How To Manage Burnout
Ignore the 'Quarantine 15', eat chaga chocolate and watch a rom-com this Mother's Day.
Welcome to the final chapter of my burnout trilogy. In the first, I suggested our pandemic burnout might be better called “languishing.” In the second, I realized my own burnout has been a long time in the making; that it’s more of a cultural condition of toxic productivity, propelled by millennials’ economic precarity, the rise of the “creator economy,” and our obsession with individual success. In both, I did a lot of complaining without offering solutions. Because as Cassandra Lam says, “Hyper-individualism and self-hatred, fuelled by internalized racism at the hands of cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy, is a doozy to heal.”
So what do we do? It’s not realistic to say we uproot capitalism. Nor am I going to stop working or switch careers for some mindless job I don’t care about (because my perfectionism means I’ll always care—even as a teen, I used to lose sleep over minimum wage retail jobs). I can’t change the system, but I can be mindful of how the ideology is burni…