Why We Romanticize Burnout

You post the blurry iced coffee at 2 a.m. The caption reads “grind never stops,” or something ironic like “thriving.” Your group chat is a carousel of “I haven’t slept in 30 hours” and “I just cried in the bathroom again.” And somehow, this is normal. Even… aspirational?

Welcome to the burnout aesthetic—where exhaustion is currency and struggling means you’re doing something right.

It’s not just about being tired. It’s about being seen being tired. The tote bag stuffed with unread textbooks, the under-eye circles, the latte-fueled rant about how busy you are. There’s a twisted pride in it. Like, look how much I’m giving to this. My grades. My sanity. My social life. I’m sacrificing everything—for school, for my career, for “the dream.” Doesn’t that make me committed? Doesn’t that make me worthy?

Somewhere along the line, we stopped chasing balance and started chasing collapse with good lighting.

The Aesthetic of Burnout

Burnout used to be a warning sign. Now it’s a moodboard.

We’ve been trained to make even our breakdowns look good. Think: Polaroids of messy desks, open tabs like battle scars, playlists called “melancholy productivity,” and captions that joke about crying over classes like it’s a rite of passage. There’s something almost comforting in the shared chaos. Like, if everyone’s falling apart, maybe it’s fine that you are too.

This isn’t just an internet thing—it shows up everywhere. Fashion brands sell “emotional support water bottles” and “I’m so tired” tees. Skincare companies push products to “treat stress skin” without ever questioning why a 20-year-old has stress skin to begin with. Even academia plays into it, rewarding students who grind themselves into the ground as if suffering is proof of intelligence.

And then there’s the unspoken prestige of being booked and busy. It’s not enough to say “I’m doing fine.” You have to say, “I’m barely holding it together, but I’m getting so much done.” Misery is rebranded as ambition. Rest is guilt-tripped into laziness. And asking for help? That’s weakness—unless you can make it funny on your Instagram.

What’s worse is that this performance of burnout often comes from a place of survival. For marginalized students, first-gen students, or anyone who feels like they’re one wrong move away from losing everything—they don’t have the privilege of slowing down. So the aesthetic becomes armor. If you’re going to be exhausted, you might as well look cool doing it.

But the longer we keep packaging burnout like it’s beautiful, the harder it becomes to recognize the damage underneath. We can’t heal from something we keep glamorizing

The hustle hangover

Burnout doesn’t hit all at once. It creeps in like a slow leak.

At first, it looks like being “on top of things.” You’re answering emails at midnight, saying yes to every group project, internship, club position, and side gig. Your calendar looks like a war plan. You’re praised for being driven, admired for how much you can handle. But somewhere between the third missed meal and the fifth rescheduled hangout, something shifts.

You stop feeling accomplished and start feeling hollow.

This is the hustle hangover—the comedown that no one warned us about. The part where you realize your achievements aren’t making you happy, just tired. Where doing “what you love” starts to feel like a chore. Where the praise wears off, but the pressure doesn’t. And when you try to slow down, that voice in your head whispers, “You’ll fall behind.”

We don’t just romanticize burnout—we build our identities around it. We say things like “I don’t know how to rest,” like it’s quirky. Like admitting exhaustion is a joke instead of a cry for help. We treat recovery like an inconvenience, something to rush through so we can “get back to the grind.”

But the truth is, the grind doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t say thank you. It doesn’t notice when you’re breaking down quietly in your advisor’s office, or when you’re staring at a screen so long your vision goes fuzzy. The hustle isn’t a god. It won’t save you. And no one gets a medal for burning out at 22.

Burnout Olympics

If you’ve ever sat in a study lounge and heard someone casually say, “I haven’t slept in two days,” only for someone else to reply, “That’s nothing—I pulled three all-nighters last week,” then congrats: you’ve witnessed the Burnout Olympics.

This isn’t just a phenomenon—it’s a campus ritual. A subtle, often unspoken competition where we flex how close we are to the edge. How much we’ve sacrificed. How much we’ve endured. It’s a strange kind of performance art: the darker the under-eye circles, the more impressive the story.

