00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.080Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:04:37.340I burnt out? Because I've internalized the idea that I should be working all the time.
00:04:41.940Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life reinforced
00:04:46.380it, explicitly and implicitly, since I was young. Her essay about millennials and burnout was so
00:04:52.900impactful, she turned it into a new book called Can't Even, How Millennials Became the Burnout
00:04:57.780Generation. In it, she describes that familiar and exhausting feeling of what she calls errand
00:05:03.040paralysis. Being so overwhelmed that you're not able to get any of these tasks in life done,
00:05:08.820so you're left feeling perpetually stuck. But our generation was supposed to have it easier than
00:05:13.320our parents did. And technology was supposed to make our lives better and more fulfilled,
00:05:18.140not worse. So why are so many of us burnt out? What's going on?
00:05:24.600I am Anne Helen Peterson, and I write culture study for Substack.
00:05:30.080So one of the reasons why I was so excited to speak to you today is because I just really have not been like in a good place, I guess.
00:05:39.480I've been feeling stuck. I've had a hundred kind of work things to do online, emails to reply to.
00:05:45.220These kind of social obligations on Zoom that somehow leave me feeling like more drained than when I started.
00:05:51.080And the main thing is like nothing was getting done.
00:05:53.980You know, I would write these to do lists and like they would just carry over, you know, day by day.
00:05:58.660And when I read your the excerpt of your book and Wired, which we'll put on the show notes, it really just struck me.
00:06:05.940You know, you start with this rundown of your digital diet and it was this very familiar and also exhausting mix of, you know, little tasks where you feel like you're kind of never working, but at the same time, always working.
00:06:19.640And so I guess my question for you is, I know that when you first started writing your BuzzFeed piece that later became the book Can't Even, it was a kind of a way for you to grapple with your own, you know, your own issues around burnout and feeling sort of burnt out all the time.
00:08:00.460that are simultaneously both really cool and good jobs.
00:08:04.980Yeah, I think that younger people have internalized this idea that like jobs should be cool, right?
00:08:11.140In some capacity, that whatever your job is, whether it's a passionate job or a job that is like, you know, on the outside, you're like, oh, I'm just like making deals and like having cool drinks after work.
00:08:24.560I don't know, like people have, it's hard to describe a cool job, you know, when you see it.
00:08:29.180And the way that a job becomes cool is oftentimes through our mediation of it through social media. Right. So that's like everything from taking pictures of your equally cool job mates, like in your cool office space to, you know, even just like taking a picture that describes like how meaningful and rewarding and fulfilling your work is.
00:08:51.160we are always representing our jobs as, I think, far more fulfilling and cool than they actually
00:08:58.620are. God, that really resonates with me. Something that you write about in your piece that I did not
00:09:04.580even really notice I was doing it until I read your piece was the way that, so not only do we
00:09:10.080have to have our jobs look cool on social media, but we also have to sort of be constantly using
00:09:15.680social media to brand ourselves in a kind of way. And so even if you are not working,
00:09:22.060what you're posting on social media, you know, if you're a journalist, you want to show,
00:09:25.660you want to use Twitter to show that you're with it, that you're smart, that you're reading good
00:09:29.380things and that you're influencing others to read good things and have good takes. But that is
00:09:33.580actually work. And so it sort of creates this weird thing where your leisure time and your work
00:09:38.660time are kind of blended because you have to be branding yourself, even though that's not work
00:09:43.140that you're necessarily being paid for it kind of we've kind of just blurred these lines of what is0.81
00:09:48.920and isn't work and that we're always sort of working and it's fucking exhausting yes well
00:09:54.460the way I think of it is that like work the contemporary like feeling of work like it just
00:09:59.680seeps into every corner of your life and when we don't have very good boundaries about like the
00:10:04.860space between work and non-work that makes it easier for it to slip into like oh I just woke
00:10:11.560up in the morning, I'm going to roll over and open up my phone and check my email right now at 6 a.m.
00:10:17.520Right. Or I'm like feeding my kids and I'm just going to like casually scroll through my Slack
00:10:23.360messages. It just slips into all of those places. And of course, the pandemic has has made that
00:10:29.420slipperiness even more so. Yeah. How do you think the pandemic has really made this worse? I know
00:10:37.040I was reading a piece earlier that said that the time that we have saved by commuting by people who,
00:10:43.020you know, work at home now, we've just filled that with more work. We haven't filled that with
00:10:46.920leisure time or rest or something else. We've just used that time, however much that time that would
00:10:51.840have been that we would be commuting to an office. That's just more work time now. Yes, absolutely.
