THE END OF BURNOUT is available for preorder!
Plus: What (not) to give the burned-out mother in your life for Mother's Day
You may now purchase my book, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives! You won’t get to read the book until January, but at least you can be assured that you will be among the first to get your copy once it’s released. And if you order it from the publisher’s website, you can get 30% off by using the discount code 17M6662 at checkout. That brings the price of the hardcover below US$20.
Burnout continues to be a cultural buzzword as the pandemic wears on and we begin to think about what a post-pandemic world could look like. To be sure, burnout was a buzzword before the pandemic, too, but the disruption in our work, school, and family lives has made burnout seem like the perfect term to capture our experience.
But as I argued in The New Republic earlier this spring, the “relatability” of burnout also undermines the concept’s meaning. By getting you to think of yourself as burned out, marketers can then try to sell you dubious cures for the condition. So they have every incentive to exaggerate the prevalence of burnout in the world. If literally everyone is burned out, though (as some junk polls suggest), then maybe no one is. A big goal of my book is to show how unhelpful much of our talk about burnout is (chapter 1) and propose more sober, scientifically-informed terms for talking about it (chapter 3).
A recent egregious example of this ridiculous culture surrounding burnout is the Slate article, “15 Mother’s Day Gifts for the Burned-Out Mom in Your Life.” The article offers a list of fairly predictable “self-care” items — books, coffee mugs, a yoga mat — but it’s introduced by an account of the dire state of motherdom during the pandemic: “9.8 million working moms are stressed and experiencing burnout. Seventy-two percent of new moms are suffering from anxiety. Millions of women are leaving—or are being forced to leave—the workforce. We’ve soared past burned—we’ve become the blackened crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.”
And then we see the first item on the list of apparent remedies to this problem, socks:
What do I know? I’m not a mom. But if a mother is truly as burned out as the stats suggest, then socks that say “I am a great mom” on the toes aren’t going to cut it. And this is the problem: To make burnout seem like a raging epidemic, we have defined it so vaguely as to preclude any genuine solution. Burnout just isn’t the kind of thing hosiery can solve. It results from experiencing a chronic gap between your ideals for work and the reality of your job. To heal burnout, we need to make big changes both in our cultural expectations of work and in our working conditions.
The burned-out moms of the world need paid leave, not cute socks. They need pre-K and affordable childcare, not gummy vitamins. They need a reasonable workload and an end to the relentless American work ethic, not new wireless earbuds. All the marketing BS around burnout is a distraction from the genuine problems with work that have festered for the past five decades. If we’re going to fix burnout, we first need to get serious about identifying the problem.
Many of you who subscribe to this newsletter are academics, as I once was and still sort of am. For those of you who want to learn how to bring your expertise to a general readership, I am offering a class on academic writing for the public, beginning May 24. Here is where you can learn more about it and register. The class will be entirely online and asynchronous — no meetings at specific times — and will last for five weeks. At the end of it, you’ll have two essays and a pitch ready to go, for when the public needs your expertise to help them understand their world.
Newsletter subscribers can get 15% off the registration fee with promo code NEWSLETTER — though the code expires on May 10, so sign up soon! And if you have further questions, just reply to this email. Again: register here!
I will also be teaching a class on spiritual nonfiction for Writing Workshops, beginning June 28. (This is for anyone, not just academics!) It will also be online and asynchronous, running for eight weeks. I have offered it a few times before and have been very impressed with the work the students have done. Whether or not you yourself are especially religious, and whether you want to write about your own spirituality or other people’s, this class will help you craft more excellent essays about the place of religion in our lives. For more information and to register, click here.
If you know of anyone who might like to get these (currently monthly, more or less) updates about what I am writing, thinking, and teaching, please forward this message to them and encourage them to subscribe. Thank you for reading!
Jon