Resting without guilt: AI doesn't get tired, I do

The tool I use to make the music of PLANETA GAYFOLK keeps no hours. It doesn't yawn, its eyes don't close at two in the morning, it never asks for a Sunday off or slips away for a long weekend. I ask for a version and it gives me one. I ask for another and there's another. If I wanted, I could keep going until dawn, and then again until the next one. It would hold out. I wouldn't.

It has taken me about two years and around 273 singles to learn something anyone with a body ought to know by default: what a machine is capable of is not a target for a human being. Written down like that, it sounds obvious. Lived from the inside, with the laptop open and an idea half finished, it isn't. This piece is about that: tiredness, the guilt of stopping, and why I've decided that rest is part of the craft too.

A factory that never closes

There's something that doesn't get said much when people talk about making things with artificial intelligence. The whole debate revolves around whether it's art, whether it's cheating, who gets the credit. Hardly anyone talks about pace. And pace, for me, is what has changed the most.

It used to be a long road from having a lyric written to hearing it turned into a song. You had to wait, rely on other people, find money, find time. That wait was frustrating, but it also forced you to stop. Now the road is very short. I write a lyric in the afternoon and by that same night I can have ten proposals for how it might sound. That is a huge gift for someone like me, who has more songs in his head than hours in the day.

The trouble is that the gift arrives without a manual. When producing costs so little, the question stops being "can I make another one?" and becomes "why not make another one?". And that second question has no bottom. There is always one more version to try, a chorus that could land better, an old lyric that deserves its moment. The factory never closes because nobody has hung a sign on the door.

Some nights I realise I've spent hours choosing between almost identical takes, eyes dry and coffee cold, and I can no longer tell whether one is better than another or whether I'm simply too tired to hear. At that point I'm not creating anything. I'm working a shift nobody assigned me.

What burnout is, according to the WHO

It's worth naming things carefully, so I'll be precise. The word burnout gets used a lot, and often loosely. The World Health Organization includes it in its International Classification of Diseases, ICD-11, which came into effect in 2022. But it includes it in a specific way: not as a medical condition, but as an occupational phenomenon, listed among the factors that influence health.

According to the WHO, burnout results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It describes it through three features:

• Exhaustion: feelings of energy depletion, of running on empty, of one night's sleep no longer being enough.
• Mental distance from your job: negative or cynical feelings about what you do, a pull to get away from it, detachment.
• Reduced professional efficacy: the sense that you're achieving less, that it doesn't come out right any more, that you're no good at what you used to do well.

The WHO stresses an important nuance: the term refers specifically to the work context and shouldn't be applied to experiences in other areas of life. In other words, it's not the same as being worn out by your family or a relationship. And an even more important one: burnout is not a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, although it can resemble them and sometimes sit alongside them. So anyone who feels this way shouldn't just stick the label on themselves. What I'm sharing here is general information and can't be used to diagnose anyone. A health professional is the person who can assess what's going on.

The signs, seen from my desk

I'm not going to say I have burnout, because that call isn't mine to make. What I can describe are the signs I've learned to spot in myself when the pace gets away from me. I'm sharing them in case they ring a bell.

The first is that I listen without hearing. I put one take on, take it off, put another on, and I have no idea what I thought of any of them. My judgement, which is the only thing I really bring to that process, switches off, and without judgement the tool is useless.

The second is that lyrics that used to make me laugh stop being funny. I write songs with humour, titles designed to get a smile out of you before you even press play. When I'm reading everything with the face of a civil servant at ten to five, something is wrong.

The third is cynicism. That "what's the point anyway" thought, which has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with wear and tear. When a song I was excited about turns into one more box to tick, the song isn't the problem.

And the fourth is the sneakiest: rest stops resting me. I close the laptop and my head stays open, making lists, remembering what's still to upload, working out how far behind I am on a schedule I made up myself.

If any of this happens to you for weeks on end, it isn't proof that you're weak. It's information. And it deserves to be listened to.

The guilt of stopping

The hardest part for me isn't the tiredness. It's the guilt that shows up when I try to pay attention to it.

When the tool can work non-stop, every hour I don't use it feels like an hour wasted. It's a very modern trap: mistaking what's possible for what's required. Because I could make another song, I feel I should. Because other people release constantly, I feel that if I stop, I vanish. And because I work alone, running a label where nobody else clocks in, there's no one to tell me to go home. The boss who pushes me and the employee who runs out of steam are the same person, and neither of them gets holidays.

