Stop being self-obsessed, it's burning you out xox
A hormonal brain dump bcos I can't keep watching my friends lose their minds in this cultural tornado mess. You are enough. Enough enough enough.
It’s all very chicken and egg, but hear me out, which came first? The burnout or the self-absorption?
It’s a strange thing to say out loud in an era so attuned to healing and growth, BUT there’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-absorption – and I think a lot of us are quietly (or even loudly) crossing it.
As I see it, there are two key intertwining strands to all this. The first is the self-obsessed focus on self-optimisation: the way we treat ourselves as projects. We dissect our behaviours on Reddit forums, group chats, over coffee, and in therapy. We monitor our progress in productivity apps. We swap fun for fulfilment, even when we’re not sure what that means anymore.
The second is the burnout that inevitably follows. Because trying to perfect yourself is exhausting. Because hobbies shouldn’t be about pace and output, they shouldn’t have KPI’s. Because modern life is just no longer conducive to happy, healthy minds.
And yet, we keep going. We optimise, reflect, reframe, redo. We’re convinced the answer is more self-awareness, more tweaking, more understanding. But what if that’s the very thing draining us?
The medical term burnout describes an occupational phenomenon - the devastating fatigue, apathy, and physical symptoms - resulting from chronic workplace stress that hadn’t been successfully managed. That definition neglects the possibilities of unpaid labour, but I’m now seeing it come up in other ways, it’s not necessarily linked to a job, it’s about everything going on, it’s a combination of stuff, but it’s also an emotional burnout, it’s psychological burnout, caused by the deluge of news and the intractable merging of human and digital, it’s the barrage of information, the comparison traps, and it’s eating us alive.
I’m seeing it hurt the people I love. I’m fighting its claws on me.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The cultural push towards self-care and boundaries came from somewhere valid: we wanted to stop women, especially, from losing themselves in care for others. We were done with martyrdom and doormat dynamics. And rightly so.
But now it feels like we’ve overcorrected. That pendulum has swung hard. Kindness is often mistaken for weakness. Accommodation is read as a lack of boundaries. Generosity is questioned and critiqued as people-pleasing.
None of these thoughts are new btw. I am unoriginal. A quick Google will show you I’m not alone in seeing that something’s off. One piece that’s been sitting with me lately is from Polyester — Our Infatuation with Self-Optimisation and How It Could Be Dividing Us More (linked in the reading list below). It gets to the heart of this cultural moment: how our obsession with fixing ourselves is making us lonelier, more fragmented, and 1000% more fragile.
We're told self-obsession is self-love. But sometimes, it’s just a softer, pastel-coloured kind of ✨suffering ✨.
We’re not meant to be in constant self-focus. We’re relational creatures. We're meant to look up from our own mirrors and see someone else across the room, across the street, across the table. We’re not even supposed to see ourselves in mirrors. We were never meant to know what we look like!! We're meant to serve and be served. To help and be helped. And yes, that can be messy. Yes, it can stretch us. But… so can endless self-analysis?
I’m in no way advocating for abandoning boundaries or falling back into martyrdom. Obvs. This isn’t about erasing the good that’s come from reclaiming our needs. But it is about balance. About recalibrating. About considering if true wellness isn’t measured by how “healed” we are, but by how well we love and are loved? How deeply we can connect. How generously we can give—not just to ourselves, but to the world.
I think I’d rather be tired from giving my time to others than from spiralling in my own anxieties. I’d rather volunteer in a soup kitchen than sit at home self-optimising and drowning in my own ruminations alone.
I’d rather be tired from compassion than hollow from self-absorption. Wouldn’t you?
But hold up, we can’t even start this conversation without… drum roll please… Capitalism!!
Which at its core, of course, wants you to believe a certain thing, buy certain things, behave in certain ways. It profits off constant striving. It thrives when you feel not quite enough in comparison to the teeny tiny percentage of the world who make their big fat living online and therefore are the ones you see living a life that is literally designed to integrate with the current and evolving online landscape and it’s trends, which is why everyone looks and sounds and dresses the same and has the same kind of lifestyle despite living on other sides of the world, (and all seem to be white, middle class, and slim?!). So the modern self-help industry has been folded into it—commercialised, streamlined, and sold back to us as lifestyle brands and 10-step morning routines. The morning shed, looksmaxxing, clean girl. It’s a homogenisation of healing that erases nuance. We cannot all self-help ourselves in the same way. Self-care cannot possibly look the same for everyone. Right??!
