WORKING FLAT OUT

In a culture where we can work ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, many of us now work everywhere, all the time. SELF-CONFESSED WORKAHOLIC Emilie Pine explains what life is like when work becomes your identity and burnout is a LIFESTYLE CHOICE

A self-confessed workaholic reveals what it’s like when you let your job take over your life

it is 4am, and my whole body is bent towards my phone’s shining screen. I should be sleeping next to my boyfriend… I should be, but I’m not. Because I have that jittery feeling: the one that won’t let me sleep; the one that fills my mind with worry that I am not doing enough. Last night we had a date – dinner, cinema, a pint. It was a lovely evening, a catch-up after a month of deadlines (mine) and solo meals (his). But in the glow of my phone screen, as I sneak out of bed, pretending that I just need the toilet, the night before takes on a different hue. ‘Stupid date night!’ I think, as I blame myself for taking time off when I should have been clearing work emails – emails that are now like blinking lights in my exhausted brain. When I’m not working – as a university lecturer – I’m talking about work. It feels like a pastime in itself, the release of talking about work in this age of extreme busyness, where we can work anywhere, at any time. Translated, this means that we work everywhere, all the time. For many people, working all the time is driven by the precarious gig economy, where financial need forces people to work several jobs just to pay the rent. But for me, and I am not alone in this, working too hard is as much about emotional need as financial. When I work long hours, I know I should feel guilty – in particular for how it takes me away from my family. But, here’s the thing, I don’t. Because I enjoy working too much, my laptop is my siren and when I’m working on something to the max, I feel like I’m high on the adrenaline. I confessed this recently to a male friend who travels a lot for work and he nodded in agreement. He told me that all those nights away from his wife and children were not a hardship, but a gift. Sitting in his hotel room, he could work all the time and not feel guilty. He loved it. I listened to him and realised that I felt the same – and later, I realised that I also felt jealous, because he has a wife who works at home so he doesn’t have to. I wish I had a wife. This is what we don’t talk about when we consider burnout: that overwork is filling an emotional gap. Because emotional needs – for self-esteem, validation, power – are so much easier to fill at work than at home. Family is complicated, whereas work is a straightforward to-do list. But that’s not the full story of overwork. The other side, of course, is how the current work culture exploits the emotions so many of us have tied up in our jobs. Companies and corporations are well aware of the importance of external validation to our sense of self. And they know, too, that we will compete not just with others, but with ourselves, to earn that validation. These insights result in a business model in which we are sold the lie that success is a scarce resource. We might not be precariously employed, but we feel as though we are. And rather than see this, rather than quit, we keep working too much in the hope that one day, some day, we will feel secure. We crave the thing that will, inevitably, do us harm, driven by a feeling of instability, wanting the hit. Needing more and more to get that hit. A hit that is never enough. I should have recognised the signs because I grew up with an addict parent.

My dad is an alcoholic. I was 16 when I first accepted that word, though he had been drinking that way all my life. I sobbed when I heard my mother say it about him. Then, in anger, I lashed out by saying it to him myself. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, so what?’ So what?, I wanted to say, So do something about it. But he seemed almost pleased with himself. And there it was: the self-congratulation, glee and pleasure of the addict, the same traits I would embody myself 2O years later. I don’t know why my dad became an alcoholic but I can diagnose myself. When I couldn’t have children, and felt lost within my life, I decided to define myself by my job instead. I had always been ambitious at work, seeking fulfilment through my job, but this became something different. Work became a refuge that allowed me to avoid the difficult questions about who I would be if not a mother. I went to work and the failure of infertility receded, and I felt worthy again, and productive. I admitted to my boyfriend recently that I was a workaholic. He already knew. But what horrified him most was that, while I had finally diagnosed the problem, I had no intention, really, of changing. Partly because change is difficult and, like any addiction, it cannot be externally directed. It’s also because being a workaholic is not just socially acceptable, but almost a badge of honour. We are so caught up in the dual myths of precariousness and living to work that declaring yourself a workaholic seems more like advertising a personal brand than admitting to an addiction. And it is this – not just ignoring, but actually cheering on the problem – that is hurting us the most. It took me a long time to realise that, in all the conversations I have with colleagues and friends about working too hard, though it sounded like we were complaining, there was another emotion at work: glee. This is the sign of the true addict, who knows

“When I’m working on something TO THE MAX, I feel like I’m high ON THE ADRENALINE”

they are acting destructively and who thinks, Bring it on. And, given that the substance we’re addicted to is productivity – monitored in everything from how many steps we do in a day to how many side hustles we can get off the ground – we don’t deny our addiction. Far from it. We applaud ourselves for our grit. Talking this way about work is, in fact, not just a symptom but a cause of the problem: the more we talk about how busy we are, the more we normalise overworking and the damage we are doing to ourselves. And we are not the only ones hurting.

Overworking the way we do means that we have to rely on partners and families to prop up our stressed-out bodies and our sagging self-esteem – a thankless kind of emotional labour they do because they love us, even if they hate what we are doing to ourselves, and to them. In my house, this means my partner forgives me for all the nights that I work after dinner, all the times I snap at him that I’m busy, and all the times I’m too tired to ask how his day was. Occasionally, I’ll realise that I’ve been difficult to live with for a while and so I make an effort (see date night above), but even when I do, I’m only barely present. I’m performing a fake self – a happy, relaxed self – that I just do not feel. During a particularly tense project two years ago, I started skipping meals, reanimating an eating disorder I thought I’d seen the end of. I stopped going on dates at all. I stopped returning texts to friends. I got lonelier, and more and more isolated. And then one evening, leaving work late, I drove my car into a wall. Literally. I actually drove my car into a wall. I realised in that moment that something had to change. I say, ‘I realised’, but I kept on going. It turns out, you can sustain burnout for a really long time. It was anger that saved me. When I started writing again, after a break of more than a decade, the words poured out of me, fuelled by a pent-up anger I had not known I felt – and I began to question why I had stopped writing. My whole life, I’d always dreamed of being a writer. Over the years, that dream had become less and less admissible, more and more ignorable, as my ‘adult’, ‘real’ career increasingly absorbed my time, my attention and, crucially, my spirit. My dreams were as big as they had always been, but my ambition had become tiny: finish my to-do list. As I wrote, I reconnected with an inner self – the voice I’d tried to mute, that had now started making itself heard. This voice told me what I did not want to admit: the only answer to work addiction is to do less. For me, that has meant taking 13 weeks of unpaid leave from work so I can try to write full time. I’m able to do this because I have an understanding boss, an understanding boyfriend and an understanding bank manager. Not everyone can take this kind of radical break from work, but everyone can, at least, try to do less. Doing less is a refusal of the logic that says we should always be doing more. The irony, of course, is that doing less, for me, actually means writing more. Doing less, then, is not about doing nothing, but about finding the space to reflect; the space to do better, more meaningful work. Doing less is about finding the space to dream. It’s not always easy – there are days when I still feel the lure of working too much and times when I get out of bed in the early hours to add another task to my to-do list. So if you were hoping for a 1O-step plan for the recovering workaholic, I have to disappoint you. Last Friday, the weather was sunny, so my boyfriend and I took a half-day and headed to the mountains. As we climbed to the peak, I felt free. We laughed and talked; in the quiet moments I thought about what to write the next day. When we got to the top, I decided on a new manifesto: we need to do less so we can be more. Emilie Pine is the author of Notes to Self (out now)

“DOING LESS is not about doing nothing, but about finding the space to reflect... finding the SPACE TODREAM”