Out of Office

When you're burnt out and hollowed out: a definition

TL;DR: Contrary to popular belief, feeling “burnout” is not just feeling over-worked or over-tired; nor is it the presence of too much pressure. In fact, it’s the absence of any internal scaffolding that allows you to survive without feeling that pressure. As such, the common cure of “just rest” is the exact thing you shouldn’t do!

This is a pseudo-reflection on recent conversations with burnt out friends, as well as my own burnout, on the definition of (you guessed it)… burnout.

“Tired Ghosts” by Jean-Philippe Brunaud

It feels like every third conversation I have right now is with someone who is suffering from burnout. More specifically, they’re either explaining to me that they’re in desperate need of taking time off work to recover from being burnt out, or they’re already on burnout leave, and wondering whether their many months of “doing nothing” is actually working.

“How are you supposed to know?”, is a question I’ve asked others, myself. Because I have been one of these wearied people, managing to spend several years chronically burnt out but persisting onwards regardless. (All before eventually succumbing to this wicked condition that necessitated me taking significant time away from my work, of course!).

People, for reasons that seem to be intuitive on the outside, tend to treat burnout as a problem of depletion. As in: I’m doing too many projects, I have undertaken too many responsibilities, and am juggling too many obligations stacked too tightly together. The solution if this is the framing of the problem, predictably, is a simple subtraction: do less, rest more, withdraw from the noise, reclaim your time, etc etc.

And for some people, that might help, but for most, it’s a pathologically dangerous “cure”.

Because most people I hear talking about burnout don’t describe tiredness, although they are in fact tired. Indeed, in my case too, it wasn’t just a problem of overextension; it was so much more than that. It was also a feeling of being hollow inside, and utterly devoid of emotion or the ability to be excited (or even sad) about… anything. The idea that burnout is too-muchness is ironic, because most people who experience it, feel not-enoughness. Deeply, right into their bones.

Rest doesn’t help in this case; and in fact rest makes the burnout worse as I’ll explain later. Similarly, time off alone doesn’t restore this, because time off does nothing but remove the only structures often holding a burnout’s world together.

In fact, this form of burnout doesn’t look like stress or overwhelmedness at all. It looks like disorientation! And how the hell do you solve disorientation? What even is that?

Nearly every person I’ve talked to about this topic agrees: it’s an inability to feel the “normal” ups and downs, or to self-motivate (outside of an existential fear of failure), or to generate direction in your life. And most of all, quite cruelly, it’s a complete inability to tolerate unstructured time; that same time that is supposed to help you “rest” and “feel better”. That’s why people who are burnt out dread weekends, and can’t wait to get back to doing the thing they suspect is killing them with ferocious dedication. It’s also why people can perform brilliantly when the pressure is high but categorically fall apart the moment the pressure disappears.

The outer symptoms of burnout can often actually look familiar to exhaustion, which is why I think they’re so often confounded: fatigue, detachment, and numbness. But the interior reality is starkly different. Something deeper and more nefarious is happening underneath, that rest alone cannot reach.

More than a lack of sleep and a physical deprivation, it is not the body that is collapsing, but the internal architecture of meaning itself.

(Yes, I’m fully aware this sounds like over-intellectualized bullshit, but bear with me…)

To demonstrate this more clearly, I want to look at environments where this form of mental and/or physical collapse is not accidental but entirely inevitable. Even, curated by design. Because in the environments that push you towards burnout, you can easily see that the worst burnouts don’t happen because someone has done too much, but because someone’s life coherence has disappeared suddenly, and nothing else has yet taken its place.

High-Intensity Advanced Programs (HIAPs)

Burnouts become much easier to understand if you look at the environments which are designed to structurally guarantee they happen.

I want to talk about something called a “high-intensity advanced program” (HIAP), of which I have been involved in two throughout my life thus far— and hopefully never again.