We wear our suffering like badges of honor. Not because we like the pain—but because in a world where success feels scarce and temporary, struggle makes us feel legitimate. Like we’ve earned our place. Like we’re proving our worth, one sleepless night at a time.

It’s not even that we want to win—we just don’t want to lose. If everyone around you is sprinting toward burnout, standing still feels like falling behind. Even if you’re exhausted, even if you’re quietly unraveling, you keep going. Because slowing down looks like weakness. Because resting looks like failure. Because in the Burnout Olympics, the only thing worse than burning out is looking like you don’t care enough to try.

And maybe the worst part? Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re competing. We talk about stress so casually—“I’m dying,” “Kill me now,” “I hate it here”—that it becomes the baseline. We laugh through our own unraveling. We make jokes instead of boundaries. And when someone does say they’re okay, we side-eye them like, Really? Must be nice.

But surviving shouldn’t be a competition. And misery shouldn’t be a bonding ritual.

The price we pay

At some point, the adrenaline wears off.

You hit send on the last assignment. You leave the meeting. You turn off your camera. And suddenly, the quiet feels heavier than the chaos ever did.

This is the part no one posts about.

It’s not aesthetic. It’s not ironic. It’s crying without knowing why. Snapping at people you love. Staring at your laptop for twenty minutes before realizing you haven’t moved. It’s waking up exhausted no matter how long you slept. It’s forgetting what excites you. It’s not knowing who you are without the constant doing.

The price of burnout isn’t just tiredness—it’s detachment. From your work. From your creativity. From yourself.

Your passion starts to feel like pressure. You lose the line between ambition and anxiety. The things you used to love—designing, writing, planning, dreaming—become things you dread. Because now, they’re tied to deadlines and grades and expectations. You keep going, but the joy is gone. And when you finally stop, when the semester ends or the project is done, you don’t feel proud. You feel numb.

And then there’s the body. The tension you hold in your jaw. The headaches. The skipped meals. The chest that gets tighter with every unread notification. We don’t talk enough about how burnout lives in the body before it ever shows up in our work.

College is supposed to be about discovery. But too many of us are too burned out to feel curious. Too tired to feel inspired. Too consumed by survival to actually live the lives we’re working so hard to build.

So…why do we do it?

Because we’re scared.

Scared of not being enough. Scared of falling behind. Scared that if we stop—even for a moment—someone else will take our place, get the internship, get the praise, get the future we’ve been killing ourselves to earn.

We burn out because the world told us that’s what success looks like. Because somewhere along the line, we learned that rest is laziness, that struggle equals merit, and that value only comes from output. We’re expected to be perfectly exhausted, constantly online, always available—students, workers, creators, and brands. All at once.

And the systems we’re moving through—academia, capitalism, social media—reward it. When was the last time someone told you to rest without tacking on a productivity tip? When was the last time you let yourself rest without feeling guilty?

We do it because we think we have to. Because “taking care of yourself” feels like a privilege we haven’t earned yet. Because even when it hurts, being busy makes us feel like we’re going somewhere.

Because admitting you’re tired feels a lot like admitting you’re failing.

And because no one really teaches us how to stop.

Is there a way out?

Maybe. But it won’t come from another productivity hack or morning routine.

The way out isn’t about quitting everything and disappearing into the woods (tempting, though). It’s quieter than that. More uncomfortable. It’s choosing to stop measuring your worth by how much you produce. It’s recognizing that rest is not a reward—it’s a requirement.

It starts with asking better questions:

Not “How much can I handle?” but “What would it look like to feel okay?”

Not “How do I do more?” but “What’s actually mine to carry?”

Maybe it means saying no, even when you’re scared to. Maybe it’s deleting the calendar app for a day. Maybe it’s letting yourself enjoy something without turning it into a side hustle. Maybe it’s choosing softness over survival.

You won’t get a grade for it. No one will clap. But slowly, your body might unclench. Your mind might clear. You might start to feel like a person again, not a project.

And yeah, the world is still fast. Still loud. Still demanding. But you don’t have to match its pace to matter. You can move slower. Gentler. Smarter. You can redefine what it means to be successful—not by how much it costs you, but by how well it lets you live.

Because surviving is not the goal.

Living is.