Running on empty, running flat ...
~ fatigue is not a warning sign, it is the consequence
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Nov 19/2025
Extreme fatigue is not tiredness stretched thin.
It feels like a system-wide alarm or siren, signalling that body, mind, and judgment are operating beyond their safe limits.
Pushing through late nights, stacked commitments, and treating sleep as adjustable.
Beyond a threshold, fatigue stops being a productivity issue and becomes a risk issue to decision quality, emotional steadiness, and strategic vision.
As exhaustion compounds, thinking constricts.
I default to short-term fixes, misread threats, miss opportunities, and lose nuance in how we interpret people and data. Fatigue can resemble cynicism or drift into quiet apathy. It also erodes the buffer between stimulus and response, leaving us brittle in meetings, impulsive in negotiations, and fragile under pressure.
Then something small gives way; a detail overlooked, a judgment rushed, a decision made on fumes.
The quieter danger is the illusion of competence.
Adrenaline masks depletion just long enough to clear another deadline or survive another crisis.
There is no courage in depletion.
Those of us who guard our energy guard their judgment.
The work still gets done; it simply gets done without burning through the person doing it.
The idea that fatigue is a consequence rathr than a warning really shifts how you think about recovery. Most people treat it like a signal to push through, but youre right that by the time extreme fatigue hits, youve already crossed a threshhold. The erosion of judgement under depletion is something that gets overlooked in productivity culture.