90 days of writing about burnout — what I've learned from your responses

I want to start with what I expected, because the gap between that and what actually happened is the most interesting part of this reflection.

I expected, maybe, a few hundred readers over the first couple of months. People who'd googled something specific — "is this burnout" or "how to leave a tech job" — and landed here because an algorithm sent them. I expected to write into a mostly-quiet void, build slowly, and hope that the writing was honest enough to keep people coming back once the search engines finally noticed the site existed.

What I didn't expect was the emails. Not a large volume of them — this site is three months old — but the ones that arrived have been the kind of messages that make you put your phone down and sit with them for a while. "I thought I was the only one." "I've been trying to name this thing for a year and this is the closest anyone has got." "My partner read this and showed it to me without saying a word. That was three weeks ago. I'm now working up the courage to tell my manager I'm struggling."

That last one stayed with me for days.

The themes that kept surfacing

Over ninety days and thirty-some articles, certain things came up so frequently that they stopped feeling like topics and started feeling like furniture. Present in almost every conversation the site seems to be part of — whether through direct messages, shares, or the pattern of which pieces people keep returning to.

The first and most insistent theme is this: burnout disguises itself as a personal failing. This came up in piece after piece, and every time I wrote about it, the response was disproportionately large. The productivity industry's dominant framing — that if you're exhausted and disengaged, you need better systems, earlier mornings, more discipline — is so pervasive that people have genuinely internalised it. They're not asking whether their environment is the problem. They're asking what's wrong with them. The relief of having an alternative explanation appears, from the responses I've received, to be considerable.

The second theme: the financial fears are real, but they're rarely based on actual numbers. I wrote about this from a few different angles — the freedom number, the real cost of staying, the fears that keep people stuck — and what came back was consistent: people had been carrying the weight of a financial constraint they'd never actually quantified. When they ran the numbers, the constraint was frequently smaller than the felt experience of it. Not gone, but smaller. That's a meaningful difference when the felt constraint is the thing keeping someone in a role that's making them unwell.

The third theme surprised me most: the loneliness of wanting out. I wrote a piece about being the only person in your social circle who wants to leave tech and received more responses to that one than almost anything else. People who feel genuinely isolated in a private conviction — that the thing everyone around them has organised their lives around might not be right for them. The loneliness of that position, the way it can make you doubt yourself, was something I'd underestimated when I started. It is apparently very widespread.

What the responses have actually taught me

There's a version of this reflection that would be about traffic figures and subscriber counts. I'm going to skip it — not because those things aren't interesting, but because they're not the most interesting thing. What's more interesting is what the pattern of responses has revealed about how people are actually experiencing burnout in tech, because it's somewhat different from what most of the public writing about it suggests.

The dominant public narrative around burnout is diagnostic: here are the symptoms, here is the checklist, here is what the clinical literature says. What the responses to this site have shown me is that people aren't primarily looking for a diagnosis. Most people who arrive here already suspect what they have. What they're looking for is permission — to take it seriously, to stop blaming themselves, to believe that the environment might be contributing to the problem and not just their own insufficient resilience.

The second thing responses have taught me is about timing. People don't seem to arrive at this site at the very beginning of burnout. They arrive — based on the questions they're asking and the things they've searched for — somewhere in the middle of it, usually after they've already tried the standard remedies and found them insufficient. The holiday that didn't fix it. The productivity reboot that lasted nine days. The conversation with HR that made things worse. This has changed how I think about what to write. The practical guidance matters — the financial frameworks, the decision tools — but the thing that has to come first is acknowledgement. That what they're experiencing is real, it has a shape, and they're not alone in it.

The third thing, which I find hardest to write about without sounding self-congratulatory: the writing has mattered to some people in ways I didn't anticipate. Not dramatically — I'm not claiming lives have been transformed. But there's a particular kind of message I've received a handful of times, where someone says they showed a piece to their partner, or printed something out, or found something that gave them the language to finally have a conversation they'd been putting off. I receive those with a lot of care, because the situations behind them are complicated and hard.

What I got wrong in the first 90 days

I assumed initially that the most resonant pieces would be the most prescriptive ones. The frameworks, the numbered lists, the actionable guides. Those pieces do well. But consistently, the ones that seem to matter most are the ones written closest to the bone — the honest first-person accounts, the piece about crying in a supermarket car park, the piece about sitting in a meeting and realising you've been simulating a functional version of yourself for months.

I also underestimated how much the financial dimension is tangled up with the emotional one. I thought the finance pieces would be their own category, separate from the burnout and identity writing. They're not. People don't experience money concerns and wellbeing concerns as separate problems — they experience them as a single interlocking constraint. Writing about one inevitably requires engaging with the other, and the pieces that try to hold both of those things honestly tend to be the most useful.

I also, early on, occasionally softened things I should have said plainly. There's a tendency, when you don't know your audience yet, to hedge — to add qualifications, to soften the more uncomfortable conclusions, to make sure you're not offending anyone. The pieces where I threw the hedging out and just said the thing — those are almost always the ones that got shared most. Something to remember.

Where the next 90 days goes

There's a certain sense of arrival that comes with marking three months of anything. A quiet confirmation that the thing is real — not a project but a site, not an experiment but a place that exists and that people find useful enough to keep returning to.

I don't want to turn this into a roadmap announcement, because the site doesn't need a roadmap. What it needs — and what I intend to keep doing — is writing honestly about things that are genuinely hard, without tidying them up artificially, and trusting that the people who find it useful will find it.

If you've been reading since the beginning: thank you, genuinely, for being part of a conversation that I'm still learning how to have. The messages you send, the things you share and don't share elsewhere, the questions you ask — those are what make the writing worth doing.

If you're new here and trying to find your bearings, the Start Here page is the most useful place to begin. It's designed to help you figure out where you are and what you might need — without making you read everything at once.