The antidote to burnout and the existential inquiry it brings seems to be doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale. It becomes exciting not to see what you can do without limits, but to see what you can do with them.

Anu Atluru writes:

“I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.”

I think another driver of this sentiment and behavior is that chasing scale strips you of some humanity. It puts your head too high up in the clouds. It removes you from what happens in the real world with real people. Pursuing something that can’t scale does the exact opposite: it grounds you. It’s a comforting and healing next act.