00:10:56.580Like everyone I know who has recuperated a commute time by having to be at home,
00:11:03.000they they are not like using it to oh I'm just like having some quiet reading time
00:11:09.140or I'm meditating or I'm trying to be really present with my kids you know any of those things
00:11:14.800that like our best selves would want to devote that time to instead we're just pushing more work
00:11:20.660into it and this certainly happened to me when I moved to Montana in 2017 um you know I was like
00:11:28.840oh, I'm going to have so much more time to be outside. Beautiful Montana. Like, it's going to
00:11:33.260be amazing. I'm not going to be on the train all the time. Like, work from home, going to be great.
00:11:39.100And instead, I just work more than I had worked in years. So being in beautiful, big sky Montana
00:11:44.980didn't make you feel less burnt out? I mean, in some ways, right? Like, I, for me, one of the hard
00:11:51.380things, the like daily hard things about living in the city was that, like, just from the way that I
00:11:56.700grew up I grew up in rural Idaho like being out of the city and in outdoor spaces is like very
00:12:03.560nourishing and replenishing to me and it was so hard to find that like I mean I love the parks in
00:12:09.280New York they're great I love parks just in general fantastic they are not the same as like being in
00:12:14.840the middle of nowhere and um and it was just you know I didn't have a car it was just so hard to
00:12:20.180to get into those spaces from New York so I did have that like available you know to me in Montana
00:12:26.520a, on a daily basis and especially on the weekends. But at the same time, like, I think
00:12:31.900the pictures that I was taking on social media of like all of this beauty were a way of trying
00:12:38.160to tell myself a story of, of how much more balanced my life was, right? Like you're telling
00:12:43.500the world, but you're also telling yourself a story with your social media. When in truth,
00:12:48.000like I was just, I was just working all the time. I was traveling constantly for, for my job and
00:12:54.500also for like go speak at colleges and that sort of thing and and oftentimes i think people who do
00:13:00.560travel a ton it's easy to frame that traveling as like glamorous life right like here i am in the
00:13:08.420in first class and you're like the only reason you're in first class is because you travel so
00:13:12.360much that you get upgraded and like the only difference in first class is that like your
00:13:16.300legs don't hurt by the end of the flight um but again you tell yourself a story in order to like
00:13:22.760not feel like crap about what the daily existence of your life is like.
00:15:18.580They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:15:22.460But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:15:25.900They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:15:29.560Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart
00:15:32.320on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:15:37.320If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:15:44.220This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:15:56.400I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:16:03.520I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:25:40.280And I think as as like creative professionals, it can be so fraught because, you know, nobody just sits down in front of their computer and like a perfect draft just spills out of you in the, you know, in 20 minutes or something.
00:25:53.700But I do feel like the time that you spend thinking and sitting in front of your computer and like ideating or whatever, that's all part of it.
00:26:02.040It gives me this like anxiety where it's like, oh, I have to like overperform to show that I work that I was actually working that and not just goofing off.
00:26:08.820And it is kind of a part of me like telling myself that I'm not goofing off, even though somewhere deep down I know it.0.98
00:26:14.540It's like this constant thing that's such an added distraction from just getting my fucking work done.0.57
00:26:20.460Well, and I think we oftentimes told ourselves stories about work has to look like a certain sort of thing, right?0.97
00:26:29.320Like instead of work can also look like staring into space.
