when nothing else works: burn it all down

the ultimate guide to starting over

At the end of last year I was looking for something to scratch my Animal-Crossing-crozy-game itch and picked up Stardew Valley on a whim.

On the surface they feel like sister games—farming, fishing, interacting with villagers—but one fundamental game mechanic changes the entire experience: time.

In Animal Crossing, you're subjected to the in-world passage of time. Mornings on the island are mornings IRL. If you want to catch a butterfly that only passes through on Thursdays at 12pm, then you better find a way to bring your Switch along on your lunch breaks.

Stardew Valley takes the opposite approach: game time is game time. More specifically, an entire day in-game is always 14 minutes long (or, put in a more terrifying way, one "in-game hour" only lasts 43 seconds).

This is just as panic-inducing as it sounds.

The beginning isn't so bad, really. There aren't that many tasks for you to complete as you start fixing up your farm, but slowly, the work needed to maintain the land only grows as you add crops and trees and slimes and cows, meanwhile the quests pile up and the strawberry crops don't have enough sprinklers and the chickens are mad at you because you forgot to pet them, and suddenly you find yourself whipped into a blind frenzy trying to contain the machine.

overwhelm in an 8-bit package (original image here)

The most fascinating part of this game is that people tend to start over. A lot. They wake up one day and wonder how they became trapped in a self-made cycle of alarm and distress, and willingly reset to Day 1 with just a tiny patch of dirt to tend to and almost no money to speak of.

Sometimes, if we're not careful, the machine takes on a life of its own. And in those times the only way out is to start all over again.

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A few weeks ago, I had my first appointment with a new therapist. Well, technically, it was with a "licensed matching expert", which apparently is a new fancy way of getting you to pay for someone to tell you what kind of therapist you need (smells like Gen-Z, but I digress).

The umbrella company, Two Chairs, operates under the ethos that patients should have therapeutic goals, rather than floating in their feelings for eternity. This is part of why they assign you a therapist on your behalf: so that whoever you are working with is qualified to address whatever particular concerns are driving you to spend both the money and the time to have a stranger listen to your problems in the first place.

We started with a standard list of intake questions ("No, I've never harmed myself", "Yes, I feel safe in my home"). Then she then looked up from her notes and asked:

"What are your goals with therapy?"

I stared at her like she had just grown sprouts of her head. "I don't know," I said, finally. "I just know something's wrong."

If you know me, then you'll know that I usually have an answer to everything. Even when I don't, I will find a way to bullshit my way to an answer because the very concept of ambiguity sets me on edge. But this was one of the few times I struggled to articulate exactly what it was that I was feeling.

I knew I was navigating a major life change. I knew I was overwhelmed. I knew that my attempts at controlling that overwhelm were becoming less and less effective, and I knew that I felt like I was being buried under a backlog of tasks and projects, trapped with no way out. I knew that it felt as if the earth were falling out from beneath my very feet as the the world kept spinning faster and faster at an increasingly alarming rate; teetering on the verge of devouring itself in one final, blinding burst of brilliance, all before incinerating into a whisper of smoke and vanishing into the oblivion.

In other words, somewhere along the way, I had fundamentally lost my ability to feel joy.

It’s a terrible, lonely, and sobering thing to realize. I knew accomplishment and I occasionally knew a fleeting sense of pleasure, but a true sense of presence and contentedness has escaped me for god-knows-how-long. Months? Years?

The child-like sense of play and wonder that had defined me for so much of my life had been smothered and reduced to a pile of ash. Everything around me felt trite, overdone, too trendy, too much effort, not enough effort, too much of a distraction.

I kept asking myself the obvious question:

Am I depressed?

But no, I'd been there, done that and I knew this was different. And then, several days later, everything came crashing down at once.

It was an ordinary Thursday in the middle of September. I was sitting at my desk in the bedroom. I remember the time and place so clearly because it's one of the handful of moments in my life where I could feel a line drawn in the sand, a distinct before and after staked into the timeline of my life.

A last-minute request had come up and I was subsequently reorganizing my calendar for the umpteenth time that week. This took the better part of two hours. By the end I was so frustrated that my entire morning had been spent just figuring out how the rest of my time would be spent that I was ready to pull my hair out.

Here's the part where you try not to laugh—I took my woes to the Great Oracle of ChatGPT:

"Why can't I enjoy life anymore?"

"Why am I always stressed no matter how long I rest?"

"What am I constantly overwhelmed and every little email or task or idea threatens to unravel my very being?"

And there it was: the stupidly simple and incredibly obvious answer to that million-dollar question:

I am burnt out.

