It has been a busy couple of weeks since The End of Burnout launched. I’ve done eleven interviews, including one with Anderson Cooper for his online show Full Circle. That was a lot of fun, though I was as nervous beforehand as you might expect, and I was exhausted and disconsolate the next day. (I bounced back.) I asked Anderson questions from the standard research survey on burnout; he gave surprisingly candid answers. Here’s a link to just that part of the conversation.
And at the end he said, “I hope people get the book. It’s so fascinating... I recommend it.”
So there you go. You can begin fulfilling Anderson’s hopes by clicking this red button:
In addition, I was interviewed for the weekend All Things Considered, and there was a joint review in the Chicago Tribune of The End of Burnout and Out of Office by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel. Salon published Mary Elizabeth Williams’s interview with me. I was on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast and the Business Casual podcast.
I had an essay in the New York Times opinion section, “How Men Burn Out” (more on that in a moment), and an excerpt from the book ran in The Guardian under the headline, “Your Work Is Not Your God: Welcome to the Age of the Burnout Epidemic.” Curio recorded an audio version of that article, for those who, like me, hate to read.
Next time you’re in Vilnius, look for The End of Burnout on bookstore shelves in Lithuanian translation. (Same goes for the local languages in Seoul, Beijing, and Rio.)
Here’s where you come in
If you have already bought the book, then God bless you. And if you have already read it, then may you dwell in the Bosom of Abraham forever.
If I can ask one more thing of you, then please consider rating and reviewing the book on Amazon. More than half of all book sales occur through Amazon. As a result, Amazon reviews — regardless of where you bought the book — can help a book get to a lot more readers.
Currently, if you search for “burnout” on Amazon, The End of Burnout comes up fifth, right after a series of erotic thrillers that has received over 200 reviews. Let’s see if we can jump up a few spots.
There are a few tips from the book’s publisher for writing Amazon reviews at the end of this message. The first review, by newsletter subscriber Rachel Clifton, is a great model (and very kind). Thank you, Rachel!
Now, about men and burnout. There was much more to say, but I only had 1,200 words to work with. It was nice to see Katelyn Fossett of Politico build on the essay in the Women Rule newsletter and give me a chance to say a bit more.
As a few friends and critics noted, feminists have been arguing for decades that patriarchy harms men as well as women. That is certainly the spirit in which I wrote the piece. The fact is, most men can’t live up to the societal standard of masculinity that is so often demonstrated through work. If being a real man means being the primary (or sole) breadwinner, well, fewer and fewer men fill that role now. I came across a sociology paper on how men use work as a site of competition; when the competition is about dominance, there can be only one winner.
I wanted to talk about my father’s outlook on his work, which very much reflected the male-breadwinner ethos. And I wanted to talk about the despair that some men feel over their inadequacy as fathers. I mean:
Parenting is a black hole filled with inadequacy and it has ruined my life. I wish I had not followed society‘s demands of increasing the population of Finland and reproducing.
— burned-out Finnish father, quoted in a research study
Above all, I wish I’d had a chance to talk about politics. (Or maybe not, since I don’t listen to enough podcasts to talk intelligently about politics.) I wanted to talk about this essay on the right and masculinity that Jessa Crispin wrote last month for Unherd. As Crispin shows, for decades right-wing figures from Rush Limbaugh to Missouri Senator Josh Hawley have blamed feminism for the ills that plague men — the loss of manly virtues, their status as breadwinners, and the violence (including against oneself) that follows. On this account, society needs to fight back against the feminist and pro-LGBTQ-rights tide, so men (especially working-class men, who are so often the pawns in these culture-war conflicts) can live good lives again.
“But,” Crispin writes,
the truth is, it was the inflation of the Seventies, and the danger of poverty it brought with it, that drove wages down and therefore women to work…. And feminism was the result of this change, not its cause: entering the workforce, women found they had to advocate for fair pay and for the removal of obstacles to advancement.
The right, then, wants traditional forms of masculinity without the economic conditions — adequate working-class salaries, which were in turn the result of unions’ power — that upheld them. There is plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of labor unions and the conditions of blue-collar work, but, to Crispin, “blaming progressivism for men’s problems, then, is an attempt by the Right to let itself off the hook.”
(By the way, I’m currently enjoying Crispin’s 2015 literary travelogue, The Dead Ladies Project. The sentence, “What is it with me and men and William James?” excellently captures the interplay of self-aware humor and earnest intellectual seeking that I admire in Crispin’s work.)
My tendency is to argue that culture plays a leading role in political and economic change. Crispin’s argument challenges me to recognize how things often work the other way.
In this case, shifting economics made us rethink femininity, making possible the “you can have it all” ideal of the 1980s. That ideal persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, contributing to the patterns we see in women’s burnout: being stretched thin over too many commitments. At the same time, the model of masculinity that prevailed before the 1970s is still with us in ways that I think many younger men don’t fully realize. And that fact is reflected in the patterns of male burnout I mentioned in my essay.
If the right has failed to take the economics behind culture seriously, then I think the left doesn’t pay enough attention to values and meaning. You certainly hear critique of patriarchy from the left, but I don’t think you see enough empathy for people (certainly not just men) whose sense of self-worth was pinned to values that may indeed be outmoded but that have not been replaced by new, positive models.
That is, we are still in the world of Peter Gabriel’s duet with Kate Bush, “Don’t Give Up,” which I mention in the book’s first paragraph, and men are subject to the same kind of despair.
Economic legislation alone isn’t going to get us to the world progressives want. A mandatory paid parental leave benefit would be great; let’s make it happen. But if men don’t know how to be fathers (as the data on their parental burnout suggests), then it’s going to be a disaster when they start taking that leave en masse to care for infants. They’re going to end up like that Finnish guy, hating himself and his kid.
That guy’s problems may stem from a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be a good man. Crispin thinks a better, more radical form of feminism than we have today would help him. In fact, in some sense, helping him is women’s responsibility. I’ll leave you with a quote from an interview related to Crispin’s other book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto:
Men are women's responsibility because women are roughly 100 years ahead of men in terms of questioning gender and going along with the project of androgyny and getting in touch with the masculine side of themselves, which men have not done. They've not explored androgyny outside of the queer communities. They haven’t developed feminine values. They've not done the writing, the research, or the work.
So men are our responsibility because we’re so far ahead of them on this path. We can’t drag them into becoming better humans — that’s their job. But we also can’t meddle with or get in the way of it.
Thanks for reading.
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