Burnout is not something to “manage”
On online murmurs. On human adaptability. On being pissed off with accepted realities.
Comorbidities of the pandemic
At one point in the non-distant past, I thought that we were in the post-burnout era. The media frenzy fizzled out. The books that had to get launched got launched. The slew of public discourse across twitter-grams died down. Seemingly, we’re in a post-pandemic era, and wasn’t burnout the pandemic's comorbidity? Like the hypertension to the diabetes.
Turns out, no. Burnout’s still around. And booming. It’s just now thriving in more ephemeral spaces than the main sections of NYT.
In the threads of closed communities all over the internet. In coffee catch-ups with friends casually sharing “Oh I’m just feeling so burned out”. In team retro figjams, stickies with warning-like “let’s avoid burning out the team with lack of clear direction”. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Pandemic or no pandemic, burnout seems to be alive for many people.
What’s noticeable in the questions asked and answers given is that burnout has become an accepted reality.
I’ve frequently marveled at the human capacity to adapt. For better or worse. We are made to conform and shapeshift. The evolutionary predicament. But sometimes - like with burnout - we roll with the punches that shouldn’t be rolled with. Like when we experience physical pain that we’ve grown to accept, unknowing that it could be fixed. Or how we accept disrespectful treatment from others, for far too long, thinking “it must be us, not them”. Or how for my Israeli friends “one or two bombs per day” in Tel Aviv are no longer a reason to flee to the countryside, since comparatively to everything else happening around them, this choice doesn’t seem as “risky” anymore. (Please read these as an observation, not a judgment.)
In these insidious ways we start to manage unthinkable things as part of our every day. And although bombs and burnout probably shouldn’t be compared in one breath, our relationship to both of those things is more similar than different.
Whenever a society decides to “manage” something it’s suggesting that there is an innate normalcy to that thing.
Is it normal to be unable to relax? Is it normal to not be able to sleep through the night? Despite being constantly tired and depleted? Is it normal to always have a racy mind? Is it normal to feel like your life happens to you, without your permission or participation? To feel uninterested in most things, or outright annoyed by seemingly benign stuff? Is it normal to lose half your hair in a few months? Is it normal to have ballistic kinds of headaches? Or unexplained stomach aches? Or weird muscle tension? Or a general sense that you’re constantly sick? Is it normal to never feel present in the moment? To be so cynical people comment on it? Is it normal to feel dread or helplessness on a regular basis?
Can we all please abandon the idea that burnout is normal?
Normalizing burnout sends the message that it's acceptable for people to routinely suffer through extreme and chronic stress, through overwork and overwhelm.
Viking retreats
I often think about our ancestors. Would the cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers have burnout from all that hunting and gathering and fire making and cave painting? Do you think Vikings, with all their pillaging and plundering, had to take time for an annual Viking retreat to prevent warrior burnout? Did Egyptians need 'stress-relief' from building the pyramids?
I’ll go out on a limb here and put a stake in the ground. Me thinks - no. They just rested when they needed to.
As someone who comes from a lineage of women who had an unhealthy relationship to work, I think a lot about the ancestral narratives I am either consciously or unconsciously repeating. Some of them I’m also (hopefully) undoing.
One of those stories passed down, is about my grandmother who allegedly lost half her teeth in midlife because of the stress she endured at work. She was an engineer in Poland, in the 1970s, so I can only imagine what that was like. This isn’t something she talks about much. Knowing this, me losing half my hair at the height of my workaholic tempest, gets a new dimension.
Another story of another grandmother. Whose calling was to be a doctor. And who instead of pursuing that proceeded to live a shadowed life of a stay at home caretaker. First for her kids, then for the kids of those kids, and enduringly for the benefit of her husband. Always full of resentment from doing things she hated to do. Cooking and serving food. Shopping and planning for food. Talking about food. Obsessing about the thing that gave her no joy.
