Surviving Burnout as a Travel Writer on the Dead Internet

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It’s been two years since I last published anything substantial on my blog, and two years since my last big adventure. Two years since my last “confession”.

In the simplest terms, it was burnout that kept me away. But that word is not enough; I have experienced burnout in professional contexts before, and this didn’t feel like those times.

Until now, I’ve not even cared enough to attempt to synthesize what this does feel like, to attempt to understand my own mind and my own reactions. All I’ve known is I’ve been in a protective fog, and that’s where I should stay unless and until it naturally lifts. To have lost all inspiration and enthusiasm overnight means that clearly something was wrong, and it needed to sort itself out before I attempted to write or travel again; no need to force it and continue just for the sake of it, potentially digging a deeper hole, especially if my heart’s not in it. They say you are under no obligation to continue to be who you were 5 years ago, or even 5 minutes ago. “Detours” are allowed, etc etc.

I’m not sure I could have put all the pieces together prior to now anyway. Too many scattered clues and experiences that didn’t seem connected at the time. But for some reason today, I feel like writing.

The signs were there

After that I did a solo thru-hike in Greenland which was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, although I got very sick after sharing a hut with another sick hiker, and finished the last few days backpacking in the freezing rain, sneezing and rundown. From there I went on to Romania, where I had no hiking plans and was excited to rest and explore the cultural and historic sites. 

At my accommodation in Brasov, I broke out in hives. I have never, ever in my life gotten hives. I wasn’t even sure what they were or what was happening to me. My arms and shoulders were covered in itchy, unbearable welts that prevented me from sleeping. I considered that maybe it was bed bugs or something else I’d come into physical contact with, but there were no markings or bites on top of the skin – it was coming from within, and the locations of the bumps would change. When I realized what it was, I bought an antihistamine from the local pharmacy and tried to relax and let it pass, and the physical symptoms did after a couple days. So I continued on my travels throughout Romania, but begrudgingly. It took a lot of effort and pep-talking myself to leave the apartment each day and force myself to cross the things off my list that I’d come so far to see. This wasn’t like me. I was excited about Romania! So why was I feeling this way? Why was it so hard? I felt like I was dragging my feet through sludge.

These weren’t the first signs, when I think back on it. In 2023, while I was staying in Bozeman and exploring Yellowstone and Grand Teton, I remember listening to the Rolf Potts podcast episode with Nomadic Matt about travel burnout. They, and so many others, have stayed on the road for much longer stretches than me and lived nomadic life for many more years than I did, so I wasn’t sure I earned the kinship I felt. Nonetheless, I really related to the conversation. I told myself “this too shall pass” and reminded myself there are many ways to deal with travel burnout and that I would be able to handle it. I was already a slow traveler, staying in places for months at a time and allowing myself rest days, so I ought to have longevity, right?

Compounded by extraneous stressors

Just before the hives, as I landed in Romania, the AI revolution (or de-evolution) had finally caught up to my website. I’d read about how my friends’ blog traffic was decimated in the prior year as they watched their stats tank all the way down from 100,000+ to 0 visits per day literally overnight because of plagiarism and AI blurbs in search results that prevent guests from clicking through to the source content. The graphs they posted were unbelievable, and now my own stats looked similar. When I logged in after Greenland, my traffic had suddenly, drastically been cut in half. I’d spent years putting my body and mind through the ringer to be able to write about unique, interesting places and advise readers (for free) on how to plan their solo trips, but now I felt as if it was all for naught. Why was I doing all this? 

Of course, I was doing it because I genuinely loved traveling, hiking, learning, and experiencing states of awe. I enjoy gathering all my thoughts and making sense of them by putting them into words and photos, coming up with written takeaways. I think most people do this, whether they realize it or not – everything that happens fits into the narrative they have about themselves. We create narratives about everything. It was fun for me to write. But the imperative to keep writing meant that I had to keep traveling, back-to-back-to-back, so I’d have new stories. If readers were no longer able to find those stories, why put myself through such effort when I could just travel intermittently while having a normal office job, like most people do? I had just left my remote job after my company was bought by a corporation that I wasn’t sure had the same values. I really needed this full-time writing thing to work out, but it was looking like it wouldn’t.

In October 2024, Google held a summit where they invited bloggers who had been heavily impacted by the recent changes to gather at their HQ and share their grievances. Bloggers hoped they might come away with some hope for the future, but it was the opposite. They all wrote about how they felt more demoralized than ever, that it’s likely their websites would never recover, that our tech overlords can do whatever they want and would continue to plagiarize with no remorse. Why publish anything if it will just be stolen?

When that news came out, I was in New Orleans, having cut my stay in Romania short when I realized I was out-of-sorts and might fare better by coming home and being around my people. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and was surrounded by friends and neighbors, but I even felt out of place amongst them, like I was a character from a different book who was crashing their story.

