Burnout Fatigue
Putting the fire back into an activist cliché
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Everyone is burnt out these days: activists, writers, workers. Even CEOs. The word burnout is ubiquitous. We use it liberally as a catchall for a series of contemporary conditions: overstretched, overworked, overtired.
Among activists, burnout is treated as a kind of occupational hazard, something movements warn against, write handbooks for dealing with. There’s a subfield of social movement studies dedicated to activist burnout. While there are debates about the unequal distribution of burnout (Is white burnout the same as burnout for Black activists? Do women and queer activists burn out more than straight men?) there seems to be consensus that activist burnout is a specific problem, something more than run-of-the-mill fatigue.
But is a term that’s used so broadly of any value? Can the origins of burnout tell us anything about why we use it and what the word does? Can writing about burnout give us pause, help us understand its diverse and even positive dimensions?
Might there yet be a light in burnout – not in the tired metaphor itself, but in the blazing element at its core?
In their cunningly-titled article Edifice Complex, historian Bench Ansfield traces the popularisation of the term burnout to Herbert Freudenberger, an American psychologist who in the 1970s provided free evening therapy services to hippies and other young people hanging out on the streets of New York, many of them using heroin, acid and other drugs. On his evening walk between his day job on Park Avenue and the St Mark’s Free Clinic, an offshoot of the free-clinic movement founded in San Francisco in the late sixties, Freudenberger passed through the East Village. Night after night he walked by rows of abandoned and burnt-out buildings in neighbourhoods largely populated by Puerto Ricans. Many of these residences had been torched by landlords seeking to clean up on insurance payouts. In Ansfield’s words, this “far-reaching pattern of state and capital disinvestment” swept American cities in the early seventies, “fueled by subprime fire insurance policies that saturated neighborhoods of color after 1968”.
As for Freudenberger, after a year of combining professional and voluntary psychology services, one morning he found himself unable to get out of bed. Searching for an apt term to describe his state of acute exhaustion, he borrowed a word he’d heard his St Mark’s patients use to describe the effects of extended drug use (according to another recent account, burnout may have originally referred to users’ veins becoming “burned out” after too many injections).
But for Freudenberger the term had another resonance. In his 1980 book Burn-Out: How to Beat the High Cost of Success he wrote:
If you have ever seen a building that has been burned out you know it’s a devastating sight. What had once been a throbbing, vital structure is now deserted. Where there had once been activity, there are now only crumbling reminders of energy and life.
The working-class tenants, however, were evicted from Freudenberger’s metaphor, just as many had been from their actual homes.
Ansfield’s brief history of burnout is a kind of palimpsest: the largely forgotten material origins of the term in the charred buildings of the East Village are written over the word’s earlier use among drug users. In the historian’s words, burnout has its genesis “in a double act of gentrification.”
When I read about burnout’s groundedness in urban working-class Black and migrant communities and drug subcultures, I’m struck by just how much the term has been untethered from any sense of collective struggle. I’m not the only one. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, whose new book Real Self-Care tackles another contemporary (and in this case, highly feminised) cliché – the idea that caring for ourselves is an individual responsibility, to be tackled through consumption (scented candles, expensive bath soaps), therapy and an assortment of new-age practices – talks about the “betrayal of burnout”, a term that “exonerates a system that does not do enough to support mental health, working parents, or child care”.
As Lakshmin and others intimate, by making exhaustion into a dramatic individual problem of overwork, we cover up the even more dramatic socio-economic inequalities behind widespread sleep deprivation and chronic stress among people with limited resources and regular experience of sexism, racism and other oppressions.
I applaud the new histories of burnout, the projects to challenge the embourgeoisement, individualisation and whitewashing of the term, as well as radical activist responses to neoliberal burnout culture. But I have another problem with the word.
Burnout gives fire a bad name.
The metaphor of burnout is appealing precisely because of its drama. Drained, wiped out, exhausted: these can’t quite capture the image of fierce flames burning from the inside, leaving nothing but empty shell. To those of us who have been fortunate to stay out of its path, the threat of fire has become increasingly real in recent years as wildfires raze more of the globe’s surface. When I read about the PTSD experienced by the survivors of the wildfires, I felt even more foolish describing the tiredness I feel midway through a Friday afternoon. It’s not a therapist I need; it’s a siesta.
As wildfires become more widespread, there is the risk that those of us watching from afar learn to look away. As Charlie Herzog writes, the flames of modern-day wildfires move quickly, then die. So does our attention. But the focus on fire’s destructiveness, its capacity literally to burn out, also hides its regenerative capacity. Historically, for example, Indigenous communities in many parts of the world have used cultural burns – low-level fires – to balance the environment, minimise the impact of larger fires and replenish forests.
Fire also has powerful political associations – far older than the recent history of burnout and its fast-tracked de-politicisation – with resistance and revolution.
Like the agricultural practice of burning crops to renew the soil for the next season, revolutionary fire is not destruction for destruction’s sake, or for a quick profit, but the levelling of oppressive regimes to make way for a more just society. Writers, filmmakers and poets have long used fire as a metaphor for the political passions and hope of revolutionary movements. A recent set of essays on Rosa Luxembourg is titled, Living Flame. Utopian film and fiction is filled with fire. Take Lizzie Borden’s 1980 feminist indie classic Born in Flames.
The activist-poet Audre Lorde invoked fire as a metaphor for anger – a source of Black women’s power, a survival tool:
My response to racism is anger (…) It has served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for fear or guilt.
***
I have suckled the wolfs lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
Of course fire can also be weaponised – literally and figuratively – by the forces of reaction. Fire holds danger. It spreads fear as well as hope. That’s what makes it such a powerful symbol. As Lorde wrote, poetry – by which she meant “the revelation or distillation of experience” – “coins the language to express and charter (…) revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of (…) freedom”. Poetry is the place where we discover, face and learn from ideas that were once “intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening”.
In its current usage, burnout doesn’t provoke fear or misunderstanding. It doesn’t even have the strength to raise the alarm. As a metaphor for activist affect, it cannot begin to embody the complexity of experiences that come from enacting political commitment in community – from excitement and joy to boredom and, yes, deflation and defeat.
There may yet be hope for burnout – but only if we take a cue from the poets, finding ways to evoke its collective history, give it back its spark.
Thanks to Samir Jeraj for pointing me to the article Edifice Complex which got me thinking about burnout.
Watch out for my conversation with Samir Tuesday 17 October as part of this newsletter’s new monthly activist writer conversation series. I’ll be talking to Samir, a London-based freelance journalist, about how he brings his activist experience to his politically engaged writing on housing, health, work, racial justice and more.