Burnout

I spend a lot of time thinking about burnout, but not my own.

Long years of unhealthy habits and overwork took me through a thorough exploration of the ways burnout can manifest. In professional, volunteer, and social settings I had so much trouble finding the ‘off’ switch when presented with a chance to help, ‘earn my keep’, or be the person who keeps everything together. When I look back at how I lived for a lot of my life, I am genuinely surprised I never managed to end up in the hospital for exhaustion.

It’d be easy to say that I pushed harder when the satisfaction and fulfillment I needed wasn’t present in other areas of my life besides the work I do, but in reality I’ve also been pulling those 60-hour weeks and trying to balance that time around a full slate of happy social and familial engagements. I just couldn’t help it, because the work will always expand to fill the amount of time you’re willing to allot to it so there was always something more to add to the task list.

Eventually I got pretty serious about priorities and making sure that I was holding reasonable boundaries for the amount of time I spent working on the things other people asked of me. Along with those practices I also developed a real knack for figuring out how to use tools and processes and standardization to streamline my work, so I can get the things done that I need to do, in the time I have to give.

This has led to me more often finding myself in a position where the people around me are at wit’s end and struggling, and I’m feeling more calm and in control, and I cannot tell you how hard it is in that moment to resist the temptation to say “Oh, let me take that off your hands.” I know that way lies madness, because, see above: the work expands.

I’ve been trying to use that time instead to contemplate WHY so many environments operate on structures of standardized burnout. ‘Capitalism and the puritan work ethic’ is an obvious answer. Capitalism, the puritan work ethic, and prosperity gospel account for a lot of folks working themselves to burnout. If your worth as a person is displayed as a function of your bank account, then you’ll grind to get ahead. If your physical safety and your family depend on you keeping your job, you won’t tell a boss “These ten-hour days aren’t healthy for me.”

But even in the non-profit spaces I know that are vehemently anti-capitalist, even in volunteer groups, I still encounter people so mired in functioning through their burnout that they can’t take the time to figure out better ways of doing things. These long hours are the price of service, they say. I’m doing the good I owe to the world, they say. I can’t take time to streamline, they say, because that takes energy away from the Real Work. And so they grind themselves to pieces rather than find ways to rest and focus.

When you’re that deep into the work, you lose perspective about whether what is being asked of you is safe and reasonable. Just one more step farther, and one more step, and now it’s 10pm on a Wednesday and you’re fighting the good fight against your email inbox without even the pressure of a deadline or an emergency. It’s just…habit. The work, you see, expands.

While it’s tempting to blame managers, at the mid-level they’re most often burning out themselves, caught between top-down policy decisions and rising employee dissatisfaction and turnover. The only response they can manage to overworked staff is to try and do more themselves, not figuring out how to create sustainable practices.

I don’t know if we actually know how, in the US, to build systems of work and productivity that don’t require a steady human sacrifice to thrive. Our relationship with work has become fundamentally unhealthy.

I sure would like to try, though.

I love you all.

(please enjoy this photo of marine wildlife having a principled debate about the scarcity and value of space on the buoy; I apologize that it is a little blurry as I was on a moving boat)