Burnout

Rest is soft, or sensual. It’s massaging your own palms with your thumbs, or

touching a purring cat, or holding a warm mug of tea, or smelling flowers or

coffee beans or cut-up herbs

I get asked a lot about “tips for alleviating burnout,” and if you’ve been reading this newsletter for awhile, you know I have a few: put your phone on airplane mode before you go into the bedroom; don’t listen to podcasts on walks; dedicate time to hang out with your own mind. But the biggest one is something I first heard from fellow burnout... See more

When an industry fails to address the societal and structural factors that make this type of work harder, and rely on workers’ passion to power the whole industry through a snowballing crisis....in those cases, not even a strong union can protect the worker from the burnout built into the system. You go beyond burnout to demoralization, which is... See more

Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out, too unattainable, too abstract. 

Everyone has what I’ve come to call a “gratification window,” the period of time in which there must be a believable reward in order to stay motivated. As exemplified... See more