If burnout has become an identity badge for you, you should read this.

I’ve noticed something about many people who say they’ve experienced burnout.

Their stories, jobs, and breakdowns may be completely different, yet the way they relate to what happened to them often ends up looking remarkably similar.

And of course, the burnout professional on LinkedIn will usually frame it something like this — with a little help from ChatGPT:

“You overperformed.
You exhausted yourself.
You collapsed.”

What actually happened is that society gave you a badge.

The burnout badge.

And that badge is incredibly powerful.

It allows other people to understand immediately that you suffered, what happened to you, and in what context.

And it isn’t just a label.

It brings recognition, comfort, and sometimes even a new form of legitimacy.

It serves plenty of other functions too. It can explain your past. It can become part of your identity.

It can even become expertise: you lived through it, so now you can talk about it with knowledge and confidence — maybe even turn it into a business, support other people, teach them about the “warning signs,” the “causes,” and how to avoid it.

The problem is not what you lived through, nor your very real suffering.

The problem begins when the badge replaces the investigation into what actually happened to you — and the effort to identify YOUR causes.

Because saying “I had burnout” creates the impression that something has already been explained.

Yet scientifically, after fifty years of research, the thing this word supposedly refers to still has not clearly established its own specificity.

And the more important the badge becomes, the harder it becomes to question it.

The person who questions the concept almost becomes the person who “just doesn’t get it.”

That is precisely when the badge becomes your problem without you even realizing it.

Because you are no longer defending only a concept.

You are defending what that concept has become for you — your attachment to your suffering.

An identity, sometimes.

A story you can share.

An extremely effective way of making other people understand what you went through, but also what you overcame.

And perhaps that is precisely why it becomes so difficult to go back.

The problem begins when, internally, you no longer allow anyone to ask:

What you went through is real — but what guarantees that the word “burnout” actually explains it, or even accurately represents it?

At that point, you can become trapped inside both your experience and the representation you have built around it.

And that is precisely where the trap lies.

I’m currently working on a more in-depth paper on this subject.

If you have experienced what you call burnout and this argument makes sense to you, then perhaps deconstructing the story that created an artificial bond between the label and your experience could finally free you from it.

And before committing to anything, you can read my work and think through the substance of the argument for yourself.