00:26:37.300um and that has been really hard to especially those of us who work in creative fields that's
00:26:43.200really hard to understand because to us work is you are sitting in front of the computer
00:26:49.260and you are doing something on that computer screen and it doesn't have to be that way
00:26:55.000so i want to talk a little bit about how did we get to this place you know when i read your piece
00:27:00.540it it really resonated with me and i think the fact that your your buzzfeed piece went
00:27:06.160mega viral shows that we're not alone in having these tasks that pile up, feeling this, this
00:27:13.060Aaron paralysis when you can't get anything done. How did we, how did millennials get to this place
00:27:18.120where we're all so burnt out? Well, I think the way that I try to position the book is so much
00:27:24.360of it has to do with instability, with precarity. And so that's what bonds people who are, you know,
00:27:32.800working three different gig jobs right now and people who are ostensibly middle class but are
00:27:38.760super over indebted both in terms of student debt and consumer debt and still really struggling to
00:27:44.960figure out like how am I going to cover rent next month or how am I going to find child care next
00:27:49.460month and the difference of course is that middle class people can oftentimes throw money at a
00:27:54.300problem and do have some some sort of a safety net either in terms of family bonds like they can you
00:28:01.680know, you could always move back into that basement and not everyone has that. But still,
00:28:06.260what we're trying to do is keep treading water. And so the energy required to keep treading water,
00:28:12.000oftentimes that means like feeling like you have to work all the time. That means taking your
00:28:16.220leisure time and optimizing it or monetizing it in some way. And that also means throwing a lot
00:28:23.520of time at parenting because you're trying to reproduce your own semblance of stability for the
00:28:29.600next generation. Yeah, it's funny. I know that you've written about the ways that parenting has
00:28:36.340a lot to do with millennial burnout. And something I found so interesting is how this cuts across
00:28:40.680race and class lines. It just looks differently for different people, depending on their background
00:28:44.700and situations. I know for me, you know, we grew up pretty comfortably, but my mom was the first
00:28:50.720person in her family to go to college. We grew up in a black Southern family. And for them,
00:28:55.700they were like you know we want our kids to not you know quote unquote become statistics
00:29:02.300and the way to get the way to achieve that is through college and a stable job and so
00:29:07.440the same way that upper middle class white parent who was interested in their kid
00:29:11.120going to an ivy league college it's sort of the same even though the cultural and racial
00:29:16.900you know reasonings for getting there are different it's sort of the same thing where
00:29:21.740this parenting then sets kids up for this idea that like the most important thing is getting a
00:29:28.520stable job, going to college, that pathway. And it really can lead to kids being raised almost
00:29:35.960as little adults. Yeah, totally. And a lot of that is motivated. And I try to do this a bit
00:29:41.540in the book. It's it is, as you said, like it's motivated by not wanting your kids to take a step
00:29:46.760back from where you've gone right and our parents generation uh you know a lot of them had reached
00:29:55.000that that middle class stability some semblance of that middle class stability sometimes for the
00:29:59.340first time in their family's history and sometimes that was through going to college and getting a
00:30:05.360job after that and sometimes it was through like getting a good union job um and and having
00:30:10.040stability that way and so the the goal is okay well I don't want my kids to fall back from where
00:30:15.800I've come. And so you try to imprint all of these strategies for success, instability. And, you
00:30:23.920know, sometimes too, and this, I found this in my interviews, like sometimes people's parents0.99
00:30:28.080didn't give a shit, right? Like they were like, whatever, you'll figure it out. But the kids0.97
00:30:33.580themselves really picked up through osmosis, you know, from their kids, their peers, from their
00:30:38.980peers, parents, from their teachers, that that was the only way that they had to turn themselves
00:30:44.120into a walking resume, even if their parents didn't care. Yeah, I definitely feel that this
00:30:49.520is reinforced both explicitly and implicitly. We're just told that this is how you're meant
00:30:56.760to live life. Your job is meant to be your everything. Your identity should be this job,
00:31:03.800and you should be working 24-7. When you're not working, you should be feeling guilty about not
00:31:08.040working or turn, whatever. If you enjoy cooking on the weekends, that should be
00:31:14.100be a business or an Instagram page or something that you can never just not be, you should never
00:31:19.360be not optimized for working or something that looks like working. Yeah. And well, and think
00:31:25.580about that though. Like what was it, you know, my, uh, like my mom would make bread on the weekends,
00:31:31.700but she wasn't like, oh, I need to try to like hustle on the side to like make a couple extra1.00
00:31:37.020dollars. And what it was is that like, they were able to, you know, pay off my dad's student loans.0.58
00:31:43.100Like they were able to buy a house in North Idaho, like they weren't struggling constantly to cover the cost of raising a family.
00:31:52.340Whereas because of incredible increases in the cost of living, the cost of child care, the cost of health care, so many families that have like dual income streams are still struggling and are like, OK, I got to make an extra fifty dollars every weekend by making bread.
00:32:08.820Yeah, that's something that I think you do a nice job of illustrating is how in our generation, millennials and older millennials, like a lot of us graduated into the Great Recession, you know, the dot com burst.
00:32:22.020Now the instability of covid. I feel like so many of us, we have never had the luxury of making choices about our life based on security.
00:32:31.640Like every every professional choice I've made has been based on scarcity. It's been based on my back is against the wall. Some calamity is happening that's completely out of my control. And I have to make my professional choices based on this scarcity. And we have no idea sort of what it looks like to be making a life at a time of stability. I don't even really I can't even know like grasp that.
