Lately, I’ve been struggling a lot with motivation. Not the kind a podcast can fix. The kind that makes you stare at your backlog, your OKRs, your Inbox, and just… blink. The kind where even the wins feel hollow.
I’ve worked in tech long enough to know what burnout looks like—but this is deeper. It’s not just about fatigue or workload. It’s about living inside systems that feel increasingly broken, while being expected to keep building new ones.
And outside of work, things aren’t exactly helping. Every headline feels like a slap: surprise bombings, veiled escalations, civil rights on life support, and a public discourse so patently ridiculous it sounds like a bad parody.
It’s not just burnout. It’s dissonance. And if you’re feeling it too, you’re not alone.
When the World Feels Unmoored, Work Feels Pointless
The news right now reads like satire:
- Airstrikes launched without congressional approval, bypassing constitutional checks like they’re optional footnotes in a war-hungry screenplay.
- Creeping authoritarianism cloaked in press conferences, where executive overreach is reframed as “decisive leadership” and dissent is smeared as disloyalty.
- Policies crafted for headlines, not humans—legislation and foreign maneuvers that feel more like performance art with body counts than actual governance.
- And underneath it all: a growing normalization of dehumanization as strategy—from immigration kidnapping to surveillance to foreign military targets—wrapped in the language of security, but reeking of opportunism and cruelty.
It’s hard to focus on system architecture or roadmap planning when the people in charge of our national architecture are actively eroding democratic norms.
I’ve built resilient infrastructure. But nothing in me wants to “optimize velocity” when I’m watching elected officials nudge us closer to another manufactured war in the Middle East and potentially dropping our support for Ukraine. It’s hard to chase business goals while watching the soul of your country degrade in real time.
Neurodivergence Doesn’t Buffer This—It Amplifies It
For folks like me—ADHD, hyper-attuned to patterns, emotionally intense—this stuff doesn’t fade into the background. It’s front and center, always. The sense that something’s off isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
We don’t always compartmentalize well. That’s not a flaw—it’s information. And when the signals from the outside world are this loud, it bleeds into everything.
I find myself rewriting infrastructure plans while doomscrolling. Rebuilding team processes while wondering whether democracy is on life support. Every task feels performative when the foundation underneath it is cracking.
The Moral Residue of Leadership in Times Like This
What does it mean to lead ethically right now?
What does it mean to care about your team, your company, your systems—when the larger systems we live in feel actively hostile to truth, equity, or sustainability?
It means every decision gets heavier. Every conversation with a struggling report feels existential. Every roadmap planning session carries the unspoken question: Does this even matter anymore?
What’s Actually Breaking Isn’t Just My Motivation—It’s Alignment
This isn’t about laziness or bad habits. This is about purpose drift.
If you lead, especially in tech, you probably believe in building something better. Something functional. Something that respects human limits and enhances potential. But when you’re watching institutions ignore limits, ignore lives, ignore the truth—your nervous system revolts.
The tension is real. Our work wants focus, clarity, stability. The world gives us chaos, surveillance, moral compromise, and performative cruelty.
That dissonance can feel like failure. But it’s not. It’s evidence you still care.
I’m Not Quitting—But I Am Rewiring
So what do you do when the world feels broken and your job feels pointless?
You don’t just keep pushing through. You redesign your scaffolding.
Not productivity hacks. Not “grind harder” motivation. But systems that actually make space for grief, for purpose, for resistance.
Five Ways I’m Working to Rebuild Direction in a World That Feels Off-Axis
Here’s what I’m doing—and maybe what you can do too—when motivation falters but the stakes are still real:
1. Shrink the frame—but protect the mission.
When the world’s on fire, don’t try to save it all at once. Zoom in. Identify a person, a team, a system you can support. That’s the mission today.
2. Audit your alignment.
Ask yourself: Do my values still fit this role? This org? If not—don’t panic. Name the misalignment. That clarity alone can recalibrate your decisions.
3. Replace ‘motivation’ with ‘ritual’.
If motivation is dead, routine is scaffolding. Create rituals that ground you—morning resets, end-of-day wrap notes, even dumb timers. ADHD brains especially need this.
4. Practice local resistance.
You don’t need a podium. Speak up in meetings. Protect your team’s focus. Push back on dehumanizing metrics. Make humane choices, even in small spaces. This is resistance too.
5. Connect to others feeling it.
Reach out. Write. Speak. Most of us are barely holding it together, and a shared “WTF is happening?” goes further than you think. Community builds resilience.
I still believe in infrastructure. In systems. In good work.
But I’m no longer pretending I can operate as if the broader context doesn’t matter.
The world is not stable. The systems are not okay. The stories we’re being told by those in power are often manipulative at best and actively dangerous at worst.
But that doesn’t mean we stop building.
It means we build differently.
With more context.
With less bullshit.
With systems that can withstand moral weight—not just scale.
If you’re feeling it too—tired, misaligned, unsure how to show up—you’re not broken.
You’re paying attention.
