Lab 032: Life Avalanche

You know, at the end of Lap thirty one, we've talked a little bit about political burnout, but I think we were just really playing it a little too cute. I think it's time to call a spade a spade. I don't know about you, but I'm dropping the cloak of shame and I'm here to say your girl is burnt out.

Yes, I'm tired. I'm tired. I'm constantly tired. I feel like I go to sleep tired, and I wake up tired, and all day I'm just tired. And the news doesn't help being quarantined and working from home for some folks not working from home right because they lost their jobs, right.

And then the pressure just to level up during quarantine.

I saw that meme at the beginning of quarantine where it was like, Okay, that business idea you had, now you got the time to do it. I was like, this is a lot of pressure.

I've heard you described this as a life avalanche. Everything's just piling up.

Yeah, you feel like you have so many balls in the air and then they all just come crashing down at some point.

Well, it's time to talk about burnout. It's impacting us in so many different ways, let's get into it. I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is Dope Labs.

Let's really get into all the different types of burnout that we have been experiencing just in this year. I don't know if it's our generation or what, but it's just like every free moment you have, you should be dedicating it to some type of grind and you can sleep when you're dead. And I'm just like, oh, I feel like this is gonna kill me too soon.

Well that just means that this episode couldn't have come at a better time.

In this lab, we're talking all of about burnout.

So let's get into the recitation. What do we know? We know burnout is not unique to me and you. No, I'm having lots of conversations. I see everybody else talking about it. People are exhausted, especially now.

I think since everybody at home and quarantining and social distancing, I feel like a lot of people have been talking about it more because for the folks that are at home and working, they're like, okay, I am living at work now, and then folks that have kids. I don't know how y'all are doing it. I really don't.

I also feel like there are levels to burn out, you know. Sometimes I get burned out on a specific topic. Sometimes I get burned out on a whole platform. Like I'm done with Instagram, right, I'm just tired of it.

Folks will be like, oh, I'm taking a break from Instagram. I'm tired of seeing people only posting like the best part of themselves and it's making me feel bad about myself. So they get burnt out on Instagram.

Social media burnout, yeah, or like some people be.

Like, oh, I'm not gonna be I'm not going to watch the news anymore.

The news. Burnout is real.

Burnout is just the big umbrella. Where do you feel it the most?

C Hm. I feel it with work, just because all the uncertainty and the role I have. I face a lot of people right so income and grad students. I don't know what's happening. I want to be able to give them complete information. So then I feel almost like in limbo, like where I have all these tasks, these things I need to get done, but I don't have all the information I need, and these people are waiting on me, and these other people are expecting to hear

If you're listening on the Spotify app, you have the opportunity to tell us exactly how you're feeling and what you're burning out on. On our episode page. There's a poll that you can take right now, and we want to hear what you're burning out on. What do we want to know?

What is burnout? I know these feelings, but like, what is it?

Yeah? Is this something that a doctor can say, I'm going to diagnose you with burnout? Like what are the symptoms of it? And what are the causes of it?

And you know, you raised a really good point you said, is this something that's just specific to our generation? My grandma was never burned out, or at least she never said it. So what happened? Am I just built weak?

I feel like we got a lot more responsibility now. I feel like back then you could just you know, live off the land, but now you got to do all this extra stuff and everybody's expecting you to be, you know, president of the United States and also own twelve businesses and make sure your hair look good. And you got that crooked tooth, don't forget to fix that. I don't got enough time or space or energy to do it all.

And I don't know how you spent your summers. But living off the land is hard. Have you ever tried to make souer kraut from thirty heads of cabbage and one hoe just chopping? It's hard.

My friend has done it all. She's done it all.

You just don't want to be a pieeer woman.

I'm burnt out.

Let's jump into the dissection.

Our guest for today's lab is doctor Ann Helen Peterson.

My name is Ann Helen Peterson. I have my PhD and Media studies from the University of Texas and my book is called Can't Even How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

Doctor Peterson's book takes a deep dive into understanding the origins and signs of burnout and connecting it to American capitalism and parenting.

