Deciding to close a business is hard. Closing it without wrecking the people inside seems harder, but it doesn’t have to be. In 2024, I made the decision to close my creative agency, a company filled with incredibly capable and talented creative women, who I deeply respected. Everyone told me it would be extremely difficult, that they would be disappointed and deeply upset. I chose to believe that while I could not control anyone else’s emotions, I could make this incredibly challenging life pivot with grace and integrity, with their wellbeing and experience top of mind, and therefore do the opposite of what seems to be the norm in this country: closing a business, or letting people go, in the most disrespectful and inhumane ways possible.

Remember Better.com? In December 2021, CEO Vishal Garg pulled 900 employees, about 15% of the entire company, into one Zoom meeting and told them their jobs were gone, effective immediately, before most of them had even processed why they were on the call in the first place. Garg took a leave of absence shortly after, once the internet made unmistakably clear how monstrous that move actually was…but the damage was done.

Better.com is not some outlier. Major tech companies do this constantly now, mass layoffs delivered through automated emails that land in inboxes before 6AM, cold and impersonal and engineered to avoid one real conversation with one real person who helped build the thing being dismantled. The whole system is built to protect the executive delivering the news, never the person receiving it.

That is the norm I was trying to opt out of.

Where It All Began

Two years ago, I found myself sitting across from a team I had built and believed in, and somewhere in the middle of an otherwise ordinary workday I understood something I had been avoiding for months. I was no longer being a creative. I was an operating executive, and I hated my job. It didn’t matter that the business was profitable or taking in seven figures a year. I spent my time on health insurance, invoicing, new business pipelines, and boring logistics, basically the entire scaffolding required to keep a company standing upright. It was a slow burn, something I didn’t recognize was happening until it smacked me in the face. I had replaced the thing I actually loved doing, which was the work itself.

I did not sit with that for long. Within weeks I had made the call. I was going to close the business, take a real beat, and figure out what came next without the pressure of growing something I was already losing myself inside of. One of my skill sets is decisiveness, and willpower. I do not believe in failure as a concept. A lesson my dad taught me at a really young age is, “you don’t have to like losing or enjoy starting over, but you have to respect it and be willing to do both.” So I knew closing my business would only mean starting over again. And when I came back, I was going to come back smaller and sharper, as a consultancy, without the weight of full-time payroll. But what felt even bigger than closing was answering the question: how the fuck do you close your business with respect and appreciation for the people who have made it all possible? I didn’t know, and no one else seemed to know either. With that, I built a blueprint, and I’m sharing it with you through this piece.

Read more

What has been eye-opening in this grieving and healing process is realizing how prolonged caretaking of anyone and anything, animal or human, for many months as they slowly reach the end of their life, requires ENORMOUS hypervigilance. July was the first time since January 2026 where caretaking didn’t consume my entire life. And while I would do it all over again, 100 times over for my girl Lou, July was selfishly about me. I feel like I’ve woken up from a 8 month slumber and experiencing genuine presence for the first time in ages. So this July I ran with this newfound feeling. I was gluttonous, I fought back against the sadness that has consumed my existence and felt, here, in this moment, on this earth, with all senses.

I thank Lou for that too. Her spirit was guiding this month’s journey of burnout prevention, just like it did when she was my sidekick and by my side in the flesh.

With that…Here is what July looked like:

1. Purged Toxic Products From My Home and Started Over

Coming out of this grief, I just needed to get rid of the toxicity, and apparently that manifested literally.

I went through my entire kitchen and living room and pulled out everything I no longer felt good about, the plastic containers I had been meaning to replace for years, the cleaning products I had never actually looked at the ingredients of, the candles I had been burning without a second thought. I switched all my food containers over to glass, my rice cooker to stainless, air fryer to glass, my cutting boards to steel…I went for it! I researched every cleaning product in the house and landed on Koala Eco as my go-to, and switched every single candle over to KEAP, specifically the Wood Cabin scent which is warm and grounding and smells fantastic. There is something that happens when you physically clear out the things that are quietly working against you! I swear! It goes beyond the practical, I wanted to match my environment to the version of myself I am slowly trying to become on the other side of all of this. I did not plan for this process to be a grief or burnout prevention ritual, but that is what it became.

COST: Items range from $10-$200

LINKS HERE

2. I Took Off My Oura Ring

I was addicted to my Oura ring. I would look at its results to guide how I feel…?! I also recognized this month that wearing it through grief was actively working against me. My sleep has been disrupted in ways that are completely understandable given everything my nervous system has been through, and waking up to a readiness score that confirms I slept TERRIBLY is information I already have and do not need to be reminded of. It was genuinely adding to my stress not helping. I’ll eventually put it back on, but for now…Grief is not a metric!

COST: Free

3. I Took My First Spanish Lesson and I Am Determined To One Day Be Fluent.

Three truths 1) My husband is fluent in Spanish 2) We travel often to Spanish speaking countries 3) I am sick and tired of coming across as some quiet, unopinionated woman when we do, while he charms entire rooms in a language I cannot participate in. Anyone who knows me understands…unopinonated?! Quiet? Nope. Not me.

SO, I finally stopped complaining about it, signed up to take my first EVER Spanish lesson. I chose Preply, which pairs you with a live tutor online. It was so fun that I bought a package - 4 sessions a month. I am now so motivated and curious. Being a beginner in your 30s is a humbling and important exercise. It’s good for the brain, and the soul. Highly recommend!

COST: €243.60 Total for 5 Sessions

LINK TO TRY PREPLY

4. I Saw The Potluck Off-Broadway and It Wrecked Me in the Best Way

In 1979, five labor organizers and activists were murdered in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina by members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party during a protest (TRUE STORY).

Flash forward to now (2026), a young man named César James Alvarez, named after one of the deceased Greensboro 5, writes a musical, The Potluck, about his experience of grappling with a tragedy that has greatly impacted his family’s life, all the while acknowledging he was not there and is a millennial trying to make sense of the past in the present moment. Centered around a twelve-person intergenerational cast, the show is weird and funny and brilliant and emotionally alive in the way the best theater ever manages. It’s relatable in the sense most of us have inherited a history we did not live through, and yet feel completely responsible for honoring it, or healing it, any way. My husband and I walked out of The Potluck moved in a way we were not expecting, and yet still cannot quite grasp how transedental it was.

Whooooof. I don’t know else to describe it…Lin Manuel did a really good job explaining its impact.

COST: $65/Ticket

MORE ON THE POTLUCK

5. We Ate Our Way Through San Sebastián and Through Our Grief

My husband and I went to Biarritz, France & San Sebastián, Spain for vacation and ate so damn much. While we had so many great meals, the evenings we had at Seabird, IRATZE and Manojo, blew our minds. All run by local husband and wife teams, each restaurant had a passion and zest for experimenting with flavors and cultures that felt so fresh and so f*cking unique. The dishes were incredible, layered and confident and completely unexpected, and the natural wine was DELICIOUS! We ate slowly, ordered too much, rolled ourselves out of each restaurant, so full and delighted. We let the whole thing be exactly what it was, two people moving through something enormous together, finding that the world still contains so much that is generous and beautiful and worth being present for.

LINKS TO EACH RESTAUANT ABOVE

COST: $130-$200 euros on average

6. I Started Reading Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson

My friend Jasmine recommended I read Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson, and I started weeping only a few pages in.

Laura Lynne Jackson writes about the ways the universe communicates with us through signs, the small and specific and sometimes inexplicable moments that carry the feeling of something larger reaching through, and I came to this book desperately wanting to connect to Lou, to feel her somewhere, to believe that the love between us did not simply end because her life did. I am not going to tell you what to believe about any of that. What I will tell you is that this book has helped me enormously. During a season of grief where logic has very limited usefulness, something like Signs, a book that speaks the language of the heart and the spirit, rather than the head, goes very far.

COST: $17.56 (paperback)

LINK TO PURCHASE

7. Booked a Solo Trip to Copenhagen With No Agenda and No Plans

In late September I am heading to Copenhagen ahead of visiting a friend in Amsterdam, and I booked it entirely for myself. I have no itinerary, no agenda and nowhere to be. It will just be me in a city, with a list of recommendations from friends, and complete freedom to do whatever I want with every hour of every day. The act of booking it, of deciding that I deserved an entire trip built around nothing except my own curiosity and pleasure, feels damn amazing.

Solo travel is something I hear people talk themselves out of far too easily. I know feeling like you need a companion, or at minimum, a very full itinerary to justify getting on a plane alone is a lot, but I genuinely think there is something that happens when you travel by yourself that cannot be replicated any other way. It’s a particular feeling of having no one’s preferences to consider except your own, at exactly your own pace….thats indescribable.

If you’re on the fence…please consider giving it a shot.

You deserve it.

July was the month I started to believe that being OKAY was something I can experience now. I am a LEO, and August is my birthday month. I have never been more excited to be a year older. 2025-2026 has been a season of overwhelm. Illness, grief, caretaking, all of it layered on top of each other for months. I want to spend the first chunk of MY new year doing every single thing I have been dreaming about: traveling, being present, taking up space, learning Spanish, ALL THE THINGS.

Lou taught me that I was the most worthy creature she has ever known, and I did the exact same for her back. I believe, we both never once questioned whether we deserved to be loved the way we loved once another. I took so many notes from 14 years with that precious munchkin…and the biggest takeaway remains true: just do it, all of it. Get the dog, do the trip, buy the thing, experience life and all the emotions and feelings it brings.

All of it is worth it. All of it.

THANK YOU JULY.

AUGUST…LEO SEASON…LETS GO!

Here’s the truth…Most Americans do not take time off. Facts. And while there are so many deeply personal reasons as to why, the guilt we feel about taking time off is a construct. It’s apart of a system that is working according to plan. The more anxiety, or concern, you feel about taking a day of rest... the more likely you will not take it.

A PTO HISTORY LESSON

In July of 1910, President Taft proposed that every U.S worker needed “two or three months’ vacation... in order to enable one to continue their work the next year with that energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.” 2 to 3 months! It is one of the more startling artifacts in American labor history, a sitting president arguing that REST was a structural necessity rather than a personal indulgence. But let’s not give President Taft too much credit. There was no follow-through after this profound statement. No legislation appeared. The idea evaporated…pouf! It went to the same place most good labor proposals go to die in this country…into thin air.

For decades after that, paid time off in America existed almost exclusively for salaried managers, the people already closest to power. It was not until after World War II that companies began extending it further down the org chart, and even then it was not generosity, it was competition.1 Businesses needed a way to attract workers in a tightening labor market, and vacation became a bargaining chip. Workers fought for paid time off the same way they fought for weekends and the 8-hour workday. It was never generously handed down by employers. It was negotiated, contested, and won.

Then, somewhere along the way, the language quietly shifted underneath us. Paid time off stopped being treated as part of our compensation and started being marketed as a “benefit.” A “perk.” Sometimes, absurdly, even a “gift.”

That reframing did enormous work. People began to see their time off as something they were lucky to receive rather than something they had earned through the time, energy, and labor they gave to their jobs. And when you believe you are lucky to have something, you are much less likely to demand it, protect it, or use it without guilt.

But PTO is compensation. It belongs to you in the same way your salary does. A gift, by contrast, is optional. It is usually rooted in generosity, in someone choosing to go out of their way to give you something they were under no obligation to provide. Of course you feel grateful when you receive one. Gratitude is generally part of the exchange. A gift can also be declined without consequence...besides it being damn awkward.

None of that, however, describes paid time off.

Language matters here, because once PTO was framed as a gift rather than compensation, we began treating it like one. We felt indebted to employers for offering it. We worried that using too much of it would make us appear ungrateful. We even began apologizing for taking what already belonged to us. That framing still shapes our behavior today, which is why so many people feel guilty for using their vacation days even though they would never feel guilty for expecting their employer to pay the rest of their wages.

LETS LOOK AT THE MATH

Overall, paid vacation was available to 79% of private industry workers as of BLS's most recent survey, which means roughly 1 in 5 private sector workers has none at all. And that number gets brutal once you break it down by pay.2 Among the lowest 10% of earners, only 44% have access to paid vacation.3 More than half of the lowest paid workers in this country get zero. So if you do have PTO sitting in your account and you are choosing not to use it, you are not just leaving money on the table. You are leaving money on the table that other people in this economy were never even offered a seat at!

So what this all really means is that the average cash value of unused PTO is nearly $3,000 per worker (according to Sorbet’s 2024 PTO Report4.) Multiply that across the entire American workforce and you get a number worth looking at: more than $312 billion in unused PTO liability, evaporating annually and treated as though it never existed in the first place!5

BIG QUESTION: If your company shorted your paycheck by $3,000 in a single year, you would not shrug and say no problem?!6 No damn way! You would definitely escalate it, you would call HR and you would probably call a lawyer. But letting that same $3,000 expire in the form of unused vacation days barely registers, because nobody has framed it to you as a loss. That is not an accident either, that is what happens when compensation gets successfully rebranded as a courtesy.

So before anyone shows up in the comments to tell me it is more complicated than that, sure. Yes, I am very aware. Staffing is thin, coverage is tough and in this country right now, it is very very hard to be running a successful business. That guiilt is real and it is not always irrational. But none of that changes the underlying math. PTO is wages in a different form, and wages you do not collect do not roll over into some cosmic bank of goodwill….They just disappear.

