Burnout and the myth of ‘success’: What happens when ambition becomes exhaustion

Burnout enters into our lives not dramatically, but slowly — without us even understanding why we are stressed out. (Image credit: Cottonbro via Pexels)

We don’t really know when the race began. We just woke up one morning and found ourselves running — for titles, validation, a sense of arrival that keeps moving further away. Ambition was meant to motivate us, and make our lives better and happier. Instead, it keeps us sprinting on a treadmill we never agreed to build.

Most mornings begin mid-sprint. The alarm rings, the phone lights up, and before our feet even touch the floor, we’re already negotiating with the day. Coffee becomes our fuel, the inbox a minefield, the calendar a judge. We chase goals, convincing ourselves that the next milestone will bring success and peace.

But the finish line keeps shifting, and every victory feels suspiciously like more work. Ambition, so noble in theory, quietly turns into addiction, and makes us official participants in the global rat race.

Then our supposed productivity becomes performance. Between the morning rush and the midnight emails or WhatsApp messages, we forget what we were trying to win — or why we started running at all.

That’s how burnout enters — not dramatically, but slowly into our lives without us even understanding why we are stressed out. It slips in through the skipped lunch, the ignored headache, the one last email sent after dinner, and the wedding in the family that you could not attend.

We defend it with excuses: “It’s just that time of year,” or “this job demands it.” Then one day we notice the fatigue has no season, and the job has eaten the rest of life. We can’t remember the last time we felt joy, or took a walk without the phone, or felt satisfied instead of merely functional.

The World Health Organization calls burnout an occupational phenomenon — a modern epidemic born of chronic, unmanaged stress. But before it becomes a diagnosis, it’s a feeling: of depletion, of losing one’s spark. Of living days that blur into each other. Of being constantly connected, but rarely present.

We were all raised to believe success was linear. Study hard, work harder, climb faster. It sounded noble, almost moral. The rat race, as they called it, as though we all agreed to run. The promise was simple — respect, stability, happiness.

But nobody told us what it would cost: our health, our relationships, our quiet moments of being. Nobody warned us that in the pursuit of more, we might lose our self.

Now, entire generations find themselves exhausted — not because they are weak, but because they are human in a world that treats humans like machines. The trouble with the rat race, as someone once said, is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Psychologists Miller and Smith once described burnout as a five-act play. It begins with enthusiasm — the honeymoon phase where everything feels possible. Then comes the slow awakening, when effort starts to outweigh reward. Light dims to brownout: irritability, fatigue, withdrawal. Then comes the full collapse — exhaustion, hopelessness, the quiet dread of getting out of bed. And finally, if you’re lucky, the phoenix moment — when everything you’ve built around performance falls apart, forcing you to rebuild around peace.

Most people recognise themselves somewhere in that story. Because burnout isn’t about weakness; it’s about the world we’ve built — where overwork is celebrated, empathy is optional, and busyness is mistaken for worth. We live in cities where commutes eat into dreams, notifications blur into noise, and time feels perpetually borrowed. Burnout, in this sense, isn’t just an individual condition. It’s cultural inheritance.

And leadership isn’t immune. “It’s sort of a lonely job,” Tim Cook once said. The higher you climb, the thinner the air becomes. Responsibility, pressure, and isolation can erode even the strongest minds. Leaders who once led with inspiration often end up managing exhaustion — theirs and everyone else’s. They fuel a culture of urgency without realising they are feeding a fire that burns them too. Employees chase titles they don’t want, leaders chase results that no longer fulfil, and the treadmill hums on, indifferent to who falls off next.

The effects go far beyond the office. Burnout seeps into marriages, parenting, and friendships. It disguises itself as irritability, insomnia, panic attacks, or the quiet ache of meaninglessness. Research links it to depression, heart disease, and the loss of creativity — but perhaps its greatest casualty is wonder. That simple capacity to feel alive, to feel awe, to feel enough.

And yet, not burning out doesn’t mean giving up. It means working with a steady rhythm. It means dreaming without drowning. Protecting our energy is not indulgence — it’s human intelligence that we often forget to use. Because burnout drains the very things our ambitions rely on: clarity, creativity, curiosity. You can’t build something meaningful on exhaustion.

For organisations, burnout is rarely an individual flaw. It’s a mirror held up to culture. When endurance is prized over empathy, when “resilience” becomes code for overwork, exhaustion becomes institutional. The best workplaces today know that well-being is not a side project — it’s the foundation on which performance is built. Caring is not a cost. It’s a multiplier.

And for individuals, burnout is not a failure — it’s a message. A quiet plea from the body saying: stop running. Listen. We can’t outwork exhaustion; we can only honour it. The world may not slow down for us, but we can choose to slow down for ourselves. Stepping off the treadmill isn’t quitting; it’s reclaiming your own pace. It’s the courage to rest, to breathe, to choose joy — and in doing so, to rediscover what real success feels like.

Because maybe the real joy isn’t in winning the race at all, but in recognising that you never had to run it. The rat race was never about competition; it was about conformity. We kept running because everyone else did — because stopping felt like failure. But the truth is, stepping away isn’t losing. It’s awakening. Burnout, in that sense, can be the beginning — the body’s rebellion against a rhythm that no longer serves the soul.

So if you’re reading this with a full inbox waiting, take a moment before you return to it. Look up. Exhale. You are not behind. You are simply being invited to return to yourself.

The irony is that even as technology promises ease, work has never felt heavier. The tools that were meant to save us time now fill every empty minute. The burnout epidemic isn’t about overwork alone — it’s about losing the boundaries between life and labour.

Burnout is not the end of your story. Simply as life was never meant to be a rat race.