I've had to repeat a very simple idea to myself many times, until I half believed it: the machine doesn't get tired because it has nothing to tire. It has no body, no life outside, nothing to lose by carrying on. I do. Comparing myself to it isn't ambition, it's a category error. It's like feeling bad for not being as fast as a microwave.

There's a subtler guilt too, which is harder to admit. Sometimes I feel that, because the music is made with AI, resting is almost an indulgence, that my work is "less work" and I haven't earned a break. But writing lyrics, sifting through dozens of proposals, throwing most of them away, editing music videos, deciding on covers and dates and carrying an entire project on my own is as tiring as any other job. Tiredness doesn't ask permission to exist based on which tool you use.

My songs are much clearer about this than my life is. In "Marica Chill" the chorus says it straight out: "Marica chill, sin culpa, sin plan" — no guilt, no plan. I wrote it as a market-stall-and-beach fantasy, with a fan and see-through shorts, but every time I reread it, it also feels like a reminder for the man who wrote it. No guilt. No plan. A day without producing isn't a day stolen from anyone.

Rest is part of the craft

It has helped me a lot to stop thinking of rest as the opposite of work and start thinking of it as part of the work. No athlete trains flat out every day. Musicians who play an instrument know their hands need to stop. Fields are left fallow so they can yield again. Nobody would call that laziness.

Something similar happens with lyrics. My best ideas almost never turn up in front of the screen. They turn up in the street, in a stranger's conversation on the metro, in something someone says on a Madrid terrace without knowing they've just handed me a title. If I spend the whole day generating, I'm in none of those places. And then what I write starts to sound like what I've already written, because I haven't let anything new in.

Rest also sharpens judgement. A song that seems essential at three in the morning often sounds weak at eleven. And the other way round: a take I threw out when I was exhausted, heard with a clear head, was sometimes exactly the right one. Rest doesn't cost me songs. It helps me choose which ones deserve to come out.

One of my songs is almost an invitation to this. "Holy Stillness", my lullaby, has a couple of lines I'd like pinned above my desk: "Rest now, little one, / Rest without fear". And near the end: "Nothing is rushed, / Everything is right". Sometimes it's harder to listen to my own songs than to write them.

Concrete limits, no heroics

Saying "you need to rest" is easy. The hard part is turning it into something you can actually do on a Tuesday. These are the habits I try to keep. I don't always manage, but when I do, it shows.

• Days without generating. I set aside days when I don't open the tool. I can write in a notebook if I feel like it, or do nothing creative at all. But nothing gets produced that day. Knowing in advance that the day exists takes away the pressure to squeeze every other one.
• A closing time. When it comes, I shut the laptop. Actually shut it, lid down, not left open "just in case". Whatever isn't finished can wait until tomorrow. It almost always can.
• A cap on versions. If none of a reasonable number of takes convinces me, forty more won't fix it. The problem is usually in the lyric or in my tiredness. I stop and come back another day.
• I set the calendar, with breathing room. I choose my own release dates, so I can give them slack. A pace that only works if everything goes perfectly isn't a pace, it's a tightrope.
• No comparing output. There will always be someone who releases more. That race has no finish line, and my songs gain nothing by coming out sooner.
• Notifications off at night. Stats, comments and messages can wait for the morning. Checking them in bed doesn't inform me, it keeps me awake.
• Looking after the basics. Going to bed at a similar time, not skipping meals to finish something, getting outside in daylight. It sounds like a textbook because it is one, and that's exactly why it works.

What I'm after isn't working less. It's still being able to work, and wanting to, five years from now. A sustainable pace is one you can keep up without breaking, not one that lets you set a record one week and disappear the next.

If the tiredness gets too heavy

I want to end on something more serious, because exhaustion sometimes doesn't stay exhaustion. If you've spent weeks feeling empty, drained, cut off from what used to matter to you, or if the tiredness is mixed with sadness, distress or the feeling that nothing makes sense, don't carry it alone. Talk to someone you trust. And seek professional help: in Spain you can start with your family doctor, who can guide you or refer you to mental health services; elsewhere, your GP or local health service is a good first step. Songs keep me a lot of company, but they are no substitute for therapy or treatment. I go into this in more depth in my mental health series.

And if the exhaustion ever turns into thoughts of death or of hurting yourself:

• In Spain, call 024: the suicide prevention line, free, confidential and open day and night, 24 hours.
• In an emergency or immediate danger, call 112.
• In Latin America and the rest of Europe, contact your local emergency number.

Reaching out for support is a lot like closing the laptop in time: a way of looking after the person who does everything else. The machine can keep going. You have every right to stop.