In the early 2000s, EverQuest introduced a boss with so many hit points (the game’s measure of health) it was meant to be functionally unkillable.
The math seemed airtight: no realistic group of players would ever coordinate long enough to chew through the health bar. They’d give up before they made a dent. Nearly two hundred players, fighting for almost three hours in a coordinated attack, proved the assumption wrong. The “unkillable” boss died.
The lesson shows up in systems engineering. At internet scale, “one in a billion” stops being hypothetical. With enough traffic and enough time, tail risks become real incidents.
The same thing happens with people.
From a distance, some people look invulnerable. Calm, reliable, always “fine,” laughing along when the team piles on. It’s easy to treat them like they have infinite hit points. They can take it.
Then one day they don’t. Someone burns out. Someone quits without warning. Someone has an out-of-character reaction and everyone says, “I thought they were fine.”
Nobody has infinite hit points. Not the rock on your team, not the most stoic manager, not you.
As AI tools make it easier to look fine—ship more, respond faster, always online—capacity gets harder for others to see and harder to track in yourself. The visible signal stays bright while the meter drops.
You don’t have a health bar. You have warning signs. Am I more irritable than usual? Am I rubber-stamping changes I don’t fully understand? Am I avoiding conversations because I feel overloaded? Each one is a reading you can take, if you stop long enough to look.
This works in two directions. For others: be careful what you pile on people because they can take it. For yourself: be honest about your own capacity before it runs out.
In games, you step away from the fight and let your health regenerate. In real life, that’s sleep, a walk, a conversation that isn’t about work. None of it counts as productivity. All of it counts as capacity.
There is no badge for enduring alone.