What If Burnout Is A Meaning Problem

Burnout isn’t always about doing too much. Sometimes it’s the hollow kind, where you’re busy, tired, and still feel disconnected from your own life. Mark Walker starts from a raw social media post: a young guy stuck in a numb loop of eat, work, scroll, sleep. People pile on with labels like “lazy,” but I take it somewhere more useful and more compassionate: what if the real issue is awareness and meaning, not discipline?

From there I share a moment that changed the way I hold time. I was in hospice with my friend as he took his final breaths just days before his 66th birthday. It’s heavy, and it’s real, and it cuts through the story we hide talk about all the time. Most of us can read about impermanence, listen to podcasts about mortality, and still keep it at arm’s length. Sitting with it makes it tangible, and that tangibility can wake us up.

We also connect ancient wisdom practices and modern research on mortality awareness, including work I found through the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley and perspectives from Tibetan Buddhist practice. The point isn’t to scare ourselves or get morbid. It’s to stop outsourcing our lives to the next app, the next system, or the next thing to blame, and to use impermanence as a lever that pulls us back into the present. I’ll leave you with simple questions you can try today, plus small actions that rebuild purpose without pretending everything is easy.

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Transcript

Burnout Versus Disconnection

Sitting With A Friend’s Death

Mortality As A Life Deepener

Small Questions That Shift Today

Share It And Reach Out

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Fierce Encouragement. This is Mark, and today's episode, I wanted to share some current things with me, and then also just bring up some things that came on a walk where I literally thought this out uh as I wanted to just kind of move, shake out the cobwebs, and just talked my way through this. So I think there's a couple of surprising things and a couple things that I just know that were in my heart that I wanted to share with you. So today I wanted to start with this post I read on social media. It's a young guy who's kind of going through some boredom, burnout, and confusion. And it resonated with me, and I wanted to talk about it because I think it's a place I find myself in even many years past, this younger man. And it's also a call out to like share some tools, share some methods that you can work through this with things that come from stories in my life, but also things that have been tried and proven. And they in this post, the younger person said they would get up and get going, you know, their day, but they still feel unfulfilled and burnt out. Every day was the same. I think that was a lot of what they said. Every day was the same. They get up and eat. They tried working out, but that ended up being boring and didn't help. Um, but they would just eat and watch YouTube and work and then watch movies and eat again and go to bed, sleeping, waking, repeating again and again. And people's comments in that post, some of them were pretty harsh, calling them out for being lazy and dumb. But there was also some other genuinely helpful comments that kind of resonated with me and what I was thinking, things around like creating structure for yourself, uh, creating that deeper purpose, something that connects with what you care about. And moving into things like just reflecting practices, writing down a few things every day, reflecting what you want to get done that day, maybe doing one extra project, something that you feel creative about or want to learn about. But there's something else that I think is important here to distinguish. And that's this idea of burnout from feeling disconnected. One can be tired and satisfied. I don't know if you've ever had that feeling, maybe after a day of physical work or really caring about the outcomes, if you're out help volunteering or something like that. We can get worn out but still feel a satisfaction in that. But we can also be really worn out and tired and completely hollow. That hollow feeling isn't a productivity problem at all. I think it's an awareness problem. So a few days ago, I was in the hospital. I'm sorry, the the I was in the hospice center with my friend Stephen, and he was a good friend of mine. But he took his last breath a couple days short of his 66th birthday. There's something contrasting here for me, just kind of reading that post today and then thinking about being with somebody as they took their last breaths, which is that we think we have all the time in the world. And maybe we do feel like nothing matters in that moment. But then there's this other side of it. Uh, my friend at the end of his life taking those last breaths, his body was failing on him, there was no time left. It does feel heavy, but at the same time, there was something that I noticed during it, and it's a little past just the raw emotion of it. But there is this sense of dissolution, uh, of fading, the river running dry as you watch it. The body kind of releasing the elements and the energy bit by bit. The mind fades, the body gives out, the breath starts to go. And again, this isn't to be a horror movie or morbid, but it's something that's real. It's something that's humbling and it's waiting for all of us. But there's this idea of me talking about it, even sharing this story or reading a book about it, or even watching a pot or listening to a podcast or watching a video on it. There's something that's made it different, like tangible. Most of us just are live in that mental model. We think about impermanence as something that we can walk by like a piece of art on the wall. But when we're sitting with it and in the room, it at least for me, it brought up that idea of dissolution and fading really, really strongly. And I think there was something else here that I got from the ancient wisdom practices I've been lucky enough to run into. But we also can disremember death doesn't make our lives smaller in a way. It uh it can help when we remember the death, when we are with it and present, it actually can enrich the quality of our current life. There's some studies that have actually been done that I found through the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley. They had some papers on it as well, but and the Tibetan Buddhist practices talk about this and then built on this as well. But when we remember our mortality, our awareness around our mortality, when we do that right and with meaning, it can increase the quality and depth of our life. So back to the 22-year-old, right? Back to this young person, back to all of us. The answer really isn't, you know, it isn't a productivity system. It isn't another app, it isn't another book or another retreat or another running to or away from something. It isn't somebody else's fault. It isn't that job, it isn't those things that we just constantly kind of look outward and blame. And that's with uh a compassion and awareness that there is a lot of hard circumstances out there. So that's not at all to be not compassionate about what's going on sociologically. But from an inner standpoint, we can slow down and use that weight of impermanence to help call us back to the moment. Maybe it's the idea of a hammer, right? We don't want to hammer ourselves with impermanence and say that we're bad. But we can use it as a lever to move ourselves, just asking ourselves genuine questions, like what's one thing I could value or get from today. And maybe it's simple, like maybe you need a hug, or maybe you need to forgive somebody. Maybe you just need to start with something small, even a walk for yourself and telling yourself you're gonna figure it all out. And honestly, if it sucks, it sucks. Maybe we can just learn from that moment and what's the next thing you want to get out of it. I want to thank you for listening. I'd love to hear what landed for you from this quick episode today. And honestly, if you have a friend or somebody that you think that might need to hear just this exact quick message today, maybe somebody who's like kind of stuck in that in-between gray zone of unfulfillment, and especially somebody who's younger who feels confused by all this purpose talk. I think it's good to send this to them. Even that small act of fierce encouragement shows up right there. So thank you very much for listening. Again, this is Mark Walker. Reach out, I'd love to hear from you. If you're interested at all, uh apply for a one on one strategy session below. But thank you for checking in, and we will catch you next time on Fierce Encouragement. All right, bye bye.