I'm lying next to my six-month-old daughter. She's finally asleep. Her sweet, breastmilk breath is soft and even—the only sound worth hearing after a day filled with email notifications and Slack pings. This is the first quiet moment I’ve had since 6:00 AM, and my body sinks into it like a stone dropped into deep water.

 

Then, a white, jarring flash from the baby changing table cuts the darkness. The screen of my forgotten phone lights up, followed by the two-note whistle of WhatsApp. An intrusive digital summons. It’s the project manager: “Sorry to bother, but can you review this job? It needs to be sent off tonight.”

 

The interruption acts like a tiny, electric defibrillation to my nervous system. I am back.

 

As a senior copywriter, I am “on duty” three nights a week to proofread, sense-check, and sign off on the “late list jobs”—the debris the overworked design team couldn't clear during the day.

 

It is 9:25 PM. Guided by a toxic muscle memory, my body obeys mechanically. I tear myself away from the blissfully unaware warm bundle next to me and stumble toward the dining room table.

 

This table, once reserved for Sunday roasts and candlelight, is now littered with cold coffee mugs, stray chargers, and the ghost-like dust of crushed Cheerios. The mahogany surface is scarred by the heat of my machine. The laptop’s glow has shifted to night mode, the dark hue of a heart rate monitor in a triage unit. My eyes take a minute to adjust, and the thought arrives unbidden: How did my life become governed by unreasonable corporate demands and deadlines?

 

The week begins at 8:45 AM on Monday with the planning meeting after a restless night. I see my own disillusionment reflected over the Teams grid of exhausted faces. We review the upcoming week: more campaigns, more deadlines, and more client expectations that inflate like a bubble refusing to burst. It’s the familiar choreography of corporate performance. I start speaking hesitantly. "Uh-hem, this week, I can’t be online after five on Thursday evening. I have a birthday dinner."

 

In our world, evenings belong to the company—not entirely and officially, of course. The contract merely states, “You will be expected to devote your full time and attention and abilities to the affairs of the Company both during normal business hours and outside normal business hours, from time to time, and whenever reasonably necessary at no additional remuneration.”

 

From time to time. Whenever reasonably necessary.

 

Like unsuspecting frogs in a pot of slowly warming water, our “time to time” has quietly mutated into the norm. And “reasonably” has nonchalantly overstepped its boundaries into the most intimate moments of our private lives. The pot is boiling, and we are still swimming.

 

There are always campaigns to review, decks to approve, and deadlines that have seemingly hallucinated themselves into emergencies. Most nights, our under-resourced digital team is online until ten. No one says no.

 

And now, my request sits there in the digital space, somewhere in between an inconvenience and a failure to grasp the unwritten rules. I'm asking permission to have a night to myself. Like a child asking permission to be excused from the dinner table.

 

To quiet the revolt in my chest, I recite the corporate prayer of the grateful employee: Count your blessings. Think of the unemployment rate. Think of the privilege of working from home. You are not the only one suffering. Shut up and get on with it.

 

The meeting ends with the usual performance of forced positivity, a brittle mask covering the collective dread of the week ahead. I stand up to make coffee, needing to wash away the residue of the call.

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On my way to the kitchen, I pause at the doorway of the spare bedroom to watch my fellow inmate. My husband is hunched over his desk, bathed in the electric blue pallor of two massive monitors. The light sculpts his features into a hollow expression of unfulfillment that has become his default mode. He looks like an animal caught in a snare, his posture a permanent question mark carved into his spine. He doesn't hear me. He is too deep inside the spreadsheet, lost in the infinite optimization of someone else's profit margins. The air around him vibrates with the metallic hum of static.

 

He was a teacher when we met. The kind who lit up a room without trying—not the performative energy we fake in client meetings while scrolling Slack on a second screen. I remember him on the rugby field, gravel crunching under his feet, shouting encouragement to his under-15 team with a voice that came from his gut. He was fueled by passion then. Now, he is fueled by caffeine.

 

I can’t help but feel responsible. I was the one who opened the door.

 

Fifteen years ago, I pitched digital marketing to him as an evolution. It seemed like a smart play: better pay, better future. He excelled, rising to Team Lead SEO in ten years. We bought the narrative that this income would buy us the dream—the house, the schools, the stability.

