The Wellness Regimen

The alarm sounded at 5:45 AM, as it did every morning, and Sarah reached for the vitamin C serum first, then the biotin supplements, then the hair-growth gummies that promised to reverse what stress had slowly taken from her. Thirty-four years old and already calculating the cost of slowing down.

In the kitchen, Greg watched her from his usual spot at the table, unmoving. He'd stopped taking anything months ago—no supplements, no hopes, no effort. His hair had thinned too, but he'd stopped caring.

"You know those are placebos," he said, not looking up from his coffee.

"They're not. And even if they were, at least I'm still trying."

Greg laughed, a dry sound that scraped against the morning quiet. "That's what you call it? Trying? Sarah, you're just polishing the brass on a sinking ship."

They'd been friends since college, bound together now by habit more than anything. But something had shifted in the past year. Greg had become something else—not quite dead, but not fully alive either. A zombie of his former self, walking through meetings, sending emails, nodding at the right times during conversations he didn't hear.

Sarah had read an article about corporate burnout that described it exactly: the hollowing out of a person until only the shell remained, still functional, still present, but fundamentally emptied from inside.

"I'm worried about you," she said, washing down the handful of pills with water.

"Don't be." He finally looked at her, eyes flat. "I'm fine. This is just what growing up looks like. You figure out nothing matters as much as you thought it would, and you... keep going. That's the whole trick."

"That's not growing up. That's giving up."

"Is there a difference?"

Sarah felt something crack in her chest, the realization that the person sitting across from her was not her friend anymore—not really. He was what happened when you stopped feeding the parts of yourself that made you human, when you decided that feeling nothing was better than feeling the wrong things.

"Yes," she said, standing up. "The difference is that one still leaves room to change."

She grabbed her bag and walked out, leaving Greg to his coffee and his certainty, carrying in her pocket the next dose of vitamins that might or might not work, but at least were still something she could believe in.