02 Aug From Burnout to Barrel: A Corporate Zombie’s Guide to Wave Salvation

I’ve seen your type before.

You, with your thousand-yard Slack stare, your third triple-shot Americano, and that nervous twitch every time someone says “let’s circle back.” You who can merge a PDF in under two seconds but haven’t merged your soul with joy since pre-pandemic Happy Hour. You’ve got a calendar so color-coded it looks like a toddler’s art therapy session, and not a single box labeled breathe.

You, my friend, are what I lovingly call a corporate zombie.
Undead in a swivel chair.
Haunting open-plan offices.
Chained to the clacking rhythm of KPIs and key results and quarterly deliverables that never quite deliver.

But I’m not here to roast you. (Okay, maybe lightly char.)
I’m here to save you.

And not with a webinar, a juice cleanse, or an executive coaching session in a beige hotel ballroom called “Living Authentically in High-Performance Spaces.”
No, darling.
I come bearing saltwater and a glorified floating plank of freedom.

Because surfing, oh, blessed, blissful, occasionally humiliating surfing.. is the exact opposite of your existential collapse.

Out in the lineup, deadlines dissolve like sugar in saltwater; Outlook’s pings can’t reach you, and the only cloud in sight is a fluffy one drifting overhead, not the digital purgatory where your spirit usually suffocates.

I used to be like you.
Addicted to urgency. Hopelessly hooked on gold stars and superior kudos, I once mistook performance reviews for a sense of self..
I once emailed someone the phrase “synergize cross-functional alignment” and meant it.

Then I burned out so hard, my chakras filed for unemployment.

I fled. Straight into the ocean.
And what I found there was not just foam and waves and the occasional wedgie.
I found the antidote.
And more importantly, I found Wave House Surf Camp in Bali a sun-drenched sanctuary where burnt-out & adventure hungry humans go to turn saltwater into soul fuel.

Let me tell you what happens when you trade spreadsheets for surf wax.

First: your body remembers it’s alive. You paddle, you fall, you scream a little, you get sand in places sand has no business being, and somehow, you love it. Because unlike in the boardroom, falling here means you tried. You got in the damn water. You showed up for yourself.

Second: you forget. In the best way.
You forget what your title is, what your five-year projection plan was, who Jeff from Finance is and why he keeps replying all. The only metrics that matter are the tide charts and the height of the swell. You measure your day in waves caught and sunset happy hours, not in Slack pings and unread notifications.

Third: you start to laugh.
Real, from-the-diaphragm, ugly-snort laughter. At yourself. At the sea. At how seriously you used to take things like fonts and “stakeholder alignment.” You laugh until the part of you that was calcifying under performance reviews starts to shake loose.

Because the ocean doesn’t care about your résumé.
It doesn’t care if you’re a VP, a junior associate, or an emotionally repressed spreadsheet gremlin.
It treats you all the same.
Which, by the way, is a great lesson in humility.. and wet wipeouts.

Surfing isn’t just a sport.
It’s a cosmic joke with divine timing.
It’s a mirror and a teacher and sometimes a ruthless little bastard.
It will toss you around, hold you under, make you question your life choices, then spit you out – reborn.

And it’s cheaper than therapy.. if you don’t count the cost of that first surfboard you bought thinking you’d be Kelly Slater by Thursday.

So here’s my pitch:

Quit the spreadsheet spiral. Pause the ping-fueled panic.
Come catch a wave.
Let the sea rinse your existential dread.
Let it un-zombify you.
Let it teach you how to breathe again, not through KPIs but through your actual lungs.

And when you finally stand up on that board, wobbly, salty, maybe crying a little, you’ll feel it.

You’ll remember.

You were never meant to live your life just in grayscale emails.
You were meant to surf.
To stumble toward joy.
To chase the sun with sea legs and laughter lines.

So, suit up.
Not in pinstripes or pressed collars, but in sun-bleached lycra still clinging with memory of yesterdays reef.
Your life isn’t waiting at the end of a quarterly review. It’s just past the shorebreak, where the horizon breathes and the tide reminds you you’re still alive.

See you at Wave House Bali, you beautiful burnout.
We’ve saved you a board, and maybe… a better story.