Hardly working - still burned out
Every morning at 6:15…
Saties Gnosienne starts playing. The sweet delirium of not knowing what this day has in store quickly dissipates the moment your brain kicks in and reminds you that it is yet another Tuesday full of meetings, tasks, and more.
Your hand taps blindly across the night table to find and turn off the alarm.
Ugh.
Sunlight filtering through the blinds. Birds outside making a fuzz, not a worry in the world. Or so it seems.
Envy. If only I was a bird.
No time to ponder that feathery existence; else time for working out will disappear. After perfunctorily going through the motions of a 30-minute Pilates workout - minus all the glamour those influencers expose in their morning routines - quick shower, followed by a huge mug of coffee in which you hope to find the will to live.
It once again falls short of that, but at least the caffeine hits your bloodstream and serves its purpose of keeping you awake.
Awake for what?
More emails of course.
Leftover cereals and banana for breakfast. The banana has seen better days, but haven’t we all? In the days of Covid, it would have been reserved for baking banana bread, but we have all moved on from that in hindsight, seemingly serene time of baking at home and discovering ourselves while a pandemic ravaged.
In between spoonfuls of an increasingly mushy mix, you scroll through the feed.
Get ready with me’s, Americans in their cars drinking 5 liter buckets of coffee, Travel influencers complaining that the Maldives is not what they saw on Social Media because there was a typhoon (God forbid that is not Instagrammable), some chick dressing in office slut..emm.. siren attire (of course they have never seen an office from the inside), looksmaxxing tutorials, a trailer for an upcoming real life version of yet another butchered anime on netflix…
Nothing really holds your attention, so you just continue scrolling until the notifications from your calendar suggest it is time to get in front of your laptop.
Upon opening, the red signs show the number of missed messages and threads you are tagged in. The cursed Teams call noise interrupts your wondering if you should have filmed a realistic get-ready-with-me for another day in the life of a knowledge worker in the home office.
The rest of the day is a blur. Notifications left and right, jumping from Teams to Outlook to Docs to LinkedIn to Confluence to SharePoint and into the occasional meeting. There is no clear red thread to it all, just busyness for the sake of it.
Deeply unsatisfying.
At the end of the workday, there is nothing really to feel accomplished about. Sure, it might look good how many messages you sent, how fast the emails have all been answered, but none of it really mattered. At least to you, it feels so.
It is 6 by the time you finish. 7 by the time you got your 10.000 steps in - another lackluster attempt at reducing the effects of sitting 8 hours a day. To make it feel more “productive,” you tune into one of those lengthy business podcasts about sacrificing your 20s to reach peak “success” by 30.
You are already 30, so it just adds to the dread. The question of: wtf am I doing with my life?
There is a point where it appears you do a lot, yet none of it sticks. None of it holds weight. The days just disappear into a haze, a cobweb of occurrences.
It can feel like burnout, yet that seems weird because you are not working yourself over the edge. There is a kind of burnout that ruins the soul, more than it does our physical capacities. From the outside, we might look like well-functioning robots, yet inside we are desperate for something that holds our fleeting sense of humanity down.
Brad Stultberg has a word for such a burnout. Zombie burnout.
The kind that happens when you do not spend enough time working on things that actually matter to you, that light you up, that genuinely interest you regardless of whether they will look good on the resume or the feed.
Let’s be real, most of us cannot pick the contents of our job to always fulfill that. It is also just capitalist propaganda that a job shall be the sole source of purpose - much easier to exploit people whose entire meaning is co-opted by work.
That said, good old Karl Marx also realized, as much as he criticized the industrial fabric workers’ conditions, that the reason it was bad wasn’t that they had to work. It was that it was alienated work which left the worker with no sense of accomplishment, no hint of what it was they contributed, no edging a sign of their existence into the products they brought into existence.
That is, in many ways, not so different from the experience of a knowledge manager stuck in a big corporate where their job is a sinkhole of instant messaging, email, tickets, and more that somehow is lost in the metrics black hole.
I was there at multiple points in my crypto career. Writing tweets I felt were pointless for an audience that only cared about farming points to secure a potential airdrop, to impress investors who wanted to dump on retail, who would judge a project by its X following and therefore care about it.
Writing SEO articles for crypto companies with teams so clueless that it was an absolute mystery how they kept a business running. The kind of article no human in their right mind would voluntarily read - or get anything from.
Jumping back and forth between Discord and Telegram to foster an “active community".
Did any of it make a difference? I do not know. Chances are the community members moved on, the projects clinging onto the last bit of liquidity and dignity left, the articles lost under a pile of AI-generated SEO article slop.
I realized that those who present themselves as successful never seem all that content. They had to brag with their wealth, the lambos, the girls escorts making up their entourage because there was not much else they had. The success often proved fleeting.
It was never the kind of success I could find myself striving for. Yet I was hung up in an industry where token price appeared to surpass all other KPIs. The quick money was still the biggest draw - despite all the other sensible aspirations there were.
Perhaps I had just been loved too much in childhood to feel the void others try to fill with worldly things.
Still, the lack of doing things that meant something to me gnawed at me.
I fixed it by forcing myself to get back into things that I actually cared about. The things that form part of my identity. Reading difficult books (and lots of just fun ones), playing the guitar regularly, self-studying Kierkegaard, listening to long Brahms symphonies, pondering what interests me in essays, and being there for my family, friends, and the larger community.
It is not really the stuff the guys who shout about meritocracy suggest we focus on. It is probably hard to measure the merit of being a good neighbor compared to the share price increase of some company.
It took discipline and the creation of an environment that encouraged me to pursue these things amid all the easier distractions I could lean into.
I still have days where I find myself in frenzied mode occasionally. But they are far less than they used to be - it helps having one job with clearer goals, and not 5 crypto clients, two of which I would simultaneously have to chase for payments (I need a prediction market because my bet is on never seeing that money atm).
I have things that matter to me I work on. Not because I have to. Not because they are “productive” in the economic sense. Nor am I hobby-maxxing.
I work on what gives me a sense of “Selbstwirksamkeit”. A sense of understanding something. The joy of knowing a new word to describe the world around me. The shared laughs with neighbors, the serendipitous encounters with cats on long walks without any content to consume, just questions to ponder, cooking jam for the entire family, the landlord, and friends.
A sense of contributing that goes beyond being a productive worker.
That might just be what has saved me from my misère.
As much as the circumstances are to blame, the existential angst of loss of income, the attempt to find a job in this economy where interviews are done by robots, and AI rejects any resume not optimized for its liking… there is and always will be a part that I can control.
That is what I dedicate myself to in the time I do not spend trying to secure my livelihood.
Humans cannot live on bread alone.
If you never challenge yourself, how will you know what you are capable of?
If you are never interested in anything, how could anything be interesting to you?
If all your self-worth is tied up in work, what happens if you lose said work?
It might seem delulu but…
Decided to boycott paragraph and support the cozy web with bearblog instead.
Thanks for reading (づ*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)づ♡