We Had the Tools. We Chose the Hustle.
Part 2- Capacity: The Burnout Thread
How did we get here?
We’ve spent years talking about burnout and the state of work, always circling back to one familiar phrase: work-life balance.
It first began showing up in the late 1970s and early 80s, when more women entered full-time careers while still carrying most of the responsibilities at home. Work-life balance wasn’t a movement for everyone; it was built for the working mother. Corporate America needed women in the workforce, so to keep them there, compromises had to be made.
Companies began offering childcare programs, part-time schedules, and flexible hours. It was a small start in giving some mothers space to have a career and manage life at home. While the structure of work stayed the same, it was a moment of acknowledging that humans have limits.
Despite its modest beginnings, work-life balance became one of corporate culture’s favorite talking points. It showed up in job postings, recruiting campaigns, benefits brochures, and performance reviews. Every company wanted to advertise it, and employees were told to look for it.
You can still hear the phrase today: “We offer a good work-life balance.” It’s the kind of promise that sounds reassuring in an interview but doesn’t always reflect reality once you’re inside. Perhaps the word balance oversold what was ever truly possible. There was never going to be an equal scale between work and life— the hours alone made that impossible. Work would always take the greater share. You knew you were lucky when you found that rare company or manager who gave a little more space to live beyond the office.
Over time, work-life balance evolved beyond a corporate buzzword into the headline solution for burnout. It’s been treated as the answer, but within the limits of its own definition, it’s an empty one. If you’re exhausted, find better balance. If you’re burned out, you have too much on your plate. The message was gentle on the surface, but the pressure was the same: it’s yours to fix.
For decades, we’ve been asking people to find harmony inside systems that were never designed for human capacity in the first place.
The next real chance to course-correct came with the technology boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. The internet, email, laptops, and smartphones changed everything. Suddenly, we could work faster, connect instantly, and reach farther than ever before. For the first time, we had the tools to make the workday more dynamic, something beyond the eight-hour day tethered to a desk five days a week.
The opportunity was right there in our hands. But instead of using it to make more life, we used it to make more work.
The time we saved waiting for responses became more meetings. Automation meant more output. More output meant more profit. Instead of balance between work and home, we blurred the line completely. The day no longer ended when we left the office, because the office came with us in our pockets.
We didn’t build a better way to work. We just built a faster one.
On paper, that speed should have made us more efficient. But how often does it really feel that way?
If technology had truly made life lighter, we’d feel it by now.
There’s no denying technology transformed our days. Tasks that once took hours or days can be done in minutes or seconds. It’s changed how we live and work in countless ways. Unfortunately, the space it created never became rest or time off; it made room for more work to rush in.
Our tools outpaced the systems they were meant to serve. We can send data across the world in an instant, yet still wait on hold for an hour just to talk to a person. Technology keeps evolving, but most workplaces are still held together behind the scenes. Old systems are patched with new ones, software that isn’t seamless, and upgrades that are too expensive to implement regularly.
Anyone working in today’s world knows this gap. You log into one program to track a task, another to find the data, a third to report it. It’s less the sleek, push-a-button future we were promised and more a patchwork puzzle of processes. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the human becomes the connector, stitching together systems that were supposed to save them time.
The modern workplace runs on half-formed efficiency. It’s faster on the surface but slower underneath. We’re not buried in paper anymore, but we’re still buried in process. The speed exists; the flow doesn’t.
Technology gave us reach and pace. It could have given us rest, but we never rebuilt the foundation it stood on. Each advancement was stacked on top of the last— new systems, new notifications, new ways to stay connected. We kept adding and adding, but never zoomed out to ask how work actually fits within our lives.
The result is a world that still runs on the same structures as decades earlier, only faster, with more screens.
We upgraded the tools, not the way we use them.
Technology gave us speed, but not capacity.
It created motion, not progress.
And now, we’re standing at another fork-in-the-road moment— this time, with artificial intelligence.
It’s the next great shift in how we live and work, and like every advancement before it, it brings both potential and pressure.
AI holds the power to create real capacity by returning time and energy to people’s lives. Like we saw in the past, whether that happens depends entirely on how we choose to use it.
Right now, most of the conversation isn’t about what AI can give back to the human. It’s about how many humans it can replace.
It’s the same pattern repeating again, the same pull toward more. The same disregard for the human spirit, the one thing technology can never replicate.
So maybe the question isn’t how much more we can do, but why every breakthrough still costs us more of ourselves. Why every “efficiency” drains a little more of the very thing that makes us human.
Maybe the next evolution of work isn’t about choosing between humans and technology. It’s about remembering which one is supposed to serve the other.
Technology will always evolve, but if we keep designing systems that value output over wellbeing and speed over substance, we’ll stay stuck in the same loop. The real opportunity isn’t in replacing the human; it’s in rebuilding around them.
Because until we start designing work that supports human life —not just human labor— the system will keep breaking, and people will keep breaking with it.
This series is my attempt to tell the whole story of burnout. It’s one I’ve been piecing together for more than a decade, peeling back the layers between how we’re built, how we live, and how we work.
Next time in Capacity: The Burnout Thread – Part 3: We’re Having the Wrong Conversation — how wellness tried to fix what work kept breaking.
