Head Down at Half Past Three
At 3:36 in the afternoon I put my head on the desk, crossed my arms over it, and didn’t move. For the better part of half an hour. I didn’t cry, though it was close.
Call it burnout, call it a quarter-life crisis—whatever the armchair diagnosticians need to call it—I simply couldn’t go on. Done. Finished. Finito.
The preceding days I’d spent thinking about what I was actually spending my days on, which is always a bad sign. That kind of recursion doesn’t take you anywhere useful. At some point I started talking to myself, then shouting at the pile of tasks in front of me, kicking it, hurling abuse at it—and the pile kept growing. More work, less time. I was drowning in things I couldn’t even name clearly.
Here’s the thing about burnout: I used to have no patience for it. You’d hear colleagues or friends describe themselves collapsing under the weight of everything and I’d think: take a week off. You’ve overworked yourself a little. Pull it together and stop being so soft. I was that person. I understand now why that person is an asshole.
Everyone wanted something from me. Answers. Copy. Press releases. Designs. Videos. Photos. Decisions. Corrections. My actual presence, in person, now. It didn’t matter how much I typed into this machine, how many calls I made, how many hours I logged—it didn’t stop. There were also the technical problems, the legal problems, the human problems, and underneath all of it this flat, constant hatred for everything.
I wanted to scream "fuck all of you"—but I couldn’t, because I’d done this to myself. I’d wanted all of this, in some vague optimistic way. The other people couldn’t help that I’d piled everything on. So I kept going, and for every task I crossed off, three more appeared. Four. Five. I was sinking into a swamp I’d built myself.
The plan was to find some balance. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Parties, drinks, drugs, friends—some kind of human warmth to make the weight bearable. But none of it worked. No matter how hard I threw myself into a night out, no matter how much fun I managed to have, the moment I sat back down at the screen and saw the notifications stacked up in their glowing red numbers, I wanted to drive my head straight through the monitor.
I knew it had gotten bad when I started twitching—this compulsive rocking, upper body, back and forth, like something you’d see in a documentary about people who’ve been alone too long. And the constant looping question: what is any of this even for? Does it end? Does it get better? Have I permanently broken my appetite for work I used to love, or is this just a temporary frying of the circuits?
At 3:36 in the afternoon I put my head on the desk, crossed my arms over it, and stayed there. I wanted nothing more than for all of it to collapse. This laptop has eaten my soul. I wanted out—Sweden, England, some island in the Pacific where no one has my email address. Anywhere that isn’t in front of this screen.
I haven’t found a solution. The books and the conversations with friends can’t make the decisions for me—what to cut, what to change, how to restructure things without blowing everything up or just feeding myself slowly into the machine. Probably the end of the year is as good a moment as any to slow down. Take real time off. Exercise—do that at all, as a starting point. Figure out what’s broken, whether it’s me or the situation or both. Stop putting my head on the desk. That’s something, at least.