My eyes are burning. My back is aching. My shoulders…well, my shoulders are stuck in a permanent rictus, caused by typing and copying and pasting and sending and opening and typing some more. I know I should get up and stretch. Should take a break from my desk. Should do any of the things that keep me human, balanced and happy. But I don’t do any of those things. Instead, I stay a hostage at my desk. Again.
It might sound like I’m working to an important deadline, or on a career-defining project. But, in reality, I’m just trying to get to the end of my daily to-do list.
At home, I scrape through family dinner all the while thinking about work. As my partner does the dishes, I sneak my laptop open to send one last email. I am cranky and snappy for the rest of the evening, before collapsing into the relief of sleep. But when 4am rolls around, my brain pings awake with a list of all the tasks ahead, and all the tasks not done yesterday or the day before. I feel like I’m hauling myself through my life, not living it. When I get to the weekend, I want to do all the things I’m missing out on, but instead I lie on the sofa and watch Poirot re-runs. And then it is Monday morning.
I wish I could say that this is a new phenomenon. But I have been here before.
Before Covid, I burnt out properly. I had to take time off from my university job. I had to ban myself from screens, and set goals that gave me a feeling of worthiness separate from work. And, after 10 years of being a lecturer and writing about other people’s creative work, I even pivoted by publishing my own creative writing. All in all, I thought I had fixed myself. But it turns out that identifying patterns and fixing them are two different things.
This is the irony of the post-burnout woman. I know the cost of working all the time, I know it and have pledged never to pay it again. But here I am once more, acting like responding to emails or meeting a writing deadline is more important than going outside while it’s still light enough to see the sky.
And I’m not the only one. At my workplace, everyone is too busy. Chats over the office kettle all focus on how there aren’t enough hours in the day. That we can’t get through it all, that we feel like we’re drowning. Far from leading to work-life balance, working from home during the pandemic meant working hours increased – with reports showing that employees spent two hours more on average on their companies’ VPNs, logging off as late as 8pm.
Post-Covid, though many of us have returned to both our offices and our long commutes, workload expectations have not gone back to pre-Covid levels. Instead, the “always-on” digital culture seems to have stuck, so much so that the Irish Business and Employers Confederation identified burnout as the key strategic issue for employers in 2026, while another report found that burnout is affecting a growing number of working women in the UK, with two in five saying they feel burnt out often or all the time across all industries due to factors ranging from the emotional demands of their jobs to the sheer volume of work.
Even though my university has wellbeing policies and a collegial working environment, the education sector is just as affected by overwork. And I’m not imagining it. The head of my university recently emailed all staff acknowledging that we’re carrying an unreasonable administrative load. She announced a task force to look into this latest crisis. Reading her email, I knew I should’ve felt relief. But all I felt was tiredness at the prospect of another survey to fill in with little promise of real change.
Meanwhile, the threat of AI is being wielded against all of us. It doesn’t matter that the results of using AI are often mediocre or inaccurate, meaning we have to double and triple check our own and others’ work, or that it’s actually faster to think something through ourselves rather than think up prompts that produce recycled understanding, it doesn’t even matter that using AI reduces both our competency and our creativity – it has been successfully sold to our bosses, and so we’re told to work even harder again, driven by the spectre of that our jobs can be outsourced to an algorithm.
These are the fears we carry to work with us. The fears that have us working on overdrive.
A friend of mine, who has spent the past three years doing not one but two leadership roles, recently resigned one of those positions to make her workload only moderately unsustainable. At the next staff meeting, however, when another colleague described her as “taking a back seat” at the company, she found herself agreeing to take on a new role, unable to hold out against the pressure for overwork.
In grind culture, it doesn’t matter how considered you are in your life and work choices. It trains us to believe that the opportunity cost of work-life balance is too high a cost to pay.
I wish I had a magic formula to counteract all of this fear. I wish I wasn’t in it too. Wish I wasn’t addicted to my boss congratulating me on delivering the latest project, to her patting me on the back while saying “Trojan work”. Addicted to it, despite the fact that I’m never sure in this analogy if my Trojan work makes me the horse, achieving the impossible, or if it means I’m actually Troy, about to be burned.
But here is what I am sure about: There is no shortage of Troys. After each impossible deadline we meet, comes another impossible deadline. That could be the most depressing conclusion for people working as hard as we are. Or it could be the thing that frees us. It has freed me from this second-time-around burnout.
The epiphany came one Friday night, as I complained to a friend about working late. “But Emilie,” she said, “don’t you know yet? It will never all be done.”
It will never all be done. I heard her words, and a tiny window opened in my brain. A window that allowed me, there and then, to let some of it go.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But realising the fiction of the finish line has kept that window open. A window to deciding what really needs to be done. Or, better yet, a window to choosing what things I want to get done. A window to refusing the corporate fear. A window to reclaiming my body, my attention and my time as my own.