Two weeks after taking time off to think, the author handed in a resignation from a design-engineering role that paid well, offered benefits and remote work, and boasted nice coworkers. They’d doubled component coverage, fixed bugs and accessibility issues, run surveys showing high team satisfaction—and still ended up miserable. Self-doubt crept in: did their work even matter? Would anyone notice if quality slipped? The relief they felt on quitting outweighed the fear of having no next gig. What tipped the scale was “AI burnout.” In meetings, coworkers flipped on automatic note-taking tools without consent. AI chatbots answered product questions in Slack without anyone fact-checking. Thousands of lines of AI-generated code merged without close review. Designers leaned on AI to spit out prototypes, skipping debates on goals or tradeoffs. Pull-request feedback came from bots, not colleagues. Every day brought a new prompt or mandated AI tool, and every scenario left the author debating whether to push back—and too drained even to try. They describe this constant mental load as political burnout: the grief of seeing ideals corrupted by convenience. That sense of betrayal extends beyond AI. When they started in the early 2010s, tech felt progressive: user-centered design was fresh, civic projects like 18F and US Digital Service aimed to improve government. Fast forward through Trump’s first term, a pandemic, racial-justice protests and a fleeting “return to normal,” and now we’re back at a more extreme second Trump era. Big names abandoned climate pledges, CEOs cozy up to corrupt regimes, and organizations once lauded for “don’t be evil” show up with gold trophies for a ruthless president. The author mourns an industry that once promised social good but now chases profit and political favor. Invoking Freudenberger’s 1970s definition of burnout as “the emotional experience of political defeat,” they argue that this exhaustion isn’t about long hours or stress. It’s about investing hope in a cause only to watch it collapse under corporate or technological shortcuts. Designing and coding for the web still excites them. They just can’t ignore an industry that has lost its original ideals.