Burnout is usually treated as exhaustion. This paper treats it as insolvency: a system that can no longer afford the cost of staying coherent. In cheap coherence environments, coherence internally consistent narrative closure is easy to produce, while contact constraint-bearing feedback: time, contradiction, cost, repair, consequence is costly and often avoided. The psyche adapts by protecting coherence through persona-maintenance maintenance = ongoing cost of holding a coherent pose; persona-maintenance = the cost of staying legible, stable, and socially safe. Over time this creates maintenance inflation rising cost required to keep the same stability, boundary erosion, projection routing disowned contradiction outward, and libido capture libido = psychic energy; libido capture = usable energy trapped in the shadow because revision is too threatening. Burnout is the point where maintenance exceeds repair capacity repair = ability to metabolize feedback into revision without collapse, and the system loses steerability. Recovery is not rest-as-aesthetic. Recovery is retrieval: returning trapped energy through revision real update under feedback and binding revision that becomes observable and constraint-coupled, supported by external scaffolds that raise contact capacity. The paper ends with a short audit protocol, a “vicious vs virtuous” feedback loop model, and falsifiers that separate real recovery from coherence theater.
Vladisav Jovanovic (Tue,) studied this question.