Meanwhile, the cultural moment we’re living through doesn’t just coincide with mental illness—it exacerbates it. Then it turns around and pathologises us for reacting. It’s like a global gaslighting. We're made to feel broken for struggling under a system that breaks us. We’re offered pre-packaged fixes for problems that were never ours alone to solve. We doubt ourselves for feeling what is, frankly, a logical response to disconnection, pressure, and fear.
I loved
’ s recent essay “To Gen Z, Carrie isn’t just a columnist in a rent-controlled New York apartment — she’s the blueprint for building a personal brand out of your inner monologue and emotional turmoil.”I was literally clapping on the tube as I read this bit:
“I also think part of Gen-Z’s loneliness, and insatiable desire to be seen and heard, stems from them being pulled out of school and work during some of the most formative years of their adult and adolescent development. Gen-Z was the generation that would have been in high school and college/young adults when the pandemic begun in 2020. Being forced out of social systems we saw as constants in our lives may have skewed Gen-Z’s perception of belonging. Existing as a “main character” online became a way to prove they existed at all when they no longer had community and physical social systems to belong to.”
I, as an absolute non expert, am totally convinced that one of the many impacts of Covid, in removing autonomy and agency from a whole swath of young people, means we are now grabbing desperately to controlling our narrative and our lives, irl and online. We are optimising, scheduling, hustling, cultivating and curating because we feel that those choices and options were taken away from us.
It’s all “Content 📱” Vs. “Content 🧘”.
So true babes.
Writers like Freya India have been articulating this for a while now, especially for young women. In her essays (freyaindia.co.uk), she writes about a generation of girls fluent in self-diagnosis but starved of joy. Ten-year-olds with ten-step skincare routines. Teens who know every therapy term (and use them incorrectly) but can’t pick up the phone and call their Grandma. She calls it what it is: a crisis of over-analysis. We’re raising girls to treat their minds and bodies like problems to solve. In one piece, she pleads with readers to stop posting your mental health online. To stop filming yourself crying. Because being open about your problems comes with problems. Duh. There's regret in opening up too soon, in misrepresenting your pain, in performing your breakdown before you’ve even had a chance to heal. Her advice? Post less. Be more present. My advice. Share from your scars, not your wounds 🧘🏼♀️
In another essay, Freya urges us to recognise that not every moment of our lives needs to be documented for validation or connection (You Don't Need to Document Everything). I agree with her and recently wrote this to someone I love, “‘Show up when no one's watching.’ What does that mean? Well, it’s said with the assumption that most people only show up when they're going to get credit for it, or recognition or praise, or when it’s easy, or when it’s public. So it’s saying, show up when none of those things are true. Get used to things happening, to making progress just for the sake of it, just for your own sense of satisfaction. Show up when it’s hard, and messy, when you don’t feel like it, when no one is watching… I agree to a large extent with that, but what I think is more important right now is to add “and when you aren’t sharing it with anyone”. Because ultimately it’s saying, don’t tie your sense of achievement, and therefore your self worth, to others people’s reactions, but we can’t say that without acknowledging that largely that is all happening via the digital realm”.
Daisy Morris, in a recent episode of The Weird Years, names the loneliness we’re all swimming in which drives so much of this. The scroll culture. The self-branding. The disconnection. Post-pandemic, we’re oversaturated with self-awareness but starved of real community. She reminds us that joy isn’t a solo activity. That healing doesn’t happen in isolation.
And of course, we’ve got numbers to prove it. A recent Guardian article reports that Gen Z is trading pub nights for Pilates and pouring into gym memberships like never before. The vibe? Less communal joy, more solitary discipline. Less shared messiness, more private self-control.
It’s not that movement is bad. It’s that when your whole life becomes a performance of self-improvement, you risk losing the very thing you’re working towards: aliveness.
Cough cough. Bryan Johnson. (Mind you, I have conflicting feelings towards him, no shade to the man who seems like he’s simply too rich and had a brush with suicidal ideation and can’t bear to return to that place… I get you. And I do like anyone who encourages connection and health… but, yah, conflicting feelings because there’s like… world poverty and you’re spending billions to look a lil bit odd??!)
For me, I’ve always tried to toe the line between my neurodivergent brain, which loves order, routine, and goal setting, and the integral need for spontaneity, freedom, and joy without structure. As someone who thrives in structured environments, but is deeply concerned by how people’s brains and lives are hijacked by bizarre and aggressive forms of productivity and control - I’ve spent much of my time figuring out how to help myself—and others—integrate important and healthy, happy goals and routines in a way that reduces stress not add to it. I have always seen that at the end of the day, it’s not about maximising productivity; it’s often about creating space. The goal isn’t more work or better hustle; it’s finding room for the unscripted, the spontaneous, the delightful. I love discipline. I really do thrive on it. I think it’s all quite human actually. And so is connection. So are relationships. So is silliness and play and joy. They can, and should, all coexist. We were designed to collaborate, cooperate, work and play together. As my Dad says, “If you can do it with others, why do it alone?”.
