Can't turn on overlay

[⛧ john ⛧]

I can't turn on/off the steam overlay in any of my games, it's grayed out. Any solutions?

[DarkCrystalMethod]

Some games do not play well with the steam overlay so the devs might have written code to disable it while their game is running.
Other than that you might have turned off the global setting that all games should use the steam overlay. If that is in fact still on then the last place to look is in the game's properties where you inherit the steam-wide setting or the setting specific to the game. I can't imagine that you've done this(and set it wrongly) on all of your games so its probably the global setting.