The reason I am writing any of this is because every summer, I watch people who have the privilege and financial ability to take time off simply refuse to do it. Of course, many people cannot afford to stop working. The cost of living is so high that taking even a few unpaid days can feel unfathomable. But money does not explain all of it. Some of this is the psychological consequence of being American, of living in a country that has taught us to measure our worth by how much we produce. Somewhere deep in our subconscious, many of us still do not believe we have earned the right to step away. We do not trust that we are worthy of time that belongs only to us, whether that means a weeklong vacation or a single day of rest.

SO if you can…take the time this summer. Sit on your couch and eat popcorn, binge real housewives, go on a walk or just stare at a wall. Whatever restoration looks like for you…. take it. The point was never an expensive vacation or the foreign destination. The point is that, for many people, you already f*cking paid for it, and it is long past time you collected your dues.

BRING BACK SOURCES! SOURCES BELOW:

With this grief, I have been introduced to a new-kind of burnout that is very different from one induced by overwork or chronic output without rest (the kind I know well and have spent years learning to navigate.) This is burnout caused by caretaking that has finally ended. It is the release after holding an enormous weight for months and months and finally arriving at the empty space that used to be filled with responsibility and devotion. This burnout is bone-deep in a way that feels almost cellular, and yet I believe that this burnout was worth it. I know that Lou is somewhere better, and that I can slowly begin to rebuild a life I had quietly put on hold to love her through her ending.

This month required the same dedication to burnout prevention as every other month, maybe more because it is less familiar and therefore easier to underestimate. So In June, I kept going with my burnout-prevention-dedication, imperfectly and tenderly and with significantly lower expectations of myself than usual.

With that…Here is what June looked like:

1. I Went to Visit My Grandmother and Let Her Take Care of Me

My grandmother Mary is one of the greatest joys of my life, full of life and humor and a kind of wisdom that simply does not exist within anyone my age. Being around her reminds me to love, to heal, to trust, to cry and to pursue happiness with everything I have because she has done exactly that for longer than I have been alive and the proof is in her smile.

She cooked dinner, made my favorite things, and spoiled me and my husband completely. Most importantly, we let her take care of us…which is its own practice for two people who default toward taking care of others rather than receiving care from them. There is nothing in any wellness-program or on any list I have ever written that replicates what it feels like to sit in the home of someone who has loved you your whole life and simply be loved without condition or performance or any expectation of being further along than you are. I went to San Francisco carrying the weight of one of the hardest months of my life and my grandmother did not fix any of it, she did not need to, she just loved me through it the way she always has. I am so blessed.

COST: My Whole Full Heart

2. I Treated Myself to a Spa Day at the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco

While I was in San Francisco I went to the Nob Hill Spa at the brand new Huntington Hotel, which has been completely reimagined by the legendary designer Ken Fulk. It is genuinely stunning in a way that feels both maximalist and deeply intentional, the kind of space that communicates clearly that whoever built it cared about the actual experience of being inside it, rather than just the experience of photographing it. It’s not made for Instagram, people!

At Nob Hill Spa, I got a lymphatic facial, used the sauna, spent time by the pool, and did absolutely NOTHING useful to anyone for an entire afternoon. It was exactly what I needed. This was a spa day dedicated to communicating to my nervous system that it was worth slowing down for.

I must also add…the service and spa shop were also FABULOUS. I walked away with a million products I did not need, and have zero regrets.

COST: $273.00

Link to Book

3. I Did an At-Home Blowout with GlamSquad and Let Myself Be Tended To

I have been skeptical of GlamSquad for hair for a very long time, specifically because I am a Black woman with thick hair and the idea of a stranger showing up at my apartment to silk press it felt like an invitation to a disaster. That fear kept me away from the service for years longer than it probably needed to.

This month I finally booked Glamsquad for a Silk Press (*a new offer!) and I am genuinely glad I did because my stylist was fantastic. My hair felt and looked incredible! Someone came to me, tended to me, made me feel put together in a way I had not felt in weeks, and left. Voila! Such a gift!

COST: Starts at $90 (*NYC)

4. I Printed Out My Favorite Substack Articles and Actually Read Them

I had an enormous backlog of Substack essays I had been meaning to read from writers I genuinely love, Rachel Kartan, , , and I simply had not been able to get there because grief had quietly consumed the bandwidth I usually reserve for absorbing other people’s words. My phone has felt really overwhelming recently, so I printed a series of their articles out, physically, on paper, and sat down and read them without a screen anywhere near my face. It kind of felt like catching up with friends I had been absent from for months, coming back into a conversation, and finding that everyone I like was still there. Reading Substack articles without the ambient noise of the internet around, is a completely different experience and honestly so damn good.

COST: *Depends on your subscription model for each writer

5. I Watched the Knicks and the World Cup throughout Fort Greene

One of the unexpected things grief taught me this month is how much I needed to be around random people who had absolutely no idea what I was going through, and sports turned out to be the most reliable vehicle for that.

I watched the Knicks and World Cup matches at bars around Fort Greene, surrounded by TOTAL strangers who were entirely consumed by something that had absolutely nothing to do with me or my loss. Tthere is a specific freedom in that, in being a person in a room whose grief is completely invisible, whose identity in that moment is just a regular-ass person watching a game and reacting to it like a normal human being. Nobody needed anything from me. Nobody was monitoring whether I was “OK” at the moment. I could be loud and happy and disappointed and completely anonymous and for stretches of this month that anonymity felt like the most luxurious thing in the world.

COST: Whatever the drinks cost

6. I Read Every Bench Plaque in Fort Greene Park

This month, I randomly started taking walks through Fort Greene Park and leaving my phone at home. One afternoon, I stopped to read a plaque on a bench. Then another. Then another. Before I knew it, I’d become completely obsessed and eventually read every single one. They made me feel something I wasn’t expecting. The dedications people have left behind for the people and animals they have loved and lost. Parents, partners, friends, and an extraordinary number of dogs. Marriage proposals. Inside jokes. Knicks references! Little declarations of love that someone decided deserved a permanent place in the world, where strangers might stumble upon them years later.

I cried on more than one bench. I laughed out loud more than once. It reminded me that love exists quietly in public spaces. I’ve now done it 4 times, and I know I’ll keep doing it. It takes about an hour if you read every plaque.

Do it. You’ll leave feeling more connected to complete strangers, to grief, to joy, and to your own humanity. I can’t explain it any better than that. It is one of the most unexpectedly beautiful things I’ve done all year.

COST: Free

7. I Attended a Pet Grief Group Hosted by Christine Galotti

Believe it or not, there are grief groups for EVERYTHING you might be losing, and before this year I do not think I truly understood what that meant or how much it mattered. This group was offered through the animal hospital where my dog Lou received her care, hosted by Pet Social Worker, Christine Galotti, who also offers individual grief counseling sessions for those who need more than a group can hold.

This group was unexpectedly really special.

A zoom-room full of people who understood without any explanation required what it means to love an animal with your entire self and then lose them. There were grown men, teenagers, mothers, young adults…you name it! People whose pets lived to 17 and died six months ago. People who lost them unexpectedly after only four weeks. The whole gambit. There were rabbit owners, cat people, reptile-loving-folks, and (of course!) dog lovers. It was a vulnerable, sobbing, gaggly-goo mess of incredible humans holding an astonishing amount of space for such a specific, special, profound, and often marginalized kind of loss.

Mon Dieu. It was truly the best thing I have done for myself while moving through this time.

COST: Free for VERG Clients // $199 for 1x1 Counseling with Christine

Link to Book

June was the hardest month of my life in recent memory. What I keep learning is that preventing burnout during grief is not so different from preventing it during overwork, in that it requires the same underlying commitment to choosing yourself in the smallest and most deliberate ways even when you do not have the energy to do it gracefully. Especially then. Lou changed my life by being in it (I LOVE YOU LOU) and I am slowly, imperfectly, learning that she is still changing it by being gone.

THANK YOU JUNE.

JULY WE ARE HERE

<3

So, I’m here to shout it: it is perfectly okay to like your job. Not love it.

You cannot fake loving your job indefinitely. You think you can talk yourself into it, think yourself into it, post yourself into it, but your nervous system keeps an honest record even when you don’t.

So what if you just stopped trying? What if liking your job was actually more than enough?

Hear Me Out

For most of my twenties, I was “convinced” that I loved my job. Not because I actually did, but because I thought that was the requirement. That loving it was the proof you were doing something right, and that anything less meant you had chosen wrong, settled early, or simply lacked the ambition to find the thing that would light you up every morning.

So I performed it. I said the words: “It’s the best.” “I really love it.” “It’s so fun.” If you go looking, there are probably public records of me somewhere declaring that I “loved” working at the Museum of Ice Cream, or that I felt deep passion building my creative agency. I wasn’t lying exactly. But I wasn’t telling the truth either. I thought I had to say it, so I said it, and then I “convinced” myself it was true, and that convincing led me directly into burnout. Time and time again.

I bring this up because the discourse around loving what you do has never been louder, and the timing has never felt more tone deaf. People are stuck in jobs they hate because the alternative is quitting cold and absorbing the full financial risk, OR applying 3000 times and hoping a recruiting bot has a momentary crisis of conscience and forwards your resume to an actual human being.

There had to be a better framework. So I made one up.

My Made Up 70/30 Rule

Upon turning 30, I decided enough with this, and built a new framework for myself that I still live by 4 years later. My job needs to hit roughly 70% fulfillment, and that 70% needs to cover 100% of my financial life. My rent, my dinners with friends, my ability to travel, all of it. The remaining 30%, which is where my real life lives. That is where I get to pursue my passions. The passion is my creative work, the thing I would do even if it never paid. Right now, this Substack and my content on IG/TikTok is my 30%. Writing, building BURNT & Utendahl Consulting, actually means something to me. It is supplementary income at the moment. It is what I protect.

The 70% is my CMO and brand strategy work. I work with clients ranging from early-stage startups to businesses doing $300+ million in revenue, helping them build, systematize, and grow. Do I love it? No. Do I like it? YES. When your job is paying for your actual life, liking it is more than enough. I am good at it, it does not stress me out, and it funds everything else. I do not dream about it. I do not wake up on Monday with excitement in my chest about a brand audit. And I have stopped pretending that is a problem.

The “Experts” Agree (In their own way)

Elizabeth Gilbert has a framework worth knowing here. She breaks it into four categories: hobby, job, career, and vocation. A job, in her view, doesn’t have to be awesome. It doesn’t have to fulfill you emotionally. 1You just have to do it with respect. The vocation is the thing that chooses you, and she is clear that not everyone has one, and that is fine. She has also said publicly that years of encouraging people to follow their passion as the guaranteed path to happiness left a lot of people chasing a promise that was never realistic for them to begin with. Her words on the job specifically: “it doesn’t need to be awesome. You just need to have one and do it with some dignity.”

Scott Galloway goes further and is considerably less diplomatic about it. His position, from The Algebra of Wealth, is that “follow your passion” is advice only the already rich can afford to give, and that typically the person telling you this made their fortune in some unglamorous industry like iron or plumbing. (I agree!) He argues you should follow your talent instead, not your passion, and he has the data to back up why: only 20% of people under 26 can even articulate a singular passion that guides their life choices2. His actual prescription: you don’t have to love it, just don’t hate it. Get great at something people will pay for, and passion tends to follow the mastery, not the other way around. The numbers on creative fields are not comforting either: only 2% of professional actors make a living from their craft,3 and the 97th percentile of YouTube creators generates enough views to pull in roughly $15,000 a year.4 The math is not sentimental.

Both Gilbert and Galloway are pointing at the same underlying truth from different angles: the cultural mandate to love your work is a setup, and most of us were never given the conditions to actually meet it.

The conversation we rarely have honestly is about what it actually takes to pursue your passions full time, and what gets left out is privilege. When someone tells you to quit your job and bet everything on your dream, what they are often not saying is: I had savings, or family money, or a partner with stable income, or enough runway to absorb the risk of being wrong for a few years. For most people, that advice is not a strategy. It is a fantasy with a liability attached.

While, YES, I am working toward being part of that small percentage of people for whom passion and talent converge into the thing that also pays the bills. The people for whom the 30% eventually becomes the whole thing. I think about it, I build toward it, I manifest it, and I believe it is possible for me. That optimism is not performative though. It is one of the things I protect most.

I am also a realist about what that requires and who actually gets there. Most of us will not experience that reality. Not because we aren’t talented or devoted enough, but because the conditions required to make it happen, the financial runway, the timing, the market, the specific combination of privilege and luck that rarely gets talked about in the success story, are simply not equally distributed. That is not a reason to stop trying. It is a reason to stop feeling ashamed in the meantime!

So if you like your job and that is the whole story right now, that is enough. It might actually be the right arrangement for where you are. The goal is not to love every hour you sell. The goal is to like it enough that it doesn’t hollow you out, fund the 30% that belongs to you, and protect that 30% with the same ferocity you bring to everything else. Do not let the 70% bleed into it. Do not let anyone convince you that monetizing your passion is the only proof it counts.

I will be here building toward the inversion, hoping you are too. But until then, liking your job is perfectly acceptable and more than enough. For most of us, it is the whole point.

