Everyone sees what you've achieved, but who is taking care of you?
That is, most of the time, the first thought that crosses my mind. Not “I am excited about this.” Not “I genuinely want to do this.” Just: it will look good on my CV.
But how much of what you are doing would you still do, if you could not put it on your CV?
The pressure to outperform. The pressure to see everyone around you getting a raise, starting a new business, launching a side project, while you are standing there, maybe just trying to hold yourself together. And somehow that already feels like it is not enough.
I am not sure when that shift happened. When “doing something” stopped being about the thing itself and started being about what it could give you on paper.
We built a society around work
Our society has fundamentally reorganised itself around work and achievement. Not just in what we do, but in how we understand ourselves. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes this in his book The Burnout Society (2015): we no longer live in a society that tells us what we should do. We live in one that tells us we can do anything. And that shift, from obligation to possibility, is more exhausting than it sounds. Because when everything is possible, not achieving everything feels like it is your fault.
And if you look around, you can see it everywhere. Think about what happened to social media. When Facebook first launched, people were sceptical. Posting about your life online felt strange, even a little excessive. Instagram was met with similar confusion. Why would you photograph your lunch? Now those same instincts have produced LinkedIn, where people photograph their growth mindset. There are actual courses you can take to use LinkedIn better, to build your personal brand, to make yourself look more hirable, more ambitious, more relentlessly optimistic about your professional journey.
And LinkedIn can be genuinely useful. It opens doors, connects people, makes industries smaller in the good sense of the word. But somewhere along the way it also became a performance. A highlight reel where everyone is thriving, learning, grateful for the journey, excited to announce. Research has found that LinkedIn is possibly more dangerous than any other social platform for mental health precisely because it is social media disguised as productivity. It rewards the performance of ambition, not necessarily ambition itself.
But does any of it end up on your CV?
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. You add the project. You add the role, the title, the certificate. You update your LinkedIn. And maybe it does help. Maybe one day you are grateful you did it.
But does your CV also say that you were running on four hours of sleep for three months? That you cried in a bathroom before a meeting? That by the time you finished that project, you had stopped caring about it entirely?
No. It does not. Because that part is not brandable.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, 52% of employees felt burned out in 2024. Among workers under 35, that number is even higher, with 59% reporting significant work-related stress. And only 34% of people globally say they are truly thriving in their lives. These are not small numbers. This is not a fringe experience. This is the background condition of how an enormous number of people are going through their days.
And yet we keep updating our CVs.
What burnout actually is, and why it creeps up on you
Burnout is not just being really tired. It is not a bad week or a stressful deadline. The World Health Organization classifies it as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It shows up in three ways: a deep feeling of energy depletion, an increasing emotional distance from your work, and a loss of professional efficacy, the sense that what you are doing no longer matters or that you are no longer good at it.
The distinction that matters most is this: ordinary tiredness coexists with motivation. You are exhausted but you still know why you are doing what you are doing. With burnout, the things you once cared about start to feel pointless. And that indifference is not laziness. It is a signal.
Christina Maslach, one of the most important researchers in this field, found something that might feel both surprising and deeply familiar: burnout tends to hit the people who care the most. The ones who invest themselves fully, who find it hard to say no, who started out genuinely wanting to do good work. Their exhaustion is not evidence of weakness. More often, it is evidence of the opposite.
Burnout builds slowly. Most people recognise it in retrospect. They look back and realise the signs were there for months: a persistent sense of emptiness, cynicism toward colleagues or the work itself, physical tension that never quite releases, getting sick more often than usual, procrastinating on things that used to feel simple. Some people continue functioning outwardly for a long time while already exhausted on the inside. This is sometimes called high-functioning burnout, and it is particularly difficult to see, even in yourself.
The inner voice and where it comes from
There is a voice, and maybe you know it too. It sounds reasonable. It says: one day you will be grateful you did this. It says: this is an opportunity. It says: other people would kill for this chance. It says: it will look good on your CV.
That voice is not malicious. It has been shaped by a culture that measures a person’s worth by what they produce. Psychologists call this “work-role centrality,” the degree to which your professional identity becomes central to your sense of self. Research published in Fast Company and Psychology Today confirms what many of us feel intuitively: when your self-worth is fused with your performance, every setback at work becomes a verdict on who you are. And every decision, including whether to rest, starts getting filtered through a productivity lens. When did resting stop feeling like something you were allowed to do, and start feeling like something you had to earn?
Researchers found that people who are truly able to psychologically detach from work during their off-hours recover significantly better from chronic stress than those who stay mentally connected. So you actually need to rest (saying this to myself as well). It is important to realize that rest is not the absence of work, it is an active physiological process. Without it there is no work. And still there is the inner voice telling you that downtime is wasted time, directly undermining your ability to actually function.
Maybe gratitude does not have to be earned
We have somehow arrived at a place where gratitude for ourselves is conditional. We are allowed to feel proud once we have achieved something. We are allowed to rest once we have worked hard enough. We are allowed to be enough once we have proven it.
But what if that is backwards?
What if we started being grateful for doing something for ourselves, not because it will pay off later, not because it will look a certain way on a piece of paper, but because we are people who deserve things that feel good and meaningful right now?
That is not naive. It is actually a more sustainable way to live and to work. The research is consistent on this: intrinsic motivation, doing things because they align with something you actually value, produces better outcomes and greater wellbeing than motivation driven purely by external validation.
If the first thought when you consider something new is what it will give you rather than how it will feel, that is worth sitting with. Not as a reason for guilt, but as information.
If you have been carrying a kind of numbness that a weekend cannot recover, that too is information. Burnout addressed early recovers far more easily than burnout that has been quiet for a long time.
Mendje is a space to start that conversation, with someone who speaks your language and understands where you are coming from.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional psychological support.
Scientific sources: World Health Organization (2019) — Burn-out, an “occupational phenomenon”, International Classification of Diseases; Maslach, C. & Leiter, M. P., Jossey-Bass (1997) — The Truth About Burnout; Sonnentag, S. & Fritz, C., Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 12(3) (2007) — The Recovery Experience Questionnaire; Han, B.-C., Stanford University Press (2015) — The Burnout Society; Gallup (2024) — State of the Global Workplace Report; University of California, Irvine (2025) — Hustle culture and the LinkedIn effect; Fast Company (2023) — The psychological pitfalls of tying self-worth and happiness to performance; World Health Organization (2016) — Investing in treatment for depression and anxiety leads to a fourfold return.