HIAPs are where young (yes, I was once young), ambitious people are subjected to conditions that no normal human development model would ever (nor should ever!) endorse, except for one big reason: that these conditions reliably produce excellence.

(And yes, because they produce excellence, we tend to treat them as noble rather than pathological).

HIAPs are programs designed to create abnormal outcomes in otherwise mostly normal people. Think about the Navy SEALs pipeline, Juilliard’s conservatory system, Olympic sports development programs, elite academic laboratories, and the performance cultures of certain finance and tech firms.

I would include, in my personal exposure to HIAPs, one elite sports program and one sadistically brutal academic program, in which the worst outcomes among my peers went far beyond just burnout to tragic self-abuse and even death. (Indeed, I was catching up with a friend from said program yesterday which is why I am thinking about this particular topic right now…)

Although nearly every HIAP is different, the similarities are very real. A HIAP is a system that severely compresses time, meaning, identity, and performance into a single overwhelming channel that is used to effectively overwhelm a person’s nervous system into compliance.

The specifics differ across the programs of course, but the structure is always the same: total physical and mental immersion, engineered pressure, strict hierarchy, complete temporal distortion, emotional volatility through purposefully-created duress, and the tacit expectation that you will sacrifice everything and anything to achieving your stated program goals.

This sounds awful, yes. But let’s not forget that HIAPs are entered freely into! In my case, twice! Why? Because these environments give you an immediate and intoxicating sense of purpose, comradeship, structure, rigor, humiliation, transcendence, and collapse to extremes that you will never experience anywhere else, (and actually, often all in the same week).

In fact, the film Whiplash, one of my favorites, is perhaps the best mainstream depiction of a HIAP! It shows the defining features with nauseating accuracy: the obsessive mentor who alternates between godlike praise and annihilating cruelty; the student who enters with talent and is reshaped by pressure into something sharper, stranger, but also less whole; and the culture that treats nervous breakdowns as proof that the system is doing its job very well.

These systems are designed very specifically to do one thing: to extract capacity far beyond what a person’s internal life can sustain. Over extended periods of time. They reshape you so completely around external pressure that the “normal world” feels trivial, incoherent, or unbearably slow when you experience it (which you mostly don’t, because HIAPs separate you from friends, family, and all relational normality).

So what does this have to do with burnout?

Well, I’m talking about HIAPs not because they are the only environments that produce burnout (far from it!!) but because they are the clearest, most distilled example of the phenomenon. They allow us to see, very clearly, the stages a person moves through to go from “I’m fine!” to “wait, why can’t I feel feelings anymore?” and eventually “who the fuck am I, and how did I end up here?”.

It begins with the entry phase, which is almost always seductively framed. You are selected, scouted, invited in. Someone sees potential in you! You believe you are stepping into a prestigious opportunity that promises transformation, belonging, and the chance to become… exceptional. The door is heavy and the opportunity is exclusive. By all means, you want to enter that room.

Once inside, the environment reveals itself. Whatever dignity or professionalism a HIAP projects from the outside quickly dissolves into a structure built on engineered extremity. You work at hours the rest of the world associates with sleep. Deadlines multiply until time itself feels compressed. Feedback is abrasive, purposefully humiliating, and deliberately destabilising. Hierarchies are rigid and expectations escalate as soon as they are met. You learn to treat your own limits as non-existent, and everything can always be done better. The atmosphere is a carefully calibrated mixture of camaraderie and competition and a leadership structure that you meet with worship and fear.

Then comes the breakdown, a psychological and physical rupture so predictable it might as well be part of the curriculum. (In my case, it literally was). Everyone in a HIAP faces this, regardless of the genre. Sometimes it is a dramatic “external” moment in public; other times an “internal” collapse, or a sense that the line between striving and self-erasure have become synonymous. HIAPs are designed with the implicit assumption that people must crack open before they can be remade. The break is not a failure of the system; it is evidence that the system is working, because…

After the breakdown comes the transformation! This is the part that outsiders mistake for “becoming talented”. Your perception sharpens, your reflexes accelerate, and you begin to perform at levels you never thought possible. This stage, if you ever get here (many of your comrades will have fallen away by now), is like a drug.