00:32:54.340No, it's so true. And I think like, especially people who work in more creative fields, like
00:33:01.360there's this expectation to the like, the company you work for is going to fold. Like, you know,
00:33:07.420you're not going to have any sort of stable job. Like, you can't expect a job to endure in the way
00:33:13.560that a lot of our parents like, started one job and stayed at that job for many decades. Or like
00:33:18.780my grandfather who worked at one company his entire life. Right. And I think that that
00:33:24.980overarching precarity, so much of it, you know, it comes from entering into the economy as adults
00:33:32.980during the first great recession. And then also just like expecting the other shoe to drop. Like
00:33:38.020most millennials I know are not surprised by the pandemic. They're like, we're just waiting for1.00
00:33:43.000everything to collapse and to me that shows a psychology that is conditioned towards precarity
00:33:49.320right is conditioned towards never feeling like you have a stability and what that does i think
00:33:54.740over the course of you know many millions of people over the course of a generation and i
00:33:59.300think it's going to affect gen z as well is it it makes it hard to to be confident to experiment
00:34:05.980to take risks you know like when people talk about what having a universal basic income does or even
00:34:12.460having health insurance that's not tied to employment is what it does is it allows you
00:34:17.620to make decisions that make life easier for you, right? That make it so that you can find a job
00:34:24.400that doesn't feel shitty and exploitative. It allows you to go back to school if you want to.
00:34:31.660You know, there are all sorts of things that having even just that modicum of stability
00:34:35.780permits for people. And we are so deeply unfamiliar with that.
00:34:39.680So how do we get to a place where instability is not the internalized norm for an entire generation?
00:34:47.360I mean, create a lot more social safety net.
00:34:50.680So the big thing that's changed between our parents and grandparents generation and now is that so many of those social safety nets have been eroded.
00:34:59.440And I'm talking about like, you know, pretty basic things like the fact that we have legislators have just largely defunded so much funding for public education.
00:35:11.480And so, like, because you have so much student debt, that makes it harder to, you know, if you lose a job, you're like, well, going to default on these loans. Right.
00:35:19.660But then also just thinking about things like funding for some funding that has never existed, but funding for things like universal pre-K or even before pre-K, mandatory paternity leave, universal health care, like things that are not alien to most developed countries across the world.
00:35:44.380Like these are things that actually make life feel like you're not conditioned to precarity.
00:35:49.100But I think that we are so obsessed with this myth of the individual.
00:35:52.960And somehow if the individual can work harder, then you'll get out of precarity.
00:35:58.300But this is why millennials are having these sort of existential crises, certainly myself included, is you get to this point of your late 30s, right?
00:36:05.760Like the oldest millennials are 39 and 40.
00:36:08.660And you're like, wait, I thought by this point I would have found some stability.
00:36:14.380And you're like, wait a second. Like, I have kids or I have been, you know, been in the workforce for almost 20 years. Like, where's that stability? Why isn't it here yet? And becoming deeply disillusioned and saying like, well, this is just broken. We need to fix this entirely.
00:36:33.440oh my gosh it's like i i go back and watch these movies that i loved in the 90s when i watched
00:36:39.940them when i was young and all of the main characters they'd be like 25 and having some
00:36:44.720like fantastic job or like having a lot of existential dread the fact by the fact that
00:36:48.740they're not you know that they're turning 28 and they don't have their life together and here i am
00:36:53.460in my like mid-30s thinking like like oh we thought we were gonna have stable jobs stable
00:36:59.380partners own houses by the time we were like 25 like that like that was the the framework we
00:37:05.300were working with what is the what isn't it like my best friend's wedding she's they're like 20
00:37:10.340so funny so funny oh goodness more after a quick break
00:40:32.540The millennial generation is one of the first generations where it's not a given that we'll have things better than our parents had it.0.97
00:40:39.180And yet there was this attitude where millennials were all lazy or entitled little brats who were all whiners.0.93
00:40:47.020Well, I do think that the messaging has kind of shifted. And part of that is, of course, that millennials are now like at the helm at a lot of different publications. But just the idea that like millennials have kind of been screwed is becoming more popular, I think.
00:41:05.240But then at the same time, I think a lot of it has to do or the way that we can change minds about this is actually having conversations with people who are, you know, our relatives, who are our peer, like people who are older than us that we actually feel like we can have a real conversation with about like, here's tell me about what it was like when you had worked your way through college, which is always the common refrain, right?
