Working Late Was My Identity Until My Health Forced a Change

The culture at the startup in Berlin was one I had chosen deliberately - fast, ambitious, built around people who cared so much about what they were building that the line between work and identity had largely dissolved. I was 25 and I loved it, or I thought I did.

We worked late not because we were told to but because the work was genuinely compelling and because there was a particular social warmth to the office at 9pm that had its own gravity.

The hours built slowly over eighteen months until working until midnight several nights a week had become completely normal and working a standard day felt somehow like underperformance. The first sign that something was wrong was physical. I started getting headaches that were persistent and resistant to anything I tried.

Then my vision started behaving strangely - occasional blurring that came and went, which I mentioned to no one and attributed to screen time. At 26, during a particularly heavy week, I had what I would later learn was a vasovagal syncope - I fainted, alone in the office at 11pm, and came to on the floor.

The doctor I saw the following morning was not impressed with my description of a typical working week. She was precise and unemotional about it: what I was describing was a sustained physiological stress load that the fainting episode was my nervous system signalling its refusal to continue absorbing.

She used the phrase 'chronic overstimulation with insufficient recovery' and the clinical framing of something I had been treating as a virtue was clarifying in a way that plain advice never would have been.

I reduced my hours, not gradually but immediately and significantly, because the fear of another episode on a floor alone was stronger than the cultural pressure to stay.

The response from colleagues was interesting - some were genuinely concerned, some treated it as a temporary interruption, and a few seemed subtly competitive about their own continuing availability. What I found, with fewer hours, was that my output did not decrease proportionally.

Focused work in a reasonable day produced almost as much as exhausted work across an unreasonably long one, and the quality was considerably better. I left that company at 28 for a role with a culture I had pre-screened during the interview process specifically for its relationship with time. I still work hard.

I do not work in a way that ends with me on the floor of an empty office anymore. The difference matters more than I used to believe it did.