💡 Your Full-Time Job Is Killing You
"Sunday Scaries" is a cute way of saying chronic stress is destroying your life.
There were days in my old life — the 10-hour office shifts, the pre-dawn alarm screaming at 5 a.m. so I could write before the world owned me — where I’d stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and think:
Is this really what I’m trading my life for?
I had a good job, on paper. “Dream job” adjacent. The kind you tell your parents about so they stop worrying. The kind that makes your LinkedIn look impressive, even if you feel like a stranger to yourself inside your own body.
I didn’t hate the work. I hated the way it left me hollow.
Hollow from skipping meals. Hollow from racing between deadlines and draining meetings. Hollow from the fluorescent lights that buzzed so loud I swear I could feel them in my molars.
At the time, I thought I was just tired.
But looking back?
I was dying.
The Soul Has Warning Signs, Too
We don’t talk about soul-death in office spaces because it doesn’t show up in bloodwork. But it’s real. And it’s measurable — not just spiritually, but biologically.
Stress, the low-grade hum of unease that saturates most full-time jobs, doesn’t just affect your mood. It chips away at your internal scaffolding.
Cortisol, your stress hormone, doesn’t just spike during a crisis — it lingers.
Long hours. Lack of control. A sense that your work doesn’t matter? All of it adds up to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and early mortality. (Sources: WHO, Harvard Health, Yale Medicine)
One study showed that workers in high-strain jobs were 23% more likely to have a heart attack. Another linked toxic work environments with up to a 40% increase in risk for chronic disease. (Sources: The Lancet, UCL, NIH)
Burnout is no longer a metaphor. It’s a diagnostic code.
I Didn’t Have a Midlife Crisis. I Had an Early-Life Awakening.
My breaking point didn’t arrive like a dramatic movie moment. No panic attack on the subway. No ER visit. Just… stillness.
I remember walking into my apartment one night after a 12-hour day. I dropped my bag, sat on the floor, and stared at the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed. Or cooked. Or wrote something for myself.
And I realized: my full-time job — this job that I thought would save me — was slowly unmaking me.
It wasn’t just the hours. It was the ownership. I didn’t own my time. I didn’t own my output. I didn’t even own my identity anymore.
Karoshi, Burnout, and Why Sunday Scaries is a Warning Sign
Japan has a word for it: karoshi — death by overwork.
You’ll find it on government reports and death certificates, not just poetry blogs. People literally dropping dead from long hours and chronic stress. Stroke. Cardiac arrest. Suicide.
We like to think we’re more evolved here in the U.S., but we’re not. We just rebrand the problem.
We call it “hustle.”
We call it “leaning in.”
We call it “climbing the ladder.”
But we don’t call it what it actually is:
A culturally sanctioned slow suicide.
One Harvard Business School study estimated that job-related stress contributes to over 120,000 deaths a year in the U.S. alone.
We don’t just hate Mondays. Our bodies physically reject them.
Researchers found that heart attacks spike on Monday mornings, especially among people with high-stress jobs. Your body knows. Your nervous system remembers. Even if your rational brain insists “it’s not that bad.”
We’re Not Lazy. We’re Just Tired of Dying.
Every time I talk about this, someone says, “But freelancing is hard too!”
Of course it is.
But it doesn’t steal your life by default.
I’ve been freelance for ten years. I’ve ghostwritten memoirs for founders who’ve taken companies public. I’ve made seven figures as a writer. I’ve traveled the world — including a spontaneous month-long trip to China I’m about to embark on soon — because I can.
Not because I’m special. But because I took the wheel.
I meet freelancers every week in my community — parents, creatives, neurodivergent weirdos like me, people recovering from burnout — who say the same thing:
“I’m never going back.”
Because once you know what living feels like, you can’t go back to dying.
This Isn’t Just About Work. It’s About Your Life Force.
If your job…
keeps you from moving your body
robs you of sunlight and rest
teaches you to ignore your instincts
shames you for needing boundaries
puts you in rooms where you can’t breathe
…it’s not a job. It’s a leash.
We’ve been taught that loyalty to companies equals virtue. That the 401(k) is the light at the end of the tunnel. That we can earn rest if we suffer long enough.
But the truth?
No one’s coming to save you.
Not your boss. Not HR. Not your health insurance portal.
The only person who can save your body, your creativity, your actual aliveness — is you.
So What Now?
If you’re feeling the warning signs — the exhaustion that isn’t fixed by sleep, the Sunday dread that starts on Friday, the quiet grief of being alive but not really living — then this is your sign.
Not to quit your job tomorrow (unless you’re ready to). But to start imagining something more.
Time freedom. Creative control. Health. A sense of ownership over your hours.
That’s what we build in my corner of the internet.
At ✍️ Make Writing Your Job and 📣 Make Marketing Your Job, we’re not just posting jobs — we’re helping people unplug from a system that was never built for us.
We’ve got:
Daily freelance writing & marketing job boards
Live classes (Freelancing 101, portfolio building, high-ticket client strategy)
A community that gets it — and isn’t afraid to rewrite the rules
This isn’t some online course that promises a mansion and passive income in 90 days. This is a movement for people who want to stay alive while they make money.
Your Job Is Killing You. Stop Letting It.
You get one body.
You get one lifetime.
Don’t waste it trying to win at a game that ends in burnout, broken sleep, and a vague sense that your soul wandered off somewhere back in 2017.
The revolution isn’t just quitting.
It’s choosing to live.