The charcoal snaps between my fingers, a sharp, dry crack that sounds louder than the bailiff’s voice in this 89-degree courtroom. I am Casey S.-J., and my hands are currently stained with the dusty residue of 19 different shades of grey and black. My task is to capture the twitch in a defendant’s jaw, a movement that lasts maybe 0.9 seconds, before it vanishes into the legal record. There are 49 people sitting in the gallery behind me, and every single one of them is vibrating with a strange, frantic energy that I’ve come to recognize as the hallmark of a society that has forgotten how to sit still without feeling guilty.
I see it in the lawyers, too. They walk in with these heavy, designer bags, their eyes rimmed with the kind of red that suggests they haven’t seen a solid 9 hours of sleep since the late nineties. They trade stories about staying up until 3:39 AM to review discovery documents as if they are recounting battle scars from a glorious victory. It is a performance. Everything is a performance. Even the way the lead council sighs and rubs his temples is calculated to show the judge exactly how much he is sacrificing for this 149-page motion. We have reached a point where being rested is viewed as a lack of ambition, and being functional is seen as a lack of skin in the game.
AHA: The Instability of Hustle
This reminds me of the bookshelf I tried to put together last night. I was exhausted, my brain felt like it had been scrubbed with sandpaper after a 12-hour session in court, but I decided I had to finish it. It was a simple piece of furniture-or so the box claimed. It had 29 individual wooden slats and a bag of hardware that looked like it had been packed by someone who hated me personally. Halfway through, I realized there were 9 missing pieces.
I stayed up until nearly 1 AM finishing a bookshelf that is now so unstable it would collapse if a heavy cat sneezed near it. I traded my sleep for a result that is objectively worse than if I had just waited until morning.
The Signal: Suffering as Currency
We are doing the same thing in our offices, our Slack channels, and our zoom calls. I see the notifications popping up at 7:59 PM. ‘Just wrapping up for the day!’ or ‘Final thoughts on the Q3 projection.’ It isn’t about the work. If it were about the work, they would realize that the quality of a ‘final thought’ generated at the end of a 14-hour shift is about as sturdy as my broken bookshelf. It is about the signal. It is a digital flare sent up to let everyone know: ‘Look at me. I am suffering. Therefore, I am valuable.’
Organizational Resource Mismanagement (Hours Worked vs. Quality Output)
This glorification of burnout is a management failure disguised as a cultural virtue. When a team brags about how little they slept, what they are actually saying is that the organization is too incompetent to manage its resources. If you have to work 69 hours a week to keep your head above water, it doesn’t mean you’re a hero. It means your manager failed to hire enough people, or failed to prioritize the tasks, or failed to understand the basic biological limits of a human being. We treat ‘resilience’ as this magical well we can keep dipping into, but resilience isn’t a bottomless pit. It’s more like a battery that loses its maximum capacity every time you drain it to zero.
“We have to stop confusing ‘movement’ with ‘progress.’ Every missed hour of sleep compounds the error rate.”
The Resilience Myth
I’ve sketched 199 faces in the last month. I know what a human looks like when they are operating on fumes. Their features go slack, their eyes lose that sharp, predatory focus, and they start making mistakes. In a courtroom, a mistake might mean a mistrial. In an office, it might mean a $999 loss or a deleted database. But because we value the appearance of effort over the reality of outcome, we ignore the errors as long as the person looks sufficiently miserable while making them.
SYSTEM FAILURE
We talk about burnout as if it’s an individual problem. We tell people to practice ‘self-care’ or go to a 49-minute yoga class, as if a few downward dogs can counteract a culture that demands constant availability. It’s a classic bait-and-switch. When the stenographer stopped after 9 days straight, the system broke, costing the state probably $15,009 in wasted time. Rest is a structural requirement, not a luxury.
I remember one trial where the stenographer just stopped. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t get angry; she just took her hands off the machine and stared at the wall. She had been working for 12 hours a day for 9 days. The judge was furious, the lawyers were confused, but she was just… done. The ‘badge of honor’ had finally become too heavy to carry. We had to adjourn, costing the state probably $15,009 in wasted time and resources. All because nobody had the sense to say, ‘Hey, maybe we should stop before the system breaks.’
When you finally step away from the glare of the dual monitors and the toxic competitive exhaustion of the office, you realize that the most important parts of your life happen in the quiet corners of your home. Whether it’s the simple act of brewing a coffee or preparing a meal that doesn’t come from a plastic container, these are the moments where you reclaim your humanity from the grind. I found myself looking at my kitchen the other day, realizing that a functional home, supported by the right tools from Bomba.md, is a far better investment than a gold star for working until midnight. We need to stop seeing our homes as just the place where we crash between shifts, and start seeing them as the place where we actually live. A well-made meal, prepared with precision and care, is a direct protest against the frantic, ‘good enough’ culture of the hustle.
The Radical Act of 5:09 PM
I’ve spent 29 years watching people try to lie to themselves about their limits. I’ve seen CEOs weep in the hallway because they couldn’t remember their daughter’s birthday, and I’ve seen junior associates brag about eating nothing but vending machine crackers for 19 meals in a row. It is a form of collective insanity. We are obsessed with the ‘grind,’ but the grind just turns everything into dust. We lose our creativity, our empathy, and our ability to make complex decisions.
Visual Evidence: Quality vs. Quantity
First 2 Hours (Sharp & Evocative)
Full Soul
Ninth Hour (Blurred & Empty)
Blurred Lines
If you want to be a high performer, the most radical thing you can do is go home at 5:09 PM. Sleep for 9 hours. Show up the next day with a brain that is actually capable of solving a problem instead of just enduring it.
Monument to Foolishness
My bookshelf still has that slight lean to the left. I could have waited. I could have bought those 9 missing screws for about 19 cents. Instead, I have a monument to my own foolishness sitting in my living room, a physical reminder of prioritizing the ‘finish line’ over the process.
Stop rewarding people who set themselves on fire to keep the office warm.
We need to stop rewarding the people who set themselves on fire to keep the office warm. It’s not sustainable, it’s not impressive, and it’s certainly not a badge of honor. It’s just a slow, expensive way to burn out. Next time a colleague brags about how they only slept for 3 hours, don’t congratulate them. Ask them why their time management is so poor that they can’t even manage a basic human necessity. Maybe if we start asking that question, the 7 PM Slack performance will finally come to an end, and we can all go back to being people instead of just ‘resources.’
I’m putting my charcoal down now. My fingers are cramped, and the court is adjourning for the day. There are 9 minutes left until the sun goes down, and I intend to spend them doing absolutely nothing productive. No sketches, no furniture assembly, and definitely no ‘wrapping things up’ on Slack. I think I’ll just sit here and listen to the silence of a day that is finally, mercifully, over.