BRING BACK SOURCES! SEE ALL SOURCES BELOW :)

What May taught me is that grief and joy are not opposites. They can coexist. Sometimes they sit in the same afternoon. I can be standing in a garden surrounded by wildflowers and horses and feel more grounded than I have all year (true story!), while also feeling my dying’s dogs, absence approaching like a tide I cannot stop. That isn’t a contradiction. I suppose it’s what it means to be a person paying attention.

So here is what I did in May to prevent burnout and keep it at bay.

May this list find you wherever you are.

MAY 2026

1. I Bought a Vibration Plate and Became Annoyingly Evangelical About It

I am not someone who buys into every wellness product that cycles through my Instagram feed. I have enough restraint for that. But when I kept seeing Melissa Wood Health using a vibration plate and it was not some expensive luxury version, just a straightforward one she clearly actually used, I thought to myself…hmm lets give it a shot!

I ordered the LifePro vibration plate during a sale and it arrived feeling completely unremarkable! And then I started using it every single morning and it became one of the more quietly impactful things I have added to my routine in a long time. It gets me back into my body before my day starts. It moves something. I cannot be more specific than that, but if you have ever felt like your nervous system needs a literal SHAKE before it will cooperate with you, you will understand immediately what I mean.

My husband, who views most of my wellness purchases with patient skepticism and not infrequently the expression of a man watching a very expensive mistake unfold in slow motion, tried it once and now uses it regularly! That is a high endorsement!

COST:$199

LINK TO PURCHASE

2. Booked a Last-Minute Lymphatic Facial at Spencer's Spa Because of a Promotional Text Message

I almost never read promotional text messages. I have exactly the right amount of friction built into my life to protect me from that particular category of impulse spending, which is to say that my marketing background makes me deeply suspicious of urgency tactics. I know what they are doing. I am usually immune.

And yet. One afternoon Spencer’s Spa sent a text offering fifty percent off a treatment if I booked within the hour, and something in me said yes before the skeptical part of my brain could object. I went that afternoon for a lymphatic facial. The space was beautiful. Calming in the specific way that feels intentional rather than decorative, the kind of room that clearly exists to make you feel like the whole world has slowed down and will still be there when you get back.

What I remembered lying there is how rarely I give myself permission to simply receive care without simultaneously planning something else inside my head. No thinking. No strategizing. Just two hours of being completely unavailable to anything except the room I was in. That is its own practice, and I needed the reminder.

COST: $125 (Promo Sale) // $229 (Full Price)

LINK TO SPENCERS SPA

3. I Finally Read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

I read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara this month and it arrived at exactly the right moment, which is to say I probably could have read it a year ago and not gotten what I got from it now.

Guidara co-owned Eleven Madison Park during the years it was ranked the best restaurant in the world, and the book is essentially an argument that excellence in any field is not a technical problem. His central thesis is that the greatest thing you can do for another person is make them feel genuinely, specifically, completely seen. Not served. The distinction sounds minor until you sit with it, and then you realize it is actually everything. There is a story in the book about a table of tourists who mentioned offhand that they had never had a New York City hot dog. His team sent someone out mid-meal to get them one! It became their most memorable course. That is the whole philosophy in a single moment.

What landed for me, reading this during a month of grief and transition and the vulnerability that comes with building something new in public, was the reminder that unreasonable care is not an operational strategy. It is a value system. It requires choosing to pay that level of attention to the people in front of you even when it costs you something extra. What I am trying to do with BURNT is not so different. The whole thing only works if people feel actually seen.

COST: $16.00

LINK TO PURCHASE

4. I Went to the Hurvin Anderson Exhibition at the Tate

While in London I visited the Hurvin Anderson exhibition at the Tate and LOVED it. Anderson is a British-Jamaican painter whose work deals in spaces defined by absence. His most iconic paintings are swimming pools, still and luminous and nearly empty, bodies of water that feel suspended between belonging and exclusion, between leisure and a longing that never quite resolves. They are paintings about what it means to be a Black man observing spaces that were not historically built for him, rendered in a visual language so serene and gorgeous that the tension lives just beneath the surface rather than announcing itself from the top. What I responded to most was the restraint. Anderson is looking at these spaces and asking you to look with him. Its brilliant

COST: £ 18.00

LEARN MORE

5. I Saw Proof on Broadway With My Friend Brooke

I went to see Proof on Broadway with my friend Brooke and I am so glad I did. David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows Catherine, the daughter of a recently deceased and mathematically brilliant but mentally ill father, as she navigates her grief, her own uncertain relationship to genius and sanity, and a mathematical proof that may represent either her greatest achievement or the beginning of her unraveling.

I have always believed that the THEATER does something that no screen can replicate. There is an electricity in a room full of people watching something unfold in real time, something that bypasses your analytical brain entirely and lands somewhere older and more honest. And then there is the part where you go to the theater with a friend you love and sit in the dark together and laugh and go quiet and feel things and walk out into the night and talk about it. That is not supplemental to the performance. That is the whole point. Burnout does not stand a chance against it.

COST: Tickets start at $80.00

BUY TICKETS TO PROOF HERE

Subscribe now

6. I Stayed at Les Sources de Cheverny Instead of the Wedding Venue and It Was One of the Best Decisions I Made All Month

My husband and I traveled to France for a wedding in May. The wedding venue, it turned out, did not have air conditioning. Temperatures hovered around 92F degrees . In a different season of my life I would have pushed through staying here without a second thought. I would have sweated through formal clothes and told myself it was fine, even when it wasn’t. But this year is different. I am carrying grief in a way that has quietly but significantly reduced my capacity for optional discomfort. I simply do not have the same tolerance I once did for choosing suffering when I do not have to.

So my husband and I checked into Les Sources de Cheverny, approximately 30 minutes away from the wedding venue, and drove in each evening for the events. I am happy to report, this hotel is…MAGIC. It felt like stepping into a completely different relationship with time. Les Sources de Cheverny is deeply committed to regenerative farming. Horses, chickens, gardens, wildflowers, landscapes that felt grown rather than designed. Nothing about it was overworked or performative. It was just BEAUTIFUL in the most simple, classic and quiet way.

Our 3 nights there were special. We biked. We eat. We laughed. We explored and slowed down in ways that are genuinely difficult to manufacture back in New York. I came home reminded that we have far more agency over our environments than we tend to exercise. It was a burnout-free heaven.

COST: Rooms Start at €380

LINK TO HOTEL WEBSITE

7. I Spoke With an Animal Medium and It Helped More Than I Expected

I am, at my core, a skeptical person. I also believe in things I cannot fully explain, which makes me a spiritual person too, and those two things coexist inside me without much conflict. I lean toward evidence and I also light candles and say intentions out loud and mean every word of them. I hold both!

This month I spoke with an animal medium named Marsha Lynn, recommended by a dear friend Olivia. My dog, Lou is dying. She has been with me for 14. I adopted her during my senior year of college and she quite literally changed the course of my life. She has moved with me, grieved with me, celebrated with me. She has been a constant in a life that has changed in nearly every other way imaginable. I have been in grief counseling. I have been in therapy. I have done everything I know how to do and I am still, in the most honest possible terms, not ready.

Some readers will think this sounds like exactly the kind of thing a person does when desperation outpaces logic. Others who have loved an animal deeply and are navigating anticipatory grief will not think that at all. They will understand immediately why, at a certain point, the question is no longer whether something sounds rational and entirely whether it helps you survive the weight of what you are carrying.

This helped. Marsha is a legend. That is all I need to say about it.

COST: $75

LINK TO LEARN MORE

8. I Started Looking Up Again

This one requires no booking, no purchase, and no scheduling. I just started looking up.

For stretches of May, especially moving through New York, I put my phone in my pocket and walked with music in my ears and paid attention. To buildings I have passed hundreds of times without once registering. To the specific quality of late spring light on a particular block. To the strange, briefly beautiful moments that exist constantly in this city and vanish completely if you are not looking for them.

One of those moments was discovering Facade Foundation, a nonprofit that transforms scaffold netting across New York City into large-scale public art installations. I came across a piece by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, whose work stopped me completely on the sidewalk. Standing there looking up at something that fun and that unexpected, in a city that rarely pauses for anything, felt like a small, private gift the city was handing me specifically because I had finally slowed down enough to receive it.

Attention is a practice. It atrophies when you stop using it. The city did not change. I did. That is the entire point!

COST: Free

Preventing burnout is never one sweeping gesture or one radical decision. It is the vibration plate at 8AM in the morning. The last-minute facial you almost talked yourself out of. The choice to stay somewhere beautiful rather than white-knuckle through something you did not have to endure. The conversation with the medium that you cannot fully explain but will not apologize for! The painting in the museum. The play in the dark with an old friend. The book that finds you at exactly the right moment. The city, finally seen again after too long looking down. Layered over time, these things change the tone of your life.

THANK YOU MAY.

JUNE, HERE WE GO. <3

Having a terrible boss has become so embedded in how we talk about work, that it barely registers anymore. Toxic boss. Toxic culture. Toxic environment. And honestly, it makes sense that we reached for that language, because the experience it is trying to describe is real. The micromanaging. The credit-stealing. The public humiliation dressed up as feedback. The emotional volatility that keeps you guessing what version of them you will get on any given Monday. The specific kind of dread that builds on Sunday nights because you know who you have to face in the morning.

That experience is real. I have worked for some pretty terrible people, so I am not coming at this from a place of theory. Despite all of that, what I want to challenge is the explanation we have been given for it.

Now, before you stop and say “wait, what?” — hear me out. Somewhere along the way, we started diagnosing ALL of our bosses with personality disorders. I hear this terminology so much that it has made me genuinely question: how is it possible? How do all of us have, or have had, so many terrible bosses? We call them narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths. TikTok has delivered a full DSM-adjacent vocabulary and we use it liberally, often correctly identifying real harm but misidentifying the source. Here is the thing though: experts generally believe that about 1 percent of the general population meets the criteria for psychopathy, and the largest study ever conducted on personality disorders in the United States found that 6.2 percent of the general population1 meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you stack every one of these diagnoses on top of each other, the math does not explain what we are all experiencing at work.

I get it. When someone makes your life difficult, the most satisfying explanation is that something is wrong with them specifically and fundamentally. It feels clarifying. BUT is it true? What is actually going on here?

The Statistic That Changed Everything For Me

Here is what the data actually tells us…Only 44% of managers aka bosses, have received formal management training.

Sit with that for a second.

More than half of the people currently managing other human beings have never been taught how to do it. Not formally…not even badly! They were handed direct reports the same way you might hand someone a fire extinguisher and then leave the building: “Good luck, it is yours now, figure it out.”

And it gets worse! In 2023, managers received an average of 50 days of on-the-job training, down from about 68 days in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data2. That is a drop of nearly 20 days in 5 years. At the smaller companies where many of us spend our careers, the numbers are almost comedic in how bleak they are. Most companies simply don’t offer management training…AT ALL. Companies with fewer than 100 employees gave only 12 minutes of manager training every 6 months. Organizations with 100 to 500 employees provided just six minutes.

6 minutes….Per 6 months…to learn how to manage human beings!

We Promote the “Best Performer” and Called It Leadership

There is a concept in organizational psychology called the Peter Principle. It was introduced in 1969 by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and it states something devastatingly simple: employees keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, because promotions are often based on performance in a current role rather than the skills required for a higher position.3

In plain language: we take the best salesperson and make them a sales manager. We take the best designer and make them a creative director. We take the best analyst and make them a team lead. And then we act surprised when it does not work. The result is a loss of a skilled worker and the creation of an ineffective manager.

A 2019 study proved this out at scale, examining performance data for more than 50,000 sales professionals across more than 200 companies. The researchers found that sales performance was negatively correlated with managerial success. The better you were at selling, the worse you tended to be at leading a team of sellers. The skills are simply not the same, and treating them as transferable is a decision organizations make consciously, because it is easier and cheaper than building a real pipeline for leadership. 4

Harvard Business Review calls what results from this pattern the "accidental manager." Results-oriented, high-performing employees find themselves suddenly promoted into management roles, more for their technical strengths than for their people management skills, and are then let loose on their teams without receiving the proper skills and training. The result, as HBR puts it, is a new manager experiencing anxiety and imposter syndrome, causing a disconnect between them and the people they now have power over.5 OY VEY.

What Happens When You Leave People Untrained

Gallup’s data shows that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager’s influence. Which means the single most powerful variable in whether you feel valued, challenged, seen, or completely demoralized at work is not the company. It is not the mission statement. It is not the free snacks or the “unlimited PTO” that you are never allowed to actually use….It is the person sitting across from you in your one-on-ones.6

About 4 in 5 people with effective managers say they feel valued in the workplace, roughly double the rate of those without effective managers. So basically, the presence or absence of a trained, competent manager cuts your sense of being valued in half.7

To add another layer to this, untrained managers are often incredibly controlling and micromanage. Why? Well, control feels like competence when you do not actually have the tools. They often take credit, because visibility is the only metric they understand. They also often avoid hard conversations, because no one taught them how to have them. Ultimately, they manage by fear, because fear is what got results from them, and it’s the only playbook they know.

So Why Did Companies Stop Investing In Management Training?