00:41:30.060Which is like, I don't know why you took out all the student debt.
00:41:33.120I managed to work my way through college.
00:41:34.740And you're like, okay, so how much did you make a semester?
00:41:53.720And like, you can do it without turning it into like a math lecture.
00:41:56.900But you can be like, here's how the cost of living hasn't changed, right?
00:42:00.920Like, or like the our races haven't been accompanied by changes for cost of living or even inflation, that sort of thing.
00:42:09.860But, you know, one of the things that I tried to do a little bit was create a little bit of empathy by being like, you know, boomers were burnt out in some capacity, too, because they had grown up in this time of unprecedented economic stability.
00:42:26.900And then as they entered the job market in the 1970s, they experienced those first waves of precarity and were responding to them.
00:42:35.540And so, like, if anything, you know, part of the reason boomers and millennials have such a difficult relationship is because I think we are pretty similar in a lot of foundational ways.
00:42:48.600I think having it come down to empathy and having real conversations about what things
00:42:55.480looked like, because I don't know, I think about folks who are, you know, the generation
00:42:59.940below, you know, after me, and I want them to know we had a hard time.
00:43:04.440I don't want them to feel as if, I want them to know that if they are struggling to figure
00:43:10.180it out, that we also struggled to figure it out.
00:43:13.100I don't want them to feel like they're alone or that they're a whiner or that they're,
00:43:17.160you know they're make their they have some sort of individual failing if they can't figure it out
00:43:21.740because i do think every generation has has their issues with that totally well and i'm seeing you
00:43:27.940know two different kind of discourses come out of gen z and one of them is like you guys were sold a
00:43:35.980false bill of goods we are going to reject that bill of goods right that's like we actually think
00:43:42.260you can like have a different sort of life that college maybe isn't the most important thing in
00:43:47.340the world that we can do something about climate change that you know everything isn't intractable
00:43:52.640so and I'm always heartened by it by that posture but then I also see some some like stuff that's0.63
00:43:59.000like oh my gosh why are millennials such whiners right like they just need to work harder and I'm0.85
00:44:05.200like, don't you dare. So I think hopefully, by creating not just empathy, but actual solidarity,
00:44:14.000right? Being like, it doesn't have to be this way for us. It doesn't have to be this way for you
00:44:17.620either. How can we work together to change it? You make this point a lot in your work that I love,
00:44:25.660that sometimes when we feel like we don't have a lot of power, leaning into the collective,
00:44:30.260whether it's joining a union, which I know more and more young people are supportive of,
00:44:33.360or just sharing honest experiences with each other can really be the antidote to some of the problems that you lay out.
00:44:39.220You know, the collective, you know, feeling like you're part of a united collective can really make you feel a lot more powerful and less alone.
00:44:46.840Totally. And it doesn't fix everything, but it does make you feel like, I mean, this is the word, right?
00:44:52.760It makes you feel a little less alone. Like it makes it feel like you're not just fighting this problem on your own.
00:44:57.320And so much of the writing and content that I see around burnout, particularly geared toward women, will always have some sort of individual little thing that like, oh, this is going to be the silver bullet or the magic bullet that that helps you figure it out.
