The Burnout Economy and the Radical Act of Stepping Away

The Burnout Economy and the Radical Act of Stepping Away

Five weeks into my sabbatical, I’m discovering the archaeology of my former self. The contrast is striking: left my last day at work, middle getting ready for a garden party-themed wedding, right Mucha doing his impression of Garfield with my lasagna. What emerges isn’t just an energy difference, but the profound realisation that I finally have bandwidth to invest in myself and my family rather than merely surviving another round of quarterly planning.

Tuesday, I decided to make lasagna on Thursday. I researched recipes, planned a shopping trip for specific ingredients, and created something delicious. This is cooking, a fundamentally different act from the panicked feeding rituals of tech-burnout weeknights: “Fuck, what will we eat tonight without ordering in again?” That liminal state of nutritional desperation had become my standard operating mode for far too long.

The Architecture of Exhaustion

We’re living through an epidemic of burnout disguised as personal failing. The narrative is seductive in its simplicity: if you can’t keep it all together, you simply aren’t trying hard enough. Have you tried making a list? But this framing obscures a more insidious reality: the same companies that plaster “employee wellbeing” across their values pages cultivate environments where ignoring weekend notifications feels like professional negligence.

After 25 years of never taking more than standard vacation time, I had developed severe “if I don’t check Slack, everything will collapse” syndrome. The reality? It doesn’t collapse. But testing this theory required two years of intentional planning and a supportive partner willing to bet on a proper sabbatical.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier: burnout isn’t a character flaw. It’s the predictable output of a system engineered to extract maximum value from human potential with minimal regard for human sustainability. The high salaries in tech don’t remediate this cycle... they fuel it.

The Hedonic Assembly Line

My coworkers and I lived this paradox daily. We shared links to meal delivery services, personal coaches, boutique fitness studios, and numerous other solutions designed to address the problems caused by our lack of energy and time. This way, we could work more efficiently and earn more to spend on “quality of life” services. It’s a pathological feedback loop.

This is the hedonic treadmill in its purest form: we adapt to our purchases and require increasingly elaborate consumption to chase diminishing returns of satisfaction. But the problem transcends lifestyle inflation; it’s about how late-stage capitalism systematically dismantles your capacity to exist without constant consumption.

I was fully integrated into this earn-and-burn machinery. After years in non-profits, I was finally receiving cold, hard cash as validation for being a “good girl.” Intoxicated by top-percentile performance reviews, I became an exceptional employee at the cost of being a diminished parent, partner, sister, daughter, and friend. I was really fucking good at my tech job, and that singular excellence became my entire identity.

My response? I spent money instead of being present. People-pleasing paired with self-destruction proved excellent for my 401(k) and devastating for everything else that actually mattered.

The Neurobiology of Productivity Culture

Within 24 hours of leaving my tech role, I began dreaming again. For years, I hadn’t been sleeping deeply enough to access REM cycles. Apparently, my neurodivergent brain was expending too much processing power navigating the cognitive dissonance required as a leader in companies that proclaimed “psychological safety” while creating environments fundamentally unsafe for me and the layers of people reporting through my chain.

During the darkest period, layoffs and reorganisation in 2023, I would literally collapse crying on my office rug between town hall meetings where executives performed elaborate linguistic gymnastics to avoid addressing our crumbling culture. Yet I remained a consistently top performer, promoted early and often.

I poured everything into workdays that stretched from 8 AM to 8 PM. It mortifies me to admit this, but during the worst stretches, I struggled to shower more than two or three times weekly. Hello, dry shampoo and Old Spice deodorant. I had ceased functioning as a human being, surviving on food my partner provided or eating snacks off paper towels like a perpetually hungry toddler.

In 2024, therapeutic work led to a psychological evaluation for autism. As a late-diagnosed adult woman, suddenly my entire life narrative reorganised itself into coherent patterns. The cognitive load of masking in these environments extracted a particularly high price from me, but no human should be expected to perform this way quarter after quarter.

How much mental processing power was I burning watching senior leadership espouse values like “authenticity” and “inclusion” while systematically violating them? It’s like being in a relationship with someone who claims to value communication but responds only with passive-aggressive emoji reactions or leaves you perpetually on read.

The Hidden Costs of Cognitive Dissonance

The psychological toll of this disconnect is immense, though it never appears in quarterly reports. The true cost of burnout culture includes:

  • Diminished innovation when people are too exhausted to think beyond survival mode. 
  • Fractured relationships with partners, children, and friends who receive whatever energy remains after work demands. 
  • Physical deterioration from chronic stress and neglected self-care. 
  • Mental health crises that companies address with employee assistance programs rather than structural change. 
  • Talent haemorrhaging as the most capable people burn out and leave, taking institutional knowledge with them.