While I was there, I posted a comment on social media that was taken out of context in a “bean soup” sort of way and dealt with trolls bombarding me, and remembered that these days when you post, you’re more likely to reach random people who have no idea who you are, where you come from, and what your expertise is than you are to reach your own followers. Posting about travel online used to be fun. I found a community of like-minded people on Twitter way back when, and even met some of them in person; I got to live in France while housesitting for one fellow travel blogger I’d met online. When I first started hitchhiking and doing volunteer work exchanges at hostels, it was a whole new exciting world and I loved comparing notes with the other adventurers. We would read each other’s posts and learn from each other. It had the scrappy DIY feeling of circulating zines. 

Now, everything was clickbait and ragebait and trite one-liners, bots with political aims, dead internet theory. He Who Shall Not Be Named was elected for a second time that November. There was a pervading sense of hopelessness in all things.

That old atmosphere of camaraderie and curiosity was gone. Not only was my website in danger, but every other avenue of communication I’d previously enjoyed was also under siege. While my body was turning on itself, it felt like all the thoughts I had ever poured out were not safe either.

It seemed like a good time to find some security, to hunker down while the tornado swirled. So that’s where I’ve been.

Where has the motivation gone?

I was living in Denver for a job, so I thought about writing blog posts about things to do in Denver. But I couldn’t bring myself to because I hate Denver and was not inspired.

I considered writing opinion pieces or think-pieces, but I didn’t really have any thoughts or opinions. I also didn’t feel like inviting anymore strangers into my head or my life.

I considered doing little day trips, but the thought of traveling anywhere at all, even for just a few hours, sounded like torture. I was perfectly content not to travel. I actively avoided it. I especially didn’t want to go to places I had been to before and really liked, places that were not mine anymore.

When I think back on my travels, I still feel the joy and awe that I felt then; I could cry at some of the beautiful memories. So it’s been hard for me to understand these feelings of near-disgust at the prospect of traveling again. Haven’t I rested enough?

Last week, Backpacker Magazine published an article by Corey Buhay called “Do Hikers Need an Off-Season? A Burnt-Out Backpacker Makes the Case.”

This piqued my interest immediately. I thought of that day in Kyrgyzstan, asking my fellow hiker if we only have a finite amount of adrenaline stores and once they’re depleted, they’re depleted. I’d felt embarrassed about struggling on that trip and didn’t think I could have trained any more or any better. 

Buhay lists signs that you may need to take time off, including “you feel slower than usual despite hiking consistently,” “you’re tired all the time,” and “you feel overwhelmed at the idea of planning your next hike or trip.” Hello, me.

There are also stories of ultramarathon runners suddenly becoming unable to run a single mile, though they were used to winning 100-mile races no problem. When I was working at the Grand Canyon and training a lot for hiking below rim, I remember reading an article about this strange phenomenon from Outside Magazine called “Running on Empty – The Mysterious Syndrome Destroying Endurance Athletes.” Runner Mike Wolfe said it wasn’t a typical case of bonking or cramps, “I didn’t push myself too hard. It wasn’t like my stomach was bad or I couldn’t eat. It was like my body was just shut down. Like, Nope, you can’t run that hard. I’m not going to allow it.” Dozens of elite athletes experiencing similar issues are quoted in the article. 

Nieman, a professor of health and exercise science at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, has spent his career studying the effects of training on the immune system. In 1992, he received the first of a dozen distressingly similar letters from endurance athletes, each of them describing a sudden loss of ability as they struggled with everything from anemia to chronic dehydration to a basic inability to get out of bed….The most common symptom described by athletes is simply an ineffable, confounding lack of ability. “It’s not fatigue,” Kreher clarifies. “If you’re pushing the limits of your body, you’re going to feel fatigued.” Instead, it’s what Nieman first encountered in those letters he received: the sudden, almost overnight disappearance of a runner’s elite endurance talents.

Obviously, I am not an elite ultramarathon runner and have never achieved the heights of these athletes, but as Buhay attests, long distance hiking is an endurance sport too, even if you’re not covering the lengths of the PCT or AT in one go. I resonate with so many clips from the “Running on Empty” article, especially when thinking about the time I broke out in hives, and the theories about the combination of mental and physical stress: 

“A shock to the parasympathetic nervous system”

“For now the focus among doctors is on determining the physiological causes of the condition, but even here there’s no consensus. Professor Nieman believes that OTS is rooted in sufferers’ immune systems.”

“He theorizes that true overtraining syndrome is triggered by a combination of psychological and physical stress.”