 

But the cost was higher than the paycheck. Today, his personality is shrouded in cynicism. His body holds the tension like a physical memory; his jaw is locked, a shield he wears even in his sleep. He sees a therapist now. The medication flows as steadily as the work requests: pills to sleep, pills to wake, pills to cope. They offer silence, but they don't offer peace.

 

I see him through the door, trapped like a specimen in amber. I catch him looking out the window, and I know exactly where his mind is. He is mourning a calling left unanswered. He was never meant for the digital world; he was meant to be a landscaper. He is imagining the smell of wet, iron-rich soil and the feel of Agapanthus roots in his hands. Instead, he spends his seasons tethered to a desk.

 

The industry extracts more than just physical health. It mines the soul. It dulls the part of you that recognizes the finite nature of time.

 

And time is the one thing we cannot bill for. It took a haunting replay of a specific memory to shake me awake. I lay in bed one night, unable to forgive myself for a scene from earlier that day: My son, holding up a Lego creation with pride; me, refusing to break eye contact with my laptop.

 

When I finally turned to him, the light in his eyes had gone out. In that reflection, I saw a stranger. I saw a woman who was present in body but absent in spirit. I realized that I had become a casualty of my own career.

 

Something had to give. And it did.

 

Two years later, I inhabit a completely different landscape—mentally, physically, and spiritually. I look back at that desperate season, remembering the nights I prayed for a way out.

 

God answered via LinkedIn InMail. A recruiter. A new role. When I landed the job, the relief was intoxicating. For the first time in years, I could log off at 5:00 PM and give my children my undivided attention. I thought I had arrived.

 

But the universe had a different appointment scheduled. One night, enjoying the luxury of doom-scrolling instead of working, the algorithm served me an anomaly. It was a video of a man speaking with unnerving calm about the moment his heart stopped. It was a near-death experience testimony. This wasn't my usual feed; it was a digital glitch. Yet, my finger hovered. An ancient, dormant sensor in my chest flickered to life.

 

That video didn't just open a door; it removed the floor. It initiated a year of total dissolution—a spiritual crisis that dismantled everything I thought I knew about God, reality, and the afterlife.

 

My ego didn't just crack; it underwent a controlled demolition. My identity, my faith, my foundations—they fell like dominoes. Amidst the backdrop of a happy, functioning family life, I plummeted into a profound loneliness. It was a quiet panic, the kind where you are screaming underwater while everyone on the surface enjoys a sunny day.

 

I felt suspended between the person I was raised to be—a conservative Christian from a small town—and the terrifying expanse of this new knowledge. I found myself devouring NDE podcasts in the spaces between laundry and school runs, trying to reconcile the dogma of my past with the undeniable truth I was hearing in my earphones.

 

The more clarity I sought, the more the floor gave way beneath me. Everything I discovered contradicted the bedrock of my upbringing. My unshakable faith liquefied into terrifying questions: Is there really no hell? Is there no judgment? Are we all just the Divine experiencing itself? Or was I unleashing the wrath of God, securing my own damnation simply by asking?

 

My family certainly thought so. I remember my mother’s voice on the phone, a whimpering, brittle sound: “You are playing with fire, my child. Are you really turning your back on your faith? On God?” My father quoted Proverbs 17:12, his voice heavy with warning: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”

 

A few weeks later, at a dinner, my sister voiced the verdict. Just before our food arrived, she leaned in. “Marlé, you know I can see into the spirit world,” she said, her voice dropping. “And I can see that the Holy Spirit has left you.” Then, driving the nail home: “Your eyes look dead. They look empty.”

 

My appetite vanished. I know now that their words came from a place of terrified love, but in that moment, they didn't save me; they severed me. The harder they tried to pull me back to the “straight and narrow,” the more I felt repelled by the certainty of my old life.

 

I no longer knew who “I” was. The successful copywriter, the obedient Christian daughter—these felt like costumes I had forgotten how to fasten. Beneath the mask, there was no one. Just a raw, exposed nerve asking: Who have I been serving? What is true?

 

Suspended between the dogma of my past and the terrifying expanse of the unknown, I was paralyzed. Should I repent and stop gambling with my soul? Or should I brave the wilderness of “All That Is” and accept that my entire identity might be built on a misunderstanding?

