By Rebecca Ruiz, Mashable, June 21, 2019.
When burnout comes for you, it’s not subtle. It casts an inexplicable darkness on the most mundane things: driving in traffic, showing up to work on time, filing an expense report. It feels like a weight tied to your waist, stealing any spark of energy you will into existence.
You might confuse it for depression — and it very well could be — but, by reflecting on how and when it arrived, you suspect the culprit is the unraveling of your work life. At some point, you were pushed beyond a limit — or even more than one: a new boss who gave you more to do with less resources, another year passed without a raise, a manager accused of wrongdoing who faced no consequences. Now you feel exhausted, without a clue how to revive yourself.
Memories of my own bout with burnout came rushing back when I read Anne Helen Petersen’s Buzzfeed essay on the subject in January. Based on how the piece, titled “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,” rapidly pinged across the internet, I know I wasn’t the only one who saw themselves in her words.
At first, I wholeheartedly agreed with Petersen’s conclusion. Burnout, she wrote, will be the “millennial condition” — the generation’s “permanent residence” — until we tear the system down, or in less revolutionary terms, fix capitalism so that it rewards quality over quantity. Yet the longer I thought about it, particularly from the perspective of someone who (obsessively) reports on mental health, the more I realized Petersen’s honest but fatalistic diagnosis might lead some down a misguided path in which they give up hope that their burnout will ever improve.
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