New essays: On death and burnout
A few days after my father died, I found a selfie on his phone, apparently taken on his deathbed. Was it a window into his final thoughts?
Two new essays came out this week: “Unfaithful Reproductions” in The Point and “The Exaggeration of ‘Burnout’ in America” in The New Republic. The one for TNR is short and argumentative. (Its argument is that all our talk about burnout is too imprecise to be of much use.) The one for The Point is quite a bit longer, more reflective, and much sadder. It could be a good weekend read, when you have 20 minutes to devote to it.
I am extremely proud of “Unfaithful Reproductions,” which addresses a deeply personal matter — my father’s entirely foreseeable death at a time when I was far away from him — and was a long time in the works. It takes off from a picture he evidently took of himself on his deathbed, a picture I later discovered on his phone. But it’s ultimately about how much we need to fill in our pictures of other people, living or dead, absent or present, with what we know of ourselves. I’m an unfaithful reproduction of my dad; by knowing myself, I can know something of him. Here’s a short excerpt:
I sent myself a copy of the picture so I could study it further. I kept wondering why he would take it. To see how he looked? To chart the depth of his decline? Or was it meant as a sad valedictory, an attempt at summing himself up? It must have been in a rare moment of lucidity during the week he spent in the hospital. Why was that the action he took with his limited time and strength? I know why people take selfies, but why did he, an 85-year-old man who never had a social media account? Who did he want to show himself to? Who was meant to scrutinize the image? What were they meant to conclude?
I am also proud to have a piece published by The Point, a magazine I have wanted to publish something in for as long as I’ve known it existed. It’s one of the smartest magazines out there, and I really like its sensibility: its commitment to rigorous thought and refusal of easy answers. It’s an honor to be counted among the writers The Point has published.
And it was really, really exciting to see one of my literary heroes and role models, Meghan Daum, say nice things about the essay:
When I started trying to publish personal essays, I tried to write like Meghan did in her 2001 collection, My Misspent Youth. I don’t think I succeeded, but I had something to aim for. With this and other recent personal essays I’ve written, I have learned a lot from Meghan’s 2015 collection (one of my absolute favorite books), The Unspeakable. There is much I admire about Meghan as a writer, but above all else I admire the fact that she doesn’t flinch. She looks directly at the things that are hardest to look at — aging into irrelevance, death, the failure of love — and speaks honestly about them. I tried not to flinch in this essay.
Two other writers I read often while working on this piece were Meghan O’Gieblyn (whose book God, Human, Animal, Machine I look forward to later this year) and Kathryn Schulz, whose brilliant and moving essay on her father’s death brought me great comfort when I reread it after my father died.
The essay about burnout is my attempt to keep in the public conversation about burnout in the months before my book on the subject comes out. I have a Google alert set for “burnout,” and every day I get articles about workers who are pushed to the limit as well as articles about ridiculous things like “skin burnout” and “March Madness burnout.” Occupational burnout is so relatable a condition that marketers trade on the term all the time to hawk energy drinks or CBD products or whatever else. The trouble is, the marketing nonsense is getting in the way of us understanding the real problem. So I tried to address that.
Along the way, I suggest that there’s a deeper reason we keep talking about burnout without realy doing anything about it: We want to burn out.
I hope you’ll read the essays. Here they are again: “Unfaithful Reproductions” and “The Exaggeration of Burnout.” If you like them, please share them with whoever you think will appreciate them.
Thanks for reading,
Jon