You develop the ability to operate under conditions that should overwhelm you completely, but don’t. Or maybe they do, but you’re just used to being overwhelmed by now. You internalise the preferences and judgments of authority figures so completely that their voices become indistinguishable from your own inner monologue, which has all but disappeared. You learn to suppress fear, hunger, pain, distraction or any feelings that do not serve your goal. This so-called transformation is often sold to you as growth, and in many, many ways it is! But it also involves a profound reorganisation of your interior life, and a narrowing of your sense of self around nothing more than the demands of something that, ultimately, has very little to do with you.

Finally comes the aftermath; the phase almost no one talks about (although, bizarrely, many of the HIAP friends I have from the military do discuss this, which at least seems a little healthy).

You leave the HIAP environment, and what is shocking is that it’s even harder being on the outside than on the inside. Because suddenly, you’re not a special or chosen person. You’re a nobody. If you’re lucky, some people see the surface-level stuff: the skills, the discipline, and the excellence that you have left your HIAP with. But most people don’t think twice about the bone-bending journey you’ve been on that has become your entire existence. Moreover, what they do not see is what has been hollowed out so completely and utterly in the pursuit of something that does not even exist in the “real world”.

Afterwards, you realize that the HIAPs’ demands have become your nervous system’s default setting and you are so used to operating under extreme duress that anything remotely quiet feels destabilizing and identity threatening. Rest is not possible because it’s so heavily conflated with worthlessness, laziness and guilt. And whatever “normal life” is, feels impossibly slow and unrelatable. So you find yourself scouring around, trying to find intensity in whatever strange places you can, unable to relax into environments that don’t require your full survival-mode attention.

Me and my post-HIAP pals desperately trying to find shrapnels of intensity to feed on

You have, at this stage, gained the most niche and under-desired, but specialised, form of mastery, but you have done so at the cost of knowing how to be an actual person in a world that does not run on crises. Congratulations!

I suppose what makes HIAPs so important to this whole discussion around burnout is their clarity. They produce this sequence in every participant, across every domain, with an eerie reliability.

They show us clearly what happens when a person’s identity is shaped entirely by external demands. And then, what happens when those demands are suddenly removed. (Hint: you are left with a vast void of nothingness).

Indeed, it would be easy to dismiss HIAPs as rare, extreme environments that have nothing to do with ordinary life. (I’m fully aware that I’ve just argued the literal opposite of this). But anyone who has passed through one probably recognises the following familiarity: once you know what these systems look like, you begin to see similar structures everywhere, unfolding in far more common contexts, only with less glamour and less obvious intensity from the outside.

You see it in medicine, where junior doctors learn to function through exhaustion so profound that they have entire weeks disappearing into a blur. Or in finance and consulting, where analysts believe, until they can no longer function, that they are being groomed for leadership (they are not). Or in start-ups, where people confuse belonging with corporate martyrdom and treat chronic self-sacrifice as evidence of “vision”. Or in the professions built around war, displacement, and permanent instability: military rotations and jobs where adrenaline becomes a normal baseline.

But the pattern does not require an institution to create the same set of circumstances. Oh, not at all! It also emerges just as easily in families where children deal with erratic parents; in work environments where one person becomes the load-bearing team member; in relationships where self-worth is continually tied to “being useful”; in communities defined by relentless responsibility or unending crises, like poverty or war.

Once you start paying attention, the pattern is unmistakable! Because the same architecture repeats itself over and over and over, spilling from the edges into eventual LinkedIn status updates:

Immersion → pressure → hierarchy → identity-through-service → unspoken expectation that you will trade long-term wellbeing for short-term results.

