Book Review: Burnout

[osprey_archer]

“The cure for burnout is not ‘self-care’; it is all of us caring for one another.”

I didn’t record a page number for this insight in Emily & Amelia Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, but this observation is central to the book. The reason why we suffer from burnout is not that we are bad at self-care or time management or budgeting or setting boundaries or any of a hundred and one other ways that society tries to pin individual blame on people who burn out.

The reason that so many people burn out is that capitalism and patriarchy (or, to borrow the Nagoski twins’ styling: “Patriarchy. Ugh”) is designed to make it difficult for humans to care for each other, and the lack not only of care but of the opportunity to take care of others burns people out.

We need other people to tell us that we are enough, not because we don’t know it already, but because the act of hearing it from someone else - and (equally) the act of taking the time to remind someone else they’re enough - is part of what makes us feel we’re enough. We give and we receive, and are made whole.

It is the normal, healthy condition of humanity, to need other people to remind us that we can trust ourselves, that we can be as tender and compassionate with ourselves as we would be, as our best selves, toward any suffering child. To need help feeling “enough” is not a pathology; it is not “neediness.”

Of course, at the end of the day, this is still to a certain extent a self-help book: none of us can remake society all by ourselves, at the end of the day we still have to live in this fucked-up world our ancestors bequeathed to us, and the Nagoskis also want to impart some skills to make that a little bit easier. But it’s refreshing to have these skills presented in a way that says clearly, the reason this is necessary is not because you’re lacking, it’s because society sucks.

(I realize that most self-care advice is well-intentioned, but there are moments when it completely misses the point. You have a person complaining that they are lonely and sad and they just want someone to be nice to them, and other people pop up all “YOU can be nice to YOURSELF. Buy yourself flowers! Run yourself a bath!”, and it can feel a little bit like watching a bunch of deeply well-meaning sunflowers ask a human who is hungry, starving even, if she’s tried going outside and photosynthesizing, because they just can’t grasp that humans can’t fucking photosynthesize.)

Or, to quote the Nagoskis again: Humans are not built to function autonomously; we are built to oscillate from connection to autonomy and back again. Connection - with friends, family, pets, the divine, etc. - is as necessary as food and water.

Comments

[oracne]

This sounds really good and useful.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I really liked it! Lots of useful information in here.

[potofsoup]

Interesting and extremely helpful!

[osprey_archer]

It was an extremely well-timed read!

[lokifan]

This sounds great! It reminds me of someone on a panel at... Worldcon, maybe? Nine Worlds? Talking six years or so ago, about their interest in self-help books and how the whole term and concept is built around this neoliberal, anti-systemic-solutions approach. It'd never occurred to me before.

none of us can remake society all by ourselves, at the end of the day we still have to live in this fucked-up world our ancestors bequeathed to us, and the Nagoskis also want to impart some skills to make that a little bit easier. But it’s refreshing to have these skills presented in a way that says clearly, the reason this is necessary is not because you’re lacking, it’s because society sucks.

That does sound helpful!

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, it's very much building on that kind of critique of self-help books, while also acknowledging that in the moment sometimes self-help is all we have because none of us can implement a systemic solution all on our lonesome. A very different approach to self-help material!