When the System You Can’t Fix Is Yourself

David Beale

— 2 min read

The burnout no observability stack can catch — and no patch can solve.

Some days I feel like a wizard at work.

I’ll troubleshoot a broken deployment, unravel a race condition, optimize some gnarly Terraform module. I solve problems under pressure, wrangle ambiguity, bring order out of chaos — all before lunch.

It’s not glamorous, but it feels good. It feels powerful. Like I matter.

But then I shut the laptop… and I crash.

The Real Burnout Isn’t Loud — It’s Quiet

When I was younger, I thought burnout would look like slamming my laptop shut, screaming “I quit,” and walking off into some punk rock utopia.

But now, burnout feels like numbness. Like staring at the wall while the laundry piles up. Like watching my kid play and feeling disconnected. Like knowing I should reach out to a friend but avoiding the text because I just can’t be a person right now.

It’s not that I don’t care.
It’s that I’ve used up all my cognitive fuel solving other people’s problems.
And I’ve got nothing left for my own.

Why Can I Debug Kubernetes But Not My Own Life?

Engineering can be deeply satisfying — but also deeply extractive.
Every day, we:

  • Anticipate edge cases
  • Contain failures
  • Trace root causes
  • Maintain uptime for systems we didn’t build

But when it comes to our own lives? No logs. No observability. No rollback button.

And the same mental muscles we use to build beautiful, logical systems… don’t work on grief. Or addiction. Or loneliness. Or marriage. Or shame.

That’s where I’ve had to learn new tools.

🧘‍♂️ Healing Is a Different Kind of Engineering

Burnout isn’t just about work. It’s about how much of ourselves we give away, and how little we’re taught to reclaim.

Here’s what’s helped me begin the long, nonlinear process of healing:

Neurofeedback

A literal brain reboot. I did sessions where my brain learned how to self-regulate through biofeedback loops. The first time I felt my central nervous system relax, I sobbed. I’d been carrying tension I didn’t even know was there.

Meditation

Not just mindfulness apps — I’m talking about sitting with my shit. Learning to breathe through panic. To notice thoughts instead of becoming them. To let go of the need to solve everything like it’s a broken container.

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy)

DBT gave me tools to emotionally regulate in a way that didn’t feel like white-knuckling it through my triggers. Distress tolerance, radical acceptance, wise mind — all tools that help me stop catastrophizing and start responding, not just reacting.

Psychedelics (Psilocybin + Ketamine)

With care, legality, and intention. Ketamine calmed the unrelenting spiral. Psilocybin cracked the shell around my soul. These weren’t just trips — they were reckonings. Grief surfaced. Memories spoke. And for once, I didn’t try to fix it — I just listened.

A Final Thought

We can’t keep giving the best parts of our brains to jobs that don't love us back.
We can’t engineer our way out of loneliness.
And we can’t keep pretending like debugging a service is more important than repairing ourselves.

I’m still burnt around the edges. Still figuring it out.
But I’m learning to reroute my systems.

Not to scale. Not to ship. But to heal.

Let’s build that architecture together.

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