The Slow Burn

I heard somewhere that it takes you twice as long to recover from burnout as the amount of time you spend pushing yourself into it.

I realized I was deeply burnt out sometime around New Year’s 2023. It is now April 2026—and I’m only just starting to feel a bit of release from the paralysis of it. That means I’ve been feeling this way for over three years, which, if you do the math, means it probably started around 2021–2022.

That lines up.

I went back to a full-time job in 2021, thinking that stability was the answer after the financial uncertainty the pandemic thrust so many of us into. Shortly after making the switch from freelance to salary with my long-time employer, everything changed within the organization—and expectations on my time and bandwidth became very different.

I kept getting buried under projects I didn’t have time to complete. In the age of WFH and Zoom, the team felt fractured and disconnected, and it became harder to do focused, meaningful work.

My work became more reactive, more urgent, and less creative. Everything felt like it needed to be done immediately, and nothing ever felt finished.

By the end of 2022 I was already desperately wanting to leave my job, but it was hard to walk away from the paycheck. I have always kept my living expenses low, so the gap between what I was earning and my cost of living was very, very comfortable. I was making enough to buy whatever cameras or gear I wanted without thinking about it. When I went on trips, I never had to keep track of how much I was spending. My credit card bills were always getting paid off in full.

For the past ten years, I’ve juggled being an art director (a higher-level graphic designer) in the corporate ad-tech world with my own hustle as a photo and video creator/director around my personal travel and activity pursuits.

I had essentially commodified my creativity in almost every part of my life—while trying to keep up with the ever-elusive trends and demands of social media.

When Everything Became Work

After a full day of work, I’d spend my nights carefully editing and curating photos from my latest trip—always falling short of whatever was trending.

For years, I had built my following by being creative, sharing my perspective, and making work that felt like mine. But that approach no longer seemed to work.

My posts would almost always underperform, and every time I opened Instagram, I was met with declining numbers. This was impacting my mental health. For the past ten years, I’ve watched my following drop by the hundreds every single month. When your perceived value feels like it’s pinned to your forehead as a bold number—and that number is always going down—it’s hard not to feel like you’re failing.

The job was draining the energy I needed to create, and creating was the only thing that might have allowed me to leave the job.

The real challenge with social media is that there is no clear ladder to success. The effort you put in does not proportionally pay you back. You put in more and more effort, chasing something that never quite materializes—and it’s very easy to burn out doing it.

I knew for a long time that social media was diminishing my self-worth and getting in the way of my creative process. But I couldn’t walk away from the opportunity to make money doing the things I loved. I didn’t know how else to turn my interests—travel, the outdoors, visual storytelling—into something sustainable outside of partnering with brands to create “content.”

Being recognized by brands as someone worth paying felt like being in the right place during the modern-day version of a gold rush. But even as early as 2019, I remember feeling disillusioned by it. I hated that I couldn’t evolve creatively on Instagram. The photos I was most excited to share performed the worst, while people seemed to only want my tried-and-true drone selfies—something I’d been doing for years and was already bored of.

The Slow Shift

For years, I mostly shared Instagram stories because that process felt the most authentic to me. My grid was largely ignored, and I would post only a few times a year.

I was still shooting quite a bit with my drone and cameras, but eventually I shot less and less.

I still lived to travel, but I was documenting and sharing less in favor of being more present—and avoiding the uncomfortable feelings that putting myself out there on social media brought up.

The types of trips I was taking started to change too. I was less drawn to traveling to jaw-dropping, FOMO-inducing vistas—and was instead traveling for personal challenge and growth.

I guess it’s what you call growing up—no longer wanting to follow the paths that no longer serve you.

I Knew, But I Stayed

When I shared my struggles with work and social media, my friends always said the same things: “Just quit your job and make content full time.” “Your IG stuff is great.” “Who cares about the numbers, just do you.”

It was obvious what I should do. Be myself and share whatever I wanted to. But I felt completely paralyzed. The job was draining me, and social media was draining what was left. I didn’t have the energy or clarity to fix either one.

One piece of advice stuck with me. My friend Rozz, a very successful content creator, told me when I visited her in Singapore: “Renee Lusano just needs to get out of her own way.”

I knew that if I didn’t quit my job and start approaching my personal work differently, I was going to stay miserable.

But I didn’t. I stayed and kept doing both.

And it only got worse.

I just didn’t realize how much worse it was about to get.