Biology doesn't care about your draft stock. It doesn't care about the $7.5 million contract the New York Islanders dangled in 1994, and it certainly doesn't care about the shadow cast by a superstar older brother. For Brett Lindros, the hardware simply couldn't keep up with the software requirements of the NHL.

We talk about "burnout" in Silicon Valley like it’s a badge of honor, a temporary glitch you fix with a sabbatical in Tulum and some overpriced nootropics. But in the mid-nineties, burnout looked like a twenty-year-old kid sitting in a dark room because the sunlight felt like a drill to the temple. Lindros wasn't a failed startup. He was a high-performance machine that hit a physical ceiling before the first quarterly report was even filed.

The 9th overall pick was supposed to be a sure thing. He was 6-foot-4, 215 pounds of pure, unadulterated potential. He had the Lindros name, that heavy, bruising brand of hockey that promised to dominate the next decade. Instead, he got 51 games. Two seasons. A handful of goals. And enough concussions to make a neurologist wince.

It’s easy to look back from our current era of "concussion protocols" and smart helmets and think we’ve solved the problem. We haven't. We’ve just rebranded the risk. Back then, you just "got your bell rung." You smelled some salts, blinked the stars away, and got back on the ice. The "friction" wasn't between the league and the players' union; it was between a skull and a frozen rubber puck, or a shoulder, or the glass. The price tag for that "grit" was a career ended before it actually started.

Brett Lindros retired at 20. Think about that. At an age when most of us are failing midterms or trying to figure out how to fold a fitted sheet, he was being told his brain was essentially a bruised peach. The doctors didn't use fancy terms like "neuroplasticity" or "chronic traumatic encephalopathy" back then. They just told him that if he took another hit, the damage might be permanent. Or fatal.

The Islanders lost their investment. The fans lost their savior. Brett lost his identity.

There is a specific kind of cruelty in being a "promising" anything. It’s a debt you haven't paid yet. In the tech world, we see it every day—the wunderkind founder who raises fifty million on a pitch deck and a prayer, only to vanish when the product doesn't scale. But Lindros didn't fail to scale. He scaled too fast for the physical infrastructure of the sport. He was playing a version of hockey that the human brain wasn't designed to run.

We love a tragedy because it makes for a clean narrative arc. We can wax poetic about the "what ifs" and the "could have beens." It’s a lot harder to talk about the mundane reality of life after the "glitch." Lindros didn't disappear. He moved into broadcasting, then into wealth management. He transitioned. He pivoted. He did all the things we tell people to do when their primary career path hits a brick wall.

But there’s a lingering bitterness to the story that no amount of corporate success can quite scrub away. The NHL in the 90s was a meat grinder, and Lindros was premium grade. We watched him get chewed up and then we moved on to the next version. Version 2.0. The "new" Lindros. We’re obsessed with the next big thing because it lets us ignore the wreckage of the last big thing.

The industry—whether it’s sports or tech—is built on the idea that everything is replaceable. If the chip fries, you swap it out. If the player breaks, you draft another one. We treat human beings like hardware with a planned obsolescence we don’t like to admit out loud.

Brett Lindros is a reminder that some systems don't get a reboot. You get one brain, one career, and sometimes, a very short window before the lights go out. We’re still waiting for the patch that fixes physics.

How many "promising" careers are we willing to trade for a few highlight reels and a playoff run?