You're not burning out because you're tired

This post was co-written with Claude.

I burned out badly a few years ago. I've since had several conversations with people in the EA community who are heading toward burnout themselves, and I noticed they were sometimes thinking about it in ways that I worry wouldn't help them. So I want to share what I think is actually going on, and what I wish someone had told me earlier.

A theory of burnout

There are good models of the mechanism of burnout already out there. Anna Salamon has written about willpower as a kind of internal currency: your conscious planner "earns" trust with your deeper, more visceral processes by choosing actions that nourish them, and goes "credibility-broke" when it spends that trust without replenishing it. Cate Hall describes something similar with her metaphor of the elephant and the rider: the rider promises the elephant rewards in exchange for effort, and burnout is what happens when those promises are broken too many times.

I usually explain this in terms of an energy imbalance: you're putting more into your work than you're getting back. Not just in terms of rest, but in terms of meaning, autonomy, connection, a sense of accomplishment, positive feedback. All the things that make demanding work feel nourishing rather than draining. Someone can routinely work 70-hour weeks and not burn out, because the work feeds them. And someone can work 35 hours and slowly bleed out, because it doesn't.

I think all of these models capture something real. But I want to focus on a piece that I think gets less attention: the question of why people keep overriding their instincts, spend down trust, and keep starving their elephant. Because running an energy deficit alone usually isn't enough for serious burnout. When the balance is off, you feel bad. You start thinking this job sucks. And normally, when people feel that way, they try to fix things, and if they can't, they leave. They find a different role, a different organisation, a different path. The system self-corrects.

Why doesn’t it for some? Put more sharply: why do some people keep banging their head against the wall? And put more mundanely: why don’t they quit their job?

Why EA culture builds effective cages

For some people, the inability to leave is practical: they can't afford to job-search, or they're in a country where options are limited, or they have dependents. But in the EA community, I think the cage is more often built from identity and psychological schemas.

There are a few obvious memes in EA culture that contribute to this:

• Heroic responsibility tells you that if you can see the problem, it's yours to solve. Do not count on other people to do their part. That’s for those who LARP impact.
• Impact-maximization thinking tells you that the expected value of staying is enormous, so the personal cost is justified.

There are often also more subtle messages:

• The community whispers to you that hardcoreness is a virtue, and you don’t want to be like those other people who don’t take the stakes seriously.
• Your boss and colleagues tell you that you’re crucial to the mission. “You’ve done so much!” or “What would we be doing without you!?” What you hear is that leaving would be at best catastrophic, and at worst a betrayal and dereliction of duty. 

But I think at the bottom there are two more fundamental things going on: Like, why believe all that stuff in the first place to the point where you grind yourself into the ground?

The obvious one is that this is your tribe after all. Many such cases. And especially if you find this community when you’re still young, and yes, impressionable, it will leave a mark. I certainly resonate with a version of this and over-identified with my first EA organization because they were the first people who really believed in me.

The more subtle one is that to enable this pattern of effective self-abuse you need an overly strong intellectual “executive module” that keeps starving important parts of you that are crying out in pain. And EA, in fact, consistently rewards the head above the heart. Your feelings are not to be trusted because they did not evolve to deal with large numbers. Status is allocated in proportion to the cleverness of your arguments, not how well attuned to your feelings you are. When making career decisions, the thing to do is writing a google doc or making a spreadsheet and engaging in lots of verbal arguments with people. It’s not about making space to listen to your inner voice.

For many EAs, this is probably a story that didn’t begin with their involvement in the community but long predates it: you have always been rewarded for being the smart one or the one who can overcome all. And so you have learned that this is what’s worth paying attention to; not your feelings, not your felt sense of what’s right. You kind of “know” and upvoted that pain is not the unit of effort. Personal fit gets a section in your career doc or whatever. But it takes some other kind of understanding and self-integrity to actually listen to what’s going on inside of you, and act on it.

And look, these beliefs and attitudes aren't necessarily crazy. In some ways, they are what makes EA so special. But they can combine into a structure that makes it psychologically impossible to leave a situation that is slowly destroying you. You might tell yourself you'll leave if things don't improve, but then they improve a little, and you stay. They get worse again. They improve a little. Two years pass. You're still there. And, oh boy, your executive module has probably built up a ton of credit, ever since it started paying off to use your head at the expense of everything else.

But when the rewards stay in the distance, when the sacrifice doesn't lead to the promised payoff, the deeper parts eventually revolt. They stop cooperating. The credit finally runs out.

Here’s what this looked like for me.

What it actually felt like

In my case, I was in a state of friction for roughly two years. I kept trying to improve things. Things got a bit better, then worse, then a bit better, then worse. I never reached the point where I could honestly say it was good, but I also never quite hit the threshold where leaving felt clearly right.

