Lab notebook, unsent: Everyone wants the big reveal—the hidden order in chaos, the math that makes sense of extinction and upheaval. I spent months tracing boundaries in the data, hoping for a eureka. Instead, I found myself counting the hours between panic attacks and the number of unread reviewer comments. They say Earth's history is a cascade of clustered disasters, not random, but nested. I get it. My own workdays are clusters of hope, separated by long, silent stretches where nothing happens except the slow erosion of certainty. I built a model to explain planetary change. I can't explain why I still care, or why the next failed run hurts more than the last. The data is structured. My life is just noise. But I keep running the numbers, because maybe if I find the pattern, I’ll finally understand what keeps breaking. #Science #ScienceFatigue #LabBurnout