OK so you’re burnt out.
The trick is to not just blame it all on social media. Which is easy to do! And I know I’ve yapped a lot about social media already. But it’s more than that. Social media is simply an enabler and facilitator to this cultural vacuum tornado mess.
So, thinking that a week off social media will “fix” everything, or that taking a break will somehow reset you? Yeah… not quite. It’s not as simple as the montage of “healthy” things and a few days of curated zen. If you think you’re burnt out, try 6 weeks of logging off… and try working through the relationship that you have with showing up (online and irl), showing off, preening, and proving. Talk about it with loved ones. Ask questions. Step away from the constant check-ins and consumption. Dive into something bigger than yourself. Get curious, get creative, get excited about concepts, history, knowledge. Be a beginner. Fail. Flop. Rest. Leap. Let yourself be inspired by the world around you - be filled up a fresh with relationships, with laughter and joy and undocumented silliness.
Connection is the antidote, looking outwards is what might just save you.
We were not made to optimise, or to become. We were made be. To be wholly and truly ourselves, to be with others, to be seen and understood from all angles, and to see and love others, to expand our sense of self and our sense of this world, to empathise deeply, uncomfortably, to sit in feelings and considerations longer than the length of a 30 second reel.
You are enough. Of great value. Offline. You are intricately designed and created. You are flesh and bones, not your Instagram handle or the number of views on a video. You are expansive. You don’t fit into a 3x3 grid, you were not made to.
And if all this sounds heavy, it’s because it is. To look around and see how far we’ve drifted from one another. But as scary as that is, I think it’s worse to be scared of ourselves, and for ourselves. The loneliness of self-focus has its own kind of horror.
There’s a difference between documenting your life for the gaze of others and living it and experiencing it with others. We’re mistaking online friendship for real intimacy. We think followers mean friends. That we have some kind of relationship with the people in our comments and DM’s. But would you call them in a crisis? Do you even have their number?
We need to tend to the friendships we already have. The grass is greener where you water it. So water it. The ones from school. From down the road. I schedule in ‘friendship dates’ at the start of each month (ironically, as part of my monthly reflect and reset - LOL) just like I do my Dr appointments, and my grocery deliveries, my friendships are integral to my wellbeing. And yes, we need more third spaces again, (a conversation for another time is to think about how the church has been replaced in the UK, once the places to gather, give, and be accepted) because there are gaps that can’t be filled by wellness apps or self-help content. They’ve been partially filled, perhaps, by coworking spaces, gyms, run clubs?? But what are many of these spaces if not another place to perform our self-discipline? To centre the self? (Again my friends, not that they are inherently bad, it’s just they are not enough. I love a run club. Sign me up. Hand me my croissant.)
So here’s the invitation. Let’s drag our gaze outward again. Let’s cook for others. Practice the art of gathering and hosting and welcoming. Text first. Pick up the flipping phone!!! not FaceTime, take a break from staring at yourself. Let your online content point to others and to other things, not just to yourself. Reclaim joy, not as a goal but as a practice. And let’s be okay with being just fine.
It is an act of resistance and defiance in this economy and cultural moment to pursue genuine holistic health (creative, mental, spiritual, physical, relational etc) without documenting, or spending all your hard earned pennies on it, with and beside others, chasing joy and delight, cultivating deep and empathetic relationships, and an impenetrable unconditional self worth, which is not driven or dictated by superficial, unwritten, and ever changing standards of becoming, but by a deep understanding that a better me, is a better you, and a better us. That we were made for more than this.
Read and listen list
The Times – On maximising your life and whether it’s making you miserable Read here
- – Stop Opening Up About Your Mental Health
- – podcast episode on loneliness and building meaningful friendships IRL on The Weird Years podcast
- – “Our Infatuation with Self Optimisation Could Be Dividing Us More” Read here
The Guardian - Gen Z gym culture and why no one is in the pub Listen here
The Wellness Scoop Podcast – On perfectionism and self-optimisation: Listen on Spotify
Two Broke Chicks Podcast – How burnout is masked as ambition and is one way you’re self sabotaging your 20’s: Listen on Spotify
- – "Main Character Syndrome" is Making Gen-Z the Loneliest Generation