As I wrote in “Open Pit Programming,” shareholder-centred value systems don’t give a fuck about wellbeing or burnout. It’s not a bug: it’s a feature of systems prioritising short-term profits over sustainable human flourishing.

This understanding didn’t crystallise overnight. It required over a decade to comprehend how I’d become trapped in this machinery and why escape felt impossible.

The Financial Architecture of Freedom

I’ve always found it mystifying how people take extended time off work, yet here I am doing precisely that. Let me be explicit: this sabbatical required meticulous planning, not just privilege.

Nearly a decade ago, my net worth was a staggering negative $30,000. A career dedicated to non-profits, combined with graduate school debt and an ostrich-like approach to budgeting, left me financially devastated. Adding a 2017 divorce, I entered my 40s convinced I would never retire.

I transitioned into tech in 2015, pursuing increasingly lucrative enterprise roles from 2017 onward. Along the way, I discovered budgeting (thank you, budgetsaresexy.com) and began tracking my net worth monthly, reversing my financial trajectory at a surprising velocity. My net worth reached six figures before I partnered with another tech veteran in 2019, finally out-earning the man in my life for the first time ever.

But here’s the trap: that intoxicating tech money and equity enabled a different kind of overspending. I was simultaneously saving and living to the edge of my means. In 2020, my partner and I bought a house: a dream I’d considered impossible. Tech stocks were ascending relentlessly, so why not buy ambitiously?

Interest rates were historically low, we refinanced even lower, and we justified that kitchen remodel we “absolutely needed.” We weren’t Subzero-wealthy, but KitchenAid appliances and a Thermador refrigerator felt like winning the lottery after years of tiny, inadequate apartment kitchens. I became the person who casually mentioned “moving walls” as integral to our renovation strategy.

We climbed aboard the hedonic treadmill with devastating efficiency: burning out at work all day, then spending evenings and weekends scrolling Houzz. Promotions dangled before us like carrots before exhausted horses. Just run faster, perhaps longer, with New York and APAC schedules scattered across our calendars. Our home became increasingly beautiful as our souls grew more ragged.

By 2023, I had achieved peak performance: director level, managing managers on a Fortune Future 50 product. I revelled in the compensation while my body disintegrated from stress, unable to prepare real meals or show up as the person my family deserved. We fantasised about rage-quitting, but mortgage statements reminded us we were a dual-income household with college tuition looming ominously.

Something had to fundamentally change.

The Fuck Off Fund: Financial Freedom as Political Resistance

In 2021, I encountered Paulette Perhach in an essay writing class, though it wasn’t until 2023 that I began building what she terms a “Fuck Off Fund”—money that grants you power to refuse situations misaligned with your values.

My FOF accumulated above my emergency fund, requiring two years of intentional saving while working full-time. Bonuses went directly to a bank I don’t access daily. I pretended that money didn’t exist. It’s been a gradual, methodical process learning to live genuinely below my means, eventually transitioning from a 3,100-square-foot Queen Anne home to a rental condo half that size in a more affordable city.

The relocation wasn’t cheap, but our quality of life has dramatically improved. Our household income has dropped to 25% of its 2024 level, yet we are at least 80% happier.

Building the fund was merely the foundation. The fundamental transformation occurs in learning how to deploy it.

The Radical Act of Stepping Away

I’m not planning elaborate vacations this year, but I treasure having a life where I shower daily and cook actual meals. Four weeks remain before graduate school begins in September, and I intend to savour every moment. I’ll attend part-time to maintain sustainable pacing while taking on selective freelance design and writing work. For once, I’m walking toward the life I want rather than frantically running from what was methodically killing me.

But stepping away transcends personal solution: it becomes an act of resistance. Every person who builds a Fuck Off Fund and uses it demonstrates that alternative modes of existence are possible. Every unconventional path taken represents a small rebellion against the notion that our worth is measured solely by productive output.

The goal isn’t escaping work entirely, but engaging with it from a position of choice rather than desperation. When you can afford to say no, you finally possess the power to say yes to what genuinely matters.

Sometimes, the most radical act in a system designed to consume you is simply stepping away and proving that the world doesn’t end when you stop running on the hamster wheel. In that space between extraction and exhaustion, you might rediscover what it means to be human.

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