The Boy Who Sold His Dreams for Silence: A Short Story About Modern Burnout (By: Francouis Pretorius)

In a town that never slept, a boy wandered the streets carrying a small, tattered box. Inside, he kept his dreams: delicate paper boats that shimmered in colors no one could name. Each night, he whispered to them, telling them his hopes, his fears, his quiet ambitions.

But the world outside had grown loud. Phones buzzed constantly. Emails piled up. Notifications choked the air. Creativity, once as natural as breathing, had become a luxury.

One evening, a stranger appeared in the town square. He wore a coat stitched from empty calendars and carried a briefcase that hummed with silence.

“I can give you something,” the stranger said, his voice smooth and soft like velvet, “something few people have anymore. Silence. Peace. Freedom from the noise of the world. But it comes at a price.”

The boy looked into the stranger’s briefcase and saw… nothing. No sound, no color, no chaos. Just emptiness. He felt the pull immediately: the relief of quiet, the lull of rest.

“What’s the price?” the boy asked.

“Your dreams,” the stranger replied.

It was a small box, after all, barely bigger than a notebook. And the world outside was relentless. Each day, the boy felt his ideas drying up, his sketches turning gray, his words stumbling before they left his lips. Perhaps… maybe it was worth it.

So, he handed over the paper boats. One by one, he watched them fold themselves into silence, vanish into the stranger’s briefcase. He felt lighter. He walked home under a moon that didn’t judge him, under stars that didn’t ask questions.

And for a while, it was peaceful. The hum of notifications didn’t reach him. His phone lay face down, the emails went unanswered, and the world’s relentless expectations seemed to pause.

But when he looked in the mirror, he realized something strange: his eyes, once full of color, now reflected only gray. He could remember the shape of his dreams, the shimmer of his boats, but only as ghosts. They lingered in the corners of his mind, untouchable, unreachable. And though the silence was comforting, it wasn’t life.

The boy had traded his dreams for quiet. The noise had stopped, but the pulse of wonder had stopped too. And he understood, finally, that burnout wasn’t just the world pressing down, it was the surrender of the very spark that made him human.

Somewhere, in a town that never slept, the boy still walks the streets. He has learned to survive, to rest in the silence. But sometimes, just before dawn, he whispers into the empty air, hoping that one day, a new paper boat might find its way back to him.

Reflection:

Mid-November feels like this story: the days are shorter, motivation dips, and creative minds wonder whether the fight is worth it. But even in burnout, there’s the faint glimmer of hope. Silence can heal, but it cannot replace the fire of imagination. The trick is finding balance before your dreams vanish into someone else’s briefcase.