This year I finally learned that work alone is not enough to sustain me
One morning in late September, I woke up just before dawn still at my computer. I had been attempting an all-nighter, my fourth or fifth in six months. As the sky started to lighten I went to bed, setting an alarm for two hours’ time; then I started up again, racing to meet a noon deadline. By then I had been working most of the last 24 hours, and most of the last six weeks.
The crash, when it inevitably came, was more of a hard stop. At around 11.30am my hands froze on the keyboard: I simply could not type another word. Trying to will myself on was a surprisingly physical sensation. I was pushing on a pedal that had got me this far – and finding, with mounting distress, that the tank was bone dry. Closing my laptop felt like a failure.
I have always loved to work. My job as a journalist permeates my life in a way that is highly rewarding, but occasionally destructive: in 10 years I have burned out three times, from taking on too much and not asking for help. I have learned to guard against these instincts by making plans away from my computer. With lockdown, those external checks were suddenly gone.
Work quickly expanded to fill the gaps – partly in the absence of anything else worthwhile to do, and partly because of the fear – as my peers were made redundant and budgets shrank – that every commission would be my last. I said yes to everything I was offered, and pitched to do more. My mantra, when friends expressed concern or I let myself feel daunted, was: “The only way out is through.” But there were clues that I was on a collision course.
When the lockdown lifted, my friend and her boyfriend, a doctor, came round for dinner. I made a comment about my lack of sleep, and the fact that I had another story to finish once they’d gone. What’s the worst that can happen, I said flippantly. “Well – cancer,” he said . Yet still I kept pushing.
I am sure that my editors would have happily extended my deadlines, had I only told them I was struggling. But all my energy wasspent keeping myself in motion, as if to pause for a moment would cause me to finally crash.
It is telling of how little I understood the idea of “self-care” – and the disservice I was doing myself as a consequence – that my only concessions were superficial and consumerist. One day I set out from my flat with the explicit intent – I don’t know where it came from – of buying a scented candle. Any attempt to create balance was overshadowed by looming deadlines: I rushed to finish a story before a massage appointment, only to then spend the hour thrumming with anxiety about how much I still had to do.
While I can laugh now, it’s revealing of my loss of perspective that the 12pm deadline I finally gave up trying to meet was entirely self-imposed; and the piece was a 15-year retrospective on Twilight. If work addiction was real, as my desperate Googling that day suggested, this was surely rock bottom. But for the first time in my experience of burnout, in among the usual panic, exhaustion, misery and self-loathing, there was a steely centre of clarity, and even resolve: I didn’t want to live this way any more.
My breakthrough came while I was interviewing a psychologist about selfcompassion. She mentioned that some people’s response to feeling stressed, anxious or powerless was to lean harder on their brain’s “drive” system, governing accomplishment and acquisition – ironically further triggering the “threat” system.
For the first time I understood why, when I felt overwhelmed with work, I would often let off steam by pitching for more of it. The way to break the cycle, the psychologist said, was to train up the “soothing” system to intervene with self-compassion: denying thatyou were struggling only made it worse.
I am sharing my story not because it is exceptional, but because I’m convinced it isn’t. Many people are labouring in prisons of their own making, downplaying very real suffering because it is not a matter of life or death and others have it worse. For all the discussion of burnout at a societal level, we don’t often talk about individual experiences of it – perhaps because it seems self-indulgent or shameful.
It certainly struck me as faintly ludicrous that I could burn out at home while in complete control of my schedule and doing highly nonessential work. But as I continued to research compassion-focused therapy, pioneered by Prof Paul Gilbert, an unexpected link emerged between my dysfunctional relationship with work and wider society.
Gilbert explained how the same competitive mindset that pushed me towards overwork also underpinned a culture that equated work with identity and self-worth, not as a means to an end; and an economy that says more is better. It was what I needed to hear to join the dots between personal and political.