It's funny, because looking back, this should've been the most obvious thing in the world. People kept asking me how I was doing (first red flag), and every time I'd answer with, "I'm fine". But I could see it in their eyes: the concern, the worry. I wasn't fine. Not fine at all. I was just the only one who couldn't see it. Sometimes the consequence of overthinking is that you end up missing the point entirely.

That evening I decided that I would prioritize more time for rest. I started clearing out blocks in my calendar and rearranging my plans for the weekend (again). The entire process nearly gave me a panic attack as I realized the domino effect that one afternoon off would have on my entire schedule: If I put this script off until Monday, I won't be able to edit and submit it to my sponsor by Wednesday, but if I don't send our save-the-dates by Sunday then people may start making plans...

I had built a delicate tower of cards and even just one wrong look could send the whole thing tumbling into shambles.

This was the moment that I was able to see everything clearly: the insanity of my life, the frantic hamster wheel, the horrible cycle I had trapped myself in. When you're spending three hours of your day reconfiguring your calendar and feeling one spontaneous phone call away from a mental breakdown, something is terribly, terribly wrong.

So I stopped.

I opened my Notion and spent the rest of the night deleting and archiving nearly 90% of my obligations. Any task, project, video that wasn't intently urgent or critical was dragged straight to the trash bin. Then I opened my calendar for a final time and deleted every predetermined time-block until nothing was left but a sweeping cavas of white space and a handful of scheduled events.

a digital desert!

I took one hard look at my house of cards, took a deep breath, and knocked it all down in one swooping exhale. I had decided.

I'm burning it all down.

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So. What is burnout, exactly?

Put simply, burnout is a prolonged state of stress.

Normally, stress is healthy. It's what keeps us alive. Stress is the "oh shit" voice in our heads that keeps us from playing in traffic and forces us to the grocery store even when we don't feel like it. It's the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and that can be a very powerful instinct when leveraged correctly.

The problem is when that cycle of "I need to do this thing" and "I've done this thing" doesn't relieve that stress. Either we continue to carry that sense of anxiety with us, or a new stressor comes up before the feeling of relief and accomplishment can even be acknowledged.

And the thing is, I wasn't actually doing that much. I've known people who slam through 80 hour work weeks with a child at home and don't even bat an eye. Sure, I had a lot on my plate—wedding, new dog, moving, figuring out career—but my life looked pretty normal, all things considered. I'd wake up around 9am, get sidetracked until lunch, finally get to working on a task or two, then sprawl on the couch while swiping through Doordash and asking Alby what he wanted for dinner (it was usually Chinese). I'd spend my evenings with a book in hand or in front of the TV, and I'd see friends and family on the weekends.

In many ways, my life was the picture of balance. So why did it feel like I was carrying the weight of my entire existence at every moment?

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The day before I blew my metaphorical house of cards to dust, I was out filming a review for my DJI Pocket 3. I had just wrapped up a very emotionally taxing week of dog-sitting my brother-in-law's new puppy (Shiba's are evil, FYI) and told myself I needed a "simple" video idea where I just sat down and talked.

I found myself the next morning at the edge of Ocean Beach with a tripod in one arm and several cameras in the other. I was setting up a complex string of intro shots and dusting sand off my jacket, my grumpiness blooming as I wondered when the couple next to me would finally leave.

Here's the thing they don't usually tell you about stress: a lot of the times, the source is external (a high-strung boss, a tiger parent, endless meetings), but it can also be internal. Your reaction to things is just as (if not more) important than the thing itself.

As some of you already know, I’ve been genetically blessed with an extra-neurospicy cocktail of ADHD, OCD, and a generally anxious disposition (the universe sure has a sense of humor). I hate making everything about this, but in hard times, it is everything. The push-and-pull of my chaotic, ADHD need for novelty and spontaneity is constantly at war with my innate OCD drive for order, routine, and certainty. Layer in an added level of anxiety and on my worst days, I truly feel insane.

Mismanaged ADHD can lead to an OCD flare-up. When this happens it becomes not just a cycle, but a spiral—a self-fueling machine that drives you deeper and deeper into misery.

And sometimes, your brain gets so far off from reality that the only way out is to stop entirely and start over.

I know this sounds like a very drawn out and dramatic way of saying "I’m taking a break", and this probably feels like an extreme measure for something that presumably could be solved with a week’s vacation. But if you’ve dealt with any level of chronic anxiety (or any other flavor of mental nonsense) then you may understand why an indulgence for one person may be a life-changing choice for another.

That's why, even though the guilt and shame still eats at me every day, I know it's necessary. In fact, it's the only thing I know for certain. Only by fully and irrevocably letting go of everything that makes me, me, can I begin to learn what was really worth keeping all along.