These are not fringe cases. In fact, they are the backbone of entire industries and of large groups of people who have had a lot of shit to deal with in their lives! And the people inside these groups often don’t realise they’ve entered a HIAP-like logic until they’re too far in to easily leave. What looks from the outside like discipline or ambition is, from the inside, the slow narrowing of the self around a system that rewards your collapse up until the moment it discards you.

The aftermath, by the way, is fucking brutal. This is the real burnout:

The all-encompassing restlessness, the unease with stillness, the sense that normal life is somehow so insufficient that it’s disorienting. The difficulty of finding internal motivation when external pressure disappears. The need for extremity through routine obligations, accumulated responsibility, and intense cultural expectations to the point of overwhelm.

If this sounds more like PTSD than a professional burnout, well, I have bad news for you…

We can therefore see, with devastating transparency, that burnout is not the product of simple “overwork” in any conventional sense. It is the end-point of a far longer and more insidious process in which a person becomes structurally dependent on the extreme demands around them. And I could insert something long and detailed here about the increased extremity in our late-capitalist era, but I shan’t.

Over time, the external world (and its crises, pressures, hierarchies, urgencies, etc) becomes the source of a person’s purpose, momentum, and identity, while their internal world is slowly hollowed out until almost nothing remains. For as long as those external demands persist, whether created by an organization or just the environment they’re living in, a person with burnout can continue to function, and sometimes even with astonishing brilliance! Because the intensity gives their lives shape, and the pressure tells them who they are.

However, the crisis begins not when the demands increase, but counterintuitively when they recede.

When the program ends, or the mission changes, or the crisis subsides, or life finally offers them the calm they once claimed to want, they find that the very conditions that sustained their identity have… evaporated.

The real issue is not dealing with stress (these people are extremely good at this, remember!), but rather dealing with what happens when the world stops telling them who to be through pressure signals, and they suddenly discover that they have no internal source of meaning to fall back on. That there is nothing inside to replace what the outside once provided.

And this is the real definition: burnout is not a failure of stamina or discipline or resilience. Again, people who suffer from burnout are usually the people who have these qualities in excessive amounts! Burnout instead is when a person’s external scaffolding disappears and they realise there is no internal scaffolding left to hold their purpose in place.

Burnout is, at its core, the collapse of meaning: first the external, then the internal, until you are forced to confront an unbearable truth that without the pressure that once animated you, you no longer know how to exist.

(And yes, this is a rather grim realization…)

Why “Just Rest” Is Catastrophically Bad Advice

Ugh. I hate to say it, but the standard prescription for burnout, aka “rest, do nothing, take time off” is not just unhelpful for the kind of burnout I’m describing. It is actually often the thing that makes it worse. And not mildly worse, but… existentially worse.

Resting is, of course, a completely viable way to resolve the problem of tiredness. But as I’ve now more than alluded to, being burnt out is not about being tired, even if that is one of many symptoms. It is about the total deconstruction and annihilation of identity, meaning, purpose and sense of self. Watching a few re-runs of Sex and the City won’t do much to fix that (even if you love Carrie Bradshaw as much as I do!)

In fact, an extremely cruel irony is that the people who most urgently need an internal source of meaning are precisely the people for whom “doing nothing” is the most dangerous state possible. Rest is restorative only if your internal world is intact, by which I mean that you have a stable sense of self, an interior life that can catch your tired self, and a deep reservoir of meaning that doesn’t depend on external pressure to stay alive.

By the time I reached my burniest of burnouts, I certainly did not have any of this available to me. And neither do the people whom I have spoken to recently.

So for someone in existential burnout, rest is not rest. “Resting”, rather, is a death wish. It’s:

• The loss of much-needed structure,

• The collapse of orientation,

• The removal of external forces that created purpose,

• Sudden exposure to a vast and disorienting internal emptiness (!!)

• A terrifying realisation that nothing inside your dead, hollowed-out self rises to meet the absence of the thing you hate most, but cannot live without: pressure.

