“How do you burnout? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
I’ve seen it dozens of times:
* The high performer who quietly implodes.
* The brilliant Chief of Staff who disappears mid-quarter, only to reappear without a fiancé.
* The HR partner who scales a transformation, only to vanish in the aftershock.
Most of the time, it doesn’t look like failure.
It looks like:
* Showing up to the town hall while your relationship dissolves.
* Leading a 9-figure integration while negotiating therapy appointments on Slack.
* Giving everything to work, and watching it forget your name 90 days later.
* Your boss calling you back early from a week and a half long vacation, and allowing the company to pay for your flight change for fear of losing your job.
* Being laid off because you put yourself first, and politely declined that extra assignment.
Millennials, especially the “oldest” ones in leadership now, are navigating a world of work that still hasn’t updated its operating system from the previous generation.
Burnout Is a Feature, Not a Bug
It’s not that we’re weak.
It’s that we were built for something different, and then asked to operate in legacy systems that never updated.
Millennials were the beta test of:
* “Do what you love” as a compensation strategy.
* A relentless focus on degrees and education as a means of advancement.
* 24/7 connection without 24/7 support.
* Hustle culture wrapped in mission statements.
* The rolling RIF, precarious employment, managers that still question short tenures.
Add in a cost-of-living crisis since 2021, record levels of student debt, political instability, climate dread, and the illusion of meritocracy, and you’ve got a workforce on the edge of collapse, disguised as “driven.”
So What Now?
In my work designing transformation programs, I’ve learned this:
“Organizations don’t burn people out maliciously. They do it efficiently.”
They reward urgency, but not recovery.
They fund OKRs, not boundaries.
They promote the person who stayed late, not the one who built a scalable process and logged off at 5pm.
If we want better, we have to design better.
“Burnout isn’t a crisis of energy. It’s a crisis of belief: about what work owes us, and what we owe ourselves.”
What I’m Advocating For (and Practicing Imperfectly)
* Design for recovery. Treat burnout risk like audit risk: predictable, preventable, and worth budgeting for.
* Replace “high performer” with “sustainable contributor.” Not everyone who burns the brightest should be your benchmark.
* Normalize pausing. In strategy, in product, in people ops. Speed is not always signal.
* Create space for repair. Build cultures that absorb exhaustion, not extract from it.
Closing Thought
Burnout doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It means you’ve finally woken up.
The next question is: What do you want to build now?
If this resonated, tell me how you’ve dealt with your own burnout, forward it to a teammate, a friend, or a fellow survivor of corporate America.
Coming Next Week: The Most Elegant Change Management Project I’ve Ever Led - The Estate of Lee Bouvier Radziwill
