There’s nothing wrong with you. You just need to achieve more.

You don’t burnout from working too much.

You burnout from lack of accomplishment or a lack of a sense of accomplishment from your work, despite working that hard or that long.

No matter what you do or how hard you work, you still feel like you’ve accomplished nothing. You’ve achieved nothing. It does not feel rewarding. It does not give you a sense of accomplishment afterwards. You don’t feel like you’ve done something today. You feel like you’re working all the time for nothing. Nothing is really happening. No difference whatsoever. You feel like you were before you started, or worse. There’s no attained outcome or result whatsoever, despite all that hard work.

The problem is, people who speak on the subject look at this and think, it’s because of too much work. You’re exhausted, and you need to prioritize rest. You need to take care of your own well-being, because it is more important than any external result that you can achieve.

They are wrong.

Keep in mind that most of them don’t want to scare you away, by telling you stuff that might make you feel bad afterwards, like telling you that you’re not working hard enough.

If they tell you that you are doing amazing, there’s nothing wrong with you, love yourself first, all happiness comes from within, you do not need to pursue happiness by chasing external accomplishments outside of you, you’d stay, and they’d keep making money.

If they told you you’re not good enough, you are not doing well enough, you’re lacking in terms of success, reward, achievement, accomplishment, fulfillment, dopamine, and serotonin, you’d leave, and they’d go out of business.

You can’t be happy without success, but you can be successful without necessarily being happy, for other reasons.

It is literally impossible to be happy, fulfilled, and in a healthy mental or psychological state or mood without success. Without being successful enough. To the extent that if your happiness levels are fluctuating or not so stable, or outright low or depressed, it is almost always if not always lack of success that is to be blamed for that. Your lack of enough accomplishment, achievement, and success is responsible for your negative mental health status or states, until proven otherwise. If you’re not happy, chances are you’re lacking in the department of success as well, and it is totally if not solely responsible for your unhappiness or lack of happiness, good mental health, and well-being, and neurological functioning.

Excessive failure leads to outright physical brain damage. It lowers your IQ and intelligence like no other.

And they never tell you that.

They gaslight you, so you stay a failure forever, by telling you failure doesn’t even exist. There’s no such thing as failure. It’s all lessons and learning, so that you never revolt against society’s injustice and unfairness someday or something. So that you don’t hate the rich. So you don’t hate people at the top, and do something about it someday.

Your placement in the bottom of the dominance hierarchy will keep crushing you in perpetuity, destroying all your capacity to make decisions that are not absolutely harmful and destructive for you and your future. You will keep self-sabotaging and ruining your own life for good, just because you are stuck at the bottom of the dominance or social hierarchy with no way out that you can see or follow at the moment, no matter what.

Everything will be negative. Everything will be pointless. Hopelessness and despair will be the norm, your average day-to-day mood. Helplessness and absolute misery and total and absolute lack of energy, motivation, and will, interest, investment, or desire to do anything productive, or anything whatsoever in the whole world will take over, and be all there is when it comes to you and your life. And there will be no way out, because of you, and who you’ve become or ended up being.

Success and hard work until you achieve massive success, achievement, and accomplishment is the only way out. Not being happy despite being in the negative environment.

That’s not toxic hustle culture. That’s not a straightforward way that leads quickly to severe burnout.

That’s your only hope.

That’s your only way out.