You wake up tired, scroll through video after video of people waking up at 5 am or
comparing yourself to your friends who seem to have already done more by lunch
than you do in an entire day and suddenly doing anything feels like a performance
review.
A feeling of being overworked, overwhelmed and somehow…you still feel like you’re
not doing enough. Sound familiar? Burnout’s a common occurrence that feels like an
unacknowledged aspect of life. But it’s important to remember that it’s not your fault.
A Productivity Culture:
From journaling to planning a day out to the minute, to morning routines that include
meditation at 5 am and dunking your face in iced water, we’ve been sold the idea
that productivity equals worth.
This narrative is subtle, but persistent and consistent:
Be Busy = Being valuable.
Rest = Laziness
Struggle = Success
Where your to-do lists somehow never seem to shrink, your value is measured by
output and normal human limitation, such as feeling overwhelmed, tired or just
drained, have now become character flaws.
We don’t just want to do more; we’ve become expected to. And when we don’t reach
that impossible criteria, we choose to blame ourselves.
The idea of self-blame:
Burning out doesn’t just feel like laziness; it feels like failure. One glance at our
peers, and we see them effortlessly juggling social lives, classes, part-time jobs,
post-grad choices, and hobbies… so we assume there’s something wrong with us for
struggling.
You feel like you’re drowning ten times deeper in the same work, and yet, no one
seems to be drowning with you.
So, we internalise it, we tell ourselves the same spiel of
“If I just tried harder”
“Maybe I’m just lazy”
“I’ll get up earlier tomorrow”
But the truth is: you’re not weak, you’re just a person going through life for the first
time, trying to balance 24 hours in comparison to glimpses of minutes from other
people’s 24 hours.
Being productive doesn’t mean changing yourself; it means commodifying and
balancing where you can.
So why do we feel burnout?
It’s important to realise that burnout is not laziness or a lack of resilience and is
certainly you ‘not trying hard enough’.
It’s just your body and brain signalling that you’ve been pushed beyond sustainable
limits and that you need rest and structural change.
If you spend hours at your desk, keep waking up at 5 am despite going to bed at 11
pm, force yourself to spend an entire day in the library, then go out with friends. You
will find that it will all catch up with you eventually.
Productivity does not equal constant work or socialising; it doesn’t match up with the
‘days in my life’ videos. It is about balance: realising that you need rest, that you
don’t need to be constantly doing something. To relax guilt-free without thinking
about what is next on a to-do list.
This feeling isn’t your fault; the idea of being perfect and constantly productive isn’t
healthy or sustainable. Your self-worth is not measured in tasks completed or hours
worked.
Next time that feeling of “failure” looms over you, remember, you know yourself best.
You are the only person spending 24 hours with yourself and if you need to spend a
few extra hours in bed or just scroll on your phone for a while, that isn’t changing
anything about what you are capable of.