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Gaya

You are not lazy. You are not ungrateful. You are not the problem. You are a person who has been running at full speed, in the right direction, doing everything you were told to do and the finish line keeps moving.&nbsp;

There is a tiredness that sleep fixes. The tiredness of a long day, a hard week, a body that needs rest. You sleep. You wake up better. Normal.

Then there is the other kind. The kind that is still there when you wake up. The kind that has been there for so long you have stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing background noise. You are not tired from doing too much today. You are tired from trying too hard for too long with too little to show for it. That is a completely different thing, and it deserves a completely different conversation.

What you have is not a sleep problem. It is a sustained, accumulated, entirely rational response to trying in conditions that were not designed for you to succeed in. It has a name. It is called burnout and it is not a character flaw. It is what happens to people who care enough to keep going when everything around them is telling them to stop.

It looks like waking up already exhausted before the day has asked anything of you. It looks like doing the thing; sending the application, finishing the project, showing up to the meeting and feeling nothing when it's done. Not pride, not relief. Just the awareness that there is another thing after this one.

It looks like the motivational content that used to work no longer working. The podcast that used to fire you up now making you feel vaguely irritated. The success story that used to inspire you now making you feel further away from your own life than before you heard it.

It looks like caring deeply about your goals while simultaneously feeling completely disconnected from the energy required to pursue them. Not because you have given up. Because you have been giving everything for a long time and the account is empty and nobody told you that was allowed to happen.

It looks like functioning. Going to work. Responding to messages. Appearing fine. While underneath all of it something that used to feel like drive has gone very quiet and you do not know how to tell anyone because from the outside you look like someone who is managing.

They will tell you to pray harder. To push through. To remember that successful people did not give up. They will send you a quote from someone who built a company from nothing and they will say "see, it is possible" as though the problem was ever that you did not believe it was possible.

They will tell you that your generation wants things too fast. That their own parents had it harder. That suffering is part of the process and you are not suffering correctly.

They will tell you to be grateful, and you are grateful; that is the thing. Gratitude and exhaustion are not mutually exclusive. You can be grateful for what you have and still be tired from how hard you are working to hold onto it. These two things can coexist, and the fact that nobody seems to understand this is its own kind of exhausting.

What they will not tell you, what almost nobody tells you, is that it is okay to be tired. That your tiredness makes sense. That a person can do everything right and still be running on empty because the conditions they are running in were not built to support them. That burnout is not a personal failing. It is a structural one that has landed in your body.

You were told that education was the key. You got the education. You were told that hard work was enough. You worked hard. You were told that if you were skilled and consistent and showed up, it would pay off. You were skilled and consistent and you showed up.

Then you graduated into an economy where the naira had opinions of its own. Where entry-level jobs required five years of experience. Where rent in Lagos takes more than half a salary that was already not enough. Where the cost of simply existing as a young person trying to build something keeps going up while the support systems to help you do that remain largely theoretical.

You did not create these conditions. You inherited them. Then you were handed the bill for them and told to hustle your way out and to please not complain about it while you do.

The burnout you are feeling is not because you are weak. It is because you are human and humans have limits. Those limits are not character defects, they are just physics.

I am not going to give you a five-step plan to overcome burnout because the five-step plan is part of the problem. The idea that there is always something more you can do, always a way to optimise your way out of difficulty, always a personal solution to a systemic problem, that idea is what got you here.

Rest is not giving up. Stopping to breathe is not quitting. Acknowledging that you are tired, to yourself, out loud, without immediately following it with a plan to be less tired, is not weakness. It is the most honest thing you can do right now.

The system will not slow down for you. It was not built to but you are allowed to slow down for yourself. You are allowed to say "I have been running hard and I need to stop for a moment" without that moment meaning everything you have been building is over.

You are not lazy. You are burnt out. There is a difference and the difference matters and you deserve to hear it said clearly by someone who is not immediately following it with advice about how to hustle better.

You have been trying. In a system that has not been trying back and you are still here.

That is not nothing. That is actually everything.

This is not a motivation post. This is permission to be tired and an honest conversation about why young Nigerians are burnt out from trying in a system that was never built to support them.

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