You’re Not Burned Out. You’re Surrounded by Stupid.
A Meditation on Sanity, Solitude, and the Modern Mind
…The Exhaustion of Stupidity
There is a kind of fatigue you can feel—not in your body, not in your bones, but in what the religious would call their soul—when every single headline reads like it was written by a caffeinated toddler with a political science degree from TikTok University.
People keep telling me they’re “burned out.”
No, darling. You’re not burned out. You’re being smothered.
By noise. By narcissism. By the endless gas leak of idiocy that we call modern discourse.
Burnout implies exertion. You didn’t collapse from climbing the mountain of truth. You were shoved down a spiral staircase made of nonsense tweets, LinkedIn self-congratulations, and political “thought leaders” who couldn’t lead a silent prayer without checking a poll first.
I stepped away recently—not forever, just long enough to remember what it felt like to not flinch at a push notification. I read Paul’s epistles in the bible, which are still motivating even for an atheist. I reread Burke, Kirk, Buckley, and many others. I stared at waterfalls instead of timelines. I remembered that thinking—real thinking—does not occur under duress. It requires space.
And whenever I’d peek back in?
It was like returning to town after the village idiot had been elected mayor, sheriff, priest, and…