My Thoughts on Burnout

Me at the height of my burnout in May 2015. In a true "I can make this all work" moment, I combined a work trip with a family vacation. It should have been perfect but instead I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I didn't want to have to do anything work-related. Two months later I quit my J-O-B. I felt a temporary relief from burnout but three years later I admit that it's back and I'm not sure when it won't be.

A few days ago Matt shared a Buzzfeed article with me on millennials experiencing burnout en masse. He shared this with the caveat that it was worth reading if you can get past the first few paragraphs in which the whiniest most pathetic excuse for a grown up complains about how hard it was to register to vote so I share that same caveat with you.

I didn’t identify with every single side-effect of burnout described (I don’t generally experience errand paralysis; since I started working from home most of the time, I actually live for an excuse to get away from my desk and out of the house). That said, I identified with almost all of the symptoms of burnout described… and I’m guessing you do too!

Which brings me to my main disagreement with the author, Anne Helen Petersen – I don’t think burnout is a millennial condition; I think it’s a human condition that almost everyone I know is experiencing right now. I think millennials are more affected by it because they came into the workplace at a time of such great economic uncertainty but, it’s definitely not limited to them. I’ve been in a corporate culture relatively recently and no one was exempt from the pressures of being on-call all the time, and the extra pressure of having to act like you didn’t feel that pressure and were so super excited to come to work every day.

For me, it’s the feeling of nothing ever being enough. In some ways I feel bound to a hamster wheel of achievements that I’m ambivalent about at best. Even as I accomplish things like completing a large project or scoring a new client they somehow don’t feel like accomplishments. I kick the proverbial can down the road by telling myself that I can relax after the next one but I never do.

I’m proud of my career and I definitely prefer being an attorney to being say, a seamstress supervisor in a prison in upstate New York (hello, Escape at Dannemora) or to being homeless, but I envy people who have somehow found a way to make a living from their passions rather than their practical talents. For a long time I beat myself up about this but I recently made peace with it. I’m just not one of those people whose work is their joy. The downside is that I spend a lot of time doing shit that I don’t want to do. But the upside is that the things that bring me joy are 100% optional and not at all colored by obligation or commercialization. No one pays me to propagate succulents, crochet, play with my kids, or color in my Game of Thrones coloring book but I’m OK with that. It’s also helped me to put influencers and social media posts in context. I definitely still get Insta-jealous of people who appear to have the perfect [insert thing here] but then I remind myself that they are paid to project an image of perfection that is probably at least 60% fabrication.

What I still struggle with is the phenomenon of career brand-building through social media that she describes. My website is bare bones, I NEVER post law related things on Facebook and I don’t even have a Twitter handle. I go back and forth between feeling OK about this and feeling like I’m a complete failure for not working harder to establish my relevance in the privacy community. This quote from the article pretty much sums it up:  “We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough.”

And as Petersen points out, it’s not just the workplace where we experience burnout; it’s also in our personal lives and in parenting. Matt and I are so not on board with the “intensive parenting” that she describes but it’s a constant struggle given that we are in the minority on this. We don’t have Lily in any academic clubs or extra tutoring but the idea that we should constantly nags at me because so many of her classmates are. We have her in piano for fun and so she develops a love of music but I’m plagued by thoughts of whether she’s advanced enough for how much time and money we’ve paid into her lessons. We only do scheduled playdates about once a month and I worry that she’s going to be unpopular because I don’t have the energy go cozy up to other moms and make those playdates happen… I could go on and on, but you get the picture. As the article says “Outings should be “experiences,” food should be healthy and homemade and fun, bodies should be sculpted, wrinkles should be minimized, clothes should be cute and fashionable, sleep should be regulated, relationships should be healthy, the news should be read and processed, kids should be given personal attention and thriving. Millennial parenting is, as a recent New York Times article put it, relentless.”

Honestly, as I typed this I was wondering how I haven’t gone bat-shit-fucking-insane yet. I think the answer is that Matt has taken a lot of the “second shift” and “mental load” that the author describes off of my shoulders. This has been a huge and hopefully permanent shift for us. Prior to Rosie’s birth, I cooked all of the family meals, kept track of all the kids’ medical appointments, kept the grocery list going, dealt with anything involving Lily’s school, etc. After Rosie was born, Matt swooped in without asking and took over 90% of the family meals, all of the grocery shopping, and much more of the mental load. I am so grateful for this and it’s probably why I haven’t gone bat-shit-fucking-insane yet.

The other reason is self-care. The author sees self-care as yet another task to be fulfilled in the effort of self-perfection and social media fulfillment. I, on the other hand, really enjoy the things I do for self-care and have benefited immensely from it. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest possible millennial but it would never occur to me to try to turn my workout sessions or facials or Sunday night spa routing into an Instragrammable event. Those things are just for me, which is probably why they are actually so restorative.

Anyway, I don’t have any easy answers but it makes me feel good to get all this out there. I feel like the best way forward for me is to try to be more deliberate about my commitments and more empathetic toward others. It’s easy to feel put-upon and like you can’t take on one more thing when you’re in burnout mode but that just makes you resentful which isn’t productive. I’ve resolved to flip the script and try to be more deliberate about my commitments so that even if I’m taking on less, I feel like I’m doing more.