Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.

Burnout is insidious, robbing you of not just your ability to be active in a fun, enjoyable manner but even the energy you need to function at all, if it gets bad enough. Most people’s experience with it tends to stick in the realms of experiencing heavy stress and a profound lack of a desire to do things (it is much akin to depression in this way), but you still hear stories of worse versions of it. The most extreme cases probably show up in stories about athletes who have pushed themselves to do too much, ignoring their exhaustion and pushing themselves to continue performing until the collective toll of this renders their bodies unable to move for a period of time. Or causes them various physical maladies (it’s difficult to find good examples of this since most of it gets chalked up to “overworked” and solved via prescribed rest, but there’s an emotional undertone to a lot of the accounts I found that went largely unaddressed). Ultimately, regardless of the why or the how, the human body and mind combo was not meant to continuously operate under this kind of stress for long periods of time. It wears away your body’s ability to recover, can shorten your life, and leaves you emotionally drained in a way that can scar permanently. Recovery from intense burnout, the kind that happens over the course of a decade of constant struggle, can take months or even years, depending on how long it went and how worn out the person already was when it started. Taking less time to rest and recover will only delay things getting worse since once you’ve worn yourself out to that point, you will never be able to hold it off as long again.

Mine is about seven years old. I came into that off a lifetime of effort and service in my childhood and college years, no real getaways, and two years (out of three) of a horrible job experience. Changing jobs and dealing with some personal issues I’d hidden away as a kid helped me recover from that, but it only took another two years to get deep in the shit again and the past seven years since have seen it gradually grow worse and worse until I’ve reached the point where I am now: a full nine days spent away from work–including the best birthday I’ve had in decades (maybe even my whole life) and so much sleep that I finally hit a point of needing to stay up super late just because I was too well-rested from inactivity and proper sleep to fall asleep at the end of the day–was enough to get me back into my normal work schedule for two and a half weeks before I started to collapse under the weight of it. It certainly didn’t help that my free time has become split between actual relaxation and the fun-but-stressful challenges of Final Fantasy 14 (for example, my Monday, Wednesday, and random other nights are filled with me grinding out my daily tasks around the difficult, repetitive challenges of Ultimate and Savage raids, or some other kind of grindy content which, as I said, is fun but still wearying). I should probably find a way to cut back on some of this stuff, but I really don’t want to. I want to have fun and do things that I enjoy and find challenges to overcome that bring me joy. But that’s difficult to manage around a ten-hours a day workweek.

It would be a different matter if it was purely a desk job like I used to have, but now my work requires intermittent effort, intermittent heavy labor, and the whole environment has shifted from the typical frustrations and comforts of a familiar work environment to one where I’m constantly looking over my shoulder for coworkers who are, for reasons I still can’t fathom, trying to cause me trouble because they don’t think I’m working enough and I can no longer trust my boss to stand up against people who say that kind of thing about me. This is as toxic a work environment as I’ve ever experienced, but it’s one that is intermingled with work I like to do and am good at, people I like, and the ability to achieve financial stability at the cost of ten additional hours of my life per week. It is difficult to convince myself to commit to leaving since I’m not sure I can even find a job that will provide me with the same stability and financial security for as much (but preferably less) of my time, let alone any of that other stuff. I mean, even with all this toxic stuff going on, I am not worried that I’ll be fired since the amount of fucking up it takes to lose your job here is enormous and typically involves illegal actions of some kind or five years of constant incompetence. All it has really cost me is the leeway I once had that made it possible to maintain this amount of work for this long a time (I’ve been doing 50 hours a week since mid 2021). The ability to rest a bit more when I needed it. All the relaxation and trust I’d built with my coworkers over the last almost-nine years. My ability to feel comfortable and relaxed in the place I spend 50 hours a week. Small things. Inconsequential things. Surely none of that is related to how much worse my burnout has gotten in the last seven months.

So today (a week before this gets posted) I rest. I don’t have any other choice if I’m going to respect the boundaries I can see in myself more clearly than ever before. If I am going to be able to come back into my office for another two and a half weeks of this crap (or more, perhaps, if nothing awful happens in my life). If I want to avoid a weekend of doing nothing, lethargy, and canceled D&D sessions. I am going to rest, I am going to sleep, and I am going to think about the future and what I can do about it without continuing to sacrifice the present.