Large companies saw their average training expenditures decline from $13.3 million in 2024 to $11.7 million in 2025. This happened during a period when those same companies were posting earnings calls about investing in their people. 8

The decision to cut management training is almost never announced. It happens in budget meetings, quietly, as a line item that seems less urgent than whatever crisis is happening that quarter. Training is consistently treated as overhead rather than infrastructure, which means it is always the first thing to go when pressure mounts.

The proportion of workers that received employer-sponsored training dropped 42% between 1996 and 2008. That was before the 2008 financial crisis hit and gave companies a new round of justification for cutting whatever felt optional. The habits formed in that era of austerity never fully reversed and a generation of managers came up inside organizations that had decided, formally or informally, that training was a “nice-to-have” for when things were going well.9

TLDR: They were wrong.

What You Can Actually Do With This

So what do you do with all this? Well, understanding the systemic origin of something does not mean you have to tolerate it. It means you can stop internalizing it in ways that make you doubt yourself, and you can start making clearer decisions.

The most important reframe is this: your terrible boss’s behavior is most likely not a reflection of your performance, your value, or your instincts about what a functional workplace should feel like. You were not wrong to expect better. The bar you were measuring against was reasonable. What failed you was the system that put an untrained, underprepared person in a position of power over your livelihood and then called it leadership.

That system is worth being angry at. Your “toxic” boss is a product of it. They are also still responsible for what they do inside it, and you are not obligated to absorb the consequences of choices that were never yours to make.

Statistically, your boss is probably not a narcissist, and I say that as someone who has worked for some truly crazy (narcissist-adjacent) people. They are probably just someone who was very good at something once, got promoted for it, received no meaningful preparation for what leading people actually requires, and rather than reckon with that, decided everyone else should deal with it instead. Until organizations start treating management training as infrastructure instead of a line item that disappears the moment Q3 looks rough, the accidental manager will keep getting promoted, and we will all keep reaching for personality disorder diagnosis language to describe something that was, at its root, a policy decision.

I share all of this because systems only change once we genuinely call them out and understand how they actually work. If you are reading this and you have any proximity to someone at your company who could push for real investment in management training, send it to them. The power to change this is more in our hands than we realize. It deserves more than a diagnosis. It deserves accountability!

BRING BACK SOURCES! SEE ALL SOURCES BELOW :)

The honest answer is this: I don’t think I have. Not in the way she meant.

What I’ve come to believe, after years of being genuinely leveled by burnout, is that it isn’t something you overcome. You don’t arrive at the other side of it, dust yourself off, and move on with your life as a “recovered” person. The skill isn’t healing, it’s recognition, maintenance and the the ongoing, exhausting practice of keeping the burnout subdued.

My pattern with burnout, the recurring kind, the kind that kept finding me no matter how many times I thought I’d escaped it, has always traced back to the same root. A belief system that told me my self-worth was my job, and that how I was perceived professionally was essentially the same as how I existed in the world. I’ve written about that thesis before and I’ll keep writing about it, because it’s at the center of almost everything I do here. But what I’ve come to understand on a more personal level is that knowing that intellectually and actually living free from it are two very different things.

What I’ve mastered is not healing. It’s recognition. I know now that I am in a relationship with burnout. A consistent, lifelong dance. Something I will be up against, in some form, for as long as I am an ambitious person in this world.

It sits like a devil on my shoulder, quiet and patient, waiting for the moment I’m most susceptible. That might sound dramatic to someone who hasn’t been truly flattened by it. But if you’ve been as deep in it as I was, to the point of hospitalizations for exhaustion, pancreatitis, cystic acne, the whole ugly cascade, then you understand exactly how serious that fear is. Feeling good comes from starving that devil. From refusing to hand it the conditions it needs.

So when my friend asked me what I did to get here, what I really wanted to say was: I learned how to prevent it from coming back. And that is a fundamentally different answer.

If I’m being honest, the three things I keep returning to are not complicated. They are almost aggressively simple, which is part of why they work.

Routines, not schedules: I want to make a distinction here that actually matters to me. I am not a regimented person. I don’t work out at the same time every day or wake up at a fixed hour or meditate on a predetermined schedule. That kind of structure makes me feel like I’m performing productivity rather than actually living. But I do have a routine. Every day I try to move my body, meditate, and honor the practices that keep me grounded, which includes some genuinely bizarre habits I have fully committed to, like ten minutes on a vibration plate to settle my nervous system. It works, I promise. None of it happens at the same time or in the same order, but it happens consistently, and that consistency is the entire point. When I stick to it I feel like myself, and when I skip it I feel the absence almost immediately in a way that is hard to explain but impossible to ignore.

Sleep, actually. I am a night owl and I will not pretend otherwise. I love going to bed late. Evenings feel like they belong to me in a way that mornings don’t always. But I’ve been actively working on shifting that, not because someone told me to, but because I finally understood why it matters. Something Ryan Holiday said reframed it for me: one of the most common tricks ambitious people play on themselves is believing that staying up to read one more thing or watch one more episode is a reward they earned. When actually, the most protective thing you can do for yourself is sleep. Getting to bed earlier is not a sacrifice. It is the single most effective way to keep that burnout-devil quiet. I’m choosing to see it that way now.

My social life. This is the one I feel most strongly about and the one I think gets dismissed the most casually. When burnout has its grip on you, it will absolutely convince you that working more is the answer. That skipping dinner is reasonable. That canceling on the people you love, again, is just a necessary sacrifice right now. And that is exactly how it wins. What I know now is that getting out, sitting across from someone I genuinely love, having a real conversation, that enormous belly laugh that you can only have with certain people, that is what keeps me tethered to myself. It is not a luxury, it is the antidote. When burnout is loudest, human connection is what quiets it most reliably. You have to stay connected to what makes you feel like a person and not just a set of deliverables, because that’s what burnout is ultimately trying to sever.

None of those three things are revolutionary. There is no proprietary framework here, no certification, no program you need to purchase. And I think that is precisely what the burnout recovery industry does not want you to notice. Because if the answer really is this unglamorous, routines, sleep, and the people who make you laugh until your stomach hurts, then there is nothing left to sell you. No retreat to book, no supplement stack to build, no coach to hire for six months at a time.

So when my friend asked me how I finally recovered, I had to sit with that word for a second. The honest answer is that I am not burned out right now, and maybe that is what recovery actually looks like in practice. But the moment I decide I am healed, fully and finally, and stop doing the work, is the exact moment burnout finds its way back in, because that is how it operates. It waits for the comfort of your certainty. It leaves a stain that doesn’t disappear so much as it stops running your life, and the only reason it stops running your life is because you made a decision, daily and without applause, to not give it the conditions it needs. The question was never how to “heal.” It was always whether you or I are willing to do the less exciting, less marketable, less shareable work of just not letting it win today. And then again tomorrow.

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of April 7, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 Is AI Going to Turn Us All Into Middle Managers? - The Atlantic

Have you heard of the term Career Shrekking? Well, Career “shrekking” is when you take a job you believe is beneath you, in exchange for something that feels safer. The term comes from dating. It originally meant choosing someone you’re not that into because you think they’ll treat you better. The twist, and the point of the article, is that the tradeoff doesn’t always deliver.

At work, Career “shrekking” looks like this:

• Taking the role you swore you wouldn’t take

• Prioritizing security over growth

• Convincing yourself it’s temporary

• Staying because leaving feels riskier than being unfulfilled

And the outcome isn’t necessarily peace. It’s often a different kind of exhaustion! Not burnout from doing too much, but burnout from doing too little that actually matters to you. So yeah, the name is ridiculous…But the shift it’s describing is very real: people aren’t chasing fulfillment right now, they’re trying to survive the market.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 He Said Yes to an IT Job. He Ended Up Enslaved in a Scam Compound - Apple News In Conversation

Journalist Andy Greenberg shares the story of a man who accepted what he thought was a routine IT job, only to be trafficked into a scam compound in Southeast Asia and forced to run online fraud operations. Many of these schemes are known as “pig butchering” scams, a term used to describe how victims are slowly “fattened up” over time. Scammers build trust through weeks or even months of conversation, often posing as romantic interests or friendly contacts, before eventually convincing people to invest large sums of money into fake opportunities.

What’s most unsettling is how structured it all is. These aren’t random bad actors, they’re organized work-systems built to scale, with real people trapped inside them and real consequences on both sides. A difficult listen, but an important one.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 When the Economy Slips, Black Workers Are Hit First– Reuters

Did you know that when the economy softens, Black workers are often hit first and hardest, not by coincidence, but by design?

Recent data shows Black unemployment rose to 8.3%, while teen unemployment climbed to 16.3%, both the highest levels in years . Even more alarming, unemployment among Black teens surged past 30%, a level not seen since the earliest days of the pandemic .

Economists call these groups “leading indicators,” but what that really means is that systemic inequality shows up here first. Black workers are more exposed to layoffs, more likely to be in precarious roles, and less protected when policy shifts strip away oversight and enforcement. And in an administration that has actively rolled back civil rights protections and deprioritized discrimination cases, this isn’t surprising, it’s the result. We like to talk about the job market as if it rises and falls for everyone equally. It absolutely doesn’t. It reveals, over and over again, whose labor is treated as expendable.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 PromTok?!

Prom used to be a night…Now it’s a full-scale event.

According to , as reported by The Washington Post, we have entered the “Prom Price Index,” where all-in cost of prom in 2026 has surged into the thousands. Dresses alone now average $450 to $550, before you even factor in coordinated outfits, elaborate prom-posals, transportation, and increasingly over-the-top pre-prom parties.

What’s driving this?…Enter PromTok, where teens document the entire experience, from outfit reveals to cinematic “prom transitions,” turning what was once a personal milestone into something designed for an audience. The result is an arms race of effort, where the expectation is no longer just to show up, but to produce something worth posting.

One recent example: a $27,000 Cinderella-themed pre-prom party. Lets be real…this isn’t really about prom…It’s about how early the pressure to perform has started. And like everything else shaped by the internet, the standard quietly shifts from participation to production.

🔗 Read More Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 Peggy — The Parent Assistant

I’m not a parent, but every parent I know says the same thing: kids’ schedules right now are completely f*cking unmanageable, and out of control.

School emails, permission slips, spirit days, sports, camps… it’s constant, fragmented, and somehow all urgent?! Well, my friend, Nick Gidwani just launched an app called Peggy that tries to solve exactly that. It reads through school and activity emails, pulls out what actually matters, and turns it into something you can act on in minutes instead of digging through your inbox at 11pm trying to remember if tomorrow is hat day. It’s one of those apps that feels obvious the second you see it, because the kids over-scheduling problem has gotten so out of hand! Check it out and pass it on.

🔗 Download Here

The problem is I am not very good at transitions. I love change (really!), but the actual window of time when things begin to shift, I get unsettled and jittery. Even when the shifts are exciting, like announcing my show or transitioning out of my role as Interim CMO at True Food Kitchen, the uncertainty still destabilizes me in ways I'm never fully prepared for. That chapter is one I'm deeply proud of, and one I'll grieve the way you grieve anything good when it ends.

So I was sitting with a lot of restless, wired energy this month and had to ask myself something I’d never really stopped to ask before: where is this actually coming from? What am I ignoring? One thing became very clear pretty quickly. I was diagnosed with ADHD five years ago and have been in full denial about it ever since. I vehemently hate stimulants, they do not work for my body, and so the diagnosis never had anywhere to live. It just floated in the background while I kept moving. This month I finally stopped moving long enough to look at it.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since: successfully preventing burnout has created its own disorientation I was completely unprepared for. For years, overwork was where I put everything. The fear, the restlessness, the drive, all of it metabolized into output. Now that burnout is no longer my default, I am sitting with energy that has nowhere familiar to go. That’s not a relapse. That’s recovery doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Figuring out what to do with that energy is its own work, and I am squarely in the middle of it.

Here’s what I did in March while I worked through it.

MARCH 2026

1. I Met With Dr. Kavitha Kolappa and She Asked Me a Question I Wasn’t Ready For

My ADHD has never expressed itself in any way that felt familiar to me based on anyone I know who has it. I am not bouncing off the walls. I am not losing my keys every day or forgetting appointments or struggling to hold a conversation. Whatever the textbook version looks like, I do not look like that. Which made it very easy to talk myself out of the diagnosis every time it came up. And honestly? I’ve been deeply annoyed by what has started to feel like a cultural overdiagnosis of ADHD, everyone suddenly claiming they have it, everyone posting on TikTok and running to their doctor for meds, and I did not want to be one of those people. I still don’t. So I just... opted out of the whole thing mentally and kept moving.

However, my denial, it turns out, has run extremely deep. Apparently what I have been doing is masking, which is when your coping mechanisms are so well developed that the symptoms don’t look like symptoms to anyone on the outside, including sometimes yourself. You just look like someone who works very hard and holds it together. Cool! Great! Exhausting, as it turns out.

This march, I decided…well I’ve had enough. And was encouraged to go see Dr. Kavitha Kolappa, from Being Health. Dr Kolappa is a psychiatrist whose entire approach is rooted in holistic care first, prescription pad somewhere much further down the list. That distinction alone was enough to make me actually show up and stay in the room. What she did that no one else had done was slow the whole thing down and ask me to genuinely consider whether what I was experiencing this month, the restlessness, the jitteriness, the wired feeling I couldn’t shake, was my ADHD running hotter than usual, or anxiety about the uncertainty I’m currently living inside? She wasn’t dismissing one in favor of the other. She was asking me to get curious instead of reactive.

