Google ‘burnout’ and you will see the National Health Service (in the UK where I live) reductively lumping it with stress, as something manageable and situational. Rather, it’s the self-combusting exhaustion that arises when someone cares so much about a cause, within a system that doesn’t seem to care back. No longer having the energy to commit to that care, burnout results in an existential crisis that tells us life is pointless, there’s nothing good in the world. Burnout can be a ferociously acute depression and those impacted float in a cloud of despair, fog brained and on autopilot. In January, I emerged broken yet gifted with a month off between jobs, naively hoping it would be enough to recover from burnout. Whilst I tried to envelop myself in nature during this time, I found taking a month off only caused additional financial stress, not least that the UK’s Universal Credit refused to even cover even a month’s rent. My last day of “freedom” before my new job was spent laying on my partner’s lap sobbing with the recognition that I was too ill to go back to work but couldn’t afford to be ill.