Burnout is a common feeling for all of us. Our world is so fast-paced and demanding, it is hard to take a breath. In fact, resting almost feels criminal to rest in our culture.
It is interesting that we call that feeling of being so tired and fed up with our everyday life we just want to stop moving, that if someone tries to nudge us to “keep going,” “do our best,” or try to shove happiness, or sell us their definition of “a good time” or “a productive time” down our throats we just want to snap their heads off, as burnout. Because fires burn out when you don’t feed the flames.
There are three things for fire to keep burning: fuel, oxygen, and heat. When one of those three runs out, the flames die out.
For people, we also need three things to keep us going: time, money, and energy. Those three are what enables us to get the things we need: food, shelter, sleep, work, time for ourselves and for the people we care about, time to explore our passions and interest, time to learn and feed our minds, soul, and body. And most importantly, rest.
But there is very limited time to earn very limited money, and if we want to have more of those two, we need to expend our very limited energy—there’s just not enough left for us to keep going at the pace the world expects to move.
So we burn out.
We stop moving. We stop functioning.
And unlike fire, it takes a while to get over burnout.
I saw this article while doing topic research for work. According to Galloway, young people nowadays want “work-life balance,” but that is impossible to get in the early stages of our career, because, as he said we live in a culture where we “need to earn our stripes.”
If we want to have the freedom to dictate how we balance our personal and professional lives, we need to have enough influence, experience, and I forgot what the third thing was.
It sucks, but it is true. If we can’t pave our paths ourselves and have to work for big capitalist corporations to earn a living, we need to play by their rules before we earn the right to rest.
So, it’s either you work for them, or we find some other way to survive and disrupt this, quite frankly, really sucky society we live in.
We can always try to take that balance we need to avoid burnout. Or we can accept the fact that burnout is just a part of our cycles and surrender to the fact that we will have to stop and start over so many times. Or we can just go through the “best years of our life” running on empty until we snap and start shooting everybody.
The point is, the world is unfair. You either change it, live with it, or bear with it while you are dead inside. Choose which battle you want to fight. You can try all three if you want until you find what battle you can win, or at least until you find one worth fighting in.
Keep burning (and burning out), pick your battles, and whenever it is within your means, feed that fire.
PsychiARTIST 