Psychology says the reason so many successful people quietly burn out in their 50s isn’t overwork — it’s that they spent three decades performing a version of themselves that the job required, and somewhere along the way they stopped being able to locate the original person underneath, and the burnout isn’t about energy, it’s about grief for a self they outsourced
When a fifty-something executive friend broke down at his celebration dinner after landing his biggest client ever, confessing he couldn't remember if he'd ever actually liked his work or just gotten good at pretending, it revealed a truth about midlife exhaustion that has nothin…