Suspended somewhere between those two narratives - one of work-induced chronic stress, the other of unfulfilled potential - I find myself grappling with my own experience of burnout and my attempts at charting a path true to myself.
In a unique time when we’re almost bound to burn out. With our attention spans fragmented by the uber distracting technology, With our sense of presence being corrupted. With the loneliness epidemic. Perpetually disconnected from our energetic field, running on fumes, doing shit that doesn’t matter to us.
Right and up
Ours is a culture of constant distraction, multi-tasking, hyperproductivity. Ours is a culture where people sacrifice their sense of basic goodness, ease and calm for the sake of work. Ours is a culture where managing burnout has become a part of life.
You’re not solely responsible for the burnout you experience. We live in a technology-oriented culture. Our workplaces were created to treat all of us like machines. In the eyes of our employers, we are a technology. And like technology - the expectation is that we can maximize our productivity. That we can reliably deliver “key results”, on time and in scope. That the creative outputs of our work can somehow be made predictable. Our capitalist system was forged on the principle that the indexes will always and forever go the right and up. Except humans cannot go “to the right and up” perpetually. We need to rest. We were made to rest.
So once again. For the people in the back. Burnout is not something that can be „managed”. Burnout is not a normal state of existence to be regularly tended to.
You know what’s normal? The absence of burnout.
You know what’s the opposite of technology? Our humanity.
The Practice
What does your humanity mean to you? How do you show up as a human? Today, think about using your humanity as an act of rebellion towards a culture that wants to dehumanize us.
Some ideas:
Resting when you’re tired (instead of downing another coffee / coke).
Sharing a struggle or a truth about yourself, with someone else (being vulnerable and real).
Doing something for no other reason than to simply do it.
Getting creative, messy, free - in the kitchen, on a piece of paper, in the bedroom.
P.S. In writing this piece, I had this funny, passing thought about Elon Musk. For all his preoccupation with our civilizations’ survival, Elon is somehow missing the point that if all 7 billion of us operated the way he does (no sleep, crap food, shitty relationships, constant work), we’d all be obliterated. Wiped out in a generation or two. And so I just couldn’t resist this…
Random collection of things
🪖 The world is holding its breath for innocent Israelis and Palestinians sacrificed in the ongoing conflict. Many things were written on the topic. Highlighting one that I think points out the heart of the drama, in the 2,000 years of trauma.
Two groups at war and both are marginalized
💻 In the wake of all the polarization related to the conflict - per above - I loved these reflections from the indomitable Sari Azout.
Principles for sharing on the internet
🤰👩👦👩👧👦 Hard to count the number of times I've reposted or shared the brilliant truth bombs from Reshma Saujani. This may be the best articulation of the gender inequality women face and its foundational "building blocks". Watch the whole thing.
🍂 Fall in New England is incredible - a color bomb. So, I’m leaning into the fall vibes. Embodying the cyclical living I’ve been learning about lately. Trying to incorporate them into my weeks and months. Reflection is one of the pillars for this slow, cozy, lazy season.
A prompt that I came across somewhere that has stuck around with me that I am intermittently journaling on: Look back ten years and you can probably identify a few blind spots or mistaken beliefs you held at the time. Now, fast forward ten years from today... what are likely to be your current blind spots? What are you not spending enough time thinking about or perhaps even willfully ignoring?
Feeling a mental and energetic shift with the Taurus Eclipse coming up on Oct 28 which is extra meaningful to me as a Taurus sun sign. This is the third in a series of Taurus Eclipses over the past 2 years, which maps cleanly to when I had my initial “epiphany-what-da-fuck-moment” in Nov 2021, where a slew of shifts and sheddings began. As the last eclipse in my sun sign for the next 20 (!!) years, I feel weird about it. Something akin to grief. Like - am I going to stop shedding now? I don’t feel like I’m done! Don’t take away the transformative powers away from me now! Acknowledging this is part of the stirring an eclipse tends to bring, I’m taking stock of the last 2 years in equal parts as I’m being easy on myself and taking extra time to rest.