When I quit my full-time job as a tenured college professor in 2016, I said I would “become a writer,” but I had no big plan for what that would look like. I had so much to learn about how to write and about the business of writing. At first, I felt like a fraud when I called myself a writer. But I kept going: taking classes, meeting with critique partners, sending pitches, revising, revising, revising.
This past year felt like the culmination of that effort. The biggest reason is that my book, The End of Burnout, came out at the beginning of January and guided much of what I did for the next several months.
I was interviewed live by Anderson Cooper. I was interviewed for articles in big-name magazines. I published essays on burnout all over the place (see below). I was on dozens of radio shows and podcasts. I gave presentations and workshops, both in-person and virtual, to academic, religious, and business audiences, including two visits to a Fortune 500 company.
This was all very exciting — and exhausting. The day after the Cooper interview, I couldn’t do anything. One day a few weeks later, I had an hourlong live radio interview followed by a Zoom talk to a university audience. Again, I could barely get up off the couch the next day.
This was not burnout. It was temporary and understandable, if unexpected, tiredness. Both times, I bounced back a day later. Burnout is when you rest and still don’t bounce back.
The End of Burnout was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2022 in the business & leadership category; it was also the Next Big Idea Club’s #3 productivity book and #4 happiness book of 2022. The irony of the book landing in those categories aside, the honor is in seeing it listed among bestsellers by big-name authors.
But I didn’t only write about burnout. In May, I published a long essay in the New York Times on an apparent breakdown in college students’ ability to learn. I don’t know how many people read it; a lot. People told me it was discussed in their faculty meetings.
I say all this not simply to pat myself on the back, though I hope I can be forgiven for doing so in my own newsletter. The bigger point is to take stock of where I am in my career and how I got here.
Seven years of grad school earned me a Ph.D. Six years of teaching and publishing got me to tenure. So maybe I should have known it would take about as long to make this career transition. Of course, five years after getting tenure, I was so miserable that I quit; these triumphs are often fleeting. At the end of 2022, I can say my writing career is going well — for now.
Here is the list of essays I published this year. Some of them might make good end-of / beginning-of-year reading:
Burnout Dominated 2021. Here’s the History of Our Burnout Problem, Washington Post, January 1, 2022
How Men Burn Out, New York Times, January 4, 2022
Your Work Is Not Your God: Welcome to the Age of the Burnout Epidemic, The Guardian, January 6, 2022
No, You Didn’t Cause Your Own Burnout, The Muse, February 3, 2022
Workers Deserve Better, Plough, April 4, 2022
What It Would Take for Us to Love Our Jobs Again, Vox, April 20, 2022
Late Assignments, Failed Tests, Sleeping in Class: My College Students Are Not OK, New York Times, May 13, 2022
“Don’t Lose Hope”: Addressing the Breakdown of College Education, New York Times, June 5, 2022
What I’m Reading: The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq, Notre Dame Magazine, September 13, 2022
Work: A Hard Ethic to Break, Zeal, vol. 1, no. 1 (2022)
The Closest We Get to the Eternal Present, Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2022
Mental-Health Days Are Only a Band-Aid for Burnout, The Atlantic, November 14, 2022
If you are interested in taking a class with me, there is still a spot or two left in my Spiritual Nonfiction Workshop, which begins on January 9. I’m happy to answer questions about it; just reply to this message.
I always conclude these end-of-year posts by saying that no matter how terrible the world seems, the year always brings numerous joys. A decade from now, 2022 will be remembered by some not as Yet Another Hell Year but as the year they got married, the year their first child was born, the year they finally graduated, the year they got sober, the year their cancer went into remission, etc. etc.
There are always problems in the world, in our lives. Some people have indeed had very bad years. Some people, from the Queen of England to Carolyn Eubanks of Buffalo, N.Y., lost their lives and thus, everything they had. We rightfully mourn what’s been lost.
But the world is so big, the problems and losses within it are never the full story. There’s a strong, misguided tendency in present-day discourse to amplify the bad, to suggest that we live in uniquely horrific times. I think it’s an attempt to prove that you’re a serious person, not some mindless Polyanna. But it’s narcissism, just the flip side of saying that we, out of all who have ever been, live in the best of all possible worlds.
No, we just live in the world, the only one there is. We ought to try to make it better in reality, but we shouldn’t start by making it worse in our imaginations. To give a fair accounting of our time here, we need to see the world for what it is: good, bad, everything.
You will hear from me again soon. I have an essay coming out in a prominent venue and will want to tell you more about what I’m saying in it. Until then, thank you for reading, and happy new year!