And our first question was how does she define burnout?

You hit the wall.

You work so hard for so long, but instead of collapsing and stopping what you're doing, you scale the.

Wall, and then you keep going some more.

You just keep going with that low grade exhaustion as the background to every component of your life.

So it's similar to hitting the wall while you're running a marathon and your body basically like shuts down and they'll be running and then all of a sudden, their legs it's like their legs don't work, and they'll hit the ground, but then they'll still be trying to run, and every time they try and stand up, they just fall back down.

So basically there's zombies and we are too. Yes, So our next question is what causes burnout.

The foundation of our current form of burnout is procarity.

Precarity is defined as the state of having insecure employment or income.

And that means pricarity in your standing in americanciety, economic procarity, social precarity, just constantly being worried in many different capacities about your safety, your financial safety, and what's going to happen with your kids, all these sorts of things, and we resort to all sorts of coping mechanisms and behaviors in order to counteract that lack of safety net.

This is realer than ever as a black woman in America, existing during this time where so many people are without homes, without jobs, in our current political climate.

So many unknowns that can cause a lot of stress.

And a little stress here and there. That's fine, But the thing about burnout is that it feels like chronic stress. It just keeps going on and on.

Right, You're building up a big burnout house with all these stress bricks, so percarity, that feeling of insecurity is what triggers the behaviors that lead to burnout.

Doctor Peterson told us that surveillance at work can be another thing that triggers burnout. This can be anything from regular check ins to documentation of daily activities, to cameras in the workplace. We're supposed to have all these tools, like digital things to help us stay on task and to keep track, but sometimes those things almost feel like surveillance, like you're being monitored and tracked as you do your work.

No way, I got PJS on.

Not if you work with me, I want everybody to be relaxed. Don't turn that camera on. I don't need to see it.

There are these modes of surveillance that are supposed to be there in order to incentivize productivity or I don't know, like there's just this underlying thesis to them that workers are lazy and we'll always do bad things.

Doctor Peterson told us about studies that show a lower quality of work from people who are working under surveillance. So it's actually doing the opposite of what it's meant to do in the first place. And she says that has a lot to do with this internalized anxiety about being watched.

So when you take all these things together, the insecurity, the surveillance, all of this just sets the stage for burnout. And we really want to know, what are some indicators that you might be burned out burnout behaviors?

What are they?

So one of the biggest ones, and our parents adopted this as well in the seventies and eighties, is you just work more. Right, if you work harder, if you work longer hours, if you try to prove yourself and capacity, then maybe you'll find that stability. But when that stability is elusive and you just keep working. You know, that's burnout.

Another burnout behavior might be this desire to totally check out. Maybe it's Love Island or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or in doctor Peterson's case, I.

Got really into the super dumb Candy Crush style game, and I would play it like at all the points when I would rather be like, oh, I should go take a walk, or I should, you know, just cook something, or I should read a book like this fiction book that has been on my nightstand that I really want to read, and be like, no, I really needed to play my game. I found myself going back to it because I was craving that sort of numb broad space.

I think we all do that. My friend has her own What's your game? TT tell the world.

She's trying to out me and embarrass me. But I stand by this game. I've been playing playing it for very many years, and it is called Smurf Village.

My friend has been playing Smurfs since and I.

Love them very much. They work very hard, and I work very hard as well to build these different villages all over and even on different planets. You know, it gets like that. So now that you tell the Folks, which you've been playing since grad school.

I've been playing Township, which is like this farm game where you plant crops, you have factories, you you know, feed your cows. The cows make milk, You collect the milk, You take the milk to the dairy factory. You make cheese, You use the cheese that you're also using to make cheeseburgers over here in the fast food restaurant, and then you sell those things. Right, you're doing all this stuff.

I didn't even recognize that as burnout, and I thought I was just bored and needed something else to do.

I didn't either until we talked to doctor Peterson, and it was clear as day. When I'm the most stressed, when I have the most things on my plate and I feel overwhelmed, Smurf Village cows, I'm here to milk you.

