The Arena: Normalizing the Frenzy

I’m sitting in the back of this climate-controlled glass box, watching a man in a $501 suit clap his hands until his palms are red, and all I can think about is the guy who just stole my parking spot. It was a tight squeeze near the trailhead of the corporate park, and this person in a silver sedan-let’s call him an apex predator of the asphalt-saw my blinker, saw my intent, and decided his 11 seconds of saved time was worth more than the basic social contract. He didn’t even look at me. He just stepped out, adjusted his tie, and marched toward the elevators like he was storming Normandy. That’s the energy in this room right now. It’s the energy of people who think that being the fastest, the loudest, and the most visibly drained is the only way to prove they exist.

Sarah: A Failure of Resource Management

In the middle of the room, the manager is holding up a 1-page memo like it’s the Magna Carta. He’s praising Sarah. Sarah is 31 years old and looks like she hasn’t seen a vegetable or a sunset in at least 51 days. She apparently stayed in this very building until 4:01 AM to finish a presentation that will likely be glanced at for 11 minutes before being archived in a digital graveyard. The manager calls it ‘unprecedented commitment.’ I call it a slow-motion suicide pact. In my world, the world where the trees don’t care about your quarterly earnings and the cold will kill you without an ounce of malice, what Sarah did isn’t called commitment. It’s called a failure of resource management. If a student of mine burned through their physical and mental reserves like that on the first night of a 21-day trek, I’d be calling for a medevac before the sun hit the horizon. You don’t win prizes for being the most exhausted person in the woods; you just become a liability to the group.

The Ghost of Leadership Past

I remember a mistake I made about 11 years ago. I was leading a group through the North Cascades, and I had this idea that I could forge ‘grit’ through pure deprivation. I pushed a group of 11 students to hike through a storm for 21 hours straight. I thought I was being a visionary leader. I thought I was teaching them what they were truly capable of. What I actually did was lead a group of hallucinating, shivering husks into a situation where one wrong step would have resulted in 11 different tragedies. One kid, a 21-year-old with more heart than sense, started talking to a cedar tree like it was his mother. He wasn’t stronger for the experience. He was broken.

I had to recognize that my desire for a ‘heroic’ narrative had blinded me to the biological reality of the humans I was responsible for. I see that same blind spot in every manager who smiles when they see a timestamp of 1:11 AM on a Saturday morning.

Cannibalizing Life for the Gears

We have normalized this debt. We’ve made it so that the person who leaves at 5:01 PM feels a pang of guilt, even if they accomplished 101% of their goals for the day. They see the ‘committed’ ones hunched over their monitors, bathed in the sickly blue light of a spreadsheet, and they feel like they’re failing. But who is actually failing? Is it the person who has a hobby, a family, and a functioning nervous system? Or is it the organization that requires its employees to cannibalize their own lives to keep the gears turning? The guy who stole my parking spot probably thinks he’s a high-performer. He probably thinks that his ruthlessness is an asset. But all he’s doing is contributing to a culture where everyone is constantly on edge, waiting for the next person to snatch what little they have left.

Reading the Collapse Signals

I’ve spent 41 years learning how to read the signs of collapse. In the wilderness, it’s subtle. A slight stagger in the gait. A glazed look in the eyes. A sudden inability to perform simple tasks like tying a knot or lighting a match. In the corporate world, the signs are just as clear, but we choose to misinterpret them. We see the irritability and call it ‘passion.’ We see the obsessive attention to detail and call it ‘excellence.’ We see the complete social withdrawal and call it ‘focus.’ It’s a lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to face the fact that we are running people into the ground for nothing.

I once saw a guy at a tech firm brag about how he hadn’t taken a vacation in 61 months. He said it with a straight face, expecting a round of applause. I just looked at him and wondered what he’d forgotten about being a human. Had he forgotten the smell of rain on hot asphalt? Had he forgotten the way the light changes in October? Or had he just replaced those memories with the 71 different ways to optimize a conversion funnel?

The Race to the Bottom

This obsession with the visible struggle creates a toxic competition. It becomes a game of chicken where the first person to prioritize their health loses. It’s a race to the bottom, and the prize is a gold-plated casket. We need to stop pretending that this is sustainable. We need to stop acting like the human body is a machine that can be overclocked indefinitely without consequence. When you push people past their breaking point, they don’t just get tired. They get sick. They get resentful. They lose the ability to think creatively or empathetically. They become like the guy in the silver sedan, seeing everyone else as an obstacle to be cleared rather than a person to be respected.

I’ve had to tell 11 different clients over the years that their ‘commitment’ was actually an addiction to the adrenaline of the crisis. They didn’t know how to function without the pressure. They had forgotten how to exist in the quiet moments. They needed a place where they could recalibrate their internal compass and remember that their value isn’t tied to their output. For many, finding a path back to themselves requires more than just a long weekend. It requires a fundamental shift in how they view their place in the world. Often, this journey begins when someone finally realizes they can’t do it alone and reaches out to a place like New Beginnings Recovery to start the process of untangling their identity from their exhaustion.

Cheering for Rest, Not Ruin

I look at Sarah again. She’s leaning against the wall now, clutching a lukewarm cup of coffee that looks like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. The manager is still talking, spinning a tale about how this project will ‘put us on the map.’ He doesn’t see that Sarah is barely on the map herself. He doesn’t see that he’s rewarding the very behavior that will eventually lead to her quitting, or worse, completely breaking down in the middle of a meeting 21 weeks from now.

We need to start rewarding the person who works efficiently and then goes home. We need to celebrate the person who says ‘no’ to a 9:01 PM conference call. We need to value the quiet, steady consistency of a well-rested mind over the frantic, flickering energy of a burnout in progress. The system will take every 1% you are willing to give until there is nothing left but a shell and a LinkedIn profile.

The Trailhead Test

I’m going to go find that guy in the silver sedan when I leave here. I’m not going to yell at him. I’m just going to look at him. I want to see if he looks as tired as Sarah. I want to see if his 11 seconds of victory brought him any actual peace, or if he’s already looking for the next spot to steal. Because at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to survive, but some of us are making it a hell of a lot harder than it needs to be. We celebrate the burnout because it’s easier than fixing the culture. We call it commitment because it sounds better than exploitation. But the trees are still there, the mountains are still standing, and they don’t give a damn about your midnight emails. They only care if you have enough left in the tank to make it back to the trailhead.

Value Proposition vs. Sacrifice

I think about that kid who talked to the cedar tree. He’s 31 now, same as Sarah. I ran into him 11 months ago. He’s a carpenter now. He told me that he realized you can’t build anything that lasts if you’re using a hammer while you’re shaking from exhaustion. We aren’t built for the marathon of the modern office. We’re built for bursts of energy followed by long periods of recovery. When we try to flip that script, we don’t become super-human. We just become broken. And no amount of corporate praise or $171 gift cards can fix a spirit that has been systematically ground down in the name of a deadline that didn’t really matter in the first place.

The Ultimate Benchmark

So, here’s a thought for the next time you see that ‘unprecedented commitment’ on display: Ask yourself what is being sacrificed. Ask yourself if the 11-hour days are actually producing 11 hours of value, or if they are just 11 hours of survival. Because in the end, the only thing you truly own is your time and your health. If you give those away for a round of applause in a glass box, who really won? Not you. We need to stop the standing ovations for the walking dead. We need to start cheering for the ones who have the courage to rest.