Two years ago I was sitting at my desk at 11pm, the fourth consecutive late night of the month, staring at a spreadsheet that had stopped making sense two hours earlier. I opened a browser tab, typed something like “most extreme thing I can do alone” and somehow ended up on a page about gorilla trekking in Uganda. I booked it that night. Permit, flights, the whole thing. I told no one until the following morning. Here is what happened.
What Burnout Actually Feels Like From the Inside
I want to be precise about this because burnout gets described vaguely and the vagueness makes it easier to dismiss. For me it was not exhaustion in the way that a hard week at work produces exhaustion. It was more like a dimming. The things that used to produce enthusiasm produced nothing. The work I used to find genuinely engaging felt like I was operating machinery I had stopped understanding. Social interactions required effort that felt disproportionate to what they returned. I was functional — my job was getting done, I was showing up — but I was not present in any meaningful sense.
The decision to book Uganda was not rational. I had never been to Africa. I did not particularly consider myself an outdoors person. I had no framework for what gorilla trekking actually involved. What I had was a very clear sense that the life I was living was not working and that something sufficiently different from it might be the only thing that could interrupt the pattern.
The Preparation That Helped
Once I had committed and told people, the preparation became its own form of recovery. Researching Uganda, reading about Bwindi, buying walking boots, getting the yellow fever vaccination — these were small, concrete, purposeful actions in a life that had become large, abstract, and purposeless. The preparation period was the first time in months I had looked forward to something with genuine anticipation rather than obligation.
I flew into Entebbe, transferred to a lodge near Buhoma sector by charter flight (one hour, the views of the Rift Valley below were the first moment I felt I had done the right thing), and arrived at the lodge in early afternoon. I ate dinner alone, went to bed at 8pm, and slept for ten hours — the first uninterrupted night’s sleep I had had in months.
The Trek
My trek was four hours. For three of those hours I walked in forest that felt genuinely ancient — not in the theme park ancient sense, not in the guidebook ancient sense, but in the sense that the trees and the sounds and the quality of the light were so completely unlike anything in my regular life that my regular life became temporarily unreal. The mental static that had been constant for months went quiet. Not because I was meditating or trying, but because the forest demanded a different quality of attention than I had been practising.
When we found the gorilla family I was in the middle of the group. The guide made a low sound and pointed and suddenly there was a silverback, enormous and indifferent, sitting eight metres away eating leaves. I have thought many times about why this moment was so affecting. I think it was the indifference. Not hostility, not performance, not engagement — just a very large, very old animal going about his day, completely unconcerned with my presence or my opinions or my career or any of the things that had been consuming me.
The Hour That Changed Something
For sixty minutes I watched a mountain gorilla family. The silverback ate, rested, and moved. Two females groomed each other. Three juveniles played with a speed and energy that would have exhausted me to watch under normal circumstances but which I watched with something close to delight. One juvenile came within three metres of our group, sat down, and looked at me. Not at the group — at me specifically. For about forty-five seconds. I have no framework for what was happening from the gorilla’s perspective. From mine, it felt like being genuinely seen by something that had no agenda in seeing me.
I cried. I am not someone who cries easily and I was not sad. I was something I do not have a precise word for — overwhelmed in a direction I had not been overwhelmed in for a very long time. The weight of the spreadsheet, the late nights, the dimming — none of it was present in that moment. It was just me and a gorilla in a forest, and that was enough.
What Came After
I stayed four days in total. The other three days I walked in the forest, ate well, slept deeply, and talked to almost no one about anything that mattered beyond what was directly in front of me. By the time I flew back to Entebbe I had not solved any of the professional problems that had produced the burnout. The spreadsheet still existed. The late nights would resume. But something in me had shifted. The problems had not become smaller; my relationship to them had changed. I had been reminded, concretely and physically, that the world I had been treating as everything was actually a very small part of a much larger one.
I resigned two months after I came back. I took a different job, at a different pace, at significantly less money. I do not miss the spreadsheet. I have thought about the gorilla family approximately once a week since then, which is more consistently than I think about most things that happened to me that year.
Would I Recommend This to Someone Who Is Burned Out?
Yes. Not because gorilla trekking fixes burnout — it does not. The conditions that created the burnout will still be there when you return. But because the specific quality of that experience — the forest, the physical effort, the hour with the animals — produces a perspective shift that is very hard to manufacture by other means. The burnout made me book Uganda. Uganda reminded me what I was burning out for. That is worth $800 and a long-haul flight.
