Purpose Recalibration: Escaping the Burnout Trap of Career Comparison

Jun 28

8 min read

Introduction: When Success Feels Like a Race You’re Losing

Here’s something that might surprise you: I gave up on school. While others were busy grinding toward university degrees, I bowed out early. I wasn’t driven. I wasn’t focused. I didn’t even care, if I’m honest, and so as soon as I left home to go study in Dundee, Scotland, I leaned into partying, distractions, and drifting.

That drive to “make something of myself” didn’t kick in until much later. It showed up gradually, and painfully, as I watched friends and former classmates climb the career ladder while I was still stuck in entry level positions.

That’s when the pressure started to build.

I didn’t just feel behind. I felt broken, like I had missed some invisible train that everyone else had boarded. What started as a desire to catch up quickly turned into a frantic internal race: one where the finish line kept moving and the cost kept rising.

This isn’t just my story. It’s one many people, especially men, quietly live through.

You see it every day online: the job promotions, startup success stories, perfectly curated milestones. But what you don’t see are the sleepless nights, the burnout, and the self-doubt bubbling beneath the surface.

It’s why I now talk about Purpose Recalibration, the deeply personal process of recognising when you’ve lost sight of your own purpose, resetting your trajectory, and slowly reinventing a version of success that’s actually yours.

The Rise of Career FOMO: When Comparison Becomes a Crisis

We’ve all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out, but when it comes to work, the stakes feel higher. It’s not just about missing a party. It’s about missing your future.

Career FOMO is sneaky. It starts with a little scroll through LinkedIn or a coffee catch-up where someone mentions their recent promotion, and suddenly your contentment disappears. You don’t even realise how deeply it’s getting to you, until your next move becomes more about catching up than choosing wisely.

Generated image of Chris Wilson at the top of a short career ladder vs colleagues on a taller ladder

And the research backs this up:

68% of early-career professionals admit they make career decisions based on fear of missing out rather than true alignment with their values.
Workers experiencing career FOMO show 28% higher turnover and are more likely to make impulsive job changes.
Professional jealousy can lead to burnout, anxiety, and chronic stress, especially when success becomes a measuring stick rather than inspiration.
The average person hits burnout by age 32, not because they lack skills, but because they’ve been sprinting in a race no one asked them to run.

I know this intimately.

I’d scroll through LinkedIn and see yet another former colleague celebrating a big promotion. And without fail, that familiar voice in my head would whisper:

“Seriously? Another one? What am I doing wrong? Why is everyone pulling ahead? What if I never catch up?”

That spiral happened over and over.

So I worked later. Said yes to more projects. Ignored my exhaustion. Buried my fears in productivity, and that old fashioned "protestant work ethic" belief system, I was brought up to on. I thought if I just worked harder, I could close the gap, prove that I belonged in the same league.

But here’s the truth no one tells you:

There’s no finish line when your drive is fueled by fear.

The Catch-Up Trap: When Progress Becomes Performance

Let’s talk honestly about what this trap feels like. It’s not just about chasing titles or higher salaries, it’s the emotional math we start to do every time we compare our lives with someone else’s.

I remember the thoughts vividly. Maybe you’ve had similar ones:

“What if I don’t keep up professionally, will they still respect me?”

“They’ve just bought a bigger apartment. Should I be switching jobs too?”

“If someone asks me what I do, I want a job title I can say with pride.”

“Everyone’s posting their wins, maybe it’s time I move just to have something to share.”

“I wasted my university years, now I have to overcompensate.”

This is what I call the Catch-Up Trap, where your ambition isn’t really your own anymore. It’s shaped by pressure, by comparison, and by a haunting sense that you’ve already fallen behind.

It feels like you’re constantly trying to “prove” you’re still in the game, even when the cost is your health, your happiness, your relationships.

Instead of tuning into your own definition of success, you start living by other people’s achievements and highlight reels.

And if you’ve ever experienced burnout (especially high-functioning burnout), this mindset is often at the core of it. You’re never off. Never enough. Always on the verge of being replaced, outpaced, or irrelevant.

What Makes the Trap So Dangerous?

The danger isn’t just in the stress, it’s in how invisible it can be. It’s perfectly acceptable, even praised, to chase more. To want progress. To grind.

But what happens when that pursuit starts to hollow you out?

Here’s what happened to me:

I stopped resting, not just physically, but mentally.
I stopped enjoying the wins, they only bought me a few hours of relief.
I lost connection with my own values, decisions became reactive, not intentional.
My sense of self-worth became tied to external validation, likes, titles, bonuses, praise.

And when the comparison spiral kicked in, I wasn’t motivated. I was panicked. I didn’t just want success, I needed it to prove I wasn’t falling behind.

If you’ve ever felt like that, like success is something you have to chase down before it disappears, you’re not alone. But I promise you: it’s not sustainable.

That’s the moment I began to wake up to a different question.

Not: “How can I catch up?”

But: “What if I’m already running the wrong race?”

The Reset: From Fear-Driven to Value-Led

When I was deep in the comparison spiral, I didn’t realise how much of my drive was powered by fear.