“Rest”, in this context, is a trap door. So if you are existentially burnt out, you should not even consider trying to follow this advice! Because this type of “help” is the equivalent of removing the structure that once supported your entire identity. Rest means stopping, and stopping means falling straight into the void that the HIAP-like environment was meticulously keeping at bay.

This is why people in this form of burnout, like I was once, dread weekends and why “time off” feels like some sort of biblical punishment. Without the external demands that once gave my life coherence, my nervous system quite literally had nothing to grip onto. Feeling calm was entirely dysregulating and I can only describe feeling stillness as feeling like I was being physically suffocated.

(But hey, at least I had published all those papers that nobody ever read and worked on those cool projects I wasn’t allowed to talk about 🫠)

Rebuilding Meaning

So what is the answer to burnout? Well, it should be clear that the answer is not rest, or at least not initially. Because the problem is not tiredness! Naturally, it follows that if the problem is a lack of internal meaning, the solution is…

To create internal meaning that is not reliant on some other wacky sense of extremity.

When I finally reached the miserable point where I decided to pull back on work, I did not begin with a strategy (despite the fact that creating strategies was, in fact, my work!).

There was no daily journaling (!), no routine, no “healing plan,” no discipline, no structure. Partly because I thought that all sounded lame, and partly because I was too burnt out to think about it. Most days I woke up with nothing more than a very specific kind of blankness that felt like some strange combination of emptiness and a temporary amputation of my insides.

✨ I dunno… maybe I should have done journaling or some influencer-adjacent activities✨

What I ended up doing, in the loosest possible sense, was whatever I felt like doing. And luckily, I’ve always been someone who has a long list of things I’ve wanted to do. I created long reading lists and worked my way through them. I moved to the countryside and did a ton of walking, in a circle, around the same lake, day after day, loop after loop. Sometimes I watched the same movie over and over. I got a piano, and a saxophone, and a ukelele. Eventually I decided to train as a sommelier, for twelve hours a day, for months on end. And then I went to culinary school and trained as a chef, before working in a 2* Michelin restaurant as a pastry chef. I also started writing a lot more. Clearly, much to everybody’s confusion, there was no plan.

Over time, doing these random things revealed what I actually liked doing, as opposed to what my HIAP-shaped life had trained me to like. These were hobbies that I did without any real intention, and this started to create structure and rhythm. Eventually, it just so happened that these are the ingredients of meaning.

But this was an after-the-fact realization, I must admit. My friends say pretty much the same thing about their ad-hoc processes: they shrug and mumble something about eventually looking forward to going back to work. For this reason, I really hesitate to discuss at all my (lack of) post-HIAP meaning-finding method, because it really was a “throw-shit-at-the-wall-until-I-don’t-feel-burnt-out” trial and error-ism.

But maybe that’s the point: There is no universal method for rebuilding meaning!

(Note: I have no idea if this is true, there may well be…)

Perhaps there is only the deeply personal process of discovering what begins to feel meaningful again, so that you are no longer a braindead zombie! And I suppose that the point of this essay, if there is any point at all, is the following:

If “just rest” isn’t working, it’s because clearly “just rest” is a dumb solution to an entirely different problem that you’re probably not trying to solve. Rest is for people who are only depleted. If you are burnt out, that is not you; your problems, my friend, run much deeper!

This is why I find it so strange that burnout is talked about as a “too much” problem: too many commitments, too many responsibilities, too many hours, too much pressure. That may all be true, but the lived experience of burnout often feels like the exact opposite. It doesn’t feel like being full of too much. It feels like being emptied out. Of too little.

Anyway, suffice to say after writing all of the above, if you are one of those millions of people who feels chronically burnt out, but completely unable to figure out how to resolve this problem because you clearly cannot just “take a chill pill” and “just resting” feels like existential demise; I hear you. So do many other people.

Try not to punch your well-meaning friend or parents when they tell you to take another vacation, which you know will only stress you out more. And, I dunno, try to find a therapist (or an alto saxophone and a glass of wine) instead!