It’s not just burnout

“I feel numb, all the time.” 

The words came out of my client softly, barely more than a whisper. But to me—a coach and facilitator who spends her days helping people build healthier relationships to their careers and with their colleagues—they sounded like a fire alarm going off.

The more we talked, the clearer it became: they hadn’t just hit a rough patch. They were in a pit—a hole that had been slowly deepening under their feet for years, even when things looked good on the surface. Even when they were getting promotions and glowing performance reviews and a series of shiny, well-paid job titles in big tech. 

They’re not alone. It seems like every time I talk to people in design and product orgs lately—in workshops and group programs, in research interviews and 1:1 coaching sessions—I hear something similar from at least one person. They’re exhausted and overwhelmed. They don’t know why they keep crying. They’re snapping at colleagues, or spewing negativity in meetings, or struggling to get out of bed in the mornings.  

Conventional wisdom would label these folks as burned out—suffering from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” as the World Health Organization puts it. 

And there are a whole lot of them. This spring, Lenny’s Newsletter surveyed some 8,200 tech workers about their current sentiments toward work—and nearly half reported significant feelings of burnout. For 1 in 5, it’s particularly dire: they labeled themselves “very” or “completely” burned out. 

And the most burned out of all respondents? Designers and researchers—the people I work with most often. 

Oof. 

There are a thousand pieces of advice out there about how to address burnout, but most of them boil down to the same things: Practice mindfulness. Rest. Get exercise. Take time off. Find a hobby. Turn off Slack notifications. Stop checking email at night. 

These aren’t bad pieces of advice—for burnout, or for being a human in general. And I think there was a time when, if you could afford to follow them, they worked. Take a vacation, do some yoga, and boom: you’re back in action. 

They’re not working right now. 

I’ve heard from more than a few people in the past year who were so depleted by their jobs that they were hospitalized—with mystery symptoms, with new chronic conditions, with mental health crises. All of them had self-care practices. All of them took vacations. In fact, most of them weren’t even working wild hours. 

Work is breaking them anyway. 

Some would say this is a matter of resilience: these people just need more grit. But the truth is, everyone I know has already tried that. They’ve told themselves to buck up. They’ve blamed themselves for “letting” work stress get to them. They’ve pushed through more times than they can count. 

But when half your field says it’s burned out, it’s disingenuous at best—and malicious at worst—to call for more personal fortitude. Instead, we need to be honest about where all this burnout is really coming from—and what we can, and can’t, do about it. 

This isn’t the first time burnout is in the zeitgeist. Just a couple years ago, during the long slog of the worst pandemic days, it was everywhere. But those were still the ZIRP years, and companies at least paid lip service and threw money at the problem. What were a few mental health days or self-care workshops if it kept people from quitting? 

The vibe has shifted. Shareholder demands and AI hype keep the layoffs coming. Job postings are more aggressive: companies want “relentless” and “hardcore,” not “thoughtful” or “inclusive.” The workday has become infinite. 

This is the context for today’s burnout: not just overwork, or poor boundaries, or perfectionism or people-pleasing or impostor syndrome. But a social contract between employers and employees that’s being gleefully destroyed, right in front of us.

It’s the extractive forces of unchecked capitalism—forces that are often ignored or invisible in conversations about burnout. But in truth, those harms are the underlying drivers of that burnout—and we need to be talking about them a whole lot more. 

The first one is moral injury: the damage that comes from participating in—or failing to stop—behaviors that violate our values or ethics. It’s the pain borne of having a conscience, but not acting on it. The concept was first applied to veterans who returned from war traumatized not just by what they’d seen, but also what they did. It’s also been used to describe the experiences of healthcare workers during the worst of the pandemic, when hospitals were overloaded and understaffed, and they had to sacrifice their standard of care. 

The moral injury of working in tech may be less visceral than that of combat veterans and doctors doing triage, but it’s no less real. Designers are expected to build features that manipulate users, that steal and sell their data, that get them hooked on quick dopamine hits. They’re asked to shove AI into literally everything—even if it results in confusion or misinformation. And they’re told that all of this is what it takes to be “business-minded.” 

Then, there’s purposelessness. This sets in when designers and other UXers feel disconnected from the reasons they got into the field in the first place. For some, it was to create something useful in the world—to make people’s lives better or easier. For others, it was the desire to create something beautiful—to make the world more aesthetic, or a little more fun. When people talk about “passion” for design, these are the things they’ll often describe—not goosing engagement metrics or rushing to build features no one asked for or cares about. Not churning out half-baked UIs on some executive’s whim.

Deriving all your meaning and purpose from your job is usually unhealthy (more on that later). But lack of purpose is a drain—it turns every workday into a slog. In fact, research says that “making progress on meaningful work” is the single most important factor in how we feel on the job. And when purpose disappears, people often experience what I think of as a type of ambiguous loss—a form of grief that can be disorienting, because it lacks closure or certainty. On the surface, nothing has changed: You have the same title. You’re still doing the same kind of tasks. 

