You know that familiar feeling all too well. That assignment you have to complete by midnight but you find yourself blankly staring at the screen, your kids crying at 3 AM in the morning for the 4th night in a row and struggling to muster the energy to get up and console them, working through your crippling case of mental block to hit those art deadlines while having to manage your burgeoning carpal tunnel in your hands. You get that hazy, hollow feeling that just drains your willpower to work towards the task at hand no matter what it might be. You find yourself being more irritable, having less patience, and general disillusionment towards your daily routines. You start questioning the point of doing all this. Its gone beyond just the typical levels of stress and just eats away at your very being. That's right, you're encountering some good ol' burnout .
If only real life Burnout was as fun as this Burnout.
I'm certainly no stranger to it. Even though I thought I had retired on decent terms with football for example, it took a solid year+ before I could simply even watch live football games again. Compared to my past career, I don't think I've encountered anything more immediately stressful (or difficult if we're being honest) than 6 AM offseason workouts in college or constantly being on edge as a Practice Squad player in the NFL who has the job security and career lifespan of a freshly stinger-less bumblebee.
We're always encouraged to make the most of our time, the ever revolving capitalistic hamster wheel demands its sacrifice in blood and sweat after all! Even things we pursue as mere hobbies at first like drawing or gaming, you can't help but hear that little voice in your head making you think what you're doing is a waste of time if you're fiscally getting nothing from it. This was a small reason why I decided to take up a freelance writing for games and anime with Sportskeeda, as well as begin to take online classes in order brush up on what I had learned in college concerning marketing and even expand my horizons further than that. I was feeling very productive for a time, then the demands of all three suddenly spiked on me simultaneously, and I found myself feeling both stuck and frustrated that my standards of quality weren't being met in my own mind for each respective function.
A typical visual representation of adulthood
After managing to juggle it for a couple months, one day it just hit me all at once like a sack of bricks thrown off the Empire State and I just completely shut down. If you've followed my blog before, you'd know I'm no stranger to talking about mental health, At this point I had to take some concrete action. I had to make some tough decisions and triage some of my commitments (thankfully having some understanding superiors) to something that was manageable for me to function as a complete person and not have to stress about some form of work for every waking hour of my days, even on weekends and supposed time off.
POV: Burnout coming to give your soul the ol' sloppy top
For some of us, it is a feeling that might just be unavoidable, especially for people around my age. The truth is that in this country the grand majority of adults are living on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. People *literally* cannot afford to stop working or else they won't be able to feed and house themselves or their family. Honestly, part of me didn't even want to type this post because I felt I was speaking from a place of privilege to even discuss this, as my own situation isn't nearly as dire. A lesson I've been trying to learn and enact on my own life is that comparison is the thief of joy, and other people's struggles, whether they be greater or lesser than yours, don't invalidate your own or your own feelings towards them. You can still show empathy regardless of the level your struggle. You might be limited in the scale of what you can do because of time or responsibility demands, but please. take that night off, go get that McFlurry you've been craving all day, or play a quick round of Halo before you start up the next segment of your homework. Shit's rough out here, you've gone through some stressful, genuinely once in a century events, and you've earned the right to throw yourself a bone every now and again.
Addendum: On Current Events
Originally I set out to make this post about burnout via work and the typical stressors of life, but recent events with the shootings in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX have come to remind that, especially in the country I call home in the United States, emotional burnout borne from the constant conga line of preventable tragedy absolutely exists too as a specter over our entire lives. A common quote (typically misattributed to the great Albert Einstein) states that"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." I tend to agree with that, which forces me to come to the conclusion that I live in an insane country.
It is a uniquely American problem that we have concerning school shootings. As of 2017, Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the states. From Columbine, to Sandy Hook, to Parkland, and now Uvalde, we see the same predictable cycle play out of hollow thoughts and prayers with no serious attempts at legislation or even negotiation of legislation to change the status quo. We internalize this cycle because it seems we quite have no other real recourse, feeling we are limited as a single person as to what we can really do to change things, but now we've even reached the point where even the people in power in charge seem to feel that way as well. That in itself is a despair that will eventually lead this country to ruin and is not even remotely emblematic of what is supposedly the greatest country in the world .
Hailing from Texas, I'm a believer in the 2nd Amendment and that the right to arm yourself, at the end of the day, if I'm in a you-or- me situation, it sure as HELL isn't going to be me. But we have increasingly seen further and further political gamesmanship, and downright obtuse stupidity in recklessly expanding and defending a comically warped view of gun rights, spinning the same horseshit excuses as the bodies pile up. This is an unsustainable level of grief that the average American, especially those with kids of their own, should be asked to shoulder on top of their already sizable load of life and effectively become numb to. We can debate the size and scope of it till we're blue in the face, but the bottom line is common sense gun rights reform needs to happen NOW, and those who stand in the way of it need to be relentlessly shamed for their cowardice and removed from office at the local, state, and federal levels of government.