Her read, and mine, is probably both. And just having that framework, being able to name what’s happening instead of white-knuckling through it, made the energy feel less like something wrong with me and more like information I could actually work with. I genuinely wish I had found a doctor like her years ago. It probably would have helped me not burn out.

COST: Varies by provider and insurance.

More on Being Health Here

2. I Started Rubbing Magnesium Butter on My Feet Before Bed and I Will Not Apologize!

This is exactly the kind of thing a hippie woman in a linen tunic at a wellness retreat would recommend. I know this. I am telling you anyway because it works!

Magnesium deficiency is wildly common, and it shows up as exactly the things I was dealing with this month: restlessness, disrupted sleep, that low hum of physical unease you cannot quite name. Sweet Sleep Magnesium Butter goes on the soles of your feet before bed because the skin there absorbs it quickly. I’m sleeping better! My legs are not doing their anxious restless thing at 11pm. A goodnights sleep is always key to preventing burnout and this damn butter helps!

COST: $35.09

Link to Purchase

3. I Added AndFocus to My Morning Routine and Gave My Brain Some Actual Support

Im going to start off and say…I LOVE this product. My brain has been doing a lot this month. Processing a public announcement, navigating a professional transition, managing the particular cocktail of excitement and fear that comes with building something from scratch. That is a significant cognitive and emotional load and I wanted to support it with something clean and intentional rather than just adding another coffee to the pile.

AndFocus Daily Focus Supplement is a non-stimulant approach to cognitive support and I started taking it as part of my morning routine. What I will say is after taking this product, my ability to sit with tasks requiring sustained attention has felt steadier.

COST: $38

Link to Purchase

4. I Found One Podcast Episode About Focus and Listened to It an Absurd Number of Times

The episode is “Why You Can’t Focus and How to Fix It in 25 Minutes” by Daily Stoic, and what I loved about it is that it refuses to let you off the hook. It doesn’t tell you that you can’t focus because something is wrong with you. It asks you to look honestly at how you are actually living: when are you going to bed, when are you waking up, where is your phone, what does your day look like before you even sit down to do anything requiring real attention. It takes what feels like a personal failing and reframes it as a logistics problem you have the power to solve. Which is both more uncomfortable and more useful than being handed a diagnosis and a shrug.

On a month where I was genuinely questioning my own brain, this was the right thing to hear at the right time. Go listen!

COST: Free

Watch or Listen to This Episode

5. I Went Back to Acupuncture for the First Time in Ten Years

I genuinely do not know why I stopped going to acupuncture, nor why it took me a decade to return. Last month, I asked my community on IG to share their favorite acupuncturist in NYC and this month I finally booked with Sanu Acupuncture (Dr. Margarita Russolello), as recommended by the always amazing, Brianna Lance.

After my first session, what I quickly remembered is that acupuncture does something that nothing else in my toolkit quite replicates. It works below cognition, below the part of you that can analyze or argue or reframe. You lie there, and your body starts doing something it clearly needed to do, and by the end you begin to feel like yourself in a way that is genuinely hard to explain and very easy to feel. I already have my next appointment. I will not be waiting another ten years!

COST: $250 for extended first session // $200 following for 1 hour.

Check Sanu’s site for details.

Subscribe now

6. I Read Strangers by Belle Burden and Let It Break My Heart a Little

When I’m in transition and sitting with uncertainty, I reach for books that have NOTHING to do with my industry and everything to do with what it means to be a person alive in the world. Strangers was that book this month.

Belle Burden’s memoir chronicles the sudden collapse of her twenty-year marriage during the pandemic. Betrayal, self-love, uncertainty, the specific disorientation of watching something you built your life around become unrecognizable overnight. It is heartbreaking in the way only really brilliant writing manages, where the sadness is also somehow clarifying. I read it during a month when I was already sitting with my own uncertainty and it put everything in perspective in exactly the way I needed, without being tidy or prescriptive about it. Reading something genuinely beautiful when you are anxious is an act of self-respect. It reminds you that the world is larger than your particular worry, and that other people have survived the unsurvivable.

COST: $25.67

Link to Purchase

7. I Bought a Nuropod and the Jury Is Still Out But I Am Committed

I had been watching the Nuropod orbit my radar for a while and March felt like the right moment to stop watching and actually try it. The premise is genuinely interesting: it works by stimulating the vagus nerve, which is the body’s main communication highway between the brain and vital organs, regulating things like heart rate, digestion, and the inflammatory response. The Nuropod sends targeted electrical signals through the vagus nerve to produce what they describe as lasting calm, consistent energy, and peak biological performance. It is the world’s most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulator, apparently.

Does it work? Honestly, I cannot tell you with certainty yet. What I can tell you is that I bought it, I am using it, and I am committed to giving it a real shot before I render any verdict. My nervous system has been through a lot this month and it deserves a fighting chance. Ask me again in a few months.

COST: $800. I know. I KNOW. It is a significant amount of money and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I am willing to bet on my own nervous system. Updates to follow.

Link to Purchase

March was messy and electric and uncomfortable in all the specific ways that stepping into something new tends to be. I don’t have the energy figured out yet. I’m still learning what to do with drive that used to go straight into overwork and now has to find a better, more honest home.

But I didn’t burn out. And I’m building something I believe in. For right now, that is everything.

APRIL, I see you. Let’s go. <3

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 Why High Performers Burn out
🎧
📊
🚩
🎨

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of March 29, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 The Capacity Illusion: Why High Performers Burn out - Inc

Burnout rarely looks like someone struggling. More often, it looks like your most reliable person continuing to deliver.

This piece introduces the idea of the “capacity illusion,” the belief that because work is getting done, everything must be “fine”. In reality, high performers are quietly absorbing the pressure of systems that aren’t working, taking on more responsibility and smoothing over gaps without signaling that anything is wrong.

From the outside, things look stable. Deadlines are met, output stays consistent, and leadership assumes capacity is intact. But that stability is often being carried by a few individuals whose endurance is masking deeper structural issues. The insight is simple but uncomfortable: burnout isn’t a motivation problem, it’s a design problem. When responsibility and pressure are unevenly distributed, the people who care the most end up carrying the most, until they can’t.

What looks like capacity is often just containment.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 How to Talk to People You Disagree With (Without Losing It) - The Daily Stoic

If it feels increasingly impossible to understand how the “other side” thinks, Jordan Klepper from The Daily Show, offers a genuinely interesting perspective. Drawing on years of interviewing people he fundamentally disagrees with as a correspondent on The Daily Show, often in highly charged environments, Klepper makes a simple but slightly ego-bruising point: arguing almost never works. What does tend to work is less satisfying in the moment : slowing down, asking better questions, and giving people the space to explain how they arrived at what they believe.

What makes this especially compelling is the pairing. Alongside Ryan Holiday, who does an excellent job guiding the conversation, Klepper brings a sharp comedic edge that makes the whole thing feel more human and less theoretical. He manages to disarm without dismissing, using humor to open conversations most people would shut down. It doesn’t “resolve” disagreement, but it makes it easier to sit with, and maybe even understand. A thoughtful, important and very funny listen.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 736 Tech Workers Are Losing Their Jobs Every Single Day
in 2026 – Kaggle

This isn’t a wave…A recent dataset tracking layoffs across 28 companies shows that 61% of cuts explicitly cite AI as the reason, and in 17 out of 28 cases, stock prices went up the same day layoffs were announced.

In other words, job loss is no longer a byproduct of failure. It’s being framed as progress. Some of the largest cuts this year include 30,000 at Oracle, 16,000 at Amazon, and 40% of Block’s entire workforce, often alongside increased investment in AI. It points to a deeper shift in how companies are being built and rewarded. Reducing headcount while increasing technological efficiency is no longer seen as a tradeoff, but as a sign of discipline. The same systems that promise to make work faster are also reshaping who gets to keep doing it.

Which makes the tension harder to ignore. The future of work is becoming more productive, and at the same time, more fragile.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 Tween Culture Is Dead

There used to be a phase between childhood and adolescence that was awkward, experimental, and mostly private. You figured yourself out slowly, in low-stakes ways.

That phase is disappearing. As this piece from RUSSH argues, social media hasn’t just exposed tweens to older culture, it has removed the buffer entirely. Today’s 10 to 12 year olds aren’t growing into adolescence, they’re stepping directly into it, adopting the same aesthetics, routines, and expectations as much older teens before they’ve had the chance to form any sense of self.

What was once a gradual transition has become immediate and performative. Identity is now shaped in public, under constant visibility, with adult standards layered on far too early. The result is a generation that is, as the article puts it, “completely indistinct from a teenager,” along with rising mental health concerns and increasing pressure to measure up. What worries me is how this carries into work. A generation raised on algorithmic visibility enters the workforce already trained to perform, to self-monitor, and to treat identity as something to be managed. When the line between who you are and how you present yourself never fully forms, stepping away from that performance becomes almost impossible.

Tweenhood used to be a buffer. Now it’s a gap that’s been erased. And we will one day see the consequences of that at work.

🔗 Read More Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 Jury Duty (New Season) - Amazon Prime

The new season of Jury Duty is so fucking funny. I truly haven’t watched a show that has made me laugh this hard in years. Jury Duty (Company Retreat) is a hidden-camera mockumentary that follows Anthony, a real temp worker who believes he’s attending a chaotic corporate retreat for a hot sauce company, while everyone around him is an actor.

It’s basically a perfect satire of work culture, especially the chaos of company retreats and “forced” bonding. You’re laughing, but also thinking, wait, I’ve been in this exact room before. Which is exactly why it works. I am absolutely loving it.

🔗 Watch Here

That framework came from a TED talk I watched at 17. And it took me until last year to finally see it clearly.

It Started With a Podcast

A few weeks ago, flying home from a work trip to LA, I listened to Brené Brown on The Interview from The New York Times. She was in conversation with one of my favorite journalists, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, discussing her new book: Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox.

For years, I was a fan of Brené Brown. Her research felt necessary. It gave language to shame, to vulnerability, to the emotional terrain many of us had been navigating without vocabulary. But over time, my fandom has thinned out. Part of that shift is personal. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a more complicated, sometimes skeptical lens toward a certain genre of Boomer women whose work once felt revolutionary and now feels…Distant. Not wrong, exactly. Just out of step with the moment we’re living in.

Still, I pressed play with an open mind. I wanted to hear what this next chapter sounded like, and almost immediately, something felt different. She didn’t sound like the researcher I once felt so connected to. Her tone carried a kind of unease. Not defensive, not hostile, but unsettled. As if she, too, was negotiating the weight of what her work has become in public life.

Somewhere between the hum of the plane and the gift of 6 uninterrupted hours, my brain started circling what that discomfort might mean, not just for her, but for us, the generation that absorbed her work at exactly the right, or wrong, moment.

If you’re my age, 34 a millennial who came of age online, you remember when her 2010 TED Talk on vulnerability exploded. It has more than 65 million views now, but back then it felt even bigger than that. It was everywhere. When it debuted, I was a senior in high school, deeply impressionable and hungry for a model of leadership that felt both powerful and humane. Her language felt adjacent to the kind of leader, and the kind of person, I wanted to become.

But listening to this new interview, I felt a dissonance I couldn’t ignore. So I paused it, switched tabs, and rewatched the TED Talk I hadn’t seen in years . And this time, I received Brené and her vulnerability work differently.

The message hadn’t changed. But I had.

Something clicked that hadn’t before…and not in a good way. A leadership philosophy widely celebrated as liberating may have unintentionally encouraged burnout for the generation of women who adopted it most earnestly.

The Early 20-Teens Felt Like a Revolution. For Better and Worse.

If you came of age professionally in the early 2010s, you remember the feeling. It felt like everything was being rebuilt in real time. This was before A.I., before the internet calcified into what it is now. Uber was dismantling taxis. Warby Parker proved you could build a profitable brand and a conscience at the same time, and every new CPG company claimed to have a mission that would “change the world.”

And in the middle of that optimism, the Girl Boss era emerged. Sheryl Sandberg told us to lean in, then Sophia Amoruso turned ambition into merch. It was a plethora of White women claiming space in matching pink sets, building brands while launching podcasts with gold foil script logos and calling it empowerment.

At the same time, there was Brené.

She wore oversized men’s shirts, barely any makeup, and didn’t seem particularly concerned with whether she was a size two. She felt like the antithesis of the glossy “Girl Boss / Lean In” aesthetic that dominated the moment. While startup culture rewarded speed, scale, and certainty, Brené spoke about vulnerability, authenticity, and bringing your whole self to work. Her message felt slower, almost corrective. Where one movement insisted you push harder, hers invited you to open wider, soften, and be yourself.

For millennial women like me trying to survive inside systems that were never built with us in mind, that invitation felt like relief. We were being asked to be ambitious but emotionally intelligent, tough but self-aware, decisive but nurturing. We were pushing against toxic masculinity before we even had language for it, exhausted by the suggestion that our only options were to harden or to hustle in heels.

I knew I did not want to be a girl boss. The posture felt exhausting and out of touch. But I also didn’t want to lead like the men I had already encountered, the ones who mistook intimidation for competence. So when Brené offered what felt like another way, leadership rooted in vulnerability and authenticity, I signed up. Many of us did. For women of color especially, it felt like permission to lead without contorting ourselves into something unrecognizable.

