Is Everyone Burned Out... Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
Have we become fragile?
Is Everyone Burned Out... or Are We Asking the Wrong Question?
Lately, my Substack feed has been filled with women promising to help me escape burnout.
Or overwhelm.
Or exhaustion.
At first, a little sarcasm crept in.
Really?
Because comparison was inevitable.
My house burned down. Everything I owned got packed into boxes, and starting over began. Then came the call that my daddy needed me, so packing up happened again.
There were years when the luxury of asking whether I was overwhelmed simply didn’t exist. Every morning simply arrived, and what had to be done next got figured out, one day at a time. Most of it happened alone.
Nobody was talking about emotional labor.
Nobody was telling me to regulate my nervous system.
Nobody was reminding me to protect my energy.
Life simply showed up every morning, and dealing with it was the only option on the table.
So, an admission: that first reaction was probably a little unfair.
A thought crept in: Have we become this fragile?
Then something important came back into focus.
Turns out, the comparison wasn’t fair to begin with. Two different lives, not one.
When my daughters were young, there were no smartphones demanding attention every few minutes. The job stayed at the office once the day ended. The evening news came on once a day, and when it was over, it was over. Nobody expected an answer to a text before the dinner dishes were even finished.
The entire world didn’t live in a pocket back then.
The women writing about burnout today carry theirs in exactly that pocket, every hour of every day.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re weaker.
It may simply mean they’re carrying a different kind of weight.
Heavy things got carried, back then.
They carry endless things.
Those are not the same burden.
Still, something keeps nagging with every new newsletter promising relief from overwhelm.
Almost all of them are trying to answer the same question.
How do I escape this?
It’s a fair question. If your life feels like it’s swallowing you whole, of course that’s the question you’re asking.
But somewhere along the way, the question changed.
The house was rebuilt.
The moves were behind.
My daughters grew up and built lives of their own.
Retirement arrived.
One morning, looking around a quiet apartment, it became clear there wasn’t a crisis waiting anymore.
There was just me.
And that’s when surviving turned out to have never really been the finish line.
The harder question wasn’t, How do I get through today?
The harder question was, Who am I now that today isn’t trying to kill me?
Nobody had prepared me for that conversation.
Decades got spent learning how to survive.
Simply becoming was the one skill nobody had taught.
That’s the conversation worth having now.
Not because burnout isn’t real.
It is.
Not because people aren’t overwhelmed.
They are.
But eventually, if we’re fortunate, life changes.
The children grow up.
The emergencies pass.
Retirement arrives.
One day the calendar that used to tell you exactly who you were suddenly goes quiet.
That’s when something else begins.
Not more surviving.
The slower business of remembering yourself.
Maybe that’s why burnout isn’t the subject that keeps pulling focus.
What comes after it is the real interest — the woman who has finally come up for air, looking around and wondering, Now what?
She’s no longer trying to escape her life.
She’s trying to reclaim it.
That’s a completely different conversation.
And maybe that’s why The Daily RE-Wire feels a little different.
Helping women survive the fire was never the goal.
The real interest is sitting with the women standing in the ashes, looking at the open space ahead of them, and realizing they get to decide what they build next.
How I learned to stop outsourcing my life.