Anne Helen Petersen Quotes

A reckoning with burnout is so often a reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

This was, and remains, the dystopian reality underlying the redesign and automation of the office. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks, for the same pay.

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

As Darcy Lockman puts it in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, “Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated.

A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centered-ness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. To emerge from burnout, and ultimately resist its return, is to remember as much.

We can understand that if companies actually want to cultivate that ever-alluring “good” company culture, they have to rethink not just the amenities and office space they’re providing their employees but the entire style of work, the whole ethos of optimization and presentism. Doing so will demand authentically embracing flexibility, as we discussed in the last chapter. But it will also mean reconsidering core values beyond “growth” and “scale,” and understanding that you cannot compel or surveil your way to sustained, quality productivity. Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met.

It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.

Workers are desperate for more autonomy over their lives. They crave more balance and less precarity. They also, crucially, want to work. But they want to work for places that treat them as human beings and that invest in them and their futures. They want to be a part of organizations that recognize that meaningful and collaborative work can bring dignity and create value but that work is by no means the only way to cultivate satisfaction and self-worth. We know that workers who are overextended become too tired, frustrated, and anxious to do their best work; they’re too busy trying to tread water, look busy, and keep poorly communicating bosses happy.

One of the refrains of the current moment is “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.” And one of the most straightforward solutions could be giving people the time and mental freedom to actually care about things that aren’t themselves and their immediate families.

Many Hollywood stars have committed versions of the long suicide. Biographies of Clift posit that he drank because he couldn’t be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to shelter within. But if you look at his own words, his testimonies about what acting did to him, you’ll see the culprit. His perpetual question to himself, as he once scribbled in his journal, was, “How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable, and still alive?” For Clift, the task proved impossible. Clift once said, “The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.” He took himself to that precipice, but he fell straight in. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, circa From Here to Eternity — those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the firm stare: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold.

hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, will never buy a home, and are terrified of what a medical catastrophe could bring, so long as you can still blend in with higher incomes in a social setting.

The Williams sisters had something else: each other, and their absolute dominance.

A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?

As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again.

Efficiency and long hours might seem at cross-purposes, but they’re the twin pillars of the ideal flexible worker: obsessed with productivity, but instead of trading that productivity for less work, they work all the time.