Looking back, I can now see how easily that turned into overcorrection.

Emotional Labor In Plain Sight

Long before Brené’s TED talk, sociologist Arlie Hochschild identified Emotional Labor in 1983 as the invisible, exhausting work of managing your own feelings to serve someone else’s emotional needs. Her research showed that this burden falls disproportionately on women, and that it is not a character flaw but a structural one, built into the way workplaces assign emotional caretaking along gender lines. A decade later, researchers studying compassion fatigue found that repeatedly absorbing other people’s emotional distress without any buffer leads directly to burnout, not as a metaphor but as a measurable physiological outcome. This research existed long before our generation entered the workforce. It just wasn’t part of the leadership language we were handed.

What we were handed instead was the message that vulnerability was courage, and that bringing your whole self to work was the antidote to the cold, ego-driven leadership we’d inherited. For millennial women who entered the workplace after 2014, this created a perfect storm. We were too young and too eager to understand that we could define our own way of showing up. So we chose the third lane; Brené’s lane. And the emotional labor research predicted exactly what happened next: when one person consistently absorbs the emotional weight of others without limits, the body keeps score, and in comes…Burnout.

Subscribe now

Revenge of Daring Greatly?

Somewhere between rewatching the TED Talk and finishing the Interview episode with Brené and Lulu Garcia-Navarro, I understood that it wasn’t just the tone that unsettled me. It was one exchange I couldn’t stop replaying.

About a third of the way in, Lulu did something few interviewers have done with her in recent years. She challenged the premise. She said the empathy-centered leadership Brené had championed for over a decade “seems to have fallen out of the zeitgeist.” Then she pointed to the evidence: the most valuable companies in the world right now are not known for their humanity. Elon Musk walked into Twitter and fired more than half the staff in a single afternoon. Meta rolled back safeguards meant to protect people from hate speech and violence. Corporate America dismantled the DEI programs it had so publicly embraced during the 2010s. And it did so without consequence. Beneath her observation was a harder and uncomfortable question: did this model of vulnerability in leadership ever actually work?

A few year ago, Writer Rafia Zakaria wrote a piece on Brene’s theories, breaking down how it actually fails the most vulnerable in its attempts to promote vulnerability. She argues that Brené’s framework assumes vulnerability is a choice, which is itself a privilege-dependent position. Brené’s model centers the self first and extends empathy outward from there, reflecting her own social location. That observation clarifies why the framework, if translated differently across hierarchies only works for those who already possessed institutional authority and psychological safety. For women trying to establish credibility, and particularly for women of color navigating systems that questioned their legitimacy from the start, the cost was exponentially higher.

What I also keep coming back to is Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point, published in 2024, where he revisits the very ideas that made him famous and interrogates what happened after they took on a life of their own. It is an act of intellectual honesty that requires sitting with the uncomfortable reality that ideas, once released into the world, do not always behave the way their authors intended. Gladwell, bravely, acknowledges in this work that the same framework that illuminates can also obscure and that perhaps in some ways, he was wrong.

Now, I am not suggesting Brené Brown needs to write a revenge edition of Daring Greatly. But I am suggesting that millennial women who built their leadership identities around her work, and who professionally burned out over and over again, could benefit from the same level of honest reexamination from the person who helped shape how we understood ourselves professionally.

Because many of us have turned a corner. We can now see that the line was not in “showing up as your full self,” but in being kind, compassionate and boundaried. And frankly, that radical vulnerability inside hierarchical workplaces was an enormous mistake, albeit an important life lesson.

Clarity Over Vulnerability

What frustrates me most is that this conversation, the real one, about impact and unintended consequences, hasn’t happened in any meaningful way between Brené Brown and the millennial women whose lives were shaped by her work.

I do not believe Brené Brown is responsible for the burnout that defined my twenties. I have written at length that burnout is often rooted in identity confusion, and that part belongs to me. This is not about canceling her or collapsing 15 years of important research into a single critique. It is about understanding why so many millennial women took her work on vulnerability, turned it into a blueprint for burnout, and why that specific consequence has never been adequately examined, including by Brené herself.

In my thirties, I no longer practice vulnerability at work the way I once did, and I have not burned out in years. I reserve, my vulnerability for my intimate relationships and families. It is transformative. I have learned that at work, being kind does not require being boundaryless, and being authentic does not require unlimited emotional availability. The distinction between personal and professional is not complicated. It simply wasn’t articulated clearly enough when we needed it.

What I am asking for is simple, for the same intellectual courage that made vulnerability a global language to be examined in its aftermath. When an idea reshapes a generation of working women, it is worth looking at how it behaved once it entered corporate hierarchies that were never designed to hold it safely. That evaluation would not diminish the work, it would mature it.

And for the women who have not yet drawn this line for themselves, who still believe that emotional exposure is the price of being perceived as evolved or good or different from the men who came before us..I promise you there is another way to lead.

You may be overextending in ways that feel virtuous but quietly deplete you. You can be clear without being cold, you can be authentic without offering unlimited access to your interior life.

Vulnerability has its place. But at work, especially inside power structures, being kind is more than enough.

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 Tinder Is The New LinkedIn?!
🎧 So Many Online Scams
📊 It Now Takes 23 Weeks to Find a Job
🚩Gen Z Is Renting…Everything
🎨 Walk Away Quick

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of March 23, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 For Some Job Seekers, Tinder Is The New LinkedIn - Fast Company

We often say job hunting is like dating. Increasingly, some people are deciding that comparison might as well be literal.

A job seeker recently went viral on TikTok after revealing her Hinge profile, where instead of photos from vacations or brunch, she uploaded screenshots of her résumé. In response to the prompt “a life goal of mine,” she wrote simply: to find work in the creative industries. The video quickly gained hundreds of thousands of views before the platform eventually removed the profile for violating its policies.

But the idea isn’t as fringe as it sounds. As LinkedIn becomes saturated with applications and employers increasingly rely on AI résumé screeners, some job seekers have begun using dating apps to reach people in their industry directly. Others say they match with professionals on Hinge or Bumble and ask if their companies are hiring, while one person even claims to have landed a six-figure job through a Bumble connection.

What I am learning from this…when the official hiring pipeline stops functioning, people start looking for side doors. And apparently one of those doors now involves swiping right.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 Here’s Why You Are Constantly Fighting Off Scammers - Freakonomics

If it feels like scam texts, fake emails, and suspicious phone calls have exploded lately, you are not imagining it.

This recent episode of Freakonomics Radio pulls back the curtain on what is now a ruthlessly efficient global industry. Modern scam networks operate less like lone criminals and more like highly organized businesses, using digital tools, data, and scale to industrialize deception. The episode walks through how these operations actually function and why they’ve become so pervasive. It is less about the fact that scams exist and more about how sophisticated the system behind them has become.

A fascinating listen that makes one thing clear: what feels like random annoyance is actually a highly organized economic machine.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 7 Months to Find a Job – Korn Ferry

It now takes about 23 weeks on average for an unemployed American to find a new job, and nearly one quarter of job seekers remain unemployed for 6 months or longer… one of the longest waiting periods since the pandemic. For many applicants, the experience has become a marathon of submitting dozens, or even hundreds, of applications and hearing nothing back. At the same time, companies say they’re struggling to find the “right” candidates, often delaying hires while they search for people with extremely specific skill sets or reevaluate roles in the age of AI.

The result is a strange paradox of the modern labor market: unemployment remains relatively low, but the process of actually landing a job has slowed dramatically. Even with new recruiting technologies and AI-powered screening tools, many organizations are taking longer, not less time, to hire. In other words, the problem isn’t always a lack of jobs. It’s the growing “great wait” between applying and actually getting one.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 Gen Z Is Renting… Everything - Archival

This week’s insight comes from Archival, the youth cultural agency behind The Culture Brief, a weekly dispatch tracking the cultural shifts driven by Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of their latest observations: the sharing economy is getting smaller, stranger, and far more personal. Platforms like Pickle, Tulerie, and Yoodlize are turning everyday objects into income streams. Instead of renting homes or cars, people are listing clothes, cameras, tools, and accessories for others to borrow. On Pickle alone, more than 350,000 items are available to rent.

Many young people feel priced out of traditional wealth-building, so ownership is being reframed less as something to accumulate and more as something to leverage. Some users are now buying items specifically to rent them out, with top earners reportedly bringing in $10,000 to $15,000 a month. For a generation wary of overconsumption yet still deeply embedded in trend culture, renting offers a way to participate in style without permanently stockpiling things they will only wear once. Taste itself becomes monetizable. In other words, the side hustle economy has evolved again.

🔗 Sign Up for Their Newsletter Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 Know When It’s Not For You

In a culture where many of us stay in the wrong jobs for years out of fear, politeness, or inertia, walking away quickly might actually be the more radical move.

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 AI Fatigue Paradox
🎧 Rooting For Kristie Metcalfe
📊 The Résumé Is Dead
🚩 Strong Brands Are Selling Lineage.
🎨 It’s Not In Your Head!

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of March 16, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 AI Fatigue Is Real And Nobody Talks About It - Siddhant Khare

AI does make work” easier.” Faster code, faster writing, faster research..faster everything. But there’s a catch no one talks about: when work becomes faster, we don’t do less of it…We do more!

In Engineer Siddhant Khare’s piece titled: “AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it” he calls this the AI Fatigue Paradox. Khare’s thesis is simple: AI reduces the cost of producing work, but it increases the cognitive burden on the human overseeing it. Instead of building things ourselves, we now spend much of the day prompting, reviewing, correcting, and evaluating machine output. What used to take 3 hours now takes 45 minutes, which means instead of solving one problem a day, you might now be solving 6. Sound familiar?

In other words, many of us have quietly become quality inspectors for machines that never stop producing work. The technology accelerates output, but the bottleneck remains human attention, judgment, and cognitive stamina. And yet most workplaces are behaving as if these limits do not exist.

It’s a sharp and necessary read.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 The Case of Kristie Metcalfe – The Daily

Kristie Metcalfe is a Black lawyer who discovered that white male colleagues at the Department of Justice were being paid significantly more for doing the same job. She filed a discrimination complaint. Under normal circumstances, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the office that exists specifically to investigate exactly this kind of discrimination, would handle it. But by the time her case was being reviewed, the Civil Rights Division had begun stepping away from cases like hers. Investigations that had been underway for years were being dropped or deprioritized. Leadership changed. Enforcement priorities shifted. Her case unraveled.

In this episode, Sarah Koenig of Serial Productions walks through how quickly 60 years of civil rights enforcement has been undone by an administration hostile to the very idea that discrimination should be investigated at all. This isn’t just about one lawyer’s pay complaint. It’s about what happens when the systems designed to hold power accountable are gutted from the inside. When the enforcement mechanism disappears, discrimination doesn’t.

If you’re exhausted by how fast things are falling apart, this episode explains exactly how it’s happening, and why it’s not an accident.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 Hiring Managers Aren’t Reading Your Résumé – Business Insider

The résumé is dying. A new report from Business Insider argues that in the age of AI, résumés have become almost meaningless. When anyone can generate a perfectly formatted, buzzword-filled CV, it becomes nearly IMPOSSIBLE for recruiters to tell real candidates apart from polished AI slop.

Some companies are already adapting. Instead of relying on résumés, employers like Automattic and Gumroad are asking applicants to answer specific questions, show what they’ve built, or complete paid work trials that last several weeks. And the shift is happening quickly. A recent survey found that 70% of employers are now using skills-based hiring, prioritizing practical ability over degrees or years of experience.

For job seekers, this is both terrifying and freeing. Terrifying because the traditional playbook, polish your résumé, list the right credentials, climb the ladder, is starting to break down. But freeing because, for the first time in decades, what you can actually do may matter more than what your résumé says you’ve done.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 Heritage Isn’t Enough- The Brandsider

Brand strategist of The Brandsider, identified a shift happening in fashion and consumer culture: heritage alone no longer sells brands. Belonging does.

For decades, luxury brands leaned on history as their biggest asset. Dior has 80 years of legacy. Hermès dates back to the 1800s. Burberry’s equestrian knight was first drawn in 1901. But having a long history isn’t what creates loyalty anymore. What matters is whether brands can turn that heritage into something people feel personally connected to.

As Belair puts it, the strongest brands make customers feel like “heirs to a story.” Instead of selling products, they’re selling lineage. That’s why we’re seeing brands dig into their archives. Burberry has revived its Equestrian Knight as a recurring character in campaigns. Hermès scarves are marketed almost like family heirlooms, designed to be passed down across generations.

TLDR: people are so isolated, so burnt out, so disconnected from any real sense of community or lineage that they’re buying it from corporations. You can’t inherit anything real: ie affordable housing, job security, a pension, time with your family, so here, buy a $3,000 scarf and pretend you’re part of a legacy that matters.

Brands are creating belonging by commodifying the absence of it. And the fact that it works tells you everything about where we are today.

🔗 Read The Full Piece Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 It’s Not In Your Head!

Once upon a time, getting a job meant showing up, making a good impression, and starting the following week. Now it’s personality quizzes, case studies, 8 interview rounds… and then being ghosted! How fun…If the job search feels exhausting right now, you’re not imagining things. It really did get harder!

