“To be burned out,” writes historian Jill Lepore in an article in last week’s edition of The New Yorker,
is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out…
Lepore traces the development of “burnout” from its origins for Vietnam War vets “burnt out” by drug addiction in Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s to the “digital burnout” of the always-on, smartphone-connected white-collar worker. Noting that we’ve reached an age in which a majority of people describe themselves as burned out a majority of the time, she questions whether the term is really useful at all. “If burnout is universal and eternal,” she writes, “it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just . . . the hell of life.”
It’s a great article and I’d encourage you to read it. (If The New Yorker blocks you from reading it online, feel free to send me an email and I can send you the text.)
But I do wonder whether Lepore gives enough credit to the particular stresses of the pandemic, and the ways in which the last fifteen months have overwhelmed our collective and individual nervous systems. The sources of strain have been diverse but pervasive. Children and teenagers have been cut off from the most important part of their lives; namely, each other. Parents have faced an unrelenting cycle of work, homemaking, and childcare, often all at the same time, without the relief provided by schools or by grandparents. Seniors have faced an even-more-acute form of the hypervigilance, anxiety, and fear that has been coursing through all our veins.
Vaccination and the decline of the virus’s spread in our community have brought a huge relief to many of us, but there’s no emotional switch that can be flipped. “Burnout” was invented, you have to remember, not by active-duty soldiers but by veterans, by those who’d passed through the inferno of war and come out the other side alive, but not necessarily intact. And I’m convinced that much of the spiritual work of the pandemic begins now, in what is (for many of us) the aftermath, as the adrenaline fades and exhaustion deepens.
So thank God it’s Memorial Day weekend. That’s not a joke… Like many of you, I’ve always appreciated this weekend as the beginning of summer, a few brief months to rest and breathe before life begins to start back up again. Last summer felt like a wonderful relief from the horror of the spring. How much more wonderful will it be to gather this summer with family and friends, to go on long-delayed vacations, and—hey—to get to come back to church!
There’s a prayer in our Book of Common Prayer that I’ve always loved, called “For the Good Use of Leisure.” (It’s on page 825, if you have a BCP at home!)
O God, in the course of this busy life, give us times of refreshment and peace; and grant that we may so use our leisure to rebuild our bodies and renew our minds, that our spirits may be opened to the goodness of your creation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
“To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged.” But we are not batteries. We can be recharged! So take this “time of refreshment and peace” and rest. Rebuild your body. Renew your mind. And may all our spirits be opened to the goodness of God’s creation.