when you’re baffled by a persistent lack of clarity and inability to get inspired, it’s showtime*

*time to traverse the Overwhelm Void

This is the fourth post in a series I'm writing about finding ruthless clarity in your life. I recommend reading about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, desire hoarding, and letting your un-niched light be a beacon to people who want to pay you before you climb into today's rabbit hole.

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me to myself re: highlighters

I couldn't stop thinking about highlighters.

Not your garden variety office supply fluorescents — aesthetic highlighters were the object of my obsession. By hour four of my fugue state (aka combing the internet for the perfect collection of Muji-adjacent, Kinfolk-approved markers), it slowly dawned on me: oh honey, this is nawwwwt a creative journey.

It was happening again.

I’d just flew by personal warning sign number #408 — pathological consumption just to feel something — which could only mean one thing: I was hurtling toward burnout, and the cognitive, creative, and intuitive opacity that comes with it.¹ Yikes.

In our ongoing conversation about what keeps us from acting in accordance with our truest, most inspired and intuitive desires, we’ve already hit some salient points. Inspired action cockblocks include:

• a lack of truly motivating motivation, which demands we chase down our real motivations and get honest about excites us even if it’s kind of unattractive (personally, spite as motivation is thrilling to me)

• a fear of making the wrong choice and cutting off your options (newsflash: you can’t and won’t!)

• keeping yourself small to prevent the ouchiness of failure (so what? who cares????)

• a worry that people won’t understand the big-ness of you, and that you need to cut yourself into bite-sized pieces to be understood

But if you’re the type of person I think you are², you’ve tried all of the above, and you still find yourself staring into the void wondering, "… uhm, what am I supposed to do next?" while simultaneously having seventeen browser tabs open, a half-finished response to an email you started three days ago, and the vague sense that somewhere, somehow, you've forgotten something important — congratulations, you've arrived at the Overwhelmed Burnout Void.³

Welcome, friend. The password is 'huh?' and drinks are in the back.

“hysteria” 🤝 “burnout”

The term "burnout" has been so co-opted these days that it's basically a semantic black whole. It's become one of those blah-blah nothing catch-all words that feels as gooey and ambiguous and dismissive as someone saying you're just "having a time."

Like ?????????

For clarity's sake, let's define burnout as a persistent mismatch between effort and recognition.

When effort consistently outweighs recognition for too long — bing-bong! — you're sprinting downhill about to face plant into a big ol' pile of burnout.⁴

And when you’re in the Overwhelmed Void, you experience a whole host of trashy side effects:

• mental and physical exhaustion

• anger, impatience, inability to regulate emotions appropriately

• brain fog, inability to prioritize or solve problems

• staring at your to-do list like it's written in cuneiform

• lack of inspiration, devoid of ambition

• general malaise or resignation, feeling hopeless or other extreme emotional reactions (like wanting to fire everyone on your team after seeing a typo on an email or totally shut down your business when you get one 3-star review on your podcast or when you genuinely consider faking your death and assuming a new identity as a lighthouse keeper in Maine could be a reasonable career pivot)

You've got a laundry list of objectively cool things you'd like to do, but find yourself parked in front of the Big Screen and Little Screen night after night, too exhausted to make meaningful progress. Instead, you're flipping through Netflix previews for three hours without settling on anything because nothing sparks even the faintest flicker of interest.⁵

Often when people tell me that they’re “blocked” or stuck or uninspired, they’re neck deep in a burnout Void State and don’t know it. It's like being in a fog so dense you don't realize there's fog — you just accept the world has suddenly gone grayscale.

I'm a fellow traveler in the Overwhelmed/Burnout Void, and honestly? Show me a creative, intuitive, non-tradish person hasn't visited this cursed zip code and I'll show you someone who's lying.

Unless you’re a total Toxic Positivity Pollyana, how could you not feel your constant efforts to live a purposeful life sometimes go unrecognized by god / Universe / your mom / your customers / your BFF / your boss / etc.? Burnout seems like a reasonable response in that instance.

The thing about being in any Void State? You can't force an exit. No emergency ejection seat, no fast-forward button. Void States are No-Time Zones where you kind of have to:

• Accept where you are — it’s like quicksand in that the more you fight it, the more stuck you get

• Do your work tuning the Void you find yourself in — find pleasure in pushing your rock up your hill, baby. In the case of Overwhelm and Burnout Void, reconnecting to your intuition is a necessary step to balancing effort and recognition in your life

And then, probably when you least expect it, the Void will spit you out. Ptooey!

Are you there, Void? Wait, am I there, Void?

Without recognizing burnout for what it is, we beat ourselves up for lacking inspiration. For being staggeringly motivationless. For being bored.

These feelings are the harbingers to confronting existential questions (what is this even for? what’s the point of doing this work? does what I do matter to anyone?) that would make anyone’s butthole clench up.

Instead of addressing them head on, we ✨avoid✨

What happens next? Choose your own sinister adventure:

• you push harder, thinking that by giving yourself harder deadlines or more moving pieces you’ll be less bored and idk somehow waterboard yourself into caring about what you’re working on (spoiler: this does not work and usually just leads to a relatively inconvenient all-systems breakdown)

• you keep chugging at your regular speed, but it feels like you’re drowning and you know you’re putting out sub-par work but you cross your fingers that eventually, you’ll get your groove back

• you reach out for inspiration, grabbing at the air, the astrology, the mushrooms, the wellness, the Erewhon smoothie, the tarot cards, the Reddit threads, the manifestation gurus, the Sephora hauls, the expensive travel, the 24-count Le Creuset set; every flavor of consumption in an attempt to feel something. "Maybe if I buy this $400 jacket I'll remember who I am!" (Narrator: She did not remember who she was.)

