You are beloved and worthy of rest because you are human, not a robot. ​ I know it’s hokey, but I’m trying to learn something from exercise science when it comes to thinking of rest as work, as essential as any workout. ​ I’m doing it because I need to start January in a place where I’m ready to (co)write a book, but also because I’ve worked nearly non-stop for the last year, and it’s time to rest.

But when I looked at the other members of the tent on display Tuesday night, I felt real solidarity for the first time in years. The Dems might always be in disarray: sloppy, unwieldy, corny, off message. But the alternative — and the homogeneity, compromise, and willful blindness that accompanies it — doesn’t feel like the future. It feels, overwhelmingly, irrefutably, like the past we’ve already left behind.

It feels different now, doesn’t it. It shouldn’t — thousands of people are dying every day. More than 67,000 have died in the U.S. alone, and 245,000 worldwide. But contemporary capitalism has an extraordinary capacity to subsume tragedy: it depends on growth, and on movement, neither of which can happen during the sort of societal paralysis that would be appropriate during this time. Not only, of course, because people are dying — but in order to stem the spread. And so (at least some of us) relax into a sort of short-term amnesia. You want things to be the way things were, you want

Some people are just now realizing the extent of the brokenness. Others have understood it, and mourned it, their entire lives.

I think that’s what a hobby is supposed to feel like: not an obligation, but a state you’re always returning to. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be organized, it doesn’t have to depend on other people. It just has to be yours.

— like seeing a good friend, long neglected, after so many years. ​ He asks him questions, and then more questions, and waits through silences when Lloyd can’t answer them. ​ — instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t. ​ He brings us back to the openheartedness of childhood, when we lacked the skill to deflect, or compartmentalize, or resort to work. ​ nonetheless a practice: a decision, made every day, to care deeply about others, but also to refuse to insulate himself from the emotions that care requires.

The thing I try and tell myself every week: Just because people don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean it’s not true. And just because this work is relentless doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. ​ It’s difficult to explain that patriarchy means rule and control by men, power held by men, and the generalized idea that men are more valuable and important — and that that can be true even if some women have some power. All sorts of people, and not exclusively men, can be involved in its preservation; the vast majority of the time, they’re not aware they’re doing so. Institutions help sustain patriarchy, but so do individuals and traditions and clothing norms and religious beliefs and health insurance benefit plans and air conditioning standards.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.”