When corporate burnout in tech becomes so severe that you don’t recognize yourself anymore, sometimes the path to healing lies not in quitting and running off to Japan (though… I did do that later), but in spiritual recovery that can happen alongside your career.
One afternoon, I was in the garden weeding after a particularly stressful work call. (I love weeding when I’m pissy. But that day? I was approaching despair. Things were not good.)
I felt a presence with me —a familiar one, the Ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis.
I’ve worked with her since 2017, so I’m often asked how to connect with Goddess Isis. In my experience, it isn’t really about elaborate rituals. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting your hands in soil, cleaning your living room and diffusing a fragrance, or watching the birds play in the sky.
That day, she told me to look at my dirty hands. The soil under my fingernails.
And I saw, in my mind’s eye, her hands—how they had buried each piece of Osiris. The grief she felt. The tears that fell.
Then, all the stress, the anger I was unknowingly carrying, just collapsed in on itself.
The Lasting Lesson in a 4,000 Year Old Story
Here’s what happened. When the Ancient Egyptian God Osiris was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set, his body was scattered across Egypt in 14 pieces.
But his wife, Goddess Isis, refused to accept this as the end.
She searched everywhere—swamps, villages, riversides—gathering each piece with fierce devotion. She took the form of a kite to travel to every corner of the land. When she found them all, she resurrected him just long enough to ensure an heir. Then, she returned to bury each part of Osiris’s body to the places where she had found them.
Temples rose from those sacred sites. Cities formed around them.
Her journey of gathering transformed the entire landscape.
I’ve known this myth for many, many years. But after working in tech and inching closer and closer to complete burnout myself, I started to see something else in this story: I started to see myself.
The Stark Reality of Burnout in the Tech Industry (and Beyond)
Burnout has reached crisis levels in the technology sector. Among tech employees, 82% report feeling close to burnout. This significantly exceeds the general workforce burnout rate of 65%, with Gen Z workers experiencing the highest rates at 83%. (Check out Statista & HR Dive)
Why is burnout so common in tech?
From my experience, I think it’s the industry’s culture of optimization and efficiency in pursuit of exponential growth and valuation. This mindset extends to human beings—we’re encouraged to not just optimize ourselves like mad, but ensure our individual role in the company has a demonstratively high ROI. Essentially reducing your humanity to KPIs.
The World Health Organization officially recognized burnout in 2019 as an occupational phenomenon in the ICD-11, defining it as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Unlike stress (which involves feeling overwhelmed by too much) burnout is complete depletion. And what used to make you shine, be proactive, or inspired is replaced with energy exhaustion, increased cynicism toward work, and reduced professional efficacy — all things I experienced when I realized how much of me had been left in the metaphorical desert.
The most unsettling part is how burnout creates a neurological feedback loop of, well, continued doom and dismemberment. The brain goes through working memory deficits, attention dysfunction, and slower cognitive transitions – so more energy and brain power is required to keep up with your past standard of performance.
Despite the health risks of burnout, most of us can’t afford the luxury of stepping away from the grind for too long. Tech is known as a well-paid sector, but most of its workforce lives in HCOL cities like the Bay Area, New York, Boston, or London.
Lifestyle creep goes beyond Allbirds. That paycheck doesn’t necessarily guarantee a six month cushion for mental health and energy replenishment. In my case, I had started paying for conveniences so I could work more. I can admit that HelloFresh had become 50% of my fridge for a while.
But burnout isn’t limited to decent or well-paid roles in tech and corporate. It affects everyone, whether you can afford lifestyle creep behaviors or whether you’re forced to compromise on basic necessities like medications vs groceries. 37% of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency expense.
Our economic system punishes all wage workers for needing time on the bench.
In my case, I couldn’t step away because:
- My visa depended on employment
- I was the primary breadwinner
For you, it could be that:
- Healthcare is tied to your job (154 million Americans rely on employer-sponsored insurance!)
- Student loans require steady payments
- The tech industry moves fast—gaps might look suspicious to future employers
So a break was off the table for me, and probably for you.
So I turned to something else: spiritual healing from corporate trauma. When external circumstances won’t allow for traditional recovery, internal transformation might just become the path forward. And for me, it was.
Becoming Slowly Dismembered like Osiris
I absolutely loved the tech startup I was at. I can confidently and honestly say it was my dream job. But it was demanding. And year after year, more parts of me were lost. Scattered.
Here’s what that looked like:
I stopped resting because I wanted to be productive.
I stopped painting and focused on upskilling.
I stopped reading novels and switched to nonfiction and business news.
I stopped caring for my health and prioritized “networking” at the pub.
Camping disappeared from my weekends. Yoga became a forgotten ritual. Home cooking was replaced by convenience.
… And you know what filled those spaces? Anger. Resentment. Stress. Exhaustion.
Of course, I told myself it was passion for the company. I claimed my irritability was because I was so focused on work. I believed my exhaustion reflected my loyalty.
This is how long burnout takes to develop—not necessarily weeks or months or years, but however long it takes for capitalism’s devastating economic reality on wage workers to trick or force you into gradual self-abandonment.
The Inventory of Loss
It wasn’t until the last pieces were beginning to fall that I realized how little of me was left.
“I gave up all of those things… for this?”
In just a few moments, I realized how I had never grieved the parts of me I had lost in pursuit of my career.
My paintings and brushes were in a box in the attic, gathering dust. My novels had been replaced by books carefully curated for Zoom backgrounds. My wardrobe reflected nothing of my personality—just corporate conformity. My fridge was 50% Hello Fresh because I’d convinced myself I was too busy to cook.
And my kids? They weren’t getting the best of me, either. They were getting scraps.