00:45:12.820So whether it's using your meditation app or, you know, doing your self-care manicure or, you know, quit your nine to five and be your own girl boss.0.99
00:45:22.800And I am my own boss and I can tell you that my boss sucks.0.63
00:45:25.500working for her is not great all the time you know and i think you know it's it's not these0.97
00:45:32.400individual choices or actions that are going to save us from something that is systemic that is
00:45:39.380that is bigger than us and you know i think the real issue is capitalism you know yep and i guess
00:45:46.060my question is how a how do we get to a place where we unlearn that it's an end of like we are
00:45:52.520doing something wrong individually if we are feeling burnt out? And B, how can we go forward
00:45:58.780knowing that the real issue is so much bigger than us? You know, it's funny. So there was a
00:46:04.740critique of the book that was like, this book doesn't talk enough about therapy, right? And I
00:46:09.940get it because I do think that a lot of the neuroses that millennials have developed, a lot
00:46:15.140of them are things that like we need to work through on the personal level through therapy,
00:46:20.200if possible, even though therapy is not accessible to so many people. But I also think that like,
00:46:28.080we've been taught oftentimes that like, oh, if you have a problem with this workplace scenario,
00:46:32.220that's a personal problem. Instead of thinking about like, oh, well, everyone I work with has
00:46:37.940this problem with this workplace. So maybe it's a workplace problem, right? Like, or all of these
00:46:44.900people feel the same way in society right now, instead of that being a personal problem, it's
00:46:50.100societal problem. It's not something that you can just work through on your own. And also almost
00:46:55.360every millennial I know who burnt out, who is burnt out, is either going to therapy or has
00:47:00.540been going to therapy, right? Like it's not like therapy is going to solve those larger issues as
00:47:08.220well. And so what we have to think about is what are these systems that are, that are making
00:47:12.940everything so sucky, right? Like what are the systems that make the scenario that leads us to
00:47:20.420burnout? And I'm heartened actually by even just like the willingness for us to say things like
00:47:27.040capitalism aloud. Like even 10 years ago, it was kind of like a like third rail, like, oh,
00:47:33.740are you a socialist? Like, oh, are you part of the Occupy movement to like talk about capitalism as
00:47:38.800this problem. Whereas now, like, I mean, in part of it, I think is the success of memes and even
00:47:44.180just like all over TikTok and Twitter, like you see a very clear indictment of capitalism as the
00:47:50.300source of a lot of our ills. And I think that like, you know, regardless of my personal politics,
00:47:56.880which are like much more radical than anything that I can see us implementing in the United
00:48:00.720States in our lifetime, I do think that there are ways to make capitalism work for the worker
00:48:34.540So I have to ask, you know, in your in the excerpts that I read, you talked about feeling so burnt out and how writing that BuzzFeed piece was in a way trying to kind of come to terms with that.
00:48:46.440How is that? How has that looked like for your personal journey? Are you still feeling that way or where are you at? Give me give me a check in.
00:48:52.600well I'm pretty burnt out in the moment I think because I'm trying to like wrestle0.97
00:48:58.300starting like this newsletter that I'm doing is basically like becoming my own shitty boss like
00:49:03.620you said uh but then also uh getting this book out into the world which requires a lot of talking
00:49:10.040about the book which I find incredibly gratifying but it also is time right um and and then trying
00:49:17.320to think to the future about other big projects like whether that's books or whatever but and
00:49:23.040it was all really uh amplified for me a couple weeks ago when the smoke got so bad out here in
00:49:29.220the west and i realized that like the one release valve that i had cultivated over the course of
00:49:36.260you know just general work stress but also like covid and quarantine stress was being able to go
00:49:41.360outside. And when that was taken away from me for a week, I was just like, I have nothing like I'm
00:49:47.300collapsing under the weight of this, this house of cards that I've built for myself. And I think
00:49:53.520that drove home to me, like, just how fragile things were like, I've, the balance was in my
00:50:00.480life of trying to keep work and some sort of release at the same time. But I mean, the thing
00:50:09.580for myself like no of course I'm not cured of burnout but what I can do is I can recognize
00:50:14.160burnout behaviors more easily I can try to like see them for what they are and just kind of
00:50:19.100not judge them but be like okay how can I maybe shift a couple things just quietly in my life to
00:50:25.060to try to change that um and you know talking about it definitely makes it feel better
00:50:29.940I agree I have to tell you your your writing on burnout made me feel
00:50:35.380you know we talked about the collective and feeling less alone just knowing that i'm not
00:50:40.640the only person who feels such incredible shame around my atrocious inbox or my inability to just
00:50:47.880like get simple shit done or the package that's been in the back of my car for six months just
00:50:53.240knowing that it's not just me really gave me the power to just start thinking about it and talking
00:51:00.320about it honestly like like i really do feel like you opened up that space for so many people myself
00:51:04.720included to do that. So I'm so grateful for your work. Yeah, I think it was something that a lot
00:51:09.480of us were ashamed of for a long time. It's like we, there was this idea that you had to somehow
00:51:15.160be like, doing all the shit, right? Like that you had to like keeping it all be keeping it all0.99
00:51:21.000together at all times. And, you know, even the people who are like, Oh, I'm so authentic on
00:51:26.640Instagram or whatever, like that is such a performance of like, messiness, like it's not
00:51:31.600actual messiness or vulnerability. And so I just hope that we can continue to have this conversation
00:51:38.880in all of the different directions it takes us and also continue to be really pissed off about it
00:51:44.340because I want to use that anger and use it to like push us towards change.
00:51:50.200Where can folks subscribe to the Substack and keep up with your work online?
00:51:54.160So you can go to annhellen.substack.com or just Google my name and Substack and it'll come up.