One of the pieces I had written in the thick of my overwhelming schedule was, ironically, about the history of work. The anthropologist James Suzman had told me that instead of taking advantage of efficiency gains from technology to increase leisure time, in the early 20th century western society had opted to double down on supposedly infinite growth – and work more. The present-day understanding of work as a source of personal satisfaction, by which I’d organised most of my adult life, had in fact begun as a management principle to justify extending the working day.
The more I learned about the capitalist imperatives underpinning my own drive to work, the angrier I got – not least at myself for buying into them. But by understanding how I fit into a broader system I feel more able to resist it.Getting eight hours of sleep and cultivating self-compassion suddenly registered as important not just for my own wellbeing, but for modelling a more sustainable way of working.
The sea change against “hustle culture” this year has been striking. Billboards have been put up calling for a four-day week, arguing that we should respond to the economic fallout of Covid-19 by working less, not more. The paradigm shift of the pandemic seems to have focused people on the substance of their lives – what really matters – revealing workaholism as a shabby substitute for meaning. Even work you enjoy “will not disguise its lack”, wrote Zadie Smith from quarantine: “There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”
My lesson this year was that work alone would not sustain me, no matter how much I gave over to it – that I cannot love what I do, and treat myself with blatant disregard. My hope for next year and beyond is to find value, and meaning, in balance. The only way out is through, I’d told myself – but the same can be said of life.
Elle Hunt is a journalist based in London
ing “SHUT UP” at every well-meaning, scientifically minded person who brings up potential difficulties in the post-vaccine Covid world. But it also means being able to get through days, and even weeks, with the minimum number of depressive breakdowns.
“I have a good feeling about next year,” I heard myself say to the dejected looking barista at a local cafe. As much as hearing those words come out of my mouth was like an out-of-body experience (and as much as I immediately regretted it as thoughts of the virus developing the ability to shoot guns seeped in) I clearly needed to get my optimism off my chest. Even if the barista didn’t seem convinced, and I had to panic about having come across like someone who had recently joined a cult.
After all, Boris Johnson did kick off this hell year with that “This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain” tweet. Which quickly became a meme about how precisely un-great a year this has been for Britain (or the rest of the world). His double thumbs up in the accompanying picture crystallising the irony into something truly grotesque.
But if optimism is a drug, then using it sensibly is really all about the dosage. Like my antidepressants, optimism should be taken daily, in the correct amount. Too much could kill me, and too little would send me into a ditch of withdrawal. Optimism needs to be balanced out with reverence for bad news, but it also needs to be enjoyed for what it is. Thoughts of hugging my friends, or masklessly huffing the smell of baked goods in Sainsbury’s, are medicinal. I also appreciate that actual medicine is medicinal, and if those making it are telling us to manage our expectations, we should probably listen to them.
Is it true optimism, though, if you know you’re deluded? Well, no one would buy lottery tickets if there wasn’t a teeny bit of them that thought they might win. Optimism, I find, is often about the fantasy of things going right. When I buy a lottery ticket, I essentially pay £2 to spend a few days living – in my head – the life of someone who just won tens of millions of pounds. I buy a house and some incredibly expensive kitchen knives. I eventually have an existential crisis about having been allocated a vast sum of money at random (optimism is fairly new to me, and I’m not always good at it).
When my mum was very ill, my thoughts would often take me to the darkest places imaginable. It was only fair then that sometimes I also allowed them to take me to a deranged fantasy land, where my mum had colour in her cheeks, and cancers shrivelled like old grapes. When everything goes to shit, thinking we can smell roses doesn’t make us stupid, it makes us human.
Eleanor Margolis is a columnist for the i newspaper
conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh for his services to, uh … Well, hold that thought, because here’s another surprise! A surprise scholarship giveaway for a fourth-grade student from Philadelphia! So much for a night that was supposed to be about the country’s true priorities.
