The dangers of burnout in the life of a man are very real. It is all too easy to exhaust the supply of oxygen and go flaming out in a burnout that’ll make a minor disaster look like a nuclear strike.
We all need time to break and recharge. Without this, we are perilously close to overloading, to burning out, to burning down.
One of the great things about sleep is that it provides us with a refuge from life for 7 to 8 hours a night on average. The typical human being sleeps 8 hours a night, though some can get by on 4 or 5 hours and have quicker dreams in an REM sleep cycle that is on overdrive. In it, we dream — not constantly, some times there is “white noise” of no thought, but we dream enough to place ourselves at the nexus-point of self-actualization and enhanced knowledge about the world. We learn by dreaming. That is why kids need more sleep than adults, and the old need hardly any at all. Some are learning a lot, some are learning hardly at all.
If a burnout happens to us, all we can do is retreat from the world and wait for time to heal all wounds. The size of the burnout determines the time spent away from the vicissitudes of life. A major burnout can take months to properly recover from. A minor one, a couple of weeks.
Entertainment serves a similar function as dreams in the calculus of preventing burnout. Multibillionaire Elon Musk is a rabid videogame player, who “downtimes” his life by going hardcore on the most popular mass market games. He’s still thinking and doing, but because it’s entertainment, it’s “fun” and it’s going to help him prevent a burnout that he was perilously close to experiencing as the head of so many business organizations. Musk’s balancing act shows that burnout can be consciously avoided, indeed must be.
The urban professional is most likely to suffer burnout. And burnout can kill. There have been cases of young financial industry men who died of overwork, and of course the Japanese are famous for dying of overwork. The burnout got them. It righteously did. If you value your health, you’ll monitor yourself for how much you are working and how much you are relaxing.
Relaxation is another counter to burnout. A time in a spa, or at the very least in a bathtub at home, is well spent, dissipating the nervous tensions that flow down the drain into burnout levels.
Being in burnout mode can make you feel suicidal, like life isn’t worth going on. Burnout wrecks everything good and true, smashes it to the ground. Burnout is the devil’s work in a paradise of too many car wrecks. Believe it.
Dark Sport 
Inner conflicts are the fuel for burnout. I am great, I am nothing. I have a good idea — it’s practical, it’s not. It’s great but it’s in the wrong context. It’s like the scientist who discovered that a filament in a vacuum produces light. It burned out quick and was not practical for any use. The burnout guy invented the light bulb. Edison invented the first practical light bulb. Someone invented a light bulb that lasts for 30 years; it was very expensive and he went bankrupt and was forgotten. Some people put their bath tub in the street and they die of rain and drugs. They’re not good actors and their brief candles go out without a play, Shakespeare or other. Without human shelter, the kindling gets wet and the flintlock of fate blows their brains out. Some people walk a thousand miles across a desert with a backpack of desserts and no water and then when they reach the ocean they drown because they brought no pen and never thought to walk only at night.
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My mother was a bona fide workaholic. She was always working. She was a university teacher but she also wrote academic books, so she would study and write all day, spending several hours per day in her office room in our home.
I would ask her now how she coped with burnout if she was still alive, but probably my brother and I motivated her to keep working to afford our good life. We had a beatiful home whose interest rate skyrocketed during the 2007-2008 financial crisis and we had a maid. She needed to accept all the work she could get to pay for this lifestyle. She wrote several books for peanuts but was able to keep getting book deals.
She would often invite friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances to her home and host dinner parties, in which she would drink wine and eat good food. I guess that’s one of the ways in which she coped with burnout.
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