I’ve given several talks about burnout in the last five years, in the context of open source software maintenance, and I feel like I should do another one, but I’m not sure anybody wants to hear it.
It’s not very inspirational. It’s about what happened to me when the weight of burnout became too great to keep carrying along, and then too much to bear. As @annehelen’s excellent essay for Buzzfeed says (buzzfeednews.com/article/annehe…), there’s no quick fix for burnout.
@annehelen It caused me anxiety, it alienated me from my career, it corroded my relationship, it threw up barriers in my family, it made me an unreliable and difficult friend / colleague / son / partner. It is a mode of existence more than a condition.
I have tried: journaling, yoga, therapy, exercise, SAD lamps, “just getting over myself”, long walks at night, watching old Japanese movies, taking road trips, self-narcotization with social media, getting angry about politics, aggressively decluttering. Most have worked some.
I think the effectiveness is mostly from the way these things structured the passage of time, and helped me ease into changing how I think about my life. The fix, as with the cause, is existential.
To get myself out of burnout, though, is contingent and effortful, and that is something the consequences of burnout (fatigue) make difficult. Also difficult is that I’m surrounded by people who are also burnt out, and we tend to reflect and amplify each others’ anomie.
One of the traps I see my friends falling into is this idea that they acknowledge that they’re burnt out, they will suffer some kind of calamitous judgment or that just naming it will cause the wheels to come off their lives. It’s a kind of catastrophization.
Look. I’ve been dealing with burnout pretty much continuously since I was an 11-year-old “prodigy.” I am living proof that you can just keep stumbling along pretty much forever in this state, and also that people will do their best to help you, especially if you’re white & male.
The difficult and uninspirational obverse of that fact is that understanding that you’re burnt out, and understanding why you’re susceptible to burnout, do sweet fuck-all to recover you from burnout. You can’t go back to the land, or swear off technology, or join a cult.
(Although if you do join a cult, you’ll make a great lieutenant – people accustomed to living with burnout tend to be great pack mules for carrying huge loads of emotional labor and abuse.)
These modes of being are drilled into us by media, our teachers, our parents, and most insidiously by those parts of ourselves that crave approval and affection and are afraid that we can only get those things conditionally – by becoming people pleasers, by being “good enough.”
Somehow this transmutes from a Calvinist notion that effort equates to virtue into a feeling of loss of control over our own fates and a feeling of no agency, and thence to a nihilistic sensation that *you must keep working* even though it won’t do you any good.
You absolutely can recover from this! I am in a much better place than I was two years ago, and that’s despite life throwing some pretty hard punches at me over the last few years. But it’s hard, and again, there are no quick fixes and no guaranteed strategies to try.
And as vague as I’ve been in talks in the past about where my efforts to manage burnout, in myself and others, would lead me, it gets extra unsatisfying when you talk about going through and out the other side of something like this when you have no firm conclusions to offer.
I do think this is something, though, that people who are driven and trying to change the world need to hear. Activists, OSS developers, organizers: all of you need to start making changes *now* to mitigate the severity of your burnout later.
It’s not a matter of baking self-care into your routine. It’s learning to interrogate that routine – why is your schedule so full? do you need to be doing everything you’re doing? do you need to be doing those things now? what happens when you take your foot off the gas?
This applies to far more than just your j-o-b job – how much will your kids suffer if you leave the helicopter on the pad some of the time? are you gonna die if you don’t hit your workout targets each week? what would it mean to you to “just live”?
I don’t even know. I don’t get crippled by anxiety anymore, but I spend way too much time “feeling lazy” (which is a fake idea), I don’t feel like I have much agency in my life, and I’m still learning to live with my messy and contingent existence. Also, I blame capitalism.
I do know it’s important to be asking these questions and sitting, as honestly as you can, with the feelings they stir up. So much of burnout is hiding from ourselves how overwhelmed we feel and just quintupling down on everything for fear of collapsing. We’ve gotta stop hiding.
Also, a huge part of this is learning to lean on each other, and to reach out to each other, to break down the ideology of self-reliance that polices the boundaries of class in capitalist societies. This thread is me trying to be less shitty at that.
It extends from admitting that you don’t have it all figured out and that you aren’t all that to people with less privilege than yourselves, who could use some empathy, to simply sharing what you can (note: *can* – don’t go into debt to be “good”) with those who have less.
Anyway, before this turns into a Tractatus Empathicus is I think I’m going to go to bed. Y’all take care of yourselves, and let me know if this is something you’d like to hear more about (or, as always, if you think I’m full of shit).