 

The crisis culminated in what I later recognized as the dark night of the soul. It was 2:00 AM. I was kneeling on the cold tiles of the bathroom—the only room where I could cry without waking the children, the only room where I was completely off duty. My voice was a broken whisper, a pact made in the void: “God, I don’t care what the answer is. I just want the truth. Just show me what to believe. Please.”

 

The breakdown was the breakthrough.

 

I found the book Conversations with God, and page by page, the reconstruction began. But as I healed, I realized my crisis wasn't an isolated event. The dark night of my soul was not only opening my eyes to my own sovereignty; it was preparing me to see what I had been witnessing professionally for years: an entire digital industry experiencing its own dark night. We just called it burnout.

 

Looking back, I can see the storm clouds gathering long before COVID-19. A collective fatigue we all pretended was normal. The rat race had calcified into a religion. We baptized overwork as "dedication." We redefined anxiety as "caring about quality." We called burnout "passion."

 

I see now what I missed then: We were dying on the inside. The pandemic didn't cause the crisis; it just stripped away the distractions. March 2020. The world stopped. No commute. No office. No escape from yourself. It was an invitation to go inward, to question the systems we had internalized, and to return to what mattered: family, home, balance.

 

The pandemic was meant to be our collective dark night—the dissolution that precedes transformation. The Universe pressed pause and asked: Is this how you want to live?

 

But we missed the moment. Instead of transforming, the industry mutated. It sold us hybrid work as “flexibility,” but in practice, it was an expansion of the factory floor into our living rooms. Now, six years later, boundaries have evaporated.

 

Pre-pandemic, there was a physical severance. You left the building, got in your car, and drove away. Now, the kitchen table, where our children eat breakfast, is the same surface where we take client calls. Our bedrooms glow with the bright light of spreadsheets until midnight. Nothing is sacred anymore.

 

This invasion is amplified by "communication creep." Email, Slack, Workbook, then WhatsApp. They don't hand you a company phone, but your personal device vibrates with work 24/7. Hypervigilance becomes your baseline. You are never truly "off" because the device in your pocket is always "on."

 

Then comes the paralysis of the calendar. With hybrid work, meetings have metastasized, consuming the very hours required to do the tasks we are discussing. The actual work is evicted from the day, forced into the night. It is a specific kind of gaslighting: being told to "protect your work-life balance" by the same people setting deadlines that destroy it. We live in the impossible gap between the rulebook and reality. The policy says stop, but the workload says go, and we are left alone to resolve the contradiction.

 

This is slow-motion soul death. And we are letting it happen, because we have forgotten that we have a choice.

 

In the spaces between rushed school pick-ups and Teams meetings, my mind drifts back to the Free State, to my father’s farm. Time moved differently there. It was not sliced into billable hours or deadlines, but measured in seasons, in the angle of the sun, in the length of the shadows. Walking through the swaying grass of the plains, I could be alone with my thoughts. My body knew how to be still. My soul knew how to breathe.

 

How did I travel the distance from that silence to this—soliciting permission to eat dinner with friends? How did we go from Sabbath rest to sleeping pills?

 

On paper, the journey looks like progress. Better education. Better money. Better opportunities. But after my dark night, I am forced to ask: What does “better” actually mean? Better for whom? And by whose definition are we measuring the cost?

 

It is November—the high holy days of retail, Black Friday. As the Head of E-commerce SEO, my husband is at the epicenter of the surge. He is nearing his breaking point. Months of accumulated cortisol have crystallized into a grueling morning ritual: his body violently rejecting the day before it has even begun. I wake to the sound of him retching through the bathroom door. I lie still, listening to the dry heave of adrenal fatigue. I know better than to ask if he is okay; the silence between us protects us both from the answer.

 

That is what happens when you build up a system that calls for human sacrifice to exist. We are that burnt offering on the altar of productivity. And we're calling it "having a career."

 

Years ago, I would have resented him. I would have offered the hollow advice to simply “find better balance.” But I have walked that road. I know the truth now: You cannot balance a system designed to consume you. This is not a failure of time management; it is a theft of sovereignty. The industry has discovered it can extract our life force—our health, our presence, the very marrow of our relationships—and repackage that extraction as “opportunity.”

 

And the most radical thing I can think of doing, is to say: It’s not.

