[outputting consistently] takes away from the heart of it if all you’re doing is focusing on that consistency.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

It seemed as though he’d lived the entirety of his childhood and adolescence on autopilot, so busy living out the life expected of him that he never questioned whether he actually wanted it. ​ In his own mind, he was worth caring about only because of his achievements. ​ The burnt-out case of today belongs to a culture without an off switch. ​ She would fantasise in our sessions about going home and sleeping, waking only for stretches of blissfully catatonic inactivity over uninterrupted, featureless weeks. ​ This belief, she had come to realise, had taken a suffocating hold on her life: “the longer I live in wait for this magical event, the more I’m not living this life,

I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months. ​ In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible. ​ I took piano lessons for fun, not for my future. ​ We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job. But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. ​ Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed. ​ And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others. ​ Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” ​ One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” ​ At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting. ​ That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial. ​ or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. ​ It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

How you act — as a manager, as a co-worker, as a partner, as a parent — has ripple effects that extend far past the immediate relationship. ​ Are you willing to have slightly less so that others can have significantly more? Or, as I like to think about it, do you actually care about other people? ​ But we’re removed from the conditions that produce it, the living conditions that result from it, and the realities of the waste it produces. All we see is a deal.

What would happen if I let myself take a break, let myself rest, gave myself some time off from the checklists and the to-do lists and the need to publicly appear productive? Maybe I’ll lose some followers, maybe I won’t be first in people’s minds when they’re thinking of someone to speak at their conference, maybe I’ll stop getting put into random lists of “Cool Thought Leaders To Follow On Twitter Dot Com.” But I’m not going to lose my job or my apartment or stop being able to pay my bills if I give myself a break from “trying to be productive literally every single day.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to find things like speaking opportunities if I want them. I’m not going to disappear if I put down my armor and let myself relax for a little while.

Fascination in the Kaplan’s sense is a magical (that’s my word) quality of an environment where your attention is held but not drained.

the major skill that all of you have acquired is how to be a more thoughtful, invested, engaged person in today’s world. That’s hard to put on a resume, and even if you could, I don’t know if employers would value it: somehow “understanding how ideologies of race, sexuality, and gender are encoded in the media that surrounds us and influence our interactions with each other” isn’t as marketable as “Proficient in Excel.” ​ There’s an old union slogan I’ve been thinking about a lot: 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for work, 8 hours to do what you will. What you do with that time “to do what you will” — go outside, read deeply and widely, go to the Bijou every night for popcorn with brewer’s yeast, run for office, go to church, advocate for things that actually matter to you — that is just as much who you are, if not more so, than the time you spend at work. Unions understood and still understand: work is part of life. But only part. ​ We don’t have to monetize our hobbies.We don’t have to value education for its ability to provide readily marketable skills.

Laziness is the taboo of our generation. I hope future cultures will look back and see that we were obsessed with working all the time. Anyone who wasn’t working enough felt ashamed. Be more productive! Your worth as a person is only as good as your job title / how much money you make / however you fit in to the production-consumption system. ​ If you think this would be a better way for all of us to live, I think the key to realizing it is finding an alternative value system other than identifying our human worth based on the work we do. This is difficult. Most people have no idea how to understand their place in the world except in relation to their job. Who am I? I’m a role at institution.

There’s a big difference between feeling like I did some things that were failures versus feeling that I myself am a failure. Rationally, I know I’m dealing with the former, but emotionally it feels much more like the latter. ​ Transitioning and moving to a new country weren’t career progress, but in retrospect they were necessary for me to get in a place where I could focus on my career again. ​ For me right now, that means figuring out how to be okay with things not feeling “Done”, and looking for ways to celebrate the progress I’ve made even when that isn’t wrapped up in easy-to-cupcake achievements. ​ and isolation is not good for burnout. ​ Focusing so much on discrete, publicly visible accomplishments made it harder for me to see the small, gradual pieces of progress that matter more to me at this point in my career – and life. I started the cupcakes as a way to demonstrate what it meant to celebrate my successes, and I hope that sharing this will help other people see what it might look like to sit with and learn from failures as well.

but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken in the race of days. ​ To all the small miracles you rushed through. ​ Learn to linger around someone of ease

Moving away from a city won’t change your relationship to work. Neither will meditating, or facials, or any of the other solutions to burnout that are actually about focusing you just enough to make you a better worker, instead of admitting that trying to work more — and focusing all of your self-bettering energy on that goal — is the problem itself. ​ rather, community, and reorienting oneself away from the American god of capitalism, might. ​ It’s going to take me a very long time to unlearn the idea that I’m only as valuable as my ability to work more than everyone around me. But I’m trying.

instead what seemed required was a kind of ironic disavowal of disavowal with regard to our online presentation: The tone foregrounds the idea that we all must put on an act that fools no one. ​ Among the historical antecedents, ​ They reinforce the idea that people should always be working by providing another arena for invidious comparison, self-branding, and optimization. But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it. ​ writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well. ​ is to see at least some aspect of yourself suspended in time and space. ​ The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment. ​ What kind of self derives from this condition? Imagine a wedding photographer who circulates, trying to capture candid images of spontaneous or unscripted moments. “Act naturally,” they might joke, before encouraging everyone to “pretend I’m not here,” ironically vocalizing the impossible possibility to diffuse some of the pressure of doing as they say. Now imagine that you are that photographer, but that it is also your wedding. And imagine also that the wedding never ends. ​ To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management ​ But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage. ​ We can understand backstage experience, then, as a respite not only from the gaze of an audience but also the gaze we must fix on ourselves to pull off our performances. ​ The algorithms that ostensibly reveal what your “true” or “authentic” self would choose for itself feed off the very exhaustion that the platforms generate, offering refuge from the burden of identity work in the automation of the will. ​ Life needs the protection of nonawareness.

BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life. In the gentle shrugging off of blame, “bandwidth” as metaphor becomes a useful distortion, since there is no regulatory body assigning us an emotional frequency spectrum. When we discuss feelings and relationships in terms of “bandwidth” we are treating them like megabits of information.

likely in childhood, when life seemed to limit itself to the small world around us. that the contours of their experience were articulated It reminds me of the passage I quote in my original piece from social psychologist Devon Price: “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you,” Price writes, “it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.” As I said last week, no one’s “bottom half of their to-do list” — the things they avoid and find themselves incapable of completing — are exactly the same, and the consequences of the inability to complete them are different. The question can’t just be how I can prevent my burnout; it has to be how I can prevent yours. The answer will entail not just creating better workplaces, but also becoming better people. How can you communicate to your kid — in a way that they will actually hear and trust and internalize — that you care about them learning, but that their ability to get into a “good” college is not tied to your love for them? How can you work to make the “mental load” in your household visible to your partner, and collaborate with them, in a way that’s not passive aggressive or creating even more load, to share it? How can you implement policies in your workplace that don’t incentivize demonstrations of “overwork”? (It’s not just saying that there’s no expectation to answer emails after 6 pm, for example, but that no emails should be sent). Or even just simply acknowledge that events that seem like fun work “escape” to some people on your team feel like much, much more labor to others?

“you can end up in this place where you don't want to engage with any of it, to talk about how burnout affects people creatively." - @erikhane @printrunpodcast https://t.co/wuJvLflFE1”

“But I think that boredom was just the sort of “self-care” I needed. I don’t like that term for all the reasons others have pointed out, but also because I think that self-care sometimes involves doing things that don’t feel lovely or gentle. It involves doing the thing that will actually make it possible for you to do the things you like doing, to be the person you like being.”

As another part of taking care of my mental health, I will be officially stepping down from all moment responsibilities.