The blue light from the screen is currently carving out a fresh headache behind my left eye, and it is exactly 3:13 AM. I am staring at a video of a woman who is ‘resetting’ her life. She is pouring oat milk into a glass that looks like it cost $33 and smoothing out a linen duvet that has never known the indignity of a coffee stain. My own duvet is currently a twisted heap of polyester and regret, and my oat milk expired 13 days ago. This is the core of the frustration. We have turned the act of existing into a competitive sport, and the trophy is a beige-tinted reel that suggests we have finally conquered the chaos of being human. I am Avery N., and my job is to listen to people lie. I am a podcast transcript editor, which means I spend 43 hours a week listening to the raw, unpolished audio of ‘lifestyle gurus’ before the magic of post-production removes the wet mouth clicks and the heavy, desperate sighs they make between sentences.
Rupture Point
I recently laughed at a funeral. It was not a giggle of malice or a misplaced joke. It was a sudden, violent eruption of sound that happened because the priest used the word ‘synergy’ while describing the deceased’s contribution to his local parish. My brain, fried by 63 consecutive hours of editing a series on corporate mindfulness, simply snapped. I was looking at the casket, thinking about the 23 tabs I had open on my laptop at home, and the word ‘synergy’ acted as a trigger. It was a mistake, an ugly one, and I acknowledge that my social calibration is currently malfunctioning. But that is what happens when you spend your life trying to optimize your soul. You lose the ability to feel things at the correct volume. We are told that if we just buy the right candle-perhaps the one that smells like ‘meditative moss’ for $53-we will suddenly find the clarity to navigate our crumbling internal infrastructure.
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Rest is a rebellion, not a refill.
We treat rest as a reward for productivity, a small treat we allow ourselves after we have checked off 83 items on a digital list that never actually ends. This is a lie. Rest is not something you earn; it is a fundamental defiance against a system that wants you to be a perpetual motion machine. When I am editing these podcasts, I hear the guests talk about their ‘morning routines’ that involve 3 minutes of cold plunging and 13 minutes of gratitude journaling-though I find that particular word to be an insufferable shorthand for performance. They sound exhausted. I can hear the vocal fry that comes from a throat tight with the anxiety of being perceived as ‘on.’ I once spent 333 minutes cleaning up a single episode where the host kept tripping over the word ‘presence’ because he was clearly checking his notifications during the recording.
The Metrics of Exhaustion
There is a specific kind of vanity in the way we talk about burnout now. It has become a status symbol, a way of signaling that we are so important, so in demand, that our bodies have no choice but to shut down. We wear our exhaustion like a designer coat. But the self-care we are sold to ‘fix’ this is just more consumption. It is a loop. Work until you break, then buy a $103 subscription to an app that tells you how to breathe, so you can go back to work and buy more things. I have seen the data on this, or at least the numbers that people like me have to type out. The wellness industry is projected to hit trillions, yet 73 percent of the people I know are one minor inconvenience away from a total psychological collapse. We are decorating the prison cell and calling it a sanctuary.
The Scream Behind the Mic
I remember a specific recording from 3 weeks ago. The guest was a woman who specialized in ‘feminine bio-hacking.’ She spoke for 53 minutes about the importance of listening to the body’s subtle cues. But between the takes, when she thought the mic was off, she was screaming at her assistant about a missed delivery of alkaline water. The contrast was so sharp it felt like a physical blow. We are all Avery N. in some way-editing out the screams so the transcript looks clean. We are obsessed with the aesthetics of health while our actual health is screaming for attention. Sometimes, the body’s issues are not something you can solve with a green juice or a walk in the park. There are deep, systemic problems that require specialized focus, far beyond the surface-level fixes of a ‘spa day.’ This is particularly true when we talk about chronic conditions that society often ignores because they aren’t ‘pretty’ to talk about, such as the work being done at Elite Aesthetics, where they deal with the actual, uncomfortable realities of physical health.
The Silence Trap
I have a theory that we are terrified of true silence because, in the silence, the facade of our ‘curated life’ falls apart. If I stop editing, if I stop the 13 different streams of audio entering my brain, I have to face the fact that I laughed at a funeral because I am lonely and tired. I have to face the fact that my $233 noise-canceling headphones are just a way to ignore the neighbors’ kids crying, which is a sound that reminds me of actual, messy life. We prefer the digital hum. We prefer the 303-page self-help book that tells us we are ‘enough’ while simultaneously selling us a 10-step program to become ‘better.’
Contradiction in Practice
Need the $23/hr income.
Searching for weighted blanket.
I am a hypocrite, but at least I am a hypocrite who knows the frequency of a fake laugh. In the transcripts I edit, a fake laugh usually peaks at 83 decibels and has a very sharp, unnatural decay. A real laugh, like the one I had at the funeral, is messy. It has sub-harmonics. It ruins the audio track.
The Ugly Truth of Recovery
The Noise Is The Signal
If we want to actually recover, we have to stop trying to make recovery look good. Real rest is ugly. It is sleeping for 13 hours and waking up with a crusty eye and a mouth that tastes like copper. It is letting the 1003 unread emails sit there until the server explodes. It is acknowledging that you are not a ‘resource’ to be managed, but a biological entity that is currently being asked to do too much. I often think about the 33 minutes of silence I once had to edit out of a recording because the guest simply stopped talking and started crying. The producer told me to ‘fix it.’ I didn’t. I left a few seconds of that raw, jagged air in there, just to see if anyone would notice. No one did. They were too busy listening to the part about how to maximize their morning productivity.
I am not here to give you a solution, because any solution I give you would just be another thing for your to-do list. I am just here to say that the exhaustion you feel is real, and it is not your fault. It is not a lack of discipline or a failure to ‘manifest’ the right energy. It is the result of living in a world that treats your attention like oil to be extracted. I have 13 different versions of this article in my head, and all of them are probably wrong. I make mistakes. I cut the wrong segments. I misspell names. But in the 43rd hour of my work week, I have realized that the mistakes are the only parts of the transcript that are actually true.
The Exit Strategy
We need to stop looking for ‘synergy’ and start looking for the exit. We need to be okay with the fact that we are not always ‘thriving.’ Sometimes, surviving is a 233-pound weight that we are carrying through a swamp, and no amount of ‘mindful breathing’ is going to make the swamp any less muddy.