The realization hit like a physical blow: I was dismembered as Osiris had been. I was scattered. And the myth of Isis gathering those scattered pieces was, perhaps, a blueprint for what to do about it.
The Journey Home
What followed was a year-long journey—one that in many ways still continues—to reclaim the parts of myself that were scattered and lost.
To redirect the energy, ambition, and loyalty I had given to work back to my Self.
It wasn’t about quitting my job or rejecting all professional ambition. It was about integration. About refusing to fragment myself for success. About gathering the pieces and becoming whole again.
I pulled the paintings from the attic. I started cooking again—really cooking, not just reheating. I bought novels and read them without guilt. I let my wardrobe reflect who I actually am, not who I thought I should be professionally.
Most importantly, I started showing up fully for my children—not just the exhausted remnants of myself.
The Recipe to Healing from Burnout is Hidden in Ancient Myth
There is extensive peer-reviewed research demonstrating how spiritual practices, meditation, and mindfulness can support in burnout recovery. From mindfulness meditation and beyond, there’s consistent results in stress reduction, mental health improvement, and work performance outcomes.
This appears to work because a consistent spiritual practice results in measurable reductions in blood cortisol levels, reducing inflammatory marker expressions, and increasing grey matter density in the hippocampus, or the learning & memory part of the brain.
In short: prioritizing spiritual wellbeing cultivates self-awareness, compassion, and stress reduction.
But why? Beyond the measurable parts, why is this true?
I think there’s an answer in the Osiris story. It’s about more than a miraculous resurrection by the Mistress of Magic, Goddess Isis. The core of the story is about gathering – about diligently, in her grief, finding those scattered pieces and making the entire landscape sacred through her journey of recovery.
When we sit in a consistent spiritual practice, we’re able to journey inward to our inner landscape. To find things. Things lost, hidden, things to mourn, things to rebirth. Sacred sites waiting to be reclaimed.
Every abandoned hobby, every compromised value, every hidden part of your personality—these are temples waiting to be rebuilt.
Where Corporate Life Dismembers Us
Modern work culture does its own kind of murder. Not violent, but gradual:
- Creative expression gets sacrificed for “practical skills”
- Authentic relationships get replaced by strategic networking (I love the commentary here about having more “useless” friends!)
- Personal interests disappear under productivity pressure
- Physical health gets deprioritized for career advancement
- Family time becomes whatever’s left after work demands
- Spiritual practice feels “indulgent” compared to hustle
If this is “growing up,” I think everyone would rather stay a child forever.
Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not growing up or being professional or being realistic.
Maybe this is actually dismemberment at the hands of this broken economic system.
Integration is the First Step to Rebirth
I’m all for mindfulness meditation as a spiritual practice. But I also like to do a little magical digging in my own inner ruins.
Take a moment to consider: What parts of yourself might have been scattered long-ago across your inner landscape?
What did you love doing before you worried about whether it was “useful”? What dreams did you abandon as “impractical”? What aspects of your personality do you hide at work?
It might be tempting to let these stand as nostalgic memories or naive dreams. But I want you to consider them as pieces of your authentic power waiting to be reclaimed.
This spiritual work is archaeological and loving, just like Isis searching the landscape for Osiris’s scattered pieces.
Go through old photo albums and notice what made your eyes light up. Read old journals and rediscover dreams you’d completely forgotten. Look at your New Year’s resolutions from five years ago—what were you reaching for then?
Scroll through your old Facebook posts and Tumblr accounts. What were you passionate about before you learned to curate yourself for professional consumption? What music were you obsessed with? What weird rabbit holes did you go down?
Journal about your tattoos and why and where you got them. Who was with you?Check your Amazon order history from 2018. Your Pinterest boards from college. Your old playlists. Your bookmarks folder titled “someday.” Look at the USB drives left in your junk drawer.
Create a digital garden for your discoveries. Or start a Pinterest board called “Pieces of Me.” Or make a physical collage or dedicate a journal to this excavation.
Each rediscovered passion, forgotten interest, and abandoned dream is a piece of you waiting to be gathered and integrated again.
Then, use your collection as a roadmap back to yourself.
Watch childhood movies you rediscovered without guilt. Bake a beautiful cake with your kid on Sunday just because it’s Sunday. Clock out on time and go see live music. Make sure you invite a “useless” friend for lunch every two weeks—someone who doesn’t advance your career but makes you laugh.
Remove Slack from your phone. Pick up that hobby you’ve always wanted to try: make yourself a sweater by winter, learn guitar, start that novel you found in your old notes.
These are small acts of resurrection that, over time, will bring you back into being. Each one is a temple being rebuilt to a part of you, a welcoming of it to come home.
An Invitation to Scorpion Medicine
This myth and the practices I created after my moment in the garden with Isis form the first arc of my course, Scorpion Medicine.
In it, we journey with Goddess Isis to heal from corporate toxicity and trauma, transforming venom into wisdom and resilient leadership.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: every toxic work experience contains medicine, if you extract it.
Every scattered piece of yourself holds power, if you’re willing to gather it back.
The betrayals, the burnout, the ethical compromises—they’re initiation opportunities if you feel called to a different kind of leadership. A leadership that doesn’t ask people to fragment themselves for a broken system to succeed.
The world doesn’t need more people who’ve gotten good at surviving broken systems. We need leaders who can resist toxicity while building alternatives that actually serve life.
The temples are waiting to be built. The landscape is ready to be transformed.
Will you refuse to accept dismemberment as the end of your story? Or will you, like Isis, choose life?
Scorpion Medicine is a 6-week journey of transforming your professional wounds into leadership wisdom, inspired by the myths and wisdom of Goddess Isis. Using Ancient Egyptian resurrection magic for modern changemakers who refuse to dim their light for broken systems. Join the waitlist here.
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