When Burnout Makes You Root Against Your Own Principles

The Strange Relief of Watching “My Side” Lose

I caught myself feeling something I didn’t want to feel: a flicker of happiness when Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and others were denied bail.

That’s the kind of sentence that makes you immediately reach for a moral escape hatch. Because I’ve spent years arguing the opposite—arguing that speech shouldn’t be treated like a crime, that the state shouldn’t keep people in pre-trial limbo, that civil liberties aren’t conditional on whether you like someone.

So why did I feel relieved?

Not because I suddenly became an authoritarian. Not because I stopped believing in free expression. I think it was something uglier and more ordinary: exhaustion. The kind of exhaustion that warps your emotional reactions even when your principles haven’t changed.

When Your Principles Stay, But Your Empathy Moves

There’s a difference between what you believe and what you feel. Most of us want to pretend we’re consistent machines: input values, output pure, predictable moral judgments.

In reality, your emotional brain keeps its own ledger.

If you’ve been defending people, narratives, and movements for a long time—and you start feeling like those same movements are becoming intellectually dishonest or morally selective—you don’t just disagree. You get tired. You start resenting the entire transaction: I keep paying for this, and you keep lowering the quality of what I’m asked to defend.

And then something happens that you intellectually oppose, and your emotional brain goes: Finally. I don’t have to do this anymore.

That’s not noble. But it’s human.

The Breaking Point: Watching Leftism Turn Into Campism

I supported leftists for most of my life. I didn’t do it because it was trendy or because I needed a political identity. I did it because a lot of the underlying values made sense to me:

• skepticism of state power
• due process and civil liberties
• dignity of the individual
• opposition to authoritarianism
• basic intellectual honesty about evidence and power

But somewhere along the way, large chunks of the online/political Left stopped feeling like any of that. It started feeling like a different operating system:

anti-West first, everything else negotiable.

That’s what broke me. Not “Palestine” as a topic. Not “America bad” as a critique. The part that broke me was the lazy moral template that gets applied again and again:

If the West is involved, the West is the villain.
Therefore whoever opposes the West is entitled to your sympathy.
Therefore inconvenient facts are optional.

Once you see that pattern, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, being asked to keep chanting along feels like lying.

This is where my patience snapped: I can handle disagreement. I can handle complexity. I can handle tragedy. What I can’t handle is selective moral vision dressed up as principle.

The Cognitive Tax of “Always Defending”

There’s a particular kind of burnout that comes from defending abstract ideals in public spaces that don’t reward nuance.

If you say “free speech matters,” someone hears “I support whoever is currently being criticized.” If you say “due process matters,” someone hears “I’m making excuses.” If you say “this situation is complicated,” someone hears “I’m a coward.”

Eventually you start noticing that a lot of people aren’t trying to understand; they’re trying to recruit you into a script. And once politics becomes a script, it stops being politics and starts being a performance.

The emotional cost isn’t just the arguments. It’s the constant pressure to be predictably aligned. To be a reliable soldier in someone else’s moral army.

At some point, your mind starts reaching for relief wherever it can find it—even in places you don’t endorse on principle.

That’s how you end up feeling a dark little exhale when someone you used to defend gets publicly punished. Not because punishment is good, but because obligation is heavy.

Outrage as a Lifestyle (And Why I’m Done)

This is where my frustration with “leftists picking a fight with everything” comes in.

I’m not against criticism. I’m not against holding power accountable. I’m not against calling out genuine harm. But the default setting in many activist-ish spaces is permanent escalation:

• a tweet becomes a scandal
• a clumsy sentence becomes a moral indictment
• a disagreement becomes a purity test
• an imperfect person becomes a symbol that must be crushed

That’s not accountability. That’s an outrage economy.

And outrage is addictive because it provides something seductive: instant moral clarity. It turns the world into a children’s story—heroes, villains, and a crowd that knows exactly what to boo.

The cost is that you start treating normal human imperfection as violence. You start reading intent into everything. You start assuming the worst interpretation is the truest one. You start needing enemies to feel coherent.

That’s not politics improving society. That’s a social machine that converts attention into anger.

Why I Sided With Deepinder Goyal (And What That Says About Me)

This pattern is also why I found myself siding with Deepinder Goyal over a tweet that turned into a predictable online pile-on.

I’m not even talking about agreeing with every word someone types out casually. I’m talking about proportionality—the lost art of responding to things at the size they actually are.

Sometimes a tweet is just a tweet:

• a human being speaking loosely
• a public figure thinking out loud
• a comment that could’ve been phrased better

But outrage culture doesn’t treat it like that. It treats it like an opportunity to enforce discipline. Not debate, not persuasion—discipline.

And this is where I’ve shifted: I’m far more allergic now to disproportionate escalation than I am to imperfect speech.

Because disproportionate escalation doesn’t just punish the target. It teaches everyone else to become more careful, more bland, more robotic. It trains people to stop talking unless they can speak in approved language. It makes public life brittle.

That brittleness doesn’t produce justice. It produces fear and conformity—often the exact things leftist politics claims to oppose.

The Feeling I Don’t Love, But Refuse to Lie About

So back to the bail denial relief.

I don’t like that I felt it. I don’t think it’s a “good” emotion. But I also don’t want to do the fake-perfection thing where I pretend my mind is untouched by years of political stress and disappointment.

I can acknowledge a messy emotional reaction without converting it into a principle.

There’s a line I’m trying to hold:

• I can be exhausted by leftist spaces and still oppose state repression.
• I can dislike certain activists and still believe they deserve due process.
• I can reject a movement’s behavior without endorsing the state’s cruelty.

If anything, this whole episode has forced me to separate civil liberties from tribal loyalty. That separation is uncomfortable, because tribes hate it when you stop reacting on cue.

But I’d rather be uncomfortable than dishonest.

Living Without a Camp

What I want now is not a new team. I’m not looking to replace one set of slogans with another. I’m trying to rebuild a way of thinking that isn’t based on reflexes.

A few things I’m trying to practice:

• Case-by-case judgment, even when it annoys everyone
• Proportionality, especially online
• No moral outsourcing to movements that demand total emotional obedience
• Consistency on civil liberties, even when it benefits people I can’t stand

This doesn’t make me enlightened. It just makes me less usable.

Conclusion

I don’t think feeling relieved at someone else’s misfortune automatically makes you a bad person. It might just mean you’re burnt out, disillusioned, and reacting to the end of a psychological burden. The real test is what you do next: whether you let that feeling rewrite your principles, or whether you treat it as a symptom of exhaustion and return to what you actually believe. I’m trying—imperfectly—to choose the second.