His spats with reporters
Trump turned press briefings from a forum to keep the president accountable and to inform the world about his policy decisions; to a daily performance ripe with monologues, insults and interruptions. Absolute loyalty was expected, and dissent was treated like treason. Journalists who tried to hold him to account were treated with disdain, interrupted or admonished, with their right to ask further questions revoked.
Many believe public officials should remain above drama and spats, but Trump seemed unable to stop himself from putting on a show – especially if it seemed he wasn’t “winning”.
“Be nice, don’t be threatening,” he told PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor when she asked the president about New York’s lack of ventilators back in April. “You’re a fake,” Trump would proclaim to reporters who asked him difficult questions. When asked about the US lives lost to the virus at a press briefing, Trump thought it pertinent to respond to an Asian American journalist: “Ask China.”
He might as well have been pointing a finger at each of them proclaiming, “You’re fired.”
His Covid-19 diagnosis
Of course, the president – who had spent months eschewing social distancing rules and refusing to wear a mask – eventually caught the coronavirus. In the final months of an election, his inner circle started to drop like flies; but he wasn’t going to go down without a show. After finding out he was sick, Trump was flown to the hospital. Ever aware of his image, he made sure he was photographed walking to the helicopter by himself - he reportedly did not want people to see him needing to be assisted out of the White House if his health got worse.
It wasn’t long before he was in the back of his motorcade, probably still contagious, waving to fans like the reality TV celebrity he’s always been.
“Maybe I’m immune,” he later announced while doing the rounds on a number of favorable TV shows.
Soon, Trump was out again, doused in his customary orange fake tan. Standing on the White House balcony, surreptitiously wheezing, he addressed his fans in a scene befitting the Hunger Games. There, he told people the virus was “disappearing” as a threat to Americans. It wasn’t: December was the worst, deadliest month for coronavirus cases in the US on record.
That photo op
As protests grew across the country this summer in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Trump must have known how it looked. Here was the president of law and order, sending in troops to fight his own people; the man who fought against lockdown; the man who likened Democratic cities to “warzones”, teargassing peaceful protestors.
But Trump knows a picture is worth a thousand words. Before the reality could sink in, of the president who hid in a bunker during the civil unrest, he made sure he had the perfect photo opportunity. His bodyguards parted crowds of choking protesters to deliver it to him: standing outside St John’s Episcopal church in DC, Trump stood with a Bible in his hands, looking sombre, as if the city around him wasn’t on fire.
archives building. He had previously filed lawsuits against three agencies involved in the decision to close the facility, in an effort to get records related to the sale. The new lawsuit is in response to what he described as a “dramatic change in the timeline for the sale”, explaining that it was expected to take place over the course of 2021, but now could happen at the beginning of the year.
Adam Bodner, the executive director for the Public Buildings Reform Board, which made the recommendation that the facility be sold, told the Guardian the sale is not expected to be completed until September at the earliest, and the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) will continue to function out of that facility for three more years after that, while they relocate the documents.
He also explained that the board made the recommendation to sell after consultation with Nara, and that it was a real-estate decision:
“The property in question appeared on our analysis because it was very valuable property and the federal government could not get the money to maintain it,” said Bodner. “It needed extensive repair and alterations. So from a real-estate perspective, it did not make sense for the government to continue to invest in that facility.”
But tribal leaders say there was very little communication with them about this decision. Wooten, the tribal chairman, recalled being invited to a “consultation” between officials from the archives and Pacific north-west tribes almost a year ago, but he said it was held at the same time as a key National Congress of American Indians event and very few tribes attended.
“It wasn’t really a consultation,” he said. “It was, ‘This is what we’re doing, we just found out about this, this is the way it is’, more or less.”
Wooten said it was clear to him why, despite the many concerns surrounding this move, the government is moving forward with selling this more than 200,000 square foot property.
“They’re seeing all of the dollar signs,” he said. “It’s hard to put a value on history, but apparently some people can. It’s kind of sad.”