But I think the big thing about it for me was instead of getting mad at myself, I was just like, I see this, I see what my body in my mind is asking for, and how can I start to slowly change some things so that I don't need this game anymore?

But the thing is playing Angry Birds or Smurf Village for an hour might help you escape, but it's not necessarily relaxing. It's just throwing a blanket over the atomic bomb. Doctor Peterson says. Instead of going after that numb feeling, what might be more helpful in decreasing burnout is cultivating a new hobby.

What a real hobby can do is give you's that mindless space. Right. It can be something that you are dedicated for, that you are not optimizing for anyone else, but that you are just like out there doing the weeding, you know, depending on whatever your hobby is. But a lot of us have failed or lost that capacity to seek that space in hobbies.

My recent hobby has been gardening, and if you go on our Instagram, you can see me and my friend Zakia when she came over to my house masked of course, and we did some gardening in my yard. It didn't go well. It went actually it went very well, but there were parts where I didn't know what I was doing and I almost hurt myself.

But you made it out alive. Riding my bike. That's my hobby. I'm out here, add me on Strava. I love it.

My friend be hitting it.

It's so free.

Yeah, it's great. To get outside, get some fresh air, and do some things that you know aren't related to work that just make you happy.

But sometimes I feel guilty about having these hobbies.

Yeah, sometimes when I'm doing stuff like that, I feel like you should be working, or you should be you know, doing something else. You should be reading the Wall Street Journal or the dictionary, learning some new words.

I'm like, ah, right, how did we get to this point? We asked doctor Peterson about the history of burnout and how we as a society got here.

So, a lot of millennials, grandparents, maybe great grandparents, the people who came out of World War Two, they enjoyed this brief period that's sometimes referred to as like the Golden Age of American capitalism, where a lot of people working class people were able to join the middle class.

So this is our parents' fault and our granny's and grandpa fault.

I don't know that my family was middle class coming out of World War Two, But I also don't feel like I had this attitude that we had to work all the time. Do you feel like you your parents?

And still my parents worked a lot, Like my mom had two jobs. My dad he worked a lot. He had one job, but he worked a lot. I don't know if they ever explicitly said you have to work hard. I think it was just like leading by example.

I think working hard was value. But it seemed like our parents worked hard. But they also seemed like they worked hard and it was effortless, like they worked hard. And every weekend we went to my grandma's house, we drove a long way and we did like I'm tired, aren't you tired? When I look back at it, I'm like, yeah, how are you going to work? And then talking to me.

Right after my age, my mother pretty much had three kids, I couldn't imagine just having my little chihuahuah Daisy is stressing me out. And so I guess now present day, we're using them as our models for what we should be doing, and that means to run ourselves ragged.

Slowly over the course of our lifetimes. In the eighties and nineties transformed childhood into something that used to be like a space for play and imagination and personality formation into for a lot of people, one long series of resume building activities. And that can be really really hard when you just think of yourself as a resume instead of like as a person with a soul and a heart and all those things.

Then you get these eighties babies and these parents who grew up with like more economic mobility. I mean, we see it.

You know.

Parents are like, once you graduate from college, you should have a job, and I'm like, that's not how anymore. I know, plenty of people with degrees and degrees is still no job right.

Or lots of degrees, all the degrees still can't get a job.

Or these jobs that don't value the work that they're doing. And so I think some of this is around what the economy and what the workforce looked like for our parents' generations, and then they project those expectations on you and you're like, nah.

There is this particular millennial experience that is represented as universal, and there are so many different ways to be a millennial, and just because burnout is kind of the unifying experience, there are different ways that they came to that point, and a lot of it has to do with who your parents were and how they decided to raise you, but also stuff like urban and rural backgrounds, like are you a first generation immigrant? Like all sorts of stuff.

So the millennial generation goes from people being born in nineteen eighty one to people born in nineteen ninety six. I was born in nineteen eighty seven. I don't have nothing in common with something somebody that was born in nineteen ninety six.

I mean, we laugh and joke about our differences and it's only two years.

