Beating Burnout
Most of us live within a burnout society that steals our time and attention from those things we should value most. But there are ways to beat the burnout.
What I watched: “How we can beat the burnout society” by Ernst-Jan Pfauth. Posted November 30, 2017.
Yesterday I was running through my normal daily process. Checking my calendar. Checking emails and messages. Checking my list of tasks and projects. Prioritizing my day. The day’s agenda was beginning to pile up.
Despite no longer working a corporate job, my days often become a series of nonstop activities. This is a reality I’m not entirely happy about. Yes, I like to feel useful, productive, and dare I say it, successful. But lately I’ve felt an odd pressure to do more, achieve more, and add yet more to my already busy days.
I know this is somewhat ridiculous. I no longer work a nine-to-five job. There is no one I’m accountable to for how I spend my time. I’ve turned down a few projects, board seats, and official positions since I left corporate life specifically so that I’m not accountable to anyone. Yet, I’m still plagued by that nagging sense that I should be doing more.
As I saw my day’s schedule bloat before my eyes, I was experiencing a bout of burnout. Even though most of my work commitment was to myself, I still felt like I was working too hard. Again, sounds ridiculous, but I bet I’m not alone feeling like this.
At one point I said to myself “How important is this? I’m probably going to be dead in 30 years.” I know that sounds morbid to some, but it’s reality. What came to mind was the book by Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, that I wrote about in “Your Life Will Be Absurdly Brief.”
At the core of the book’s argument for a better way to live is the reality that the average human lifespan is absurdly brief. Thus, the book’s title. If you live to 80, you have about 4,000 weeks on the planet. That’s it. That might sound like a lot, but it’s not. Especially when you do the math and start deducting time for sleep, chores, childcare, cleaning, cooking, eating, and all of the other ongoing activities we must do.
Perhaps a friendly spirit (no, I don’t believe in those) was sitting on my shoulder and delivered to me the random video by Ernst-Jan Pfauth to help me wrestle with this issue. Pfauth points out that if we feel like we’re working too hard and getting burned out, we’re not alone.
Pfauth listed percentages of the labor forces in a few countries that feel overworked. The Netherlands is 14%. The USA and Canada is 40%. Australia is 48%. And the United Kingdom is 51%. That’s millions upon millions of people who are experiencing overwork and burnout.
Korean-born German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, author of The Burnout Society (paid link), has said “We’re living in a burnout society.” He’s correct. I talk to friends all the time who feel overworked and are amid or approaching a state of debilitating burnout.
Once upon a time, we’d point to material things such as a fancy car as the status symbols we’d cling to in order to feel like we’re succeeding in the ways we’ve been acculturated to succeed. Nowadays, a newer status symbol seems to be rampant – being busy.
Whenever someone asks us how we’re doing, we almost instinctively answer, “Oh, so busy.”
Busted! I say that all the time. Even though I know I shouldn’t hold up my busyness as a type of success or status yardstick, I still do it. I don’t like that I do it, but I have to be honest and admit I do.
Whether it’s charging ahead aggressively in our career, dutifully pumping iron at the gym to have a great body, or getting the most likes on social media, we work hard constantly to achieve measurements of success, popularity, and power. It’s a no-win hamster wheel scenario created by the society and work culture we all live in.
Pfauth mentioned something else that resonated with me, the gnawing need to constantly work toward self-improvement, a feeling I experience often. We’re not alone. About 20 million self-help books are currently sold each year with the self-help nonfiction book category one of the fastest growing.
Much like Pfauth, I succumbed to a sort of self-help addiction for many years. Whether it was about how to organize, minimize, negotiate, manage, increase productivity, earn or manage money, exercise, and so much more, I was determined to absorb the supposed wisdom in the mountain of self-help books I consumed.
The thing is though you can never quite reach the lofty goals and metrics the self-help material wants you to achieve. Why? Because we’re human. Constant and perfect optimization and productivity isn’t how we’re supposed to be wired. Our culture has pushed us in that direction, but it’s not a natural state for us.
But you’d be forgiven if you assume the constant self-improvement and hyper productivity culture and success along with all the associated hard work is normal and how it’s supposed to be. Everywhere you look and everyone you talk to exposes this hard-working busyness malady.
Pfauth wanted to know why so many of us are in this overworked state. He dove into some positive psychology research and learned two things.
The first thing is that in the burnout society we view life as a competition. All the goals we are told are worth reaching, from money to popularity, they are always measured relative to other people. So, we have to have more than others.
Second thing I learned? It’s a pretty bad idea to view life as a competition because it’s a competition we can’t win. No matter how successful we are, there is always someone else who seems to be doing better.
We compete nonstop with others to have and be more. We exhaust ourselves even though we’ll never win the rat race. It turns out the success we’ve been promised by society and the self-help industry is an empty promise. Add all that together and it’s a perfect recipe for burnout.
How do we fix that? What’s the cure? It turns out extensive research on happiness confirms what is probably obvious to many of us even if we don’t act on it.
Help other people.
Spend time with people you love.
Figure out what gets you into a focused state of flow.
Learn new skills.
Embrace gratitude.
Gratitude is the one I struggle with the most oddly. On any given day you’ll probably find me helping people, hanging out with someone I care about, entering a state of flow (happens a lot when I’m writing), or learning new skills even if those skills have no specific usage other than to satisfy my curiosity. But gratitude? That’s a tough one.
I’ve read enough research studies on happiness and contentment to know that gratitude pops up consistently as an important component.
Countless studies have shown that people who value what they have, right now, are often happier people.
Those things magazines, television, advertisements, and social media culture tell us to pursue run counter to what actually makes us happy. Money, popularity, or power will not make us happy. We might get a short-term endorphin rush when we achieve such things, but that rush is extremely short-lived.
Perhaps you know all this. I knew all this before I watched the video. But I forget about this all the time and fall prey yet again to pursuing that which I know won’t truly make me happy.
Pfauth believes we need daily rituals to remind us of what makes us happy. A ritual that Pfauth chose is to write down three things that he’s grateful for and why. I’ve considered undertaking a similar gratitude ritual. I have a friend who posts his gratitude message to himself most days on social media. That’s his ritual. Maybe it would work for me but it’s something I’ve yet to try.
What ritual I do engage in every single day is meditation. Every day, usually first thing in the morning, I meditate for five minutes. Sometimes longer, but always for at least five minutes. Perhaps I can improve this ritual by inserting some gratitude acknowledgement into the mix. Maybe I need to consciously ask myself for what I’m grateful as I’m exiting my fully relaxed meditative state.
Everyone would be better off if they escaped the burnout society. Perhaps you and I will muster the effort to move past burnout into more peace, calm, and engagement with life. But what about everyone else. It’s incumbent upon us to help others do the same.
Personal burnout has societal roots. It’s not just something we’ve created out of thin air. Since burnout results from societal influences, it’s important that we all fight back together to push back against “a society that works towards a place where most people feel overworked and worn out, in which creativity is crushed, and in which we no longer have the time and energy to have great conversations with friends.”
Maybe say no the next time someone asks you to commit your time. Maybe turn off your notifications at the dinner table so you can better connect with others at the table. Maybe you’ll figure out other ways to focus more often on those things that really matter. Then, once you and I figure that out, let’s help our friends, family, and colleagues do the same.
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