Five years ago I wrote about the entrepreneur and burnout, about how I learned, slowly and with plenty of relapses, to stop. It was a piece about me and people like me, who started businesses when the phone still sat on the desk and the working day ended, more or less, when you left the office.
Things have changed since then. The generation that grew up with the internet in its pocket is now old enough to lead teams, create content, freelance or launch its own startup. And it seems more tired than we were at the same age. Not lazier, as people sometimes say with a certain smugness. More tired. It is worth asking why.
The office that never closes
For a young employee in 2022, the office is no longer a place. It is a phone. Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, email, the team chat, the client chat, the “urgent only” group that somehow lights up every evening. Each notification is small. The trouble is there are hundreds of them, at any hour.
A message sent at 11 p.m. saying “not urgent, have a look tomorrow” is rarely read tomorrow. It is read at 11:01, and your brain starts working on it. The sender means no harm. But taken together, these messages carry an unwritten rule: you are always available.
Working from home erased the boundaries
In 2020, when the pandemic sent us all home, I wrote that working from home was becoming the norm and that we would gain some things and lose others. Two years on, I think I underestimated what we would lose: boundaries. With no commute and no office door to close, the working day spills into the evening, and the laptop on the kitchen table never really shuts.
I am not against remote or hybrid work. I work with teams in several countries, and from Limassol, Cyprus, where I have lived since 2018, remote collaboration is simply normal. But flexibility comes with an obligation: you have to build for yourself the boundaries a fixed schedule used to give you. Nobody taught most young people how, because those of us who are older never needed to learn it.
Constant comparison and hustle culture
There is something else my generation did not have: a permanent shop window into other people’s lives. Open Instagram or LinkedIn and you see university classmates who just closed a funding round, creators who “made their first million at 24”, people who wake up at 5 a.m., work out, meditate and ship a product before breakfast.
Hustle culture has turned working yourself into the ground into an aesthetic. It is seductive, especially at 25. But it is a shop window, not an X-ray. Nobody posts the sleepless nights, the anxiety before a pitch or the month with zero sales. When you compare your backstage to someone else’s highlight reel, you lose every time.
Creators: when passion becomes a machine
Two years ago I wrote enthusiastically about the creator economy, and I still mean it. The fact that anyone can be their own TV channel is remarkable. But as a business advisor to Devinoso, an affiliate network for influencers, I also see the other side: the algorithm never takes a holiday. Stop posting and your reach drops. Reach drops and income follows. And for many creators, they are the product: you cannot delegate your own face.
Creator burnout is something well-known creators have been talking about openly for a few years now. The lesson for anyone who lives off an audience is to build a system, not just a stream of posts: a content calendar, material prepared in advance, people who help, more than one source of income, so that a week off does not mean a collapse.
Doomscrolling: pandemic, war, inflation
The last two and a half years have brought a new source of exhaustion: the news. First the pandemic, with its daily case counts. Then, since February, the war next door in Ukraine. Now inflation and energy bills. We all learned a new word, doomscrolling: compulsively scrolling through bad news, usually at night, in bed, with the phone inches from your face.
Wanting to stay informed is natural. But reading the same story in ten versions does not make you better informed, it makes you more anxious. Having run Stiri de Bine (a Romanian good-news website) for years, I know how much the way we consume information shapes our mood.
The Great Resignation and “quiet quitting”
In the United States, people have been talking since 2021 about the “Great Resignation”: the wave of workers who left their jobs after the pandemic, looking for something better or simply less draining. This summer, a new phrase went viral on TikTok: “quiet quitting”. You do not resign, you just do exactly what your job description says and nothing more.
The debate is still going on and I do not think it has a simple answer. Some see laziness, others a healthy reaction to years of unspoken expectations. I read it as a signal: when lots of people start protecting their energy by pulling back, the problem is not only theirs. It is also about how we organise work.
What you can do if you are the one running on empty
I am not a doctor and I do not want to give medical advice. I can only share what works for me and what I see helping the people around me:
- Clear boundaries. A time after which you stop reading work messages. Work notifications off in the evening and at weekends. Most “emergencies” can wait until morning.
- Real offline time. A few hours a week without your phone. Mine is diving: underwater there is no signal, and you cannot think about anything except your breathing.
- Regular sport. Tennis and skiing clear my head better than any productivity app.
- Sleep is non-negotiable. Your phone does not belong in bed.
- Real friends. People you share a table with, not just reactions. Since moving to Cyprus, my friends in Romania are the one thing I genuinely miss, which is why I visit them often.
- Professional help. If the tiredness does not go away after rest, if you have been sleeping badly for weeks or nothing brings you joy anymore, talk to a doctor or a psychologist. It is a normal and brave thing to do, not a weakness.
The good news is that mental health is discussed far more openly today than ten years ago. The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon in its new international classification of diseases, which came into force at the start of this year.
What managers and founders can do
Burnout is not only an individual problem. If you have a team, part of the responsibility is yours. A few simple things I also recommend to the startups I advise:
- A realistic workload. You cannot ask for five “top” priorities in the same week. If everything is urgent, nothing is.
- Clarity. A lot of exhaustion comes from ambiguity: what is expected of me, by when, who decides. One clear goal drains less energy than ten vague messages.
- No 24/7 expectations. Say explicitly that nobody has to reply in the evening or at weekends. And use scheduled send.
- Lead by example. If the founder sends emails at 2 a.m., the team gets the message, whatever the handbook says. Take your holiday and actually be on holiday.
The online generation is not weaker
I often hear that young people today “can’t take the pressure”. I do not believe it. I think they are coping with pressures we never had: constant connection, constant comparison, constant bad news. They do not need lectures about how hard things were in our day. They need boundaries, good examples and leaders who do not confuse availability with performance.
How do you protect yourself from this kind of exhaustion? And if you run a team, what have you changed since the pandemic so that people are not working every evening and every weekend?