Tt exactly because it's like we grew up in two different states. We have parents that were in different fields, like we had different interests, Like my millennial and your

And I think what we forget is layering these identities right and how those burnouts can stack up.

Absolutely, there's so much nuance when it comes to burnout.

Let's take a break and then we're going to talk about specific industries and types of jobs that are most at risk for burning out. We're back. So we've already talked about the origins of burnout and how to recognize it when it's happening. We ask doctor and Helen Peterson if there are any particular industries that are especially vulnerable to work or burn and out, and it came as no surprise that academia and higher education are at the top of the list.

There's just so many different ways that the precarity of academia right now is coming to bear on people. And I think that some people at this point in their lives, in their mid late thirties, are like, I can't do this for the rest of my life.

That's such a good point. And even within higher education there is nuance in there and the types of burnout that a person can experience, Like if you're talking about a faculty member, professor, the burnout that they may experience is going to be very different from a student who has multiple classes and things like that, right.

And they may not know are they still having classes, what do they do about tuition? All those things lead to that same kind of insecurity.

And like we said earlier, insecurity is a trigger of burnout, and that insecurity can take many forms, including an inconsistent schedule.

I cite a lot of research from work that's been done on retail workers and how things like lack of an advanced schedule can lead to so many different types of burn on. Part of that is just like if you think about your life and you have no ability to schedule it, Like psychologically that's hard, but it also makes everything else in your life hard, like scheduling childcare when you don't get your schedule until a week in advance.

This really makes me think about the gig economy, Like this idea of just ditching all these jobs together to create enough income to live.

The amount of money that they're making per month can vary from month to month. That can be very stressful.

Yeah, and even just when the work has to be done right. It's different if you know you have a nine to five every day and you're blocking that nine to five off. Having that schedule consistently can be useful. But if you don't have a schedule and you're just at somebody else's whim and so you just don't have any ability to really plan what your days are going to look like, and that can wear you down.

How can you like try to have a steady social life where you can cultivate meaningful relationships or hobbies when, again, you don't have a steady schedule.

Doctor Peterson says that industries that are super specialized can also be a risk.

What I was really surprised where there's a lot of burnout is zookeeping. There's a great academic paper on this that zookeepers, like a lot of other professions that attract people who are they can't think of themselves as doing anything else, right, A zookeeper really really really wants to be a zookeeper, and a lot of academics show that as well. But you know, doctors, some librarians, teachers this sort of thing, and because it is such a desirable job.

But they stay with the.

Job even as they get more and more exploited and have less and less stability, because it is a calling. It's something that they feel like they have to do.

This felt like what we saw in Tiger King.

Oh yeah, absolutely, Joe exotic or knows he loved those animals and he was very broke.

And so was you remember that other guy that they showed and he was training those young women up. They were definitely being exploited. Doc Antl Okay, doc Antl was doing the same thing, exploiting those folks. That woman was saying she wasn't even getting paid. They had to work all these long, crazy hours, and it was like, oh, it's because you're the only person. You're passionate, You're the only person that can save these tigers. That's wild.

And I mean we see that with our teachers right now. And even like we're always saying teachers aren't getting paid enough, but they still continue to not be paid enough, even though they deserve to be paid more. And teachers are usually nine times out of ten, people who are very dedicated to their students and they can't see themselves as anything else. Like most teachers, they stay teachers twenty thirty

Yeah.

Doctor Peterson also says there's another group that we might not be thinking about, and that's parents.

You know, the thing that I keep coming back to, and I'm not a parent myself, And part of the

Because of gender inequality. There is a different load that women bear in the household when it comes to this kind of stuff, and it means that they are unable to participate in the workforce at the same levels. We have some additional information about that in the show notes thirty nine percent of the workforce is women, but of people that have lost jobs after the coronavirus, fifty four percent are women.

Yeah, being a woman, they expect so much more of you as a person, like you need to be able to work and then also take care of your family. But then they also hold you back within the workforce because you are a woman, Like it doesn't make sense at all. Another group of people that we need to consider are folks that are lower income.

