I did not set out to write a book. I set out to understand the algorithm that had been running inside me for twenty years.
Books led to research papers. Research papers led to late-night conversations where Misty and I — who had been building Creative Doorway together while navigating this in our own relationship — looked at each other and said: what if all of this is connected? The book started as research. We had burned out — personally, professionally, relationally — and we refused to accept that this was how the story ended.
Each researcher I encountered had spent decades studying a different piece of the same puzzle without knowing the other pieces existed. Damasio mapped how the body keeps emotional score. Porges explained why the nervous system stays in threat mode. Schwartz discovered what lives underneath the defenses. Van der Kolk proved the body remembers what the mind denies. Connecting their work into a single framework was the intellectual project that became the book.
The Chapter That Nearly Broke Me
Writing about my marriage was the hardest chapter — not because it was painful to revisit, though it was. Because I had to admit how long I let the performance cost us before I was willing to name what was happening. Misty deserved better than the version of me that showed up during those years. The distance that hardens into silence between two people who love each other but cannot stop performing long enough to see each other — that is not just a marriage problem. That is the meeting where nobody says what is actually wrong. Writing that chapter was the first time I said so in a way I could not take back.
But the chapter that nearly broke me was about presence. I spent weeks trying to write about humility as a doorway and every draft sounded like the motivational posters I was trying to dismantle.
Three Endings That All Contradicted the Book
First came an inspirational close, the kind that lands like a TED talk finale and gets shared on LinkedIn. It felt like I was selling something. The second was a practical close with action steps and an implementation plan. It collapsed into the exact formulaic thinking I had been cautioning against. The third was the poetic close. Ambiguous. Open-ended. Trust the mystery. It felt like a cop-out. Every ending contradicted the book that preceded it.
How do you conclude a book that argues against conclusions? The demand for a framework — the hunger for steps, the desperate need to leave with something measurable — that is not just what self-help does. That is what the synthetic self does. I had spent nine chapters warning about this pattern. And every ending I wrote enacted it.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to write about the experience and let the experience speak for itself. The struggle was the opening. Not the insight, not the framework — the moment I stopped trying to force one. I had to fall on my face, publicly, in front of the chapter itself, to remember what I supposedly already knew.
The book does not treat burnout as the problem. It treats burnout as the signal. The problem is identity misalignment — Algorithm Burnout, measured and named. And you cannot optimize your way to presence. The formula for getting there IS the trap.
I know what you might be thinking. Presence. Awakening. The original host. But I still have a mortgage. Kids who need braces. A boss who does not care about my nervous system recalibration. I get it. I am not built for a monastery either. I still have to make money in the machine. The book does not ask you to abandon the machine. It asks you to notice who is driving it.
Why Nobody Else Would Write It
I wrote it because nobody else would. Because the wellness industry reduced burnout to exhaustion and self-care. Because the tech industry celebrated the algorithm without acknowledging what it costs the people running on it. Because the people I had spent my career alongside deserved to have what they were experiencing named, validated, and explained — not by someone standing above the problem but by someone standing inside it. Further along the path, maybe. But not above it. The cost of waiting is something I can now measure — in years that could have been lived differently, in relationships that deserved more presence, in a body that eventually stopped whispering and started shouting.
Writing the book changed me in ways I did not anticipate. Not the research — I expected the research to be transformative. What I did not expect was that the act of writing honestly about the performance would begin dismantling the performance itself. Each chapter forced me to sit with something I had been avoiding. The experiment chapter made me relive the withdrawal. The marriage chapter made me say out loud what Misty and I had been circling for years. The presence chapter made me confront the fact that I could write about humility without actually being humble. The book became the intervention I thought I was offering other people.
Real awakening is one of the hardest disciplines you will ever take on — not because it requires extraordinary effort, but because it requires the willingness to not know. And that willingness is exactly what the performed self was built to prevent.
If any of this landed, there is a free assessment that measures what I am describing. 48 questions. 15 minutes. No email required to start. Just honest answers. algorithmburnout.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Algorithm Burnout the book about?
A: The full story — the neuroscience, the psychology, twenty years of watching the pattern, and the personal reckoning with it. It maps how identity misalignment develops, what it costs physiologically, and what happens when you finally see it clearly.
Q: Is this a self-help book?
A: No. It does not offer a five-step program. The transformation comes from seeing the pattern clearly, not following prescriptive steps. The formula for getting there is the trap — and the book is honest about that.
Q: Why does the book argue against its own conclusions?
A: Because the demand for a formula is the same pattern the book is trying to expose. The hunger for steps, the need to leave with something measurable — that is the synthetic self wanting a framework to optimize. The book had to enact its own thesis by refusing to give the reader what the performed self was asking for.
