On "Burnout"
And why I hate that word and other HR language
I recently stepped down from running People Against Prisons Aotearoa’s Tāmaki (Auckland) branch. I was attending a minimum of one meeting a week, in addition to managing between 10-30+ people per fortnightly branch meeting. That, plus working a full-time job, spending at least two nights a week in the library to read and write, maintaining a social life, managing a household, and dealing with some personal issues I don’t want to write about, made me feel like I couldn’t go on anymore. I’d experience full-body paralysis in meetings and have to go into another room to breathe deep and unclench my muscles. It’s not the group’s fault, they’re rock-solid people, but running an organization that our white supremacist government rails against and regularly threatens to persecute takes its toll after a while. I’m taking a 3-4 month break now, and I’ll return and run a smaller project within People Against Prisons in the Antipodean spring.
When I tell people this, they kindly say some variation on “Oh, it’s normal to burn out” and recommend some form of “self-care.” They mean well, so I warmly respond in kind, but I hate those words. I imagine hopping in a time machine and explaining to Hồ Chí Minh, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Yahya Sinwar, Toussaint L'Ouverture, or Assata Shakur that I “burned out” and need to do “self-care,” and I scoff. People lived in caves and weathered famines for the communist causes I believe in. While it’s normal to push yourself too hard and need to recover, the word “burnout” sets my hair on edge. I hate it, and I’ve been trying to unpick why.
My first thought was that the word “burnout,” like “bandwidth” or “capacity,” is something you say to your boss. In a labor context, it’s a safe-for-work way to tell them “you’ve exploited me so much that I can’t go on anymore” without incurring disciplinary wrath. “Bandwidth” and “capacity” function the same way. They let you say “I don’t want to do this, or I won’t unless you pay me more” in language that’s as scientifically immutable as a set amount of data, or the weight a bridge can bear before it collapses. They’re useful for paid work, where being too honest can deprive you of money and land you on the street, but they’ve become ubiquitous in non-work contexts, too. I think they’re a linguistic spackle that lets us elide describing problems we need to articulate more precisely—problems that we, communists, are going to need to solve if we’re ever going to win.
That problem, for me and others I know, is a compulsion to overwork oneself. In voluntary organizations, we don’t have bosses to push us. Our “burnout” is self-inflicted. But that also means it’s my responsibility to prevent it. If I were to say “I’m burned out,” I could shift the blame to a nebulous “society,” or “capitalism,” or People Against Prisons itself and avoid my own responsibility. The truth is that I just didn’t know my limits. I overworked myself and put myself out of commission. When I run things in the future, I’ll better know how to not do that again.
“Burnout” didn’t always apply to everything from surgery to back-office work. Psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger coined the term in 1974, writing that the people most prone to it are those who are “seeking to respond to the recognized needs of [other] people” and that they work in places like “free clinics, therapeutic communities, hot lines, crisis intervention centers, women’s centers, gay centers, and runaway houses.” Writer Anne Helen Petersen popularized the term for contemporary use in a viral 2019 BuzzFeed article titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” She writes that “burnout... is the [universal] millennial condition... our [collective] base temperature,” and that everyone from doctors to marketing managers to Lockheed Martin weapons manufacturers experience it alike.
I think this is horseshit. If a doctor doesn’t see a patient, they can die. If a public defender can’t represent someone, they go to jail. If a BuzzFeed writer writes a few less thinkpieces than they’re capable of doing, the world is unchanged (and arguably a better place, depending on the writer.) I think Petersen, in her essay, confuses an internal compulsion to overwork oneself with an external pressure to produce. “We don’t quit. We internalise that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig,” she writes in her article, gallingly using the royal “we.” But in both Petersen’s and my situation, no one is making us do that work but us. We’re not pulling double-shifts to support our families. We’re managing our time badly and hurting ourselves in the process. If critical masses of the population keep calling that bad time management “burnout,” we’ll never grow up and triage our time the way we need to to stop global catastrophe.
I also don’t think contemporary understandings of “burnout” are compatible with communist political work. “Burnout,” in Petersen’s telling, needs to be overcome so we “derive... joy and meaning” from life and live happily into our old age. But what if the work you do might kill you? I’m very good at communist organizing, and despite all my work being legal, I know it’s the sort of work right-wing governments typically murder people for. I sometimes think they’d throw me out of a helicopter if they could. What does “burnout” mean in this context, where success marks you for persecution, torture, imprisonment, and worse? I plan to live to old age, but I’ve accepted that my life is no longer fully my own. Will it matter how much “self-care” I’ve done if a western government imprisons or shoots me once war with China gives them an imprimatur to? Or will it matter what I’ve accomplished, regardless of how “burned out” I feel?
I don’t have firm answers to any of those questions, nor do I know the right way to live. What I do know, per the writer B.D. McClay, is that when you’re doing art, communist political work, or anything real, “something is working itself out through you.” “You have to submit,” she writes, “to the truth, to the real, to the bends and knots of what is coming to be through you.” When I lead an organization well, it feels like everyone’s energy combines into an electrical current that courses from my feet to my head. It exits when I open my mouth, speak, and impel the group to action. That current is hot sometimes, hotter than I can handle. But I’ll learn how to do it and others will too. We’ll need to redirect that lightning if we’re going to win.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is playing Handel’s “Water Music” at 7:30pm on Thursday, June 12 at The Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell. I’ve been really enjoying their work lately, having gone to other concerts for the past few weeks, and I think it’ll be good.
Recommended Reading
Reposting Sarah Miller’s n+1 Magazine essay on ayahuasca last week made me remember that they published my favorite piece of sports writing ever a few years ago, an essay by Georgia Cloepfil about being a woman playing soccer abroad.
I’ve read every single one of Kate Wagner’s essays about Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and this one, about the brother-sister relationship, why Wagner made it incestuous, and aristocratic historical feeling towards the subject was particularly interesting.