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The morning after I went full-meltdown-mode, I walked over to a local coffee shop and sat down to redo my Notion (if you're new here, hi, I'm the internet's biggest Notion nerd!). I ported all of my remaining tasks, projects, content, and notes into a single-paged dashboard, which I (embarrassingly) titled "project burnout". I made a bucket list of all the things I wanted to do, places I wanted to visit, creative projects I had dreamed about but never got around to doing. Yes, I considered this "simple". Yes, I considered this "resting". Leave it to me to over-plan the idea of no-planning.

It took me the better part of five hours before I realized how insane I was being. Clearly, I needed some structure (and not in the form of a Notion dashboard) to keep me in line and make sure I wouldn't just spend all my time...doing whatever the hell this was.

like i said: insane.

Later that night I tried again, this time sticking to a simple list:

1.) No digital organization tools

• The only cure to the efficiency trap is to stop prioritizing efficiency altogether. Add friction. Learn that fulfillment and content aren't rooted in quantity, but quality.

• Obviously, we live in a society, so I'm making allowances for my Google Calendar and Apple Notes. But otherwise I'll mostly be getting by with an old, half-empty Leuchtturm notebook. Paper is messy, imperfect, slow. It lends itself to doodling and daydreaming and spontaneity. It gives us space to be who we truly are.

2.) No "instant" social media

• Social media is my job, and even if it weren't, creating is healing and I don't want to hinder that process. But the speed at which certain feedback loops run can be damaging. This means no pandering for attention on Instagram stories or chasing trends on the TikTok FYP.

• The only creative platforms I'll be using are YouTube and Substack (so you can look forward to more naval-gazing here! rejoice!), but with no publishing schedules or sponsor deadlines. I'm allowing these because the pace of production gives me enough space to approach the creative process the way it was meant to be: live, then create.

3.) Do morning pages & an artist date every week

• I read Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way years ago and was inspired to pick it up again after a friend mentioned it. It's about learning to be an artist again, but it's also about learning how to get out of your own way.

• There're a lot of exercises and woo-woo hoo-ha (which I also plan on doing), but the foundation of the program is 1) morning pages: three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness done daily, which has obvious benefits during a mental health crisis, and 2) artist dates: 2 hours a week dedicated to "filling the well", AKA, doing whatever the hell you want to do for the sake of it. And doing things for the sake of it is what this is all about, in the end.

Other than these three things, I'm free to do whatever I want: play games all day, stare at the wall, jump out of a plane, take a trip to Morocco, learn parkour, spend a week straight studying various types of reptiles at the library. Realistically, it will probably just involve a lot of walking, reading, and wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood.

The goal is simply to go as slow as possible, and to learn to be okay with that.

It's learning how to life again. Believing that our worth is not in what we do but who we are. Remembering who I was as a child before the should's and must's of adulthood colored everything grey. Understanding, like we did back then, that time is relative.

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I've been spending the last two weeks slowly reverse-weaving the web of dense-yet-scattered complexities in my life, pruning and stripping the productivity systems and Product-Hunt's-top-trending-beta-something-or-other down to the barest threads possible.

I transferred all my important tasks and project info from Notion into a simple paper journal, then removed the desktop app from my dock with a brief swish-and-flick! of the mouse. I swiped through my iPhone, deleting Instagram, then TikTok, then Whoop—I've decided I'd rather have my wrist real-estate back for inefficient-yet-delightful uses like a new charm bracelet I just made—and finally, culling down my notifications (did you know iOS has a batch feature now?!) to just the essentials: text, calls, and reminders (because I still have ADHD and Momo still needs to be fed).

It's been a slow and meandering process—one earmarked by plenty of puttering around the house and journal sessions in the backyard when weather permits—and that's okay.

where i’ve been doing my morning pages this week while the weather is nice

I've encountered many quotes about happiness over my lifetime but only two of them have ever stuck with me:

1. "Happiness is something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to."

2. "People who think life is long and easy are happier than those that think life is short and hard."

When we say that life is short, what we're actually saying is that life is too short. But it's not. In fact, for many of us, life is long enough to fit nearly everything that truly matters: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. When you strip it down to its parts it's really not so complicated after all.

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I didn't intend to post this at the beginning of October, but I guess it's fitting, in a way. Fall has always been my favorite season, but I can't remember the last time I actually enjoyed it. The last few years have simply been a string of "maybe next week"s until the holidays pass and another year begins.

This time around? I'm prioritizing crisp, leafy walks and apple butter scones and baking all afternoon and filling the house with wonderful smells while Alby and I watch an old, campy Halloween movie with a steaming cup of tea in my favorite mug. I want to doodle cute spooky monsters all over my journal and wear fuzzy pumpkin socks and serve my favorite mac-and-cheese recipe at Thanksgiving dinner, and most of all I plan on doing a whole lot of absolutely nothing, nothing at all.

Always,

Wes