Life advice nobody told you: Fear feeds on inaction. The longer you wait to act, the stronger your fear becomes. When you take action, you starve fear of the oxygen it needs to survive. The answer is found in the action.
Most people do not know that Venki’s Nobel-winning career was built on a complete collapse & restart. Let me point out to the "dog that did not bark" in his CV: He did not study Chemistry.
Venki has a PhD in Physics. After finishing it, he realized he did not know enough about the living world to solve the problems he cared about.
Instead of pushing through a career he felt disconnected from, he did the unthinkable: He started over as a student. He went back to graduate school at UC San Diego to study biology from scratch after already having a PhD.
When Venki talks about work life balance, he is mostly talking about Cognitive Rot.
Anyway, imo, burnout happens when we stop learning & start performing our expertise. Our balance is the courage to be a beginner again.
i have a cousin who keeps her life quietly to herself. you don’t notice she has started a new postgrad program until she is already walking that path. you don’t realize she is seeing someone until it slips out in the smallest way. her choices are not for discussion they belong to her and those she trusts. i used to think that meant she was closed off that closeness required sharing everything. now i see it differently. there is something remarkable in the way she moves careful, private, deliberate. it is not distance it is thoughtfulness. it is calm. it is strength. sometimes the deepest family bonds are the ones that quietly hold space for each person to be exactly who they are.
Humans shouldn't always stay at home, even if you have nothing to do. Because staying at home for too long makes the brain become dull and leads to overthinking. You'll have more negative emotions. Psychology calls this state mental rumination. Most of the time, people who stay at home long term are not physically lazy - but mentally exhausted. You increasingly do not want to go out or see people. Even going to the supermarket downstairs to buy a bottle of water feels troublesome. You start to get used to being in a daze alone, scrolling through your phone and staying up late. Then you repeatedly struggle with yourself in an empty room. You think you're resting. But in fact, you're quietly draining the vitality of life. Your brain needs stimulation. Movement. Connection. Without it, your thoughts turn inward and spiral. The longer you isolate, the harder it becomes to break the pattern.