@NicoleLapin’s post explains it all

If you’re here, you either read my announcement or you’re desperate enough to try anything. Both are valid. I’ve been there.

This was supposed to be article #3. But after the flood of DMs asking, “Okay, but what actually worked?” I’m starting here instead. Because when you’re burned out, you don’t want theory. You want specifics!

It took me 2 full years to heal my burnout. 2 very long, disorienting, painful, occasionally humiliating, and ultimately transformative years. During that time, I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of money trying everything. It was less “self-care journey” and more high-stakes whack-a-mole. Some things worked, some things made it worse, many were spectacular failures, and a few changed my life in a profound and positive way.

This is not a neat “10 steps to cure burnout” guide. What helped me may not resonate with you, and what didn’t work for me might be exactly what you need. There isn’t one formula. There are only patterns, experiments, and choices. I believe in sharing this kind of detail because burnout is isolating, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

So let’s begin!

THE LIST ➡️ ➡️ ➡️

Read more

It feels imperative that I begin this month’s BURNOUT PREVENTION recap by acknowledging something that has nothing to do with work and everything to do with why so many of us are struggling to feel okay right now. The United States may be on the brink of war. And for the past few days, after I do my morning routine, I open my phone and there is a new thing to absorb that would have been considered unthinkable two years ago. Burnout prevention this month has been challenged by not just work, but by the world.

I believe self-care, in whatever way works for you, is not a “trend.” It is both a privilege and a survival strategy. This month I feel degrees lighter, despite it all, and I attribute many of these practices to exactly why.

So here’s what I did in February to stay sane. May this list find you in whatever way you need it.

FEBRUARY 2026

1. I Committed to an Eight-Minute Morning Check-In

Every morning, I sat down for 8 to 10 minutes and checked in with four parts of myself: my body, my intellect, my emotional self, and my spiritual self. I didn’t force it to be profound, I just asked each part what it needed that day. It’s called a QUAD check, a simple mind, body, spirit meditation that can radically improve your day.

It’s is subtle and quick, but if I skip it, I will feel slightly off and irritable (ask my husband, he can confirm). This practice keeps my whole self, in healthy, even, conversation. It keeps me from defaulting into output as a coping mechanism.

Its magic.

COST: Free

Learn More On How Do It Here

2. I Had a Consultation Call with a Grief Doula — Callie Chamberlain

If you read my Burnout Prevention Recap from January 2026, you know I was in debilitating grief over my dog Lou’s terminal illness. Lou is still here. Miraculously, she is doing better. We get more time with her on this earth than we thought, and I am so deeply grateful for every single day.

Despite Lou’s improvement, I am still navigating grief. My sister recommended I work with a grief doula and pointed me to Callie Chamberlain. Callie and I had a consult call in February and I loved her energy and spirit. What struck me most while learning about Callie’s work is that she doesn’t just work with end-of-life grief. She works with founders and their grief! I know that phrase might sound niche, but it isn't. If you've ever closed a business, been pushed out, quit, or had to walk away from something you poured yourself into, that loss is real and it is heavy! There's no funeral, nobody brings you flowers, and people expect you to move on quickly because the thing you lost wasn't a person. And yet it can absolutely wreck you. Callie works with that kind of loss too.

I genuinely wish I had known about her when I closed my agency last year. We haven’t started working together yet, but the initial consult was exactly what I needed and I look forward to beginning.

COST: Initial Consult: Free // Followed by $150 per session

Contact: calliekchamberlain@gmail.com

3. I Co-Hosted a Clothing Sale with My Friend Melanie Masarin

My closet is a graveyard of good intentions and it was time to let many piece go. Two weeks ago my long time friend and fashion-savant asked me if I wanted to join her closet sale (she knew I had so much shit) and I said yes and so glad I did. It was so fun and incredibly rewarding to see pieces I once loved, or bought hoping to one day love, find a new home.

What felt good was the decisiveness! There’s something psychologically clarifying about deciding what stays and what goes without turning it into a months-long internal debate. When so much feels out of my control right now, being ruthlessly decisive about my own closet felt like power. Small, domestic power, but power nonetheless.

Cost: $15! Our friend Krissy let us use her space at Sky Ting. The only real cost was hangers, labels, and the time it took to organize it.

4. I Rediscovered a Meditation I Used to Listen to All the Time

I went back to Justin Michael Williams' Intention Setting meditation this month and genuinely cannot tell you why I ever stopped. I am a firm believer in intention setting. I often come back to the Deepak Chopra mantra from The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (I know, I know, he's in the Epstein files, that's a conversation for another article):

“Attention energizes, intention transforms.” I swear by it. And yet it is so easy to forget to actually do it.

Justin guides you through an intention-setting practice with one simple premise: stop, and honestly evaluate whether how you're living is aligned with what you want. Right now, having something pull you back and remind you to do this is so important.

Set those intentions baby!

COST: Free

Link to Listen

Subscribe now

5. I Started Taking WonderCalm Gummies by Plant People

This month, I decided to try the WonderCalm gummies by Plant People. Not because I needed another supplement, but because I was curious and willing to experiment. Who knows if it’s a placebo. I genuinely do not care! I’m telling myself they work, they’re clean and free of crap, and at this point, no harm, no foul.

When that low hum of overwhelm starts rising, I take one and move on with my life.

COST: $26

Link to Purchase

6. I Recommitted to Pilates in a Way That Actually Works for Me

This month I finally stopped putting pressure on myself to get to a workout class in person (which if you live in New York, you know is its own specific form of travel anxiety.)

For February, I pretty much exclusively did at-home Pilates and it's been great! No commute, no scrambling, just me my weights and my mat. Melissa Wood Health and Sculpt Society are my two go-tos, and they couldn't be more different. These two platforms are nothing new but they WORK. Sculpt Society is harder, more dance-focused and will genuinely kick your ass, while MWH is slower, more intentional and deeply good for your nervous system.

Between the two I have everything I need. It clears mental noise and moves my body through what my brain simply cannot process on its own, and right now that matters more than ever.

COST: $40/month

Link for MWH

Link for Sculpt Society

7. I Replaced My Second or Third Coffee With Something More Intentional

Yes, I drink a lot of coffee. I love it! THE TASTE, THE SMELL,THE FEELS. But I am also aware that caffeine overstimulation is one of burnout's best friends, hence the change in routine.

This month I ordered the ESSPO variety pack and started swapping out my later afternoon coffees for it. Its genuinely helped me feel calmer. ESSPO is a new sparkling espresso drink, founded by Philippe von Borries, one of the co-founders of Refinery29. Think espresso tonic that sips like a soda and hits like a cold brew. Each can is 120mg of caffeine, clean ingredients, sweetened with blue agave and monk fruit, three flavors: Cherry Vanilla, Classic Vanilla, Sweet Lemon.

Most importantly, it’s actually delicious!

COST: $43.99

Link to Purchase

8. I Continued Switching My Skincare Over to Clean, Small Brands

In this economy, I want my money going to smaller brands who are actually making something worth buying. Honestly, with everything else there is to worry about right now, the last thing I need is to also be slathering chemicals and junk on my face!

LINNÉ's Repair Face Oil was a very intentional purchase of the month. There's something genuinely relieving about simplifying what you put on your body and feeling good about where your dollars are going, especially right now when so much else feels completely out of your control.

The product feels and smells amazing. I must add, everyone keeps saying my skin is glowing! Worth it all the way.

COST: $84

Link to Purchase

9. I Saw My Friends And Finally Went to Bistrot Ha

February was about seeing my people and getting out of my own head. Human connection is one of the most underrated burnout prevention tools we have, and isolation, however cozy it can feel, will quietly burn you out.

This month, my friend Shay and I went to Bistrot Ha on the Lower East Side. I am happy to report that it was so damn good. It’s the sister restaurant to Ha’s Snack Bar, and the menu is flavor forward in a way that feels completely unexpected and completely intentional. Nothing about it feels safe or predictable.

We did not show restraint. Two glasses of wine each. Ordered handsomely. Every dish layered and alive. We left feeling delighted in a way that no amount of alone time on my couch could have produced. There is something that happens when you sit across from a friend you love in a room full of energy and conversation. Your nervous system just remembers what it is regulating for.

COST: $100+ per person.

Preventing burnout is not one sweeping boundary or one radical decision. It is a series of small, conscious steps taken daily, then weekly, then monthly, often so subtle you barely notice them working.

None of this list looks extraordinary on its own. But layered over time, it changes the tone of your life.

THANK YOU FEBRUARY! MARCH HERE WE GO <3

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 Alysa Liu Quit, Came Back for Joy, and Won Gold Anyway
🎧 Is This Another Roaring Twenties?
📊 Trump has booked 3,800 innocent children into detention.
🚩 Our New Late Night Hosts Are Digital
🎨 Doechii Got Fired

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of February 23, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 The Alysa Liu Effect- The Atlantic

Alysa Liu retired from figure skating at 16 because she didn’t want to become, in her words, “a sulky, overtrained arthritic with the emotional disposition of burnt toast.” So she left. She went skiing, hiked to the Mount Everest base camp, enrolled at UCLA to study psychology. When she came back to skating in late 2024 after two and a half years away, she came back with one rule: “No one tells me what to do.”She didn’t come back to chase medals, she came back to be, as she put it, “a performance artist, not a medal-seeking desperado.” And I believe, because she stopped caring, she won America’s first Olympic gold in women’s figure skating since 2002.

Alysa has taken the world by storm for many reasons, but the one that keeps appearing on our feeds and in headlines is her pure joy. For most of us, “joy at work” feels like an oxymoron, something we can’t quite access or even imagine. Learning about Alysa rediscovering her love for skating, and then watching her embody that joy so openly and authentically on the ice, is exactly the kind of inspiration we need right now. She is a treasure, an inspiration, and unapologetically herself. She refuses to shrink or assimilate to fit anyone else’s expectations. In doing so, she gives us something rare: someone to look up to, and permission to believe that this level of contentment, freedom, and spirit might still be possible for all of us.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 Will the Market Crash in 2026? with Andrew Ross Sorkin — Smart Girl Dumb Questions

The 2026 market is booming. The energy? Absolutely terrible. Everyone can feel something is off, but no one wants to say anything because saying “this feels like 2008” makes you sound like a doomsday prepper.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the journalist behind NYT DealBook, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and co-creator of Billions, wrote a book called 1929 that breaks down what actually caused the greatest economic collapse America has ever seen. And the parallels to right now are uncomfortable. SGDQ Host, Nayeema Raza, asks the questions we’re all thinking: Is this another Roaring Twenties? Are we in an AI bubble? Are we in a crypto hype dream where everyone pretends the numbers make sense?

If you've been feeling like the economy is a house of cards held together by optimism and venture capital, this one's for you.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 Children in ICE Detention Jumped 6x Under Trump - The Marshall Project

**Content warning: This section contains descriptions of child detention and mistreatment**

Trump is locking up children. Around 170 children are held in ICE detention on an average day, more than 6x the number under Biden. On some days, ICE has held 400 children or more. Since Trump took office, at least 3,800 children have been booked into detention. At least 1,000 were held longer than 20 days, violating the court-ordered limit. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro visited and was brutally honest: “They are literally being treated as prisoners. This is a monstrous machine.”

Inside, families report moldy, worm-filled food and undrinkable water. One child with appendicitis was left writhing on the floor screaming in pain until he vomited. One family has been locked inside for eight months. Advocates warn: “It’s only a matter of time before we see a child die.”

These families aren’t criminals. Many were taken during routine check-ins and have pending legal cases. They’re being caged because Trump wants to deport as many people as possible, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt. Including toddlers. Including infants.

This is state-sanctioned cruelty.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 The New Late Night - Vanity Fair

TV late-night talk shows are dead. Johnny Carson’s final Tonight Show episode reached 55 million Americans. Today’s network late-night shows struggle to get even 1/10th of that audience. Why? Because who’s sitting around at 11:35 p.m. waiting for Jimmy Fallon to interview someone with rehearsed talking points about their new movie?!

HOWEVER, the talk show isn’t dead IRL, it’s just moved online! It’s Jennifer Lawrence sobbing through Hot Ones‘ spicy wings, Rosalía musing about saints on Subway Takes, Tina Fey reading Bowen Yang the riot act on Las Culturistas. It’s Keke Palmer telling Amelia Dimoldenberg why she envies rocks. Now, digital creators like Brittany Broski (who got famous from a kombucha meme) and Quenlin Blackwell wield more cultural influence than most traditional “stars.”

The old model required you to climb a ladder, kiss the ring, perform professionalism, and wait your turn. The new model says: if you’re interesting and people want to watch you, that’s enough. It’s more democratic, more accessible, and infinitely more exhausting because there’s no off switch. The talk show is alive and well my friends!

🔗 Read The Full Piece Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 Doechii Got Fired, It’s Inspiration For Us All.

Did you know in 2020, rapper Doechii was fired from her job as an assistant in Florida? She documented it in a video titled “I got fired thank God,” and it recently went viral again for all the right reasons. Doechii is now a Grammy-winning artist. But that’s not really the point. The point is getting fired may be what finally pushed her to bet on herself.

We’ve been conditioned to treat job loss like a moral failing. But what if the job was the problem? Getting fired sucks. But sometimes the thing that feels like rock bottom is actually the push you needed to finally move in the right direction

If you’ve been fired, laid off, or are staring down the possibility of it, this is your reminder: it’s not the end, it could be the beginning!

