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“Burned-out” is a linguistic reference to rockets.
Today burnout implies you have a weakness: a stressed gasket or aorta, an o-ring or an esophageal sphincter that can’t handle the pressure. Your psychological ‘deficiency’ manifests as physiological incapacity: you can no longer keep up.
More accurately, burnout is from overuse: a system burns you as an expenditure to test limits.
In this framing, you are a sacrifice on a pyre of productivity: a captive burned to appease monstrous gods.
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Staying silent and non-reactive will never allow you to shine, challenge yourself, or try something new.
Without risk, you will never be able to feel good or accomplished because not only will no one else know what you’re capable of, but neither will you.
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Our reasoning is sound: given this then that. But if our given assumption is not real then a myth has been propagated, and our prediction will be wrong.
Examples: Does congress serve the people? Do jobs really want talented hard workers? In both cases the answer is no, which should change your predictive calculus.
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You can have a freebie or two: coast for a day or two.
When it turns into a month or two, your momentum is lost, and you become stuck.
Laying fallow is not bad; it just takes an exponential effort to regain the speed and traction you had before: more discipline to regain broken trust.
Thought: there should be a sweet-spot grid on return vs. discipline/procrastination.
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Doubling back on terrain surprises: the new perspective is unnerving by being almost familiar.
It produces anxiety because of what we missed. Retreading the same ground (only to learn new lessons) confounds linear progress inf favor of a cyclic squiggle.
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As you strike out for the far shore, partner by your side, rowing through the waves you will encounter difficulty.
When your partner jumps out, taking their oar with them because they are tired of the journey, you can keep rowing, but it will just spin you around in a lopsided parody of progress.
At this point, you need to consider: do you go on alone (becoming your own partner), wait for your partner to rejoin you (conserve your energy), or jump in the water and swim around (say fuck it.)
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Society 1: In a mad scramble to survive, every action must produce results, so any experimentation is out of desperation. If your risk pays off, you realize your lucky gains, consolidate, and undercut any competitors.
Society 2: With a social safety net, your risk is mitigated. Knowledge (gleaned through failure) becomes a practice of re-application, collaboration is commonplace, and overall success flourishes.
Fear of failure in an individualistic society engenders competition and sabotage. Support societies encourage communal progress rather than taking out your opponent.
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Winning looks like an event, but it is a process. Winners win and must keep on winning to remain winners.
The horizon of achievement will always stretch beyond, deferring "when" into infinity.
You can always choose now and win a different game.
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Not paying attention means you have focused internally, retreating from the world.
Living in your head means you miss the world and enriching details. That is, you miss out on life for a fantasy.
Of course, the external world may be a nightmare, and fantasy is your reprieve, or perhaps your internal ruminations are terrible, and you avoid your mind to survive. But the only way out of regretting a life of escapism is to begin anew in the present.
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Baron Munchausen once pulled himself and his horse out of a swamp by pulling upward on his own hair.
While this fantastical feat is humorous because it is impossible in reality, bootstrapping is precisely what we must do in the spiritual realm: lift ourselves through moxy and determination alone.
(idea from Slavoj Žižek)