But the job you cared about is gone.   

Then there’s the water we’re all swimming in: the rising authoritarianism, the stripping of human rights, the climate change-fueled disasters, the bombings and tariffs and ICE raids and housing crises. 

Not everyone in design thinks the current American regime is bad, I suppose. (And I recognize you might be reading this from another country, facing its own problems.) But the people I tend to work with—people who got into UX or product work because they cared about the human beings they were building for—sure do. If you’re still reading this, you probably do, too. Perhaps you’re feeling like many of my clients are right now: distraught, on edge, nervous system on high alert all the time. 

This kind of chronic stress takes a toll all on its own—but the damage is greater when you can’t acknowledge this collective backdrop. And that’s the reality for a lot of people: you’re not supposed to make things political at work. So instead, you shove all that stress down and perform okayness: You smile. You nod. You try to act engaged in conversations about KPIs and OKRs and the endless pile of AI slop no one asked for. The cognitive dissonance is exhausting. 

Is it any wonder people are hitting their limits? 

This post has been heavy so far, but I swear I’m not here just to spread doom and gloom. I’m here to help you figure out what to do. And so as I was writing, I revisited Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s 2019 book about women and burnout—and was reminded that as big as the problems we’re facing are, there’s only one place to start:

This isn’t about cultivating more “resilience,” though—it’s not about seeing your burnout as just a personal problem, a weakness to be rectified. It’s about recognizing that the systems we’re working in have been designed to make us feel perpetually unstable. Choosing to take care of yourself, instead of wallowing in hopelessness, throws the first wrench in that system. 

So how, exactly, do you “stabilize you” in times like these? The authors’ suggestion—and the one I’ve found the most valuable in my own life—is simple: 

Free yourself from anything. When you feel like everything is too big and out of your control, and all you can do is succumb to another day of grinding through, the first step is to simply do something. Because doing something reminds you that you do have agency, even if you can’t control all the things you’d like. 

So what’s your something? What should you do?  

Maybe you quit your job and move to a farm in Maine to raise goats. Maybe you take your talents away from big tech and apply them someplace that feels more meaningful, like local government or activism. Maybe you pivot to another career entirely—become a palliative care nurse, or a doula, or a therapist. Maybe you try to find an organization with a better culture fit. Maybe you try working for yourself. Maybe you take FMLA leave and come back to your org in three months a bit more rested. Maybe you finally start declining all the pointless meeting invites you get. Maybe you simply stop pretending everything’s OK at work and get serious about setting boundaries. 

There are a thousand things you could do, from big, blow-your-life-up shifts to tiny tweaks. The problem is, none of them is likely to be perfect. This makes it easy for our brains to shut down our options—to nix any and every idea, before we’ve given it space to breathe:

That’s impossible. I can’t take a salary cut/risk a bad review/go back to school/take a leave of absence/start over again at my age/say “no” to my boss. 

Pretty soon, we’re left with nothing but the status quo:

I have to keep doing what I’m doing. 

Except, you can do any of those things. You can always quit. There are just tradeoffs to each choice—tradeoffs to your time, your finances, your energy, your ego. 

This reframe is crucial, because so much of what’s burning us out is this sense of powerlessness—this feeling that there’s nothing we can do about anything. But when we acknowledge the options we do have, imperfect as they might be, we teach ourselves and our nervous systems that we’re not trapped. That we do have agency. 

And here’s the thing that often goes unsaid when we’re feeling trapped: There are tradeoffs to sticking with the status quo, too. You’re already making them. 

You might be trading your mental health for the promise of financial security. You might be trading time with your kids for the money to send them to good schools. You might be trading a sense of purpose for the prestige of working at a marquee company. You might be trading your evenings for a good performance review. You might be trading your deepest values for a larger paycheck. 

Everything is a tradeoff, and I can’t tell you whether yours are worth it—only you can. But what I do know is that naming your particular tradeoffs matters—because once you name the price you’re currently paying, you can ask yourself some important questions: 

• When I’m honest with myself about these tradeoffs, how do I feel about myself? 

• How are these tradeoffs affecting my life? If I keep paying this price, what might it do to me in the long run? 

• How do these tradeoffs compare to the other tradeoffs I could make? Which tradeoffs feel more sustainable for me?  

This process won’t get rid of uncertainty, of course. If you start setting boundaries at work, you might get seen as a slacker. If you bring your design skills to public service, you might find yourself attempting to do good work in a hostile political regime. If you retrain as a therapist, you might spend so much time fighting insurance companies you want to scream. Your business might tank, your goat farm might be a bust, your new job might be even worse than your old one. 

It can be debilitating to face all these unknowns. We spin and spiral and second-guess. We tell ourselves that if we just think harder about the situation and every possible thing that might happen in the future, we’ll be certain—and then we’ll take action.

