Are You Burned Out, or Just Having a Bad Week? The Quiz

A bad week can do an excellent impression of burnout. Three bad meetings, one broken appliance, two nights of terrible sleep, a deadline that reproduced while nobody was looking, and suddenly even the dishwasher seems personally invested in your collapse.

That does not mean the exhaustion is fake. A hard week is allowed to be hard. The useful distinction is what happens when the week ends. Temporary overload usually has a return path. Rest helps. Distance helps. A decent weekend, one solved problem, or a night where nobody needs anything from you can restore enough capacity that the world begins looking like a place you may reluctantly continue participating in.

Burnout-like depletion behaves differently. The problem is not merely that demand was high. Recovery stops working the way it used to. Rest becomes maintenance instead of restoration. Tasks that once felt manageable begin arriving already heavy. Cynicism becomes less like a joke and more like protective equipment. Dread starts earlier. Capacity shrinks. Even good outcomes may fail to produce much lift because the system is spending nearly everything just remaining operational.

The test, then, is not whether you are tired. It is whether the tiredness still knows how to leave.

So let us once again deploy the standard ProbleMattic instrument of modern philosophy: a twelve-question glossy-magazine quiz, this time designed to distinguish temporary overload from a more persistent pattern of depletion. This is not a diagnosis, a substitute for medical or mental-health care, or an excuse to turn one bad Thursday into a documentary series. It is experiential telemetry.

The Quiz