Are We Actually Burned Out — or Just Bored of Being Useful?

1. The Diagnosis That Never Quite Fits
Burnout. A word as worn out as the people it’s meant to describe. We throw it around like confetti at a funeral. Everyone is “burned out” — by work, by news, by notifications, by the general embarrassment of being alive in a world that still produces spreadsheets. But the term is suspiciously accommodating. It fits too many people too easily. That alone should make us wary.

The real question, of course, is whether we are actually exhausted — or simply unmotivated to continue playing a game whose rewards have lost all meaning.

Because maybe we’re not burned out. Maybe we’re just bored of being useful.

2. Usefulness as a Mild Form of Slavery
From the age of seven, we’re asked what we want to “be.” Not who, not why. Just what. And ideally: something useful. An instrument. A well-oiled part in a malfunctioning machine. No one ever said: Be useless. Be extravagant. Be unnecessary.

To be useful is to be tolerated. To be useful is to be allowed inside the gates of relevance — so long as you don’t loiter or ask uncomfortable questions.

And so we trained ourselves. To optimize. To perform. To take pride in being needed, even as the need itself became pathological.

But here’s the problem. Usefulness only works as long as the system you’re serving makes sense. And what if it doesn’t? What if your job is to carry buckets of water on a sinking ship? Or write emails that generate other emails that eventually generate a meeting in which everyone agrees no one wants to be there?

Burnout isn’t the result. It’s the camouflage. The socially acceptable way of saying: I can’t believe I wasted this much energy on pretending this mattered.

3. The Fantasy of Collapse
There is a perverse appeal to the idea of burning out. It’s dramatic. It suggests sacrifice. It lets you exit the arena with a limp and a sigh, rather than just walking out the door.

Saying I’m burned out is easier than saying I’m bored. Because boredom, unlike burnout, doesn’t earn you sympathy. Boredom is the luxury of the ungrateful. Boredom is lazy. Boredom is impolite.

But here’s what no one says: Boredom is political. It means you’ve stopped believing in the game.

If burnout is the body saying no, boredom is the soul saying why?

And unlike burnout, boredom doesn’t need recovery. It needs reinvention.

4. The Bureaucracy of Suffering
We have therapists now for everything. Performance anxiety. Screen fatigue. Compassion fatigue. Meeting fatigue. (There is no word yet for the fatigue of pretending to care about quarterly targets. I suggest PowerPoint melancholia.)

The workplace, once a factory, now presents itself as a family. There are “well-being weeks” and “resilience workshops” and pastel-colored slides about “energy cycles.” These are not solutions. They are branded condolences.

Modern work does not want you dead. It wants you alive — but slightly miserable. Enough to obey, not enough to revolt.

And so burnout becomes a managed condition. Something to be monitored and mitigated. A human glitch to be debugged. But boredom? Boredom has no protocol. It cannot be charted in a wellness app.

Boredom is the beginning of refusal. And refusal cannot be monetized.

5. The Quiet Revolution of Opting Out
What if, instead of asking how do I recover from burnout?
We asked what am I recovering for?

What if the real crisis isn’t depletion — but direction?
What if usefulness is a cage — and boredom is the first crack in the bars?

Maybe we’re not burned out.
Maybe we’re just done pretending that being productive is the same as being alive.

Maybe the real rebellion isn’t in collapse — but in the absurd act of choosing joy over output, silence over signaling, absurdity over achievement.

And maybe — just maybe — there’s a future in which usefulness becomes optional.
Where worth isn’t measured in tired calendars and Slack pings.

Where we don’t burn out.
We just walk away.

Quietly.
And without explanation.