I’m overwhelmed by choice, and simultaneously, tired of making choices, so the solution is just to… do nothing. One angle to burnout that I have thought about

I’m overwhelmed by choice, and simultaneously, tired of making choices, so the solution is just to… do nothing. One angle to burnout that I have thought about (but never seen others discuss) is what I'll call "personal narrative management." It goes like this: For most of human history, people had fairly straightforward narratives that they could rely upon when going through life. You were born into a certain community, had a certain societal role, lived your life, then went to [afterlife.] The list of potential options was pretty narrow, and the list of potential futures was likewise constrained within humanly-conceivable limits. In the modern era, however, this has mostly evaporated. Nation states are too large to have a single cohesive metaphysical narrative. Traditional religious structures are fracturing without much to replace them. The media continually creates and destroys potential pasts and futures, creating anxiety and never relieving it. This is easy to see if you read articles from a year or two ago; many take the form of "If X happens, Y will happen, and then [horrible thing] Z will happen." Yet X never happens, was likely never going to happen, and in fact was mostly just a narrative created to generate clicks for ad revenue. Yet we, the readers, have been thrown through a narrative loop. One approach to dealing with burnout could thus be "managing your personal narrative." Remove the choices that really don't make sense to you. Stop reading news stories that are opinion or projection based and just stick to descriptions of events. Make a career path that is based on stuff you enjoy doing and not on the predominant narrative is for a certain profession.