AWC Burnout Essay 01: The Cost Of Always Working.
All Nighter
June 2026
I knew all the right things. Rest. Balance. Time away from work. I still couldn't stop.
And then one day I realised I was tired all the time.
Not physically tired. A different kind of tired.
The kind that follows you even after you've slept. The kind that makes hobbies feel like work and rest feel like guilt.
For a long time, I thought the solution was simple: work harder, become more disciplined, get organised and push through it.
But what if that's the problem?
We live in a culture that constantly tells us we could be doing more.
There is always another opportunity, another side hustle, another skill to learn and another goal to achieve. Social media has given us front-row seats to the achievements of thousands of people every day. Success is no longer something we occasionally witness. It has become something we consume constantly.
The result is that many of us no longer measure our lives against our own expectations. We measure them against everyone else's.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that Mental Health UK found that 91% of adults experienced high or extreme levels of pressure or stress at some point during the previous year, with 1 in 5 experiencing it often or always.
That is not a small number.
Whether we've experienced burnout ourselves or watched someone close to us struggle with it, most of us understand what it looks like.
Somewhere along the way, productivity stopped being a tool and became part of our identity.
Being busy became something to be proud of.
Being exhausted became proof that we were trying.
Rest became something that had to be earned.
The strange thing is that most people know this isn't healthy. We know we need balance. We know we need rest. We know constant work isn't sustainable.
And yet many of us still struggle to stop.
Perhaps burnout isn't simply caused by working too much.
Perhaps burnout is the result of feeling that no matter how much we do, it is never enough.
More money. More followers. More achievements. More progress.
The finish line keeps moving. And when there is no finish line, how do you know when to stop running?
Through the research that I have conducted for my project, I noticed something I didn't expect.
People rarely talked about wanting more success. They talked about wanting peace.
Time. Connection. Purpose. The feeling of being present in their own lives.
Something else came up more than I anticipated: loneliness. Despite living in a world where we are more connected digitally than ever before, many people still feel isolated. NHS England found that around 1 in 5 adults experience loneliness, with younger adults among those most affected.
All this connection. And still so many people feel alone.
It made me wonder whether being connected and feeling connected are actually the same thing.
Which raises a question I keep coming back to:
If so many people are chasing success in order to find happiness, why do so many successful people still feel burned out?
Maybe the problem isn't that we are working too little.
Maybe the problem is that we have forgotten why we are working in the first place.
This essay is not an attempt to provide answers.
It is an attempt to ask better questions.
What does success actually mean?
How much is enough?
What are we sacrificing in pursuit of achievement?
And perhaps most importantly: what does it mean to live a meaningful life without burning out?
I don’t know the answer yet.
But I think it is worth searching for.
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References
Mental Health UK. Burnout Report 2025.
NHS England. Health Survey for England: Loneliness and Wellbeing.
