This Was Meant to Be a Blog Post

But it turned into a rant… of course.

Look, I'm not a workplace strategist. I don't have a PhD in neuroscience or a best-selling book about employee engagement.

I'm his daughter. That's how I got the spreadsheet.
That's why I'm here.

But I've also been in it. Fully fried. Treading water. Crying because Outlook sent a follow-up reminder at 8:07am.

So when someone said, "can you turn this into a blog post?"
…I did.

What follows isn't professional advice. It's just what burnout actually feels like when you're inside it.
No filters. No fake optimism. Just printers, despair, and a very normal meeting called "Quick Sync."

The Printer Jam That Broke Me

There's a very specific flavour of despair that hits when the printer jams on a Monday morning and you realise — very calmly, very clinically — that this might be the thing that finally ends you.

Not a trauma. Not a breakup.
Just paper. Paper and an error message.

That's how it starts.

Not with an explosion, but with tiny malfunctions.
Forgetting what day it is.
Crying because your inbox says "follow-up."
Thinking about quitting your job while brushing your teeth — and forgetting halfway through the thought because you're already late for a meeting titled "Quick Sync."

This is burnout.
Or what used to be called burnout.

Now they're calling it The Great Detachment, which sounds like either a sci-fi film or a gentle cult.
It's neither.
It's just the slow erosion of anything that used to tether you to meaning.

I Couldn't Write the Neat Version

I wanted to make this neat.
I really did.

There was going to be a title. A hook. A point. Possibly an infographic.
You were going to scroll through and go, "ah yes, that's insightful."
And then you were going to return to your job and immediately pretend everything was fine.

But I couldn't write that version.
Because I am absolutely not fine.

I don't mean that in a dramatic, melt-down-on-a-desk sort of way.
I mean that in a quiet, dry-cereal-for-dinner, eye-twitching-in-meetings, "do I even do anything?" kind of way.

It's not tiredness.
It's not laziness.
It's not a productivity issue.
It's something else. Something deeper and flatter. Like my nervous system got unplugged and someone's too afraid to tell me.

You're Not Alone in This

And I know it's not just me.
Because people keep saying things like:

"I just need a proper break."
"Things are busy right now."
"I'm fine, just tired."

But we've been saying that for three years straight.

And we've all got that look in our eyes now — the one you get when you're still technically moving, but only because inertia hasn't given up yet.

This Isn't a Blog Post

So no — this isn't a blog post.
This is a slightly feral, unofficial message from someone who was supposed to write something helpful and ended up whisper-screaming into the CMS instead.

If you're also on your last nerve but still answering emails with "no worries at all!"
If your personality has started buffering mid-sentence.
If your brain left the building and no one noticed:

You're not alone.
You're just very, very done.

And somehow, still showing up.
Which honestly? Might be the most heroic thing any of us are doing right now.

PS: Why am I writing this on the Clover Era blog?

Because that's kind of the whole point.

Clover exists because this isn't sustainable.
Because people are burning out, disconnecting, ghosting their own potential — and everyone's still pretending it's fine.

We're not here to sell solutions with smiley graphs. We're here because someone had to say it out loud.

You're not imagining it.
It really is this hard.
And if you're still standing — even just barely — then we built this for you.