But certainty never comes. 

Weirdly, the opposite often happens: The longer we spend looking around for certainty, often the less confident we feel—because what we’re actually doing is trying to outsource the decision to someone or something else. We don’t trust ourselves to decide what’s right for us.

And that lack of self-trust? It just reinforces the idea that we’re powerless. 

So if moral injury and a prevailing sense of purposelessness are burning you out, the first thing I want you to accept is this: Certainty isn’t coming. You have to choose action anyway. 

You have to pick some way to change your work life so that it feels a little less meaningless, a little less fraught, a little less injurious to your sense of right and wrong. 

And the more honest you are with yourself about the tradeoffs you’re already making, the easier it will be to evaluate your options fully. Because you can hold your current choice up against all the other ones, and look at them all with a bit more distance: 

• What does each choice get me? What might it cost me?

• Given the specifics of my life—my finances, my mental and physical health, my family, my values—which kinds of costs can I bear right now? Which can I bear long term? 

These questions don’t make the choices easy, but they do make them clear. And they remind you that you don’t have to have a grand plan or a magical solution. You just need to free yourself from something. 

But there’s one more factor I want to talk about—one that exacerbates moral injury and purposelessness, and makes freeing yourself from anything a whole lot harder: overidentification with work. 

In tech and design, it’s common—and often encouraged—to make your career your whole personality. To treat your job title as the sole source of your identity.

When work’s going well—when you feel like you’re making the world a better place while also moving up the ladder and getting a nice salary—defining yourself through your work can feel pretty good! But when work starts feeling pointless or downright immoral, you don’t get joy or fulfillment. You get an identity crisis: My work is who I am. If it doesn’t matter… I guess I don’t matter, either. 

When those thoughts kick up, there are two main responses I see people have. The first is to shut down—to believe that they are, in fact, worthlessness. Self-esteem crumbles. Cynicism goes up. They feel lost, empty, and numb—like the person at the start of this article. 

When people are in this state, they might think they no longer identify with work—because they’ve lost the capacity to care about it. But the truth is, their work still has a chokehold on how they feel about themselves. 

The other response I see is to resist feeling worthless by trying even harder to squeeze meaning from work. These people jump through hoops to “prove their value.” They fight every fight—even when they know their organization’s incentive structure or business model is stacked against them. They take on responsibility for their organization’s choices—like the solo content designer who can’t possibly keep up with all the different product pillars, yet believes it’s their personal failure if some clunky UI copy goes live. The designer who believes that every time their company decides to shove a half-baked feature out the door, it’s their personal job to drop everything and work nights and weekends to prevent it from being confusing or inaccessible when it launches. 

The people who treat themselves like human band-aids: the only thing preventing the organization’s dysfunction from impacting users.  

These behaviors aren’t just exhausting. They also internalize the belief that moral injury and purposelessness are personal problems—that if you just worked harder and pushed back better, then your organization would finally do the right thing. Even when all the evidence says otherwise. 

There are people who think the solution to this is to simply stop caring—that because work won’t love you back, you should completely sever your sense of self from your work. I’m not one of them. A world where we spend decades toiling away at something we feel nothing for? No thank you. 

But what I do believe is that we need our identity to transcend our work, not be defined by it. And that means asking ourselves some bigger questions—questions like: 

• Who am I? What gives me meaning? Connection? Joy? 

• What are my values? What matters most to me?  

• What kind of world do I want to live in? What would it look like for me to contribute to that world? 

These questions might be hard to answer, but I encourage you to sit with them for a while. Because the more you’ve invested in understanding who you are, the less of a chance work has to answer the question for you. And the easier it is to put work in its place—to turn it from the driver of your identity into just one place you might express that identity:

• What are the ways my work can support my values? What are the ways that it can’t?

• Where else in my life am I expressing those values?

• If the answer is “nowhere”… what do I need to do to change that? 

This doesn’t mean it won’t hurt when your organization makes a decision that violates your values. But it does mean that those decisions will feel a little less personal. Because you’ll know that the meaning isn’t in the job itself. The meaning is in you. 

I started this essay by sharing that nearly half of tech workers are feeling significant burnout right now. But I want to close it with a different number: When you add in those who report being slightly burned out, the number jumps to 84%. 

Odds are, that figure includes you. 

So wherever you’d put yourself on the spectrum, I want to offer you this: Don’t wait until it’s worse to take action. You deserve to take care of yourself—even if it feels impossible right now. Maybe especially if it feels impossible.  

Not with some magical fix. There’s no secret path forward that enables you to face the polycrisis without overwhelm; to find meaning in your work without it taking over your life; to always find ways to use your talents that are both good for the world and your retirement account.

But I can promise this: You can find your agency. You can uncover real choices. Not always the ones you wish you had, but choices nonetheless. The sooner you take an honest look at what’s really draining you at work, the sooner you can start making them. And the sooner you’ll remember how powerful you still are.