The degree, the promotions, the title, all of it checked off exactly like it was supposed to be. And at some point, it stopped meaning what it was supposed to mean.
Most men aren’t taught to separate what they do from who they are, so when the job gets hard, feels empty, or disappears entirely, it doesn’t just cost you a paycheck. It costs you a sense of self you didn’t realize was borrowed. That gap between what you can perform and what you can sustain is where burnout lives.
We figure out whether the job is the real problem, or whether it just became the container for an identity crisis that would’ve shown up somewhere eventually. The work is usually untangling what you want from what you assumed you were supposed to want.
Individual work gives you room to figure out what you actually want, separate from what you think you’re supposed to want. Group work helps when you realize half the men in the room are quietly running the exact same math on their own careers.