cost me things I will never list in a post like this. I still showed up. Most people do. That is the part nobody counts: the strong ones are not coasting. They are paying full price and hiding the receipt so nobody around them has to feel uncomfortable.

I watched myself start to cut corners I never cut. I got short with people who did not deserve it. I stopped enjoying the parts of the work that used to be the whole point, including building Bin X and serving Eco Moving Utah customers who trust me with the most stressful week of their year. When the work you built with your own hands stops meaning anything, that is not a motivation problem. That is the gauge on empty.

What I do differently now

I count honestly. My whole creative world over at Totally Not An Empire runs on a raven who counts everything and never leaves his post. He is not decoration. He is the reminder that somebody is keeping the real ledger, including the cost. I stopped pretending the ledger was balanced when it was not.

I say the cost out loud. To my people, and lately in public, because the performance of being fine is half the weight. The other half is the situation itself, and that half I can work on. The pretending half I can just put down.

I protect the small things that refill the tank. Writing songs for my album Two Ravens on the Standard. Building a silly game one chapter at a time. Selling one more ridiculous shirt in the merch store. None of it is the business. All of it is why the business still has a person behind it.

And I rest before I am forced to. That one took forty three years to learn, and I am still not good at it. But a day taken on purpose costs a lot less than a week taken by collapse.

If you manage people

Check on your strong people. The ones who always land on their feet feel every landing. They will not tell you what it costs, because telling you feels like one more job. Notice the cost, not just the output. You will keep people everyone else burns through.

Burnout is real. It is not weakness, and it is not a character flaw, and it does not care about your title. I was a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a VP of Development, and it found me anyway, in a warehouse full of moving totes, between a delivery and a job application.

I am still here. Still building. Still running Eco Moving Utah, still shipping Bin X, still putting one more strange and honest thing into the world at Totally Not An Empire. The raven counted every hit this year. Not one of them finished it.

If you are in the middle of your own version of that year, you are not the only one counting.

Caw caw.