Fear of falling behind.

Fear of being seen as a failure.

Fear of being invisible.

These fears are incredibly motivating, in the short term. But over time, they chip away at your energy, identity, and health. You can’t build a fulfilling career, or life, on a foundation of fear.

What changed everything for me wasn’t a big dramatic event. It was the pause I was forced into when burnout finally took me down. That pause gave me the chance to reflect and ask myself some questions I hadn’t dared face in years:

What do I actually want?
Who am I trying to impress?
What does success look like on my terms?
What parts of my career have I chosen intentionally, and what parts have I inherited from other people’s expectations?

These questions were uncomfortable at first. Especially when I realised that many of my career moves weren’t aligned with what mattered to me, they were just attempts to close the gap I felt between myself and others.

But asking them was the beginning of what I now call my Purpose Recalibration.

What Is Purpose Recalibration?

It’s the shift from chasing success for validation…

To building your life around what’s meaningful, sustainable, and aligned with who you truly are.

It’s made up of three core pillars:

👉 Recognise – Get radically honest about what’s no longer working. Acknowledge the burnout, the fear, the exhaustion, the misalignment.

👉 Reset – Interrupt the cycle. That might mean rest. It might mean asking for help. It might mean stepping back to get perspective.

👉 Reinvent – Start building something new. Something grounded in your values, not your fears. Not a dramatic overhaul overnight, but a recalibration that points you in the right direction.

This isn’t a “five steps to success” formula. It’s a process I lived through, one that’s still evolving. But it’s helped me rebuild my career, my confidence, and my sense of self from the ground up.

And I know I’m not alone in needing it.

Why Resetting Matters

In a world that celebrates constant growth, “resetting” can look like failure. But here’s the truth:

Growth without alignment is just noise.

Progress without reflection is just momentum.

Success without fulfilment is just performance.

If you feel like you’re doing everything right but it still doesn’t feel good, it might be time to reset.

You don’t need to burn it all down.

You just need to ask: What if I chose differently from here?

The Reinvention – Building a Purpose-Led Life After Burnout

Coming out of burnout felt like emerging from fog. At first, I couldn’t see very far ahead. But for the first time in a long while, I could feel. And what I felt was this: I couldn’t go back to the way things were.

Reinvention didn’t start with a grand vision. It started with small truths.

I didn’t want to perform anymore.

I didn’t want to chase success that didn’t matter to me.

I didn’t want to work in a way that cost me my health, family, or peace of mind.

And I didn’t want to be alone in it.

Rebuilding From the Inside Out

Here’s the biggest thing I’ve learned about reinventing your life and work after burnout: you can’t just change the what. You have to change the why and how too.

That means:

Choosing work that energises, not just impresses
Defining success by impact, connection, and fulfilment, not just title or income
Making room for your health, relationships, creativity, and rest, not just productivity

For me, this meant starting Where I’m At, a space born from everything I’d been through. I didn’t set out to launch a community. I just needed a place where people could be honest about burnout, ambition, and identity without judgement.

But the more I shared, the more others reached out. People craving something real. Something supportive. Something sustainable.

You Don’t Need to Quit Everything to Begin Again

Here’s something I want to make very clear: reinventing your life doesn’t have to mean quitting your job, moving countries, or making huge risky leaps.

It starts with alignment.

🌀 Small shifts in how you show up

🌀 Clearer boundaries

🌀 Speaking your truth, even just to yourself

🌀 Finding or building community where you’re seen, not just productive

Sometimes reinvention is dramatic. But often, it’s steady. Quiet. And deeply personal.

What Reinvention Can Look Like

For you, reinvention might mean:

Saying no to the next promotion because you’re already stretched too thin
Pivoting toward a field you’ve always been curious about
Getting support for your mental health without shame
Launching a side project that reflects your true values
Redefining success as how you feel at the end of the day, not just what’s on your CV

The important thing is that it’s yours. Not based on comparison. Not driven by fear. But aligned with what you now know matters most.

💬 A Final Reflection: Burnout Wasn’t the End, It Was My Wake-Up Call

If you had told me three years ago that my breaking point would become the foundation of a new life, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Burnout forced me to stop.

Midlife forced me to question.

Comparison forced me to confront my deepest fears.

And those forces, while painful, cleared the path for reinvention.

This blog post isn’t just about my journey. It’s about ours. Because so many of us are silently questioning the lives we’ve built, wondering if it’s too late to change.

It’s not.

You don’t have to burn everything down to begin again.

You just need to recognise what’s no longer working, reset the patterns that exhaust you, and slowly, courageously reinvent your life on your own terms.

That’s Purpose Recalibration. And it’s Where I’m At.

📌 Want to keep going deeper?

Join the Where I’m At community, a safe space for burnout recovery, midlife reflection, and purpose-driven reinvention. Join the waiting list
Listen to the Share, Inspire and Explore podcast for real conversations about burnout, resilience, and life after collapse. Listen on Spotify
Reach out, I read every message. Let’s talk about what’s next for you.