For your stay attention this weekend…

Notes on burnout, work and play

Briefly: May and June day retreats in Kent, UK | Emma Gannon on How We Live Now | My live appearances | Catch my interviews on Moms Don’t Have Time To Read and How To Be Human

Hello,

Clearly work is on my mind this week - after writing about working on holiday in my newsletter, I seem to be irresistibly drawn to articles about work, too. 

I think it’s partly because so much burnout is in the air - you can almost smell it, like clouds of smoke rising through a burning town. This is a signal, an emergency. It seems to me that the people who are burning out now are the people who thought they escaped the worst ravages of the pandemic. These are the people who held everything together for everyone else, making the world feel safe for children, emotionally supporting older friends and relatives, keeping teams of colleagues buoyant or rallying to support sick neighbours. Three years in, they’ve hit a wall. 

Emma Gannon has been writing wonderfully about her own burnout, and her recent newsletter - Burnout Isn’t Always About Overworking - makes an important point. I’d probably go even further, and say that I’ve noticed a slightly accusatory edge creeping into our discourse on exhaustion. We’re trying to pin it back onto the individual: the insinuation is that we, personally, have failed to manage our energies properly. Anything - anything - but address the structural impossibilities of the contemporary world. But as Emma’s piece makes clear, burnout often creeps up on us after months or years of stress, grief, or loss of control. Most relevant to this moment is ‘existential burnout’, the sense that a whole way of life isn’t working. Either way, this is not an individual problem. It’s a collective one.

The people I know who are floored by burnout at the moment all fit into a category I’ve come to see as the Good Student. As kids, they sailed to the top of their class, but were always pushed to work harder, to add ever more strings to their overladen bows, and to excel at every single one. Nobody ever took them aside and said, ‘Hey, you’re doing enough. Go and do something you wouldn’t dream of putting on your LinkedIn profile for a while.’ Carrying this oppressive conscientiousness into adulthood often means that these people don’t achieve the heights of success that looked inevitable for them. They get bogged down in detail, and are afraid of making mistakes. Yes, I am talking about myself - or a part of myself that I had to escape in order to fail spectacularly at having a writing career for 15 years.

I recognised them in Adam Grant’s piece about email apologetics - the culture of saying ‘sorry for the delay’ if you’ve ‘failed’ to reply for, oooh three hours maybe? I’ve noticed that some people also chase a response to emails after 24 hours. I am not okay with this. Emails are asynchronous communication tools. If you need something urgently from me, you’ll have to call. Chances are you don’t have my number, and if you do, I’m unlikely to answer unless you are my agent, my assistant, my husband or my mother. Those circumstances are quite deliberate, because I am not the emergency services. Oh and also, chasing an email after a few hours means that I’ll only take longer to respond, and may well block you because I am stubborn as a mule. I’d could say ‘I don’t make the rules’, but I do. And yet I fully recognise that most people don’t get the chance to set communication rules and rhythms that protect their sanity; see the above paragraph about burnout. It’s just that those of us who do have some agency have a responsibility to exercise it. Maybe it’ll catch on. (For a more thoughtful take than mine, take a look at Anne Helen Petersen’s classic piece How Email Became Work). 

Not all of us spend our lives on email, though. This exploration of the lives of ‘iceberg cowboys’ in Newfoundland made me realise just how varied this thing called work can be. It’s dangerous, difficult, backbreaking-work, but also a roaring success story of the far north, where ways of life are in flux. The cowboys’ work is founded on the idea that water trapped inside icebergs froze millennia ago and therefore lacks any of the pollutants found in our current water sources. These men (and yes, they are all men) sail out and wrangle the enormous chunks of ice that break off into the sea, capturing a source of highly pure water which they use to make… beer. There are, as I always say, many different ways to be human.

One further take on work which I commend to you all is Marina Benjamin’s latest book, A Little Give, which came out last week. Always a deeply astute writer, Marina turns her sharp eye to the subject of gendered labour, and in particular to the burden carried by women in middle age who are often juggling the pinnacle of their careers with older children and ageing parents. Underneath it all - and the subtext of this whole newsletter - is the complex issue of our own desire towards this work, as well as our deep frustration with it. We want to create blissful domestic spheres; we want to throw ourselves into fulfilling work; we just don’t want to feel like the only ones holding it all together. 

As we draw to a close, let’s turn our thoughts to play instead. We know that some animals, like dogs and otters, engage in play, but it’s hard to understand why. As this article makes clear, it does not develop intelligence or measurable skills. But the true benefits of play might be more diffuse. Like us, these animals may simply enjoy the dopamine rush, but perhaps they are also creating safe moments of unpredictability that allow them to problem-solve and respond in the moment. Now there’s a skill to put on your LinkedIn profile.

Take care,

Katherine

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