Don’t burnout. Just balance better.

Don’t burn out. Just balance better.

Mondays, Wednesdays, Friday: political science classes. Two hours commuting each day. Tuesdays, Thursdays: interviewing kaumātua for my research assistant job. Also Thursdays: data sessions, analysing Treaty Principle Bills submissions with other academics.

Between all that: co-author 3 journal manuscripts, edit a textbook chapter, attend pointless research meetings, co-author a news piece, plan a media panel, complete 7 readings, charge equipment, print consent forms and info sheets, contact and recruit interview participants, collate data for my MPOLS dissertation fixed-effects model even though I don’t start that until next trimester, and manage my endometriosis.

I think I forgot something — oh, finish all my assignments and keep an A grade average. So last week, when they offered me another research assistant job, of course I said yes. Why?

The most obvious answer is ambition. Career opportunities like these are designed to be accepted, never declined. But the real answer is uglier than that.

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

Gone are the days of a foreman watching you, whipping you into shape. Now we self-regulate. We measure ourselves, optimise ourselves, punish ourselves — and then label it ambition, responsibility and growth. Max Weber (1904, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) warned that societal devotion to profit may trap us in what he called an iron cage: a system so rational, so efficient, that no one needs to even enforce it anymore. Looking at my calendar, I’m starting to think he was right.

Today, we push ourselves beyond mental and physical limits because we’re convinced that we can self-optimise (Byung-Chul Han, 2010, The Burnout Society). Han called this the ‘achievement society’ where we are both the exploited and the exploiter. Our internalised pressure to be smarter, better is what drives us rather than external enforcement.

This idea stems from neoliberal economics. Neoliberalism argues that markets can regulate themselves. Achievement societies treat people the same way. The main fantasy of neoliberalism is that if you just let competition and financial profit incentives run their course, equilibrium will emerge. Markets will stablise themselves. People will optimise themselves. Of course we all know this is bogus. Markets crash and people burn out.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

But yet, this dedication to levelling up or to achieving more persists. It rewards hours worked as proof of your worth, or self-aggrandising LinkedIn posts as evidence of your “can-do” attitude. All this does is leave us feeling like everything – burnout, stress, exhaustion – is our fault.

If you’re overwhelmed, the problem is not the system itself. The problem is that you’ve failed to manage yourself properly. The solution, apparently, is simple. Don’t burn out. Just balance better.

I can’t help but notice the irony when I look at my own life. When I really think about everything I’ve said yes to, I don’t feel even an ounce of satisfaction. No sense of accomplishment. No quiet sigh of relief. Just an uneasy feeling that I could be doing something else, something bigger, something more impressive or lucrative.

That’s the danger of being so obsessed with productivity because productivity has no natural endpoint. There is always another task or more work, but never enough time to rest or feel content. I speak from experience when I say this, but there’s truly no dignity in compliance. And yet, we keep foolishly trying to optimise our workloads or schedules until we just can’t anymore. Until we burn out.

At that point, I usually ask myself: was it worth it? No.

But then again, satisfaction was never part of the plan anyway.