Burnout

There was a day in May last year when I finally admitted to myself that I was burned out. I was sitting on the couch in my office, and I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. My phone was in the other room, and I didn’t even have the energy to go grab it and order food on Uber Eats. Then I fell asleep in that position and woke up 16 hours later with a hilariously bad kink in my neck (couldn’t look left).

Until this happened to me, I used to mostly reject the idea of burnout. I thought it wasn’t a real thing and that people who struggled with this were just fundamentally lazy or weak and couldn’t take the pain of what it requires to live and work at a high level. It’s funny how life humbles you.

Part of why I was so skeptical about burnout is it can be difficult to define. Are you just tired? Why don’t you go take a week off and get back to normal? But it’s not that straightforward. I think of burnout as an enduring biopsychosocial fatigue that comes with running your system too hard for too long. I was conventionally tired, and I think years of sleep deprivation caught up to me, but more than that I felt paralyzed. I lacked will power to go do basic adult life tasks. It was hard to get out of bed.

When I think about how I got to this point, it just comes down to the unique intensity of working in the crypto industry. In a world where markets don’t ever turn off it’s easy to get sucked into endless spirals of overwork, and that’s what happened to me. From 2020-2024 my life was a mostly non-stop grind of investing, trading, content creation, and building startups. I worked every day including weekends, and I didn’t take any real holidays. I went to sleep between 2-4am and was up and in the trenches by around 9am. Before I stopped, I was working with 22 startups in various ways across North America, Europe, and Asia… and living like that takes its toll, obviously. Eventually your body just says, “nah it is OVER for you.”

At the end of last year, I ended up taking some space from the industry to recover and reset my life. It was super needed. Now I’m thankful to be back and feeling (mostly) better, but as 2025 picks up steam I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make working on the internet in a 24/7 industry more sustainable over the long term.

The main change I’m making is to be more intentional with defining my tasks and goals. I want to be able to engage well, work hard, do the thing, but then actually disengage and be DONE instead of just endlessly hopping from one thing to the next. To that end, I’ve cut most of my commitments so I can focus on investing in startups with Seed Club, co-hosting Liquid Culture, and advising [redacted]. I’m excited to say no to everything else.

Before wrapping up I should say that I’m sharing all of this to open source my experience with burnout and riff a bit. I know I’m not the only person living on the edge here so, if you ever want to talk about it feel free to reach out. It looks like 2025 is going to be unhinged for crypto, but I’m hoping this time around I (and we) can play the game with more balance. God help us.