The reason you feel like you're falling behind isn't burnout - it's a class architecture designed to make upward mobility feel possible while making it structurally impossible - Silicon Canals

"For a long time, I called this burnout. The internet certainly wanted me to. There's an entire industry built around convincing knowledge workers that their problem is a depleted battery, a misaligned chakra, or an insufficiently optimized morning routine. But I've rested. I've optimized. I've taken the walks, done the journaling, adjusted the sleep hygiene. The feeling persists. Because the feeling was never really about energy. It's about structure."

"Every society needs a story about mobility. The story has to be credible enough that people invest their best years in pursuing it, and vague enough that when it doesn't materialize, they blame themselves rather than the system. In the United States, this story is the American Dream. In Singapore, it's meritocracy. In the European startup ecosystem, it's the promise that a good idea plus venture capital equals liberation from wage labor."

The author, a media company founder in Singapore, explores how feelings of burnout and inadequacy persist despite optimizing personal habits and maintaining disciplined work practices. Rather than a depletion of energy, the underlying issue is structural. Societies construct narratives about upward mobility—the American Dream, meritocracy, or startup success—that appear credible enough to motivate intense personal investment but remain vague enough that failure gets attributed to individual shortcomings rather than systemic limitations. These narratives share a common design: they create the illusion of possible advancement while maintaining the actual structural conditions that prevent genuine mobility.

Read at Silicon Canals