This is a really great piece of writing on 3500-year-old advice on avoiding burnout.
It also gets at something really key, which is self-care isn't enough. There's a reason corporations love promoting self-care for their employees (thread)
Employers LOVE to encourage self-care precisely because it's SELF-care. It's telling you that if your emotional reserves are drained, you can just... refill them yourself. No outside help needed. Have a bath bomb, a meditation kit: that'll refill your tank.
When I was at Microsoft, our overworked and burnt-out team got an influx of people to help us get the game across the finish line.
Those people had been assigned from another team that had been crunching for 3 years and finally shipped their game.
So we--tired, burnt-out, empty and used up--got people to help us who were... tired, burnt-out, empty and used up.
And one day I was talking to the EP, who was worried a lot of people were about to quit.
And I said hey, I don't understand. These people just finished THREE YEARS of crunch. Why is Microsoft just moving them to another game in crunch? Why aren't they getting three months of vacation and a bonus so they can spend it in Hawaii or something?
He gave me that "oh, sweet summer child" look, and explained that Microsoft was well aware that when people are burnt out and hating their jobs, and you give them time off, they spend that time off thinking about how much better NOT being at work is than being at work.
So then they tend to come back to work just long enough to find a different job.
And of course, there's a terrible sort of logic to that, if you don't care about the people.
And yeah, there was a lot of that logic and people who worked there and talk about "Microsoft PTSD" are sometimes 100% serious and sometimes speaking hyperbolically but only just.
I still haven't fully recovered from my Microsoft burnout. And no self-care did anything to help with it. But ironically, I also had one of the best burnout-reducing experiences of my life at Microsoft.
It was over the holidays, and my doctor was in Hawaii, and I got what felt like strep throat.
So I called up the employee healthcare line, and spoke to a nurse, and was like, "should I go to urgent care, or...?"
And he was like nope, stay home, we'll send you a doctor.
I was like, you'll what?
Just stay home, we'll send you a doctor. And sure enough, about 45 minutes later, a doctor knocks on the door of my apartment. White coat, black doctor bag, everything.
She spent a leisurely hour or so with me talking about what I should do and eat and look out for over the next week, did a strep test, set up a lab on my counter to test it (medical care AND a show!) and called in a prescription for me. The pharmacy sent someone with the meds.
And that was the only time in my life I've ever felt *rich.*
Like, I was aware growing up that we were upper-middle-class and fortunate to be so, and I'm aware now that I make good money.
I don't mean "aware of financial privilege."
I mean RICH.
Like, I felt, having that experience, like, "oh, this is what it's like to be so rich that you have an *entirely different medical care system* that just dispenses with all of the frustration and inconvenience of American medical care."
I was making, I think, about $80k, which in Seattle is still "living paycheck-to-paycheck" money unless you've found a really cheap living situation and don't have student loans.
So I *wasn't* rich, to be clear. But for a few hours, I felt like I was.
And I went back to work, when I recovered, charged up and ready to work and cheerful.
Because even though I knew that the company had ulterior motives for providing me with that sort of healthcare, and that I was still just an interchangeable cog in a wheel to them...
that was what I knew intellectually.
what I knew *emotionally* was that when I was miserable and exhausted and sick and vulnerable, my employer took care of me. They did something that felt *lavish.* And no part of it was on me, other than just asking for help.
It wasn't "self-care." It was *being cared for.*
And as many horrible experiences as I had working there, *every time* I'm really sick, I think "maybe I should go back."
Of course, they nerfed that program so
But in any case, that was something that wasn't even addressing burnout directly, but still helped with it more than anything else the company did.
And it's part of why I roll my eyes so hard my contacts pop out every time companies talk about self-care, or act like providing some sort of self-care kit or whatever (hell, even if it's time off) is the same as the company providing *care* for its employees.
Because what you need when you're burnt out isn't self-care.
It's *care.* You need *help.* You've drained your own resources, and having the same entity that used them tell you to go take care of yourself is just... really gaslight-y.
The thing most burnt-out people need is LESS WORK. They need help. They need additional headcount on their team, or better management, or something that takes some of the burden off them.
They don't need a fucking bath bomb. Even time off isn't actually *addressing the problem."
If you want to address burnout, something about the way you work needs to *change.*
And in most companies, that's not something you can do for yourself. It's not self-care. You need resources from *outside yourself.*
And Rabbi Markiz's post is the first time that I've seen someone address that "self-care" is actually *part* of the burnout cycle, not a solution to it.
Moses's father-in-law gets that, and is like, "dude, you need OUTSIDE HELP."
Like 3500 years ago, people understood that the resources to deal with burnout have to be *external.* You can't do it yourself.
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fascinating things that I, a Jew, did not know and have learned about Judaism from reading Christian commentaries on the parables of the lost coin, sheep, and sons:
-Jews are super-legalistic, but the penalty for telling a story anyone didn't like was immediate stoning, no trial
-if a son did anything a Jewish father didn't like, the Jewish dad immediately performed a ceremony that cut his son off from the family
-Jewish fathers didn't express affection for their children
-100% of Jewish siblings hated one another because of competition for inheritance
-Jews hated shepherds, despite pretty much every important person in Jewish foundational peoplehood stories being a shepherd
-if a Jewish woman misplaced a coin, she'd be stoned for adultery because losing money was the same as sexual promiscuity
I mean, it's VERY tough to get into the industry without a degree.
That said, I actually agree that most game design degrees are pretty useless if what you care about is quality game design rather than just... getting in the door.
The point of which was that when I was interviewing people for various game design roles, we'd see a lot of freshly minted game design degrees walk in the door.
And their entire field of creative references was... other games.
So I'm writing a thing on the trio of parables that ends with the prodigal son and like MAN OH MAN do Christian commentators insist that Jews hated shepherds.
Like, I can't even count the number of commentaries that insist that shepherds were "despised figures" for first-century Jews and the parables of the lost sheep and lost coin were designed to insult the Pharisees by comparing them first to a shepherd and then to a woman.
So, as is my wont whenever Christian commentators make a claim about what was normal for first-century Judaism, I decided to try to hunt down their source on this.
are we really surprised that the guy who wrote <checks notes> "pretty as a swastika" abused his Jewish girlfriend?
like people kept dismissing this crap in Marilyn Manson's songs as "he's just doing it for shock value"
and maybe he was
but if we've learned anything from GG/the alt-right/Trump/etc. it's that a LOT of people move from doing it for shock value, or the lulz, to believing it
and more importantly, you don't get to use marginalized people as fodder for your "shock value"
like, I'm literally not sure how dehumanizing a marginalized group for shock value is different from dehumanizing them for an ideology
Welp, I needed to get some writing done and I can't go to a coffee shop, so I found a nice table with a fireplace outside and got a tea and sat down to write.
And, dear reader, I regret to inform you that my curse of having people have terrible conversations near me is unabated.
I'm listening to two dudes go off on how Jeff Bezos's girlfriend is a gold-digger with "secondhand plastic surgery" (what does that even MEAN?) and how he could have any woman in the world so why is he dating her?
It's just astonishing to me that these men seem to hold, unexamined, both the belief that 1) every woman can be bought for enough money and 2) a bazillionaire should not be dating this particular woman because she can be bought.