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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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The more you see yourself as productive, i.e., someone who accomplishes your desires, the more "you" becomes an act of capturing outcomes.
This is because actions for purpose become utility, and utility is a trait of objects: to pride yourself on your "use" ahead of your "self" is to subjugate your value to production.
Similarly, equating your identity with desire (and its fulfillment) is to relate to all things as gratification or blockage; reductionist othering converts everything into objects and acts.
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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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Believing in an institution empowers it, making it more credible. As you turn its edicts into dictates, you further enable its authority.
A reversal occurs: for the sake of our goals, we are captured by the thing we created, aligning ourselves under it, renouncing our agency to shape it, and proclaiming it should shape all.
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We often switch the game without changing our motivation.
Example: We drink until we are out of control, allowing us to lose inhibition and seek attention. We then get sober to stay in power. Feeling empowered, we start to moralize.
The new game comes with new power and accolades from society, from which we can get more attention.
Are we better off? Absolutely.
Have we addressed the primal driver? No.
What happens next? We find yet another game.
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Humans can now only relate to others as objects, as commodities: the human relation is now a product-driven object-obsessed interaction. Worse, how you relate to others is how you relate to yourself.
The seduction is easy: I love working with tools whose smooth functioning moves into a frictionless joy of goal achievement. I am a product fetishist, producing myself as a proximate object for consumption.
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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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It takes pain over time to become courageous. Mostly we don’t want to change; we want relief.Yet, there is a threshold of despair from which cowardice costs too much.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes to react until you are spontaneous: you courageously avoid long-term pain and temporary relief.
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There was a time (before cell phones) when you could sit for 10 minutes doing nothing. Today we convert all time to use: your commute is time to learn, your evening is consuming entertainment to enable communal discourse tomorrow, and your vacation doubles as social media production.
Similarly, meditating (formally doing nothing) is now a practice requiring discipline: your 10 minutes is sanctioned work for mental health, requiring apps and guides to mitigate your drive to spring into action consuming or producing.
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The compulsion to achieve goals is a self-satisfaction loop.
Achievement is tangible agency and verifiable proof that your will is manifesting change in the world. And yet, the infatuation with achievement can replace the reason to achieve.
Once we acquiesce to the “utilitarian treadmill” we create measurable tasks for more manageable, rapid fulfillment, displacing and neglecting the more long-term emotional or relational goals that would make a truly satisfying life.
(Concepts: Goodhart’s law + reverse hedonic treadmill + memento mori)
