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April 25 - April 28, 2023
Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it.
COVID-19 is the great clarifier. It clarifies what and who in your life matters, what things are needs and what are wants, who is thinking of others and who is thinking only of themselves. It has clarified that the workers dubbed “essential” are, in truth, treated as expendable, and it has made decades of systemic racism—and resultant vulnerability to the disease—indelible. It highlighted the ineptitude of Trump’s federal leadership, the dangers of long-term, cultivated mistrust of science, and the ramifications of allowing the production of medical equipment to be run like a business where
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“The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
Burnout has become so pervasive that in May 2019, the World Health Organization officially recognized it as an “occupational phenomenon,”
This isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.
In truth, millennials are boomers’ worst nightmare because, in many cases, we were once their most well-intentioned dream. And in conversations about boomers and millennials, that’s the connection that’s often left out: the fact that boomers are, in many ways, responsible for us, both literally (as our parents, teachers, and coaches) and figuratively (creating the ideologies and economic environment that would shape us).