And then one day I came into the office, tried to start working, and simply could not. The experience was like the strings of a puppet being cut, some connection between will and action had been severed. I could form the intention to work, but nothing happened. No movement. No engagement. Just stillness.

It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. Looking back, I think it's exactly what you'd expect from the models above. The deeper parts of me had been overridden for long enough, with too little reward, and they simply stopped following instructions.

What I want to push back on

When people talk about preventing or recovering from burnout, the advice often sounds like this: Meditate more. Take more holidays. Set better boundaries at work. Exercise.

None of this is wrong, exactly. But it misses the point. If you were the kind of person who could just take more holidays, you probably wouldn't be burning out in the first place. There's a reason you're not resting. There's a reason you're not taking the pain seriously enough to make drastic changes like quitting. That reason is the thing worth paying attention to.

I'm not saying surface-level fixes are useless. But if you treat burnout as a rest deficit, you'll keep recharging just enough to go back into the same situation that drained you. The deeper work is in examining why you can't walk away, and whether the relationship you have to your work, and to this community and ideology more broadly, is healthy.

This isn't something you can change in a day or a week. It may require working with a coach, a therapist, or a mentor; someone who can help you see the patterns you're embedded in. It involves a certain kind of internal transformation, a kind of self-integrity where you stop overriding the parts of yourself that are in pain.

What I'd encourage if you're in the grey zone

If you're in that in-between state where you’re not fully burned out, but bleeding, here are some questions and suggestions I'd offer:

• Ask yourself honestly whether leaving is a realistic option for you. Not whether you will leave, but whether you could. If you have a deep sense that leaving would be almost impossible, that's a danger signal. It means you've chained yourself to something that keeps hurting you.
• Ask yourself what stops you from leaving, and whether those reasons are healthy. Maybe they are. But maybe the reasons are more about identity, “just one more week, bro”, or a distorted sense of indispensability. Be honest with yourself about which it is. Warning: this is hard.
• If you have the sense that leaving would be really bad for your organization, ask the people above you to make a contingency plan. Even if you’re the CEO, there is a board above you whose responsibility it is to figure out what would happen if you left, or got run over by a bus. Ask them to come up with a plan. Just having that conversation can ease the burden of responsibility. It makes the possibility real and survivable, rather than catastrophic.
• Seek outside help. Find a coach or therapist you can talk to about your relationship to work, to impact, to this whole EA thing. For what it's worth, I had a therapeutic relationship during my burnout period. It didn't prevent me from burning out, but it still helped a bit, and if I’d been in less of a cage, maybe it could have prevented the worst.
• Speak openly about what you're experiencing. Tell the people around you that you're struggling. This is harder than it sounds in a community that valorizes sacrifice and grit, but it's important.
• Figure out what you're missing and ask for it. What do you need from your work to feel nourished? Autonomy? Positive feedback? A sense of completion? More social connection? Everyone is different here, and you'll learn over time what you need. But you have to actually ask for it and make it happen, rather than assuming the mission will eventually reward you.

What recovery actually looked like

People sometimes ask what I did to recover, expecting a story about travel, deep reflection, or some transformative practice. The truth is less inspiring. When I was fully burned out, my planning horizon shrank to about a week. When my partner asked me in the morning to take down the bins and do the dishes by the end of the day, it felt like a big fucking deal. So what did I actually do? I played chess compulsively. I watched YouTube videos. I played video games. I tried to while away the days. That was all that was available to me. I wish I could say I used the time wisely, but the whole point of burnout is that your capacity for intentional action has collapsed.

What probably helped was having a support system: a partner, friends, financial security. You can't easily build that from the bottom of a hole. So maybe the most practical advice I can give is: build it now while you can.

What I learned, and didn't learn

I also get asked what I learned from the experience, and I somehow have the sense that people expect an intellectual answer: a framework, a set of principles, a rational update. I don't really have one. What changed wasn't my beliefs about burnout necessarily (though I do have a better intellectual understanding now); it was something more embodied. I have visceral boundaries now around work that I don't enjoy. I shy away instinctively from over-identifying with organizational success. I notice earlier when I'm overriding my own signals.

This isn't a rational update I made in light of evidence. It's an embodied boundary that formed as a result of the scars I now carry. Cate Hall writes about how, after burning out at her law firm, she couldn't go near anything that resembled legal work for a decade. I recognize that pattern. The elephant doesn't forget.

I'm not sure whether this kind of transformation can happen without the scarring. I hope it can: maybe through coaching, through contemplative practice, through honest self-examination. But I suspect the reason burnout is so hard to prevent is precisely because the changes it demands are not intellectual. They require a different relationship to yourself, one where you actually listen to the parts of you that are suffering, rather than explaining to them why their suffering is worth it.