DEAR OOO,
I’ve been sort of going through the motions at my job for several months now. For a while, I couldn’t quite figure out what was up, because I’ve always liked my job and been enthusiastic about doing it, but when I started reading all these stories about burnout it hit me: That’s what I’m experiencing. I work in media, so it’s not like I’m saving lives, but it’s been a stressful year between the pandemic, financial pressures at my company, the difficulty of working at home with kids and the challenges of managing people who are also burnt out. I talked to my boss, who I like, about it. He encouraged me to take an extra week off, which I did. Now that I’m back at work, though, I still feel burned out. I can’t quit my job, because I’m the source of health insurance for my family, so how do I cure myself?
–Katie
Stories about burnout, you say? Have there been stories about burnout this year? I guess I remember a thinkpiece or two, a historical lookback, a few oddly framed trend pieces, a big reported feature and ohmygod so many how-tostories. (I’ve repressed at least a dozen others; it’s actually illegal to send me more.) Nearly all of them made me feel something on the spectrum between annoyed and furious, either because they were dismissive or overly glib about the concept or because their suggested solutions made no sense.
For awhile, I kept getting Google News alerts for my name because, as a person who quit her job in April 2021 and made the mistake of using the b-word in my tweet, I somehow became a data point in a handful of these stories, despite exactly zero of their writers asking me for comment. I am so burnt out on Burnout Discourse that I ignored multiple questions about burnout submitted to this very column. I also ignored multiple friends who suggested I write about burnout instead of just ranting about how everyone else got it wrong. I literally got a request to be on a panel about burnout while writing this column.
Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.