When you don't have money to throw out a problem in this society, it just compounds even more so when you're so tired from working all the time. Do you want to go to the store make a meal with fresh vegetables that takes a long time and that maybe your kids won't eat, or do you want to take five minutes, go through that drive through and get something right away that you know that your kids are going

Or even under resource decisions.

Exactly you are expensive it is to get fresh fruits and vegetables and all the nutritious stuff. Our society isn't set up for low income people to have good nutrition.

And don't even get us started on the things that are in place if you need help getting food, and how it actually limits you from really high nutritional value foods. Right, And that's actually the topic of our next lab. We are talking all about food systems, and we actually want to hear from you. What did you see missing from your food system when the pandemic hit? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight

How do you doubt those flames?

Now? I try to resist in the book giving any sort of like list of things that you can do, because I think oftentimes what we as millennials have done is we've sought out ways to fix whatever part of us we see has broken, and turn of like our ability to work all the time. So we're like, how can I get unburnt out so that I can work more?

Right, which is like, that's the problem.

Is that you want to fix yourself to work more, when really the solution almost all of the time is figuring out how you can work less.

I talk about this all the time, Like part of my time management and kind of self management is I schedule these little blocks of like fifteen minutes just to do nothing that's not a lot of time. Is in the middle of the day is so useful, and I don't I'm not apologizing for no, and you shouldn't, friend.

So for me to battle burn out, what I try and do is be very very strict about what my cutoff time is for when I'm going to be like, okay, this is tee tee time, Like I'm not doing anything else, I'm thinking about me. So that means that from you know, six thirty to seven thirty, I'm doing all the things that I want to do, the things that make me happy, whether that's reading a book, gardening, or you know, call in my sisters or whatever whatever it is, it's t

One of the things that doctor Peterson also said is that you can't thinks burn out alone. You know, this is a system.

This is the kind of a message of the book is that it's not about us making any personal changes. Although there are small things you can do and you

All of us us are struggling. Everybody is struggling with burnout right now, and so we just need to take that into account that even if somebody has a nasty attitude directly to you in an email and it's work, sometimes you just got to be like, I don't know what's going on at home for them.

Some of the indicators for burnout are also indicators for other things. And you know, burnout is not a pure medical condition, like it's not a classified medical condition or diagnosis, right, but it's linked to other mental health concerns, right, like depression, anxiety, and so I think we always want to check in.

So if you're feeling particularly burnt out and you're feeling like it's affecting you more mentally than anything else, definitely try and reach out to somebody that you can talk to. Talkspace dot com is a great resource. This isn't an ad, these are just resources that we know of, But definitely try and reach out to somebody and talk about the things that you're experiencing.

I have to say, you know, tt, I'm really grateful for you because I I think you're really good at making me stop and think and not overload myself with things to do.

Lots of people come into lots of situations trying to be a superhero like yes I can handle this, Yes I can handle this, And we always want to say yes because we don't want to like block an opportunity and we don't want to make it seem like, oh I can't handle the pressure. But that's not what it

On our website, you can find a cheat sheet for today, along with a ton of other links and resources in the show notes.

And if you want to stay in the know with what's going on with Dope Labs, don't forget to sign up for our newsletter on our side too. No pressure though, you don't got to do any of this, get you some rest.

Special thanks to our guest expert doctor and Helen Peterson. Her book Can't Even How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation is available now wherever books are sold.

You can find even more links to her work in our show notes, but you don't got to go there if you don't want to.

Also, we love hearing from you. What did you think about today's lab? Do you have ideas for future Labs call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and let us know.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs. Podcast tt is on Twitter at dr Underscore Tsho, and.

You can find Zakiya at z Said So follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Dope Labs is produced by Jenny rattlet Mast and Lydia Smith of Waverrunner Studios.

Mixing in sound design are by HANNS. Brown.

Our theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura, with additional music by Elijah Alex Harvey. Dope Labs is a production of Spotify and Mega Oh Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T T Show, Dia and Zakiah Watley.

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