Burnout is a Systemic Issue
Millennial burnout, tech burnout, creative burnout - I’ve written about how to find better balance before. As I’m closing out another #100dayproject focussing on #100daysofbalance, I’m emerging with a wider perspective. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how they don’t believe in balance. It doesn’t exist, they say. And I see where people who say this are coming from. We’ll never find that elusive state of arriving at balance. It’s a constant balancing act, and a lot of us are exhausted by the sheer endlessness of performing it. When Covid-19 came around, that balancing act became even harder. Boundaries between ourselves and work became blurry for most of us. In an article I found, Tiffiny Costello describes why she “quit ‘the dream’ of freelancing to return to a 9–5”:
„My last year as a freelancer was filled with anxiety, depression, naps (so many naps), poor eating habits, long runs, too much coffee, ridiculous sleeping patterns, or no sleep at all. And yet — people PRAISE this type of lifestyle (queue the Gary Vee followers). It is unhealthy to set no boundaries between yourself and work.“
That’s how a lot of us started to feel about our work as we started working from home fulltime. As talk about “pandemic burnout” got louder, I saw a lot of articles digging into this ‘trend’ and aiming to provide support:
The CNBC, advised to “just find out what works for you and, if it’s not working, try something new”.
Forbes was calling for “sustainable growth [that depends] on a holistic approach to well-being”.
Fast Company claimed that the feelings of burnout a lot of people are experiencing have nothing to do with work, arguing that “the work aspect of working from home is largely positive” while “the home aspect of working from home is stressful”, urging employers to “support people as whole humans, not just transactional employees”.
HBR did a whole series on burnout titled “Beyond Burned Out” diving deep on the topic and highlighting that “combating burnout may feel like an overwhelming and herculean task, especially after months of emotional fatigue, but if you’re armed with the right tools, it can be easier than you might think.”
The Atlantic made an argument that only your boss can cure your burnout, by “[placing] fewer demands on people, [giving] them more control over how to handle those demands, and [providing] support to handle them”, and a doctor declares burnout as a given by now, claiming that taking back control plus a dose of self-compassion are key, as well as that “as a society we must accept responsibility for creating a culture of burnout“.
The New York Times talks about how late-stage pandemic burnout has us languishing. But luckily you can learn how to get to the other side and flourish again.
The New Yorker recently did a deep dive into the history of the condition, concluding that wellness sites’ lists of coping strategies just don’t cut it “in the conditions of late capitalism, [where] work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield.”
Stanford also wrote about burnout from an organisational perspective and stated that “instead of pressuring already-stressed individuals to fix themselves, true wellness requires organisation-level interventions.”
The dominant narrative makes stress and burnout an individual problem - people just have to learn skills to cope and develop resilience. More recent pieces recognise that individual wellness only get us so far, and the whole thing is a much bigger issue. A systemic one. No wonder we’re all hitting that wall!
To solve this issue, we need a more holistic approach, and even activism. Like back in 1886, when workers started to push for an 8-hour work day, now honoured with a public holiday - labour day. As Jenny O’Dell points out in her book “How to Do Nothing”, she sees “a similar battle playing out in our time, a colonisation of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” A lot of us see the need to change the way we work. I see a few things that need to happen:
Step 1 - Learn how to manage stress in yourself
It starts with you - you need to learn what causes you to be stressed, and how you can deal with it in healthy ways. A lot of common advice stops here though. I believe we need to go further than individual wellness, and look at what other factors perpetuate the constant stress we’re feeling.
Step 2 - Unlearn hustle culture
As Tiffiny mentions above, we praise a lifestyle of working ourselves to the ground. We wear busyness as a badge of honour. People like Elon Musk boasting about his 80-hour work weeks doesn’t exactly help the cause. There’s a lot to dig in and unpack on a societal level.
Step 3 - Redesign the way we work and do business
We’re stuck in an outdated system of working that stems from the industrial revolution. As people worked in factories, it made sense to use units of time as measurement for productivity. In the age of knowledge work, this equation falls short. We’re already on our way to changing it - agencies and freelancers are already moving away from billing by the hour and towards value-based pricing, citing that “the traditional Cost-Plus-Billing model is becoming more and more inadequate as a way to account for the increasingly complex and diverse services that agencies offer and the true value of what they deliver to clients.”
And with that, the question becomes - what could a new way of working look like for you? How can you design your career to focus on sustainable growth for the longterm instead of growth at all costs - one of those costs being your mental and physical health?
If you want to learn more about burnout, check out my resource library.
I offer leadership coaching that helps you draw boundaries in the face of these systemic challenges. If you want to explore working together, have comments or want to add more resources to this post, I’d love to hear from you - you can contact me here.