“I asked Wolfe if he could pinpoint a moment or a specific event that might have had that kind of singular influence. He couldn’t think of one, but he speculated that years of mental fatigue could have taken its toll. ‘I believe in the mind-body connection,’ he said. ‘I’ve often wondered about myself and others having worked so hard for so long that at some point the mind quits before the body and just says, ‘Enough.’”

“Soon after the onset of acute symptoms, he sent Skaggs a desperate e-mail looking for answers. ‘If he had any advice at all, it was to get away from the whole scene,’ says Roes. ‘In time your body will feel better, and you’ll be able to just run however it fits into your life.'”

Maybe I wasn’t running marathons, but in the midst of hiking hundreds of miles, I was also traveling by myself as a woman in foreign countries, trying to figure out where I was going to sleep each night, how to translate food labels and road signs in other languages, foreign currency, public transportation, rushing not to miss planes, constantly changing time zones, and working remotely at my 9-5 the entire time (except in the final year, when I took a sabbatical from work and increased my travel pace so I could write more – maybe the final nail in the coffin). Half the time I was living in my truck and using a Jackery power station and solar panels to work remotely from BLM campsites, and shitting in a bucket.

I found it exciting and fun, and much better than the alternative of working in an office and never going anywhere, but maybe it was quietly taking a mental toll on me for a lot longer than I realized. 

Are we all burnt out?

If you are a millennial, you’ve probably been fed the same videos on Instagram over the last couple years as I have – the ones highlighting how our generation is so burnt out in general because we see no ROI from our efforts the way previous generations seemingly did. You can have a degree, work hard full-time and even do overtime and get promotions and raises, but it does not keep up with inflation and we still can not save enough for the cost of basic living. It used to be that if you worked a normal job, one person’s wage could afford a home, food, a vehicle, a couple nice vacations a year, and to support their family. Now both partners in a relationship work full time and still can’t afford to own anything outright or take any time off. 

It’s not just me or my little subset of writers and travelers that are experiencing burnout due to the state of the world. I have friends in marketing, medical fields, and social work that are all expressing the same sentiments, and hundreds of people online. Maybe it’s just my algorithm, but it seems like it’s everyone, regardless of which career they’ve chosen. 

And it seems everyone has come to the same conclusion, that it’s not sustainable to continue with maximum effort indefinitely if you have no hope of seeing return on investment in some kind of way, besides just the self-confidence and satisfaction derived from a job well done. We are not endless wells, and you are not a “sellout” if you hope for some kind of payoff. At the very minimum, you should be able to rely on the principle that the work you’re doing will be yours, and won’t be stolen and ripped off as if copyright is just some cute utopian idea. We need to be able to own something to feel that our work matters, and to continue doing it; if not homes, can’t we at least own our creative output?

Why now?

The fact that I’m writing this diatribe seems like a sign that perhaps the fog is beginning to lift – knock on wood. Words are spilling out of me today, in my characteristic overly verbose and annoyingly introspective style, unable to be culled. Why now?

Is it because I’m feeling more understood and supported now that I see articles like the one from Backpacker Magazine, or I Travel for the Stars‘ Substack on why she decided not to go through with her move to Sweden (another “this is something I always wanted, but now it’s not” type of story)?

Is two years the amount of time it takes to start to recover from burnout? I’ve been working full-time throughout these years, sometimes in stressful environments and on stressful projects, so I haven’t truly been resting. But I did step away from the hallmarks of my previous lifestyle during this time. I’ve had a stationary home, and have barely exerted myself physically, and haven’t pooped in a bucket in the back of a truck.

I’ve recently started to have ideas again, and dreams, and imagined different plans for the future. They’re not always about travel destinations I want to visit; I thought about taking a pastry class, or starting a coffee truck, or saving up to take my dog on a BarkAir trip to Wales so she can explore her ancestry as a Welsh Springer Spaniel – lol. I took a day trip to Great Sand Dunes. I taught myself ProCreate and started making Dog Collar Patches with hand-drawn designs based off of the travel photos I’ve taken throughout the years. These things are random and I still feel largely directionless, but it’s better than the numb nothingness I felt before. 

By next summer, I want to be hiking to the same capacity I used to be able to, I want to conquer another 14er here in Colorado or do a big backpacking trip with my dog. When I start training at the gym, will my body immediately say “nope”, like Wolfe’s did? As I begin to publish articles again, will I be met with negativity or theft, and want to crawl back into my hole? 

If you’ve been through stages of your life where burnout eclipsed everything, what did recovery look like for you? How did you inch back into your life and find yourself again? Was it the same You as before, or had you changed? Was that a good or bad thing?

I’d love to hear your experiences, as I’m still navigating what “moving forward” looks like for me now. Most of my life I’ve had a vision and pursued it relentlessly, and this is the first time I haven’t been able to picture where I’m going. As long as Maple is along for the ride, I guess we could go anywhere from here.

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