But here's what's actually happening: burnout has disconnected you from your intuition, your self-hood, your truest desires. It's not that your inner wisdom has abandoned you — it's that the signal can't get through all the static created by exhaustion, resentment, and that peculiar empty feeling that comes from giving more than you receive.

Your Burnout Is Actually Your Guardian Angel If Your Guardian Angel Was Like, Really Threatening and Menacing To Your Entire Existence

Une petite reframe: What if burnout is not actually a failure state but a cosmic intervention? Like when your phone sends you that "storage almost full" notification right before you're about to take a series of very sexy~sexy photos — annoying, but ultimately saving you from missing key moments of hotness entirely.

Burnout isn't a reflection of your inability to cope properly. It's a flashing neon warning sign from your psyche that something's gotta giveeeeeeee, Helen Hunt! It's your inner wisdom's last-ditch effort to get your attention before you drive your entire life / somatic system off a metaphorical cliff.

Your burnout overwhelm isn't trying to ruin your life — it's trying to save it. And yes, its timing is terrible and its methods are extreme, but have you considered that maybe it's been trying to get your attention through gentler means for months? Those Sunday scaries? That mysterious eye twitch? The fact that you burst into tears when the barista said "oat milk's on the house today"? All ignored warnings from your scary guardian angel⁶, who finally had to resort to unplugging your entire personality just to get you to pause.

When we recognize burnout as a communication rather than a condition, suddenly it becomes less of an identity ("I'm so burned out") and more of a conversation ("Oh, I see what you're trying to tell me").

Surrender to the Void (Or Else!) (lol)

The secret non-shitty option? Address the burnout.

Refocus on what matters.⁷
Eliminate what does not.⁸
And wait for your intuition to work its magic.

Allow inspiration to pour itself back into your cracked open dome. See the next steps appear, like hot Mr. Darcy suddenly emerging out of the fog, with stunning clarity.

Burnout isn't just a workplace phenomenon — it's an intuitive blackout, a creative crisis, a spiritual emergency.⁹ But the good news is: your intuition hasn't ghosted you. It's still there, waiting patiently beneath the layers of other people’s expectations and personal dream memory loss.

Sometimes finding ruthless clarity isn't about figuring out the "one right thing" to do next. It's about clearing away the fog of burnout so you can see all the possibilities that were there all along, waiting for you to remember who you really are.

Next week (and the last in this series!): a step-by-step guide to how to navigate the Overwhelmed Void without sacrificing your last two brain cells on the altar of TikTok productivity hacks or ctrl+alt+delete-ing your professional life. See you then!

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1. Me to my brain: Bro, please say sike. PLEASE BRO.

2. smart, intuitive, v cool, hot, perpetually curious, sometimes described as “vaguely bog-witchy.” You may also identify as a future hag (complimentary).

3. One of three Void States we explore (embrace?) at Holisticism. The others? The Uninspired Void and the Ready-To-Start-But-Don't-Know-Where Void.

4. A mismatch in effort vs. recognition could look like not getting paid enough for a job you do; not getting praise or acknowledgment for your efforts; not seeing the impact of the tasks you spend time on, like taking three hours to create an IG carousel to have 18 people pity like it. To move out of a state of burnout, effort and recognition need to be more equivalent.

Adam Grant

actually talks about this quite a bit in his book “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.”

5. I’m interested in everything, so I know I’m in trouble when I start saying I’m bo-O-o-ooooored like a petulant fifth grader. My mom always used to say, “Only boring people get bored,” and you know what, Chris P. slayed with that. AND I notice what I call boredom is simply an inability to allow myself to be awed by something. Like, a refusal to be captivated. A rejection of curiosity. It’s gross and tbh I get a little scared when I clock that it’s happening because I know I’m tap dancing on the precipice of burnout and I gotta get right with myself tout suite.

6. more like a Hell’s Angel, amiright?

7. consciously uncouple from other people’s “shoulds” and do the work to uncover your own motivations and values. I think this comes along with getting to know oneself, which so far I’ve found is a labyrinthine, lifelong pursuit (lol eye roll, annoying!! [kidding] [kind of]). Some pathways to getting to know yourself I’ve found useful — obviously an incomplete list because I’m still in process, and hope to be until the day I exit this mortal coil:

• Trying out meaning making identity systems like astrology, human design, and matrix of destiny

• Making creative work

• Self-reflection through spiritual practice

• Being in relationship with other people, seeing how you are in the world

• Going through hard things, seeing how you respond to difficulty, pain, challenge

• Just doing new things and seeing what happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Addressing your somatic experiences with curiosity and intrigue

• Studying philosophies and meaning making systems

• Talking to people you think are interesting

8. This is surprisingly do-able, within reason.

9. Not to be all Chicken Little about it, but collective burnout isn't just a personal crisis — it's the invisible infrastructure of late-stage capitalism. Like how the Romans used lead pipes in their aqueducts and were like, “Hm, why is everyone being so actually crazy rn!?” (… lead poisoning, babes…), we've normalized chronic exhaustion and then act shocked when democracy crumbles because no one has the stamina to pick it up. This isn't accidental. A burned-out populace doesn't have the energy to riot, much less vote or organize unions. I see reclaiming your energy as not just self-care but a sort of corporate sabotage — a direct attack on systems designed to extract your labor until you're hollow. As Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and adrienne maree brown have been screaming into the void for decades: your well-being is revolutionary. Recovery from burnout is resistance, sure, but it’s also reconnaissance!!!! It gives you the eagle-eyed clarity to recognize who most benefits when you're too tired to question the status quo. Reclaiming your energy and intuition from the depths of burnout is a necessity in imagining and creating a better world for us all <3