The privilege of burnout
I was glad to see discussion of burnout get so much attention last week following Anne Helen Petersen's mega-viral Buzzfeed News essay, "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation." Having suffered occupational burnout myself, and having written about that experience and the burnout epidemic as a consequence of America's self-destructive culture of work, I think much more needs to be said about this problem. Petersen has opened up an important conversation. I contributed to it with a short essay for The New Republic, "Millennials Don't Have a Monopoly on Burnout," arguing that burnout cuts across generations and suggesting that this fact means our shared experience of burnout can spur the solidarity we'll need to prevent and heal it in each other.
Petersen, who is a friend of mine, has generously cited me as someone whose thinking has shaped hers, and she's given me and my essay shout-outs in her (always excellent) newsletter and in radio interviews over the past few days.
If you're looking for further perspectives on this issue, I recommend another response to Petersen, "This Is What Black Burnout Feels Like." In that essay, Tiana Clark brings attention to the unique pressures that workers of color face, including the additional burdens of history, of suspicion, and of representing an entire racial group. And to see how children are prepared early for burnout, read John Thornton Jr.'s Vox essay, "I Work with Kids. Here's Why They're Consumed with Anxiety." I plan to assign it to my first-year writing students for the first day of class next week.
Some critics of the burnout discussion focused on the privilege of those who were sharing their stories. Who am I to complain about burnout, when the job I burned out doing was a tenured professorship? Well, for one thing, I gave up that job and now work as an adjunct instructor and freelancer! (And I'm much happier, even if I do wish I still had a full-time, tenured teaching job.) But more than that, an important aspect of burnout is that privilege doesn't protect you from it. Like anxiety or depression, burnout is a different kind of thing than the stresses people experience due to poverty or social marginalization (though it's surely not isolated from those stresses, either).
To make some sense of the role privilege, or the lack of it, plays in burnout, I read a number of psychology articles (and haven't come to a solid conclusion yet). I also returned to Phoebe Maltz Bovy's book, The Perils of "Privilege": Why Injustice Can't Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage. Maltz Bovy, who's a great presence on Twitter, argues that the turn to "privilege" as a framework for discrediting someone's opinion (as in, "your [white, male, hetero, etc.] privilege is showing") has been "a disaster" for the effort to create a more equitable society, which is, presumably, a goal the privilege-accusers share. She sees the "privilege" framework as a distraction from discussion of the actual basis for social equity: rights.
In the case of burnout, then, it's less helpful to discount a securely-employed person's burnout story on account of their privilege than it is to call attention to burnout as a phenomenon affecting a wide swath of workers. It's true: More workers should have more job security! And: That won't keep them from burning out! Doctors have pretty secure positions, yet nearly half of them exhibit key symptoms of burnout, as I noted in my essay. (Among workers generally, the burnout rate is a bit over 25%.) We need to do more than ensure job security if we want to fix the burnout problem. In fact, you might say that burnout is a job-security problem, since it can lead workers to quit or be fired. (Note that burnout is not a diagnosable disorder according to the DSM-V. It has no medical or legal standing.)
By the way, I want to offer and endorsement of "Feminine Chaos," the twice-monthly Bloggingheads conversation about culture Maltz Bovy and Kat Rosenfield produce.
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Right at the end of December, my review essay on "The Good Place" and "Forever," two TV comedies set in the afterlife, was published in America. "The Good Place" in particular is about moral improvement after death, which is a very appealing prospect! Wouldn't it be great to put off becoming better until after your schedule is totally clear, once and for all? Not just this show, but multiple religious and philosophical systems, suggest this is how the cosmos actually works.
Would you also like to learn how to blather about TV shows? You're in luck: I will be teaching a seminar on "How to Write About Books, TV, Movies, and Music" for Writing Workshops Dallas on Sunday, February 10. You can take the seminar even if you're not in Dallas; a live stream will be available. Learn more and register here.
Between now and the time my next newsletter goes out (Feb. 1 or so), a long essay that was a long time in the writing will be published in Commonweal. Its premise is that the American work ethic is demonic. It does to us everything religious people say demons do. It haunts us, it tempts us, it undermines us. In the essay, I report on going out to a desert monastery to see how a community of Benedictine monks battles that demon. We who live in what the monks call "the world" have much to learn from their struggle. I hope you like the piece, and if you do, I hope you'll share it in your networks.
And if you like what you read in this newsletter, please share it, too. That's one of the best ways you can support my writing. As always, thank you for reading!
Jon