A LinkedIn post by recruiter Linda Wildbret went viral this week.
Normally I scroll past viral LinkedIn content almost instantly. Most of it blends into the same pattern of engagement bait, fake vulnerability and corporate theatre. This one didn’t. Not only because it was interesting in itself, but because the reactions underneath it didn’t feel like noise. They felt real.
Hundreds of people describing the same things: burnout after years of overperformance, waking up with stomach pain before work, workplace bullying that has somehow become “culture”, managers looking away because it’s easier, people being quietly pushed out after decades of loyalty, and then the slow shift where you stop reacting at all because reacting costs too much.
And almost every thread had the same line: “Heel herkenbaar.”
Recognizable.
That alone should say enough, because when something like that becomes widely recognizable you’re not looking at individual cases anymore. You’re looking at a system.
You can read Linda Wildbret’s original post here.
What struck me is that most of the people responding didn’t hate their jobs. That’s the strange part. Quite the opposite. They cared. Sometimes far too much.
They believed in what they were building. They stayed through reorganizations, politics, understaffing, constant management changes, endless “transformations” that never really transform anything. They stayed because the idea was always the same: it will get better eventually.
Until eventually something broke.
Not in one moment. Not in a dramatic breaking point.
Just quietly.
That is how it happens most of the time.
You don’t really notice when it happens. First you stop speaking up. Then exhaustion becomes normal. Then you start disconnecting just enough to keep functioning.
That’s it. That’s the shift.
I recognized that immediately. Not in theory, but in myself.
A week ago I wrote about my current burnout in When Your Body Pulls the Plug.
What I didn’t fully understand then is how many people are sitting in that same space. Not the fragile ones. Not the ones you’d expect. The reliable ones. The people who keep systems running when others drop out. The ones who absorb pressure so nobody else has to. The ones who are still delivering long after something internally has already gone wrong.
And at some point the body just stops participating in the negotiation.
