The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving in the dark room, a tiny, rhythmic white pulse against a sea of unwritten code. My wrist aches from the awkward angle I’ve held it in for the last five hours, and my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with fine-grit sandpaper. A notification flashes on screen, a chipper little pop-up from HR: ‘Don’t Forget! Tomorrow’s Mandatory Mindfulness Hour at 11 AM! Find your center!’ I want to throw my laptop through the wall.

This is the paradox. The company that sends you guided meditation links is the same one that schedules a project launch for the day after a national holiday. The manager who praises your ‘hustle’ for answering emails at 10 PM is the one who will later forward a memo on the importance of work-life balance. They hand you a thimble and ask you to bail out an ocean liner, then suggest you should have a more positive attitude about being soaked.

For years, I bought into the personal responsibility narrative. I really did. I thought my exhaustion was a moral failing. I wasn’t meditating hard enough. I wasn’t time-blocking with enough discipline. I wasn’t drinking enough kale smoothies or practicing enough gratitude. I would read articles about optimizing my morning routine, convinced that if I could just wake up 15 minutes earlier, my entire life would fall into place. It’s an insidious little voice, the one that whispers, ‘Everyone else is handling it. Why can’t you?’ It’s the sound of the gear grinding itself to dust.

Then I started seeing the pattern. The brilliant, fiery developer who worked 75-hour weeks for a year, burned out, and was replaced by two eager juniors for 15% less than her salary. The marketing manager who cried in her car during her lunch break, quit due to ‘stress,’ and was immediately replaced by someone praised for their ‘fresh energy.’ The system wasn’t breaking; it was working exactly as designed.

This isn’t a theory. It’s a business model.

For a certain type of company, particularly in high-growth sectors, human beings are a rapidly depreciating asset. The model is brutally efficient: hire young, ambitious talent with minimal outside commitments. Pay them just enough to feel valued but not enough to feel comfortable. Dangle the carrot of a promotion that only 5% of them will ever get. Extract every ounce of creative and intellectual energy over a 25-month period. When they inevitably burn out, their productivity wanes, and they start asking inconvenient questions about equity or long-term strategy, you thank them for their service and show them the door. The hiring portal is already full of 35 fresh-faced replacements ready to do it all over again. It’s cheaper than retention. It’s cheaper than building a sustainable culture. It’s cheaper than treating people like people.

This feeling of being perpetually observed, of having to perform even when you’re just trying to survive, is exhausting. It’s like that feeling when you accidentally join a video call with your camera on. You thought you were just a name in a list, an invisible observer, and then suddenly you’re on screen. Your messy hair is noted, the unmade bed in your background is scrutinized. You’re performing. The modern workplace is a surprise camera-on moment that never ends. Every Slack status, every calendar block, every response time is a part of that performance.

I used to think this was purely a white-collar, knowledge-worker problem. A disease of privilege. I was wrong. I was talking to a guy, Avery J.D., a few weeks ago. His company removes graffiti. It’s hard, physical work with acrid chemicals and high-pressure water that can strip skin from bone if you’re not careful. You’d think his stress would be purely physical. But he told me his burnout was from the app. His boss instituted a new scheduling system. He’s not paid by the hour, but by the job. A job that’s supposed to take three hours might take nine if the paint is stubborn. He gets no extra pay. The app pings him at all hours-a new job at 9 PM on a Sunday, a client complaint at 6 AM on his day off. His company sends out a weekly ‘Safety Tip’ email. Last week’s topic? ‘The Importance of a Good Night’s Sleep.’ Avery just laughed. His sleep is interrupted by the very system that tells him to value it.

Avery’s job is to strip away layers to get to the original surface. He spends his days blasting away spray paint, felt-tip, and enamel to reveal the clean brick or concrete underneath. It’s a perfect, if painful, metaphor. We’re all trying to do that, aren’t we? Trying to blast away the layers of corporate jargon, unrealistic expectations, and performative wellness to get back to the person we are underneath. But the pressure required is immense, and the noise is deafening. We’re left shivering and raw.

I was complaining about this to a friend, who argued that you can’t just wait for the system to fix itself. You have to build your own systems for restoration. Not just coping mechanisms, but actual, restorative practices. It’s not about another app to meditate with or a yoga class squeezed between meetings. It’s about finding activities that are fundamentally well-designed, systems of engagement that respect your time and energy, rather than exploit them. Whether it’s a hobby with clear boundaries or even forms of leisure, the principle is finding something that isn’t trying to hack your attention for profit. It’s the difference between a doomscroll and a deliberate, engaging pastime like Gobephones, where the rules are clear and the system is designed for a specific type of engagement, not to bleed into every waking moment of your life. It’s about reclaiming agency in a world that wants to turn you into a resource.

Let’s say that again. The exhaustion that settles into your bones, the Sunday night dread, the inability to focus on a book you used to love-that is not a personal failure. It is the predictable result of a system that treats human energy as an infinite-yield commodity. It is the smoke alarm screaming that the building is on fire. The corporate response is to host a webinar on how to better tolerate smoke inhalation.

I once made a mistake on a major project budget. I miscalculated the cost of a software license by $45,000. My heart sank when I found it. I went to my boss, laid out the error, my plan to mitigate it, and prepared for the worst. She looked at me, and instead of yelling, she said, ‘Okay. That’s a system problem. Why did our process allow for a single point of human failure?’ She helped me fix the process, not just the error. She was a good manager, one of the few who saw people as part of a system to be improved, not a resource to be depleted. People like her are the exception, and they are usually fighting a lonely, uphill battle against the very business model that signs their paychecks.

So what’s the answer? I used to believe in fighting the system from within. Now, I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think the only winning move is not to play their game. Or, at least, to understand the rules so deeply that you can’t be fooled by the performative wellness gestures anymore. You can’t unsee the churn-and-burn model once you recognize it. You see the fresh-faced new hires and you feel a sense of pity, not envy. You know what the machine is designed to do to them.

Avery sent me a picture the other day. It was a brick wall, perfectly clean. He’d spent 15 hours on it. ‘Looks like new,’ his text said. A minute later, another text came through. ‘My shoulders are on fire. Got a ping for a new job in 25 minutes.’ The wall was clean, but the artist was already on his way to vandalize another one. The system never rests.