Burnout As A Badge of Honor
(Things I Wish More People in Tech Talked About – Part 1)
💤 Sleeping in until noon wouldn’t do my eye bags justice. We don’t talk enough about how tired everyone is.
Not the “didn’t-sleep-well-last-night” kind of tired, but the deep, quiet exhaustion that sneaks in when your worth starts to sound a lot like your work. The one you try to debug with another side project, another certification, another “quick” Slack reply at midnight. . The kind that makes you forget who you were before the deadlines started defining you.
Somewhere along the way, hustle became identity. Rest became guilt. And exhaustion? Well, that started to feel like proof you cared enough. 🤷🏻♀️
The Myth of the “Passionate Engineer” 💻 and “Loving What You Do”
People love to say, “Find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” But here’s the truth: you might just work every day of your life instead.
👩🏻💻 When I first got into tech, I thought passion was the goal. I’d pull late nights for side projects no one asked for. I’d chase certifications like they were collectibles. I told myself I was just ambitious, that this was what success looked like.
In tech, passion is currency. 💰But passion can quickly become pressure. You’re supposed to love what you do, so much that you’d stay up till 3 a.m. refactoring a function that no one but you will ever notice.
And to be fair, many of us do love it. We love the thrill of solving something hard, of shipping, of seeing our work live out in the world. But that passion slowly morphs when “loving your job” turns into “proving you deserve it.”
🤨Suddenly, you’re not debugging code, you’re debugging your own self-worth.
The Quiet Competition 📊
It starts innocently: someone posts about learning three new frameworks this month, another just got promoted, someone else casually mentions their 80-hour weeks like a war story. There’s this unspoken leaderboard that floats around in tech circles, a scoreboard made of GitHub contributions, unread newsletters, and who’s learning the most frameworks this month.
👀 You tell yourself you’re just motivated. But underneath it all, you start chasing that same exhaustion. You start wearing your burnout like a badge, proof that you’re in the arena, doing “real” work.
The irony? The people you admire are probably just as tired.
When Rest Feels Illegal 😔
Try taking a real break, not a “scroll through X and check Slack anyway” break, but a real one. Notice how your brain resists it? It’s because somewhere, you picked up the idea that rest equals laziness.
💡 We measure output, not energy. We celebrate launches, not recoveries. And the moment things get quiet, we fill it with noise , podcasts, audiobooks, another tab open, anything to avoid stillness.
But stillness is where perspective hides. It’s where creativity regenerates. It’s where you remember who you are when you’re not sprinting.
Maybe We’re Just Tired of Being Tired 😫
What if we stopped equating “I’m busy” with “I’m important”?
What if curiosity, not exhaustion, became our badge of honor?
🚀Tech moves fast, but we don’t have to. The best ideas rarely come from burnout; they come from balance, from moments when your brain finally has room to wander.
So here’s a gentle reminder, from one over-caffeinated coder ☕️ to another:
You don’t have to earn your rest.
❓Question of the week:
When did you first realize productivity had replaced peace for you?
– The Cat Cache Team 🐾
