Agency and the Port Freezer

There was a time when I worked as a laborer in a port’s commercial freezer storage. Picture this: -25В°C, a floor covered in slick ice, heavy crates of frozen fish, and forklifts flying around. To put it mildly, the job was about as far from “creative” as it gets.

Naturally, sitting there on those crates, I wasn’t philosophizing about high-minded concepts like “professional burnout.” Back then, it was just an instinct—an internal reflex. I am simply biologically incapable of functioning as a faceless cog.

Since I couldn’t alter the external environment, I instinctively changed the internal framework of the process. I took that hostile environment and turned it into a tactical game and a personal cryogenic gym. Forklift schedules became a chess match, the slippery ice became a balance and coordination trainer, and I optimized the ergonomics of every single movement to eliminate waste. Globally, I was doing the exact same job. But internally, I stopped being an object acted upon by circumstances and became the author of my own space. A genuine sporting grit kicked in, and the routine transformed into a controlled testing ground.

The conceptual understanding of these mechanics came much later—through years of managing projects and architectures, watching people across various roles burn out by the department.

Today, it’s fashionable to treat burnout with meditation courses, sabbaticals, or office ping-pong tables. But we don’t burn out from the sheer volume of work. We burn out from a loss of agency—when we become a disposable function in someone else’s black-box process, chasing KPIs we neither understand nor care about. The brain simply refuses to allocate dopamine to power a conveyor belt where you are just a replaceable resource. The result is that heavy, leaden emptiness.

What makes you a Creator is not your title, your status, or your membership in some “hyped” industry. It is your capacity to assert your will and structure the chaos within your own radius of action.

If you feel yourself burning out, stop being a function. Start playing your own game on their field. Hack the routine from the inside out. It is the only antidote that scales over the long term.