Off-Grid Workload

The tiredness doesn’t come from a single hard day. It builds slowly, through repetition. Lifting the same things. Checking the same systems. Solving the same small problems before they become bigger ones. You’re rarely exhausted in a dramatic way—you’re just never fully rested.

What makes this fatigue hard to explain is that it’s preventative. You’re tired because things are working, not because they failed. The effort goes into keeping problems invisible, which means there’s nothing obvious to point to when you feel worn down.

You start pacing yourself differently. Tasks get broken into smaller pieces. Recovery time stretches. You notice how long it takes your body to settle after a day of upkeep, even when everything went smoothly.

From the outside, it looks manageable. From the inside, it feels like carrying a low-level load that never gets set down. You don’t feel burnt out—you feel occupied, constantly.

The tradeoff here isn’t obvious until later. Independence gave you control, but it also made you the buffer. There’s no shared system absorbing strain for you. The margin lives in your body instead.

This page exists to recognize that unseen fatigue—the kind that comes from holding things together quietly, day after day, without anything ever officially going wrong.