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 Copenhagen Is Recruiting Burned-Out Workers
🎧 Obama Speaks, We Listen
📊 Americans are Loosing $3 billion Annually to Romance Scams
🚩 Imperfect Trends Are Trending.
🎨 Never Look Down on Anybody Unless You're Helping Him Up - Rev. Jackson

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of February 17, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 The World's Happiest City Is Literally Guaranteeing You'll Be Less Miserable- Time Out

Copenhagen just launched a campaign called the “Friend Recruiter Program” that targets people who are miserable in their jobs. Nominate a burnt-out friend, get them to browse Copenhagen’s job portal, and you both get entered to win a free trip. They even made a playlist called “From Burnout to Balance” to drive the point home.

Think about what it means that an entire city can use American burnout as a recruitment strategy. They’re not pitching better salaries or career advancement. They’re actually pitching the radical concept that your job shouldn’t ruin your life. And they know it’ll work because burnout here is so pervasive that “escape to a place where work doesn’t destroy you” is a genuine selling point.

Copenhagen can make this promise because Denmark has what the US refuses to build: strong labor protections, universal healthcare, affordable childcare, mandatory vacation time…the list goes on! So when Copenhagen says “come here, you’ll be happier,” what they’re really saying is: “We don’t treat workers the way America does!!”

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 President Barack Obama Breaks Silence on Trump - Brian Tyler Cohen

In an era where everything coming from the current administration triggers emotional exhaustion, hearing from Barack Obama feels like the ultimate energy boost.

Its worth noting, Obama rarely comments on the current administration. He has been measured, deliberate, and disciplined in his silence, the way only someone who has actually held the weight of that office can be. But when Trump posted a disgusting, racist video depicting him and Michelle as animated apes, that was the line. His response was, of course, diplomatic, thoughtful…measured. Because that’s who he is. And honestly? In a political moment that feels like a race to the bottom, watching someone lead with that kind of grace is its own form of resistance.

Also, he talked about Bad Bunny and the 2028 election, so there’s that.

I miss him so much. That’s really all.

🔗 Listen or Watch Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 AI Romance Scams Cost Americans $3 Billion Last Year - Vox

Romance scams are at an all-time high, and AI is making them faster, cheaper, and easier to run. A single scammer who used to manage a few cons at a time can now run 20 or more simultaneously using AI toolkits purchased on the dark web, complete with fake personas, deepfake video tools, and customer support.

The numbers:

• Americans lost $3 billion to romance scams last year alone

• “Pig-butchering” scams defrauded $75 billion worldwide between 2020–2024

• Only 1 in 4 victims were able to recover stolen funds

The infrastructure for this is disturbingly mundane. These toolkits have tiered pricing, user reviews, and customer support! The skill barrier to entry, as one cybersecurity expert put it, “is essentially gone.” We’re in a loneliness epidemic, AI can now convincingly fake intimacy at scale, and there’s a thriving marketplace built to exploit both.

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 "Imperfect by Design" - 2026 Canva Trend Report

Canva released their 2026 design trends report, and buried in all the aesthetic forecasting is something actually interesting: 80% of creators say this is the year they regain creative control. They’re done optimizing for the algorithm. The trend they’re calling “Imperfect by Design” is showing up everywhere, messy collages, rough cuts, lo-fi aesthetics, designs that look like someone’s actual notes app instead of a brand deck. Searches for DIY and scrapbook-style elements are up 90% year over year. People are creating for fun instead of engagement metrics.

There’s a companion trend called “Opt-Out Era”, clean layouts, serif fonts, straightforward branding. The visual equivalent of logging off. It’s described as “taking a visual timeout from digital burnout and the constant hustle.” What I like about this is that it feels like a refusal to keep feeding a system that demands we optimize ourselves into oblivion.

🔗 Read The Full Report Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 Thank You, Rev. Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson died today. He dedicated his life to the advancement of Black and brown people, to the belief that we deserve to live a life full of our hopes and dreams, like anyone else. Born into poverty in segregated South Carolina, he marched with MLK, was present when he was assassinated in Memphis, and spent the next five decades refusing to let that moment be the end of the movement. He ran for president twice in the 1980s, not because the path was clear, but because Black people deserved to see themselves in that race. He registered millions of voters. He built coalitions across race and class that people said couldn’t be built.

He was imperfect, as we all are. But in his imperfection he never lost sight of a greater purpose, the purpose of hope. The relentless belief that hope is the driver of change and good in the world.

“Keep hope alive.”

Thank you for everything, Mr. Jackson.

🔗 NYT Photo Album of Jesse Jackson’s Life

“I am thrilled to announce” “I am so excited to announce” “I am thrilled to share” “

…says hundreds of millions of people.

But are you? Is there no other way to share news?

Here’s what makes this particularly frustratingright now: We’re experiencing the worst year for layoffs since the Great Recession. Job openings are at their lowest level since September 2020. Companies are citing AI as the reason for 7,624 cuts in January alone.

And in response to this genuinely terrifying labor market reality, we’re all performing enthusiasm! Writing the same sanitized announcements that sound like they came from your Grandpa’s Facebook.

The disconnect is staggering.

What We’re Actually Losing

When everyone says the same thing, we lose the ability to signal what actually matters. If everyone is “thrilled” about everything, then how do I know when you’re actually thrilled versus when you’re just following the LinkedIn playbook? We’re flattening human experience into corporate-speak at exactly the moment when human experience should be the differentiator.

Here’s what I mean: imagine you’re looking at 3 posts.

Post A: “I’m thrilled to announce I’ve accepted a new position at XYZ Corp. Excited for this next chapter!”

Post B: “I'm joining a company that's building something I'd actually use myself. First time I've been able to say that."

Post C: “This promotion means I can finally pay off my student loans. Genuinely relieved."

Which person would you remember? Which person would you want to grab coffee with? Which person sounds like an actual human you might want to work with? You'd pick Post B or C, right? Turns out, so would LinkedIn's algorithm. The very platform that created this problem is now trying to fight it."

Subscribe now

LinkedIn Created This Monster

LinkedIn's algorithm underwent a major shift between September and November 2024, deprioritizing what they call polished corporate announcements in favor of 'knowledge sharing and professional conversations'. The algorithm now evaluates factors like first-person narrative voice vs. third-person announcements, with LinkedIn claiming it's trying to 'detect and reward humanity' and 'reduce AI-generated content.'

So how’s that working out for them? Well…not good! As of October 2024, 54% of long-form posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. AI-generated posts surged 189% right after ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022. So despite claiming that those AI-generated posts get 45% less engagement than human-written ones, we’re officially using robots to write our posts...

….which makes us sound less human

…which then makes people engage less

…which makes the algorithm suppress us further.

Long story short: It’s a death spiral of inauthenticity!

The “Professionalism” Excuse Doesn’t Hold Up

I know what you’re thinking: “But Madison, we have to be professional!”

Do we? Or have we just collectively agreed that “professional” means “sounds like a robot?

I really do understand the genuine enthusiasm of a promotion or new title or moving on to another company. I get it deeply. But the argument that being honest could put your career at risk is relative. You can absolutely share what XYZ job did for YOU in an honest, vulnerable, way that does not put your job in jeopardy. Just your ego (dare I say!)

You have to brave the feeling that maybe someone will think less of you, and reality is…so what? But more honestly, no one really cares.

Here are some examples. What if you said?:

• “This role lets me work remotely, which means I get to move closer to my family”

• “I finally get to use the skills I’ve been dying to use for years”

• “This company’s values actually align with mine, which feels like a luxury”

• “After years of pitching this idea internally and getting nowhere, I found a company that's already building it. Let's go!"

These are honest. These are vulnerable. These are also completely professional.

The Opportunity Cost

We’re living through a legitimately historic moment. We’re all navigating genuinely uncertain terrain.

And our response is to... perform corporate optimism. To hit “generate with AI” and post the same generic enthusiasm everyone else is posting.

What a f*cking waste.

This could be the moment when LinkedIn becomes actually useful. When people share real insights about navigating career transitions in an AI-disrupted economy. When we crowdsource actual strategies for dealing with industry upheaval. When we build genuine professional communities instead of everyone performing the same corporate theater.

In the age of AI slop and jobs disappearing, why wouldn’t we be a touch more…human? Genuine? Open? Considerate?! I mean if we’re all about to work 3 days a week and be broke with no future prospects, isn’t the one thing we actually have going for us…our brains? Our sense of humanity? EMOTIONS>

I bet in years to come, the bravest people in this world will no longer be doctors and lawyers but people who are honest on the internet…Who find a way to hold on to their integrity of being human and find the courage to share what’s really going on.

So, the next time you’re about to post “I’am THRILLED to announce,” ask yourself:

“What would Madison think of me?”

Just kidding. I don’t care. But YOU should care.

How about sharing, what are you actually feeling? What would you tell your best friend about this news? What's the real story here?

And then consider: “well, what if I just... said that?”

If BURNT unpacks the roots of burnout, The Exhaustion Index tracks it in real time, because exhaustion isn’t just personal, it’s global. Each week, I break down the biggest conversations on work, rest, and productivity, so you don’t have to doomscroll your way to enlightenment.

Think of this as BURNT’s news section, minus the wellness clichés, plus some sharp, necessary critiques.

This week, we’re talking about:

​​📖 Wait Now We Need Humans?! The AI Layoffs Are Backfiring
🎧 Bezos & The Washington Post = A Disaster
📊 Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio!
🚩 You May Need A Resume Strategist
🎨 Wise Words from Junot & Doris

Let’s get into it.

📆 Week of February 10, 2026

1️⃣ Must-Read: The Article You Need This Week

📖 AI Layoffs Are Backfiring - Inc

For the last year, companies have been loudly telling us that AI would “replace” people, streamline teams, and permanently reshape work. While that is true, according to a new report cited by Inc., 50% of companies that cut jobs due to AI expect to rehire for similar roles by 2027!

Don’t be fooled, this rehiring will most likely fall under different titles. What’s striking isn’t just the reversal, but how fast it’s happening. While 62% of businesses are testing AI tools, and 26% of employees used AI at least weekly in 2025, the promised efficiency hasn’t materialized in the way executives sold it. Chatbots are struggling with nuance, customers are fed up and teams are thinned past the point of functionality. The whiplash: layoffs framed as innovation, followed by rehiring framed as strategy, is frustrating us all. Now, if this feels familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this cycle before. New tech gets mythologized, then labor absorbs the shock, followed by reality catching; the difference this time is how many people were burned along the way. Le sigh, we shall see.

🔗 Read the full piece here

2️⃣ Listen to This: A Podcast That Gets It

🎧 How Jeff Bezos Broke The Washington Post - Radio Atlantic

Recently on q morning Zoom call, The Washington Post’s executive editor announced they were laying off roughly a third of an already gutted newsroom. A ZOOM CALL.

Radio Atlantic breaks down how Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 promising to save journalism, has instead presided over its systematic hollowing out. Joshua Benton from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab walks through the playbook: treat reporting as a cost center, demand profitability from an institution never meant to be a cash cow, cut “inefficiencies” (translation: people), act shocked when quality collapses. This is the same pattern everywhere. Buy something meaningful, demand it be "sustainable," burn out the workforce, blame them for not "innovating" fast enough. What connects it all? Decisions made by people with zero stake in the actual work.

🔗 Listen Here

3️⃣ Insight of the Week: Did You Know?

📊 Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime Show Drew 135 Million Viewers

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime performance drew 135 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched halftime shows in history. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Kid Rock peaked at around 6 million viewers.

Any backlash to Bad Bunny wasn’t about talent. Conservatives called him a “foreigner” for singing in Spanish and celebrating Puerto Rican culture. Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917. Kid Rock said his show was for “folks who love America,” as if speaking Spanish makes you un-American.

Well, I hate to break it to the racists out there, but the overwhelming majority chose inclusion over performative patriotism.

WE LOVE YOU BENITO!

🔗 Read More

Subscribe now

4️⃣ Trend Report Watch

📉 👀 Resume Strategists Are Having a Moment

Yes, the job market is brutal, and now there’s an entire industry of resume strategists helping people game a system that’s increasingly run by algorithms. 88% of companies now use AI in hiring, which means your resume isn’t being read by a human first, it’s being scanned by software that decides in seconds whether you’re worth a recruiter’s time.

The problem? AI recruiting tools are a mess. They screen for keywords, filter out qualified candidates over formatting issues, and according to Gartner, only 26% of applicants trust AI to evaluate them fairly.

Introducing specialists who know how to structure a resume so it gets past the bots and actually lands in front of a human. Greg Langstaff (@langstaff.greg) is one of them, and his advice is spot on!

Hate to break it to you…this is not a job market, its a rigged game.

🔗 Check Him Out Here

5️⃣ Just Because:

🎨 A Gentle Push You Might Need to Hear

One of my favorite writers, Junot Díaz shared this Doris Lessing quote, and honestly, it’s the reminder a lot of us need right now:

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

We spend so much time waiting for the right moment, the right resources, the right level of stability. But if you’re waiting for burnout culture to fix itself, for capitalism to suddenly care, or for conditions to feel less impossible before you make your move, you’ll be waiting forever.

The conditions are always f*cking impossible. Do it anyway.