Too Young to be this Tired!

Published September 2, 2025

by Marc Simpson

Founder’s Note

Burnout is usually treated as a personal failure. A lack of balance. A boundary problem. A time-management issue.

This framing misses the point.

Burnout is increasingly a structural outcome; one that shows up earlier, lasts longer, and is quietly normalized for young workers entering unstable labor systems with few safety nets.

Too Young to be this Tired is not a personal essay. It’s an observation from inside the system. It examines how early work, especially in care-driven and public-facing roles, conditions people to accept exhaustion as a baseline rather than a warning.

This piece sets the tone for The Urban Brief: grounded, systems-focused, and concerned with how policy decisions show up in real lives.

—

Founder, The Urban Desk

“You’re too young to be this tired.”

That was the response the first time I said I needed a break, after an 80-hour workweek during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had started working as a nursing assistant at the end of 2018. Long hours and physical labor were not new to me. What was new was the scale. Short staffing had always existed, but the pandemic turned it into a permanent condition. The workload intensified. The margin for rest disappeared.

By the time my 20th birthday came around in June, I knew how to work while exhausted.

Not the occasional fatigue of a busy week, but a sustained, low-grade depletion that shaped how I moved, spoke, and planned. I learned how to perform competence without rest. How to stay productive while depleted. How to treat exhaustion as normal.

At the time, none of this registered as burnout. It registered as responsibility. As a strong work ethic. As being a “team player.”

Starting work early is often framed as an advantage. It builds discipline. It creates opportunity. It puts you ahead. What is discussed less is how early entry into demanding systems often substitutes experience for support. Young workers are praised for resilience while being denied stability.

Burnout does not always arrive as collapse. More often, it shows up as numbness. Irritability. Detachment. A narrowing sense of time where the future feels abstract and rest feels indulgent. When this happens early, before there is language to name it, burnout becomes invisible.

That invisibility is useful. Not to workers, but to institutions.

When exhaustion is individualized, systems avoid accountability. Long hours become a character test. Chronic understaffing becomes a growth opportunity. Recovery becomes a personal responsibility rather than an operational requirement.

This pattern repeats across sectors: healthcare, service work, education, public administration. Fields that rely heavily on young labor often rely on early burnout as a cost-saving measure. Turnover is expected. Sustainability is deferred.

The problem is not that people fail to take care of themselves. The problem is that systems are designed with no margin for care at all.

Burnout before 25 is not a rite of passage. It is a signal, one that points less to individual weakness and more to structural design. When exhaustion shows up this early, it is not incidental. It is embedded.

If work is going to be sustainable, recovery has to be treated as infrastructure, not indulgence. Predictability has to matter. Capacity has to be real, not assumed.

Until then, burnout will keep arriving early and being misnamed as ambition.