 

After the fire of my own awakening, the view from the other side is stark. I see now that we are heaping too much upon that altar. We are trading the holy for the profitable. We are bartering away the unrepeatable magic of our families for the sake of margins that do not belong to us. Worst of all, we are surrendering our agency. We have forgotten that the door is unlocked. We have forgotten that we have a choice.

 

I was in a dark place when I allowed my work life to consume me. It got darker as I grappled with my existential questions. But now, looking outward, I realize I am merely one face in a crowd of millions.

 

For a brief season, we convinced ourselves we held the leverage. We called it the "Great Resignation," a time when walking away felt like a revolution. But that window has closed. The narrative has shifted, and the exit doors have locked. We have transitioned into a colder, more stagnant reality—a "Big Stay" born not of loyalty, but of fear. We are no longer quitting in droves; we are simply enduring. We are technically employed, occupying squares on a screen, but spiritually, we have already left the building.

 

I catch this detached energy everywhere—in the hushed conversations at the coffee machine, in online communities, and in the cynical humor of my social feeds. It is no longer about reshuffling for a better title; it is a collective waking up to the lie. The lie that says your worth equals your productivity. The lie that says your life is a currency to be spent in service of someone else's profit, according to someone else’s rules, deadlines, and schedules.

 

In my darkest hours, Conversations with God offered a hard truth: You are not the victim of your circumstances; you are the co-creator of your reality.

 

As more souls are forced into this realization through fire—whether by burnout or simply the soul’s desperate scream for fulfillment—we are being pressed to look inward. Yes, some of us are still constructing a definition of success that resembles exhaustion. And that’s okay; everyone is on their own timeline. But others are ready to choose something else. Could the industry’s dark night, this epidemic of fatigue, be the catalyst for a collective awakening? Could it be the pressure required to force us to take back our power?

 

I do not have all the answers. I am still in this business myself—at least, for now. My husband’s workdays still bleed past 7:00 PM. The prescriptions still arrive monthly.

 

But I have learned to ask the necessary questions. Questions are dangerous to the status quo because they challenge accepted "truths." They pry open doors to something far greater than the grind.

 

So I ask myself: Is this the way I pictured life when I dreamed of adulthood? What is success to me? Is it getting glowing performance reviews while my children grow up in my peripheral vision? What brings me joy? How do I want to spend my days?

 

Tonight, my daughter’s body grows heavy in my arms. Her chest rises rhythmically, her soft, steady breath the only clock I want to watch. I drink in the moment. I am still retraining my nervous system to be present here, without the phantom limb sensation of a phone awaiting a WhatsApp request.

 

I slip out of bed and close her door gently. Across the hallway, the blue light spills from my husband's office. I peek in.

 

"It's time," I whisper.

 

He turns around. His eyes are rimmed with red fatigue. "I'm not done. I just have to…"

 

"The work will always be there," I interrupt, my voice soft but steady. "Come sit with me."

 

He looks at the screen. Then at me. It is a hesitation that spans a lifetime. Then, an act of rebellion: he shuts the laptop. The click of the hinge is the crisp, metallic sound of freedom.

 

I take his hand. His palm is warm, tacky from hours gripping the mouse. We walk past the kids’ rooms and out to the steps by the sliding door. The full moon turns the swimming pool into a sheet of silver, a polished mirror in the dark. Above us, the old Yellowwood tree shifts in the breeze, the rustling leaves sounding like a long, collective exhale from the earth itself, as if wanting to let us in on the secrets of the universe.

 

We look up. A satellite, a tiny man-made speck of labor, races past Orion’s Belt, driven by its own urgent schedule. But gazing past it, I sense a Presence vast enough to swallow our worldly worries, our fears, and our deadlines. In the blissful, quiet darkness, I feel the gaze of the Universe—my guides, my ancestors, my Creator—simply observing us. Just as they always do.

 

In this silence, the insight finally lands. We are not here merely to survive. We are here to thrive. And that means remembering who we are beneath the titles, the salaries, and the appraisals. It means discovering our inherent worth—not because we did something good, but simply because we are.

 

We are sovereign souls with the right to choose how we want to live this crazy, fleeting life. We have the right to close the laptop.

 

Because the work will always be there. But tonight, for the first time in a long time, so are we.

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