What we lose to burnout

Photo by Tim De Pauw on Unsplash.

In Katherine May’s latest book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, she describes the burnout she’s experiencing as a kind of loss: the falling away of things that once filled up her days, added texture to her life, and made her her. May notices her burnout by noticing what’s slipped away, such as her capacity to read more than a few sentences at a time. This description, of burnout as loss, was very striking to me. It made me wonder about a sort of paradox of burnout: a too much-ness (overwhelm, overwork, over-sensitivity) and a simultaneous not enough-ness (withdrawal, lack of connection, loss of interest).

Reading Enchantment got me thinking about the phenomenon of burnout, the rise of burnout-related self diagnosis and self help, and the constant churn of systemic vs. individual explanations. Burnout is clearly the result of systemic conditions, yet it shows up in very individual ways. I’m curious about when or why it’s useful to identi…