There’s a form of collapse that doesn’t make headlines.
It doesn’t announce itself with dramatic exits or public implosions. It shows up in smaller ways. A skipped status call. A budget review that feels disproportionately heavy. Reading the news — another authoritarian impulse disguised as policy, another triumph of greed over competence — and noticing something inside you go flat.
I’ve been in tech for more than twenty-five years. I’ve watched the dot-com boom and bust, the financial crisis, the consolidation of platform monopolies, the normalization of surveillance capitalism, the “move fast and break things” era, and now the breathless insistence that we must “AI all the things” while running leaner teams and quietly celebrating serial RIFs as operational excellence.
None of this is unprecedented.
What’s different now is the concentration. The acceleration. The lack of embarrassment. The explicitness of extraction.
When you layer that on top of leadership responsibility, long-term stress, grief, late ADHD diagnosis, identity reconfiguration, and the ambient strain of watching institutions degrade in real time, something shifts. The fatigue stops being episodic. It becomes structural.
You begin to understand why some leaders quietly stop caring.
Not in rebellion. Not in spectacular burnout.
But gradually, almost invisibly, until the internal edge that used to drive you feels worn down.
The Lie of Laziness
When I find myself procrastinating on something that matters or dragging my feet toward a meeting I used to run with clarity, the easiest explanation is laziness.
But laziness doesn’t usually come with guilt. It doesn’t trigger recursive self-analysis. It doesn’t unsettle people who have spent decades building an identity around responsibility and competence.
What this feels like is erosion.
Erosion is a concept I’ve written about extensively at the institutional level — how systems hollow out over time, how incentives drift away from mission, how competence gets replaced by optics, how structures can continue functioning long after their internal integrity has thinned.
The harder realization is that leaders are systems too. We are also subject to misaligned incentives. We often absorb load without recalibrating capacity. We defer maintenance because there is always something more urgent. From the outside, everything still appears operational. Inside, tolerances narrow.
The Stack: ADHD, Burnout, Depression
Part of the confusion comes from how these forces layer.
ADHD makes activation unreliable. I can want to engage and still feel friction initiating low-novelty, high-ambiguity work. The gap between intention and action widens, and that gap breeds shame.
Burnout introduces cynicism. The mission that once animated you starts to feel performative. Rest doesn’t restore much because the depletion isn’t purely physical; it’s cognitive and moral. You’re tired of holding contradictions together.
Depression changes the texture entirely. Interest dulls across domains. Music feels flatter. Curiosity narrows. Even things that used to anchor you — reading, building, learning — require more effort than they return.
From the outside, all of this looks like disengagement.
From the inside, it feels like running at high RPM for years and only recently noticing the engine has been overheating the entire time.
High-capacity leaders are adept at compensating. We build scaffolding. We systematize around weaknesses. We absorb additional load because we can. We assume the dip is temporary and that clarity will return after the next push.
But sustained load without recovery always produces a bill. Eventually the nervous system collects.
Futility as Physiology
There is also a dimension that rarely gets acknowledged in leadership discourse: the cumulative psychological cost of watching institutional decay while being expected to operate as though nothing is wrong.
It is difficult to care deeply about stewardship and craft while watching expertise sidelined in favor of loyalty, or efficiency narratives used to justify shrinking human capacity. It is disorienting to sit in budget meetings that celebrate marginal gains while broader systems feel increasingly unstable. It is exhausting to see technological hype cycles treated as moral imperatives rather than strategic tools.
When this pattern repeats across professional, political, and personal domains, the sensation of futility stops being philosophical. It becomes physiological.
“This feels pointless” is no longer an argument. It’s a stress response.
That response isn’t a moral failure. It’s what happens when a system operates under sustained strain without reinforcement.
The Self as Infrastructure
I’ve argued that infrastructure can be a form of resistance — that building resilient, human-centered systems inside organizations is a way to counter volatility and short-term extraction.
What I’ve had to confront more recently is that the self is infrastructure too.
If you treat yourself as infinitely scalable, you will eventually fail. If you run at sustained high utilization with no monitoring, no redundancy, and no meaningful recovery window, you shouldn’t be surprised by outages.
Observability matters. Paying attention to changes in mood, motivation, and energy is not self-indulgent; it’s maintenance. Load management matters. So does failover — therapy, medication when appropriate, honest conversations with trusted people.
In this framing, depression isn’t a character flaw. It’s a warning indicator. Ignoring it doesn’t prove resilience. It increases the blast radius when something finally gives.
Stabilization Before Reinvention
When you’re strategic by temperament, the instinct is to redesign everything at the first sign of erosion. New job. New venture. Radical exit. Complete realignment.
But rebuilding while the foundation is unstable is how collapse accelerates.
If the issue is depletion layered with depression, then stabilization is the priority. Not optimization. Not reinvention.
Stabilization looks unremarkable. Showing up to required meetings even if passion is offline. Delivering one meaningful piece of work per day instead of chasing grand transformation. Protecting sleep. Moving your body enough to metabolize stress. Engaging professional support instead of trying to self-debug indefinitely.
It’s not inspiring work. It’s maintenance.
But maintenance is what prevents failure cascades.
Tired or Empty
One distinction has become clarifying for me: the difference between being tired and being empty.
Tired responds to rest and reduced load. Empty does not. Empty requires care, and sometimes treatment. It requires acknowledging that the system is injured, not merely overextended.
From the outside, both look like decreased output. Internally, they are not the same state.
Misdiagnosing emptiness as simple fatigue leads to cycles of guilt and failed self-correction. Recognizing injury opens the possibility of intervention.
Collapse and Stewardship
If you are a leader who feels yourself thinning — who dreads meetings you once navigated confidently, who senses a creeping futility that productivity systems cannot fix — that experience is not laziness.
It may be grief resurfacing after years of survival mode. It may be burnout accumulated across seasons of overextension. It may be depression layered quietly beneath both.
Collapse is rarely explosive. More often, it is the result of sustained strain without repair.
Institutions decay that way.
So do people.
The work, then, is not to shame yourself back into performance. It is to reinforce the infrastructure.
Including the one inside your own nervous system.
What Resistance Looks Like Now
If institutional erosion is real — if competence is thinning while extraction accelerates — then human-centered leadership becomes more than a management style. It becomes a structural counterforce.
Resistance, in that sense, is operational. It is expressed in how you shield your team from unnecessary volatility instead of passing it through. It is expressed in your refusal to normalize impossible expectations simply because they arrived from above. It is expressed in honest conversations about capacity, in building redundancy, in designing systems that reduce chronic fight-or-flight rather than exploiting it.
It also includes refusing to treat yourself as disposable infrastructure.
You cannot build durable organizations while privately collapsing. You cannot model sustainable leadership while silently eroding.
If larger systems are degrading, then preserving integrity, competence, and psychological safety within your sphere of influence is not a small act. It is a stabilizing one.
Collapse spreads through neglect.
Stewardship spreads through care.
And stewardship begins with maintaining the systems you are responsible for — your team, your standards, your boundaries, and your own body — so that you can continue to do the work without hollowing out in the process.
