Ennui will rock you: books, games and more for getting through burnout
As a cure for burnout – the bonedeep exhaustion and broken spirit – it would be hard to find a movie less suitable than Seconds, director John Frankenheimer’s brilliant but sobering morality tale from 1966. As a film about those same symptoms though, nothing has done it better since. Throughout the first act, a weary New York banker is a study in alienation, lost in a listless commute and a fug of ennui, voice reduced to a mumble. In 1966, between The Twilight Zone and the counterculture, the answer was to become a whole new person, surgically transformed, the old self subject to a staged death. From there, to California and a second chance at life. If all that sounds like a plan to you, do check out the film first. Danny Leigh
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Art
This video captures, in real time, the Dutch artist and ultra-marathon buff
Guido van der Werve (above) running around a house for 12 hours straight. By its final minutes he is exhausted, and anyone game enough to endure the entire work probably will be as well. It seems to show a hamster-wheel existence of pointlessness, one easily relatable to working life’s burnout. Worse yet, this is a holiday home and running is a leisure activity whose punishments are readily embraced. For all the absurdity, the artist’s circular mega-sprint remains an awesome feat, at once confronting and escaping everyday life’s relentlessness. Skye Sherwin
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Book
Gustav von Aschenbach starts Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice worrying that his strength as a writer has been exhausted. But that isn’t the half of it. We start to feel his burnout most searingly when he makes the mistake of going on holiday to the Venetian Lido. He tells himself he needs to relax, to get a change of air and “to bring freshness to his blood”. Instead, he encounters a cholera epidemic, unbearable sexual tension and the anguish of obsessive and unrequited love. He feels the exhaustion and ravages of age with new and horrifying clarity and ends up so wasted that there’s only one way out. It becomes all too clear that the novel’s title is a bleak prophecy. Sam Jordison
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Music
The five string quartets that Beethoven composed in the last three years of his life rank among the greatest works of art in the western world. They span a huge range of human emotion, from despair to joyous abandon, but the fourth of them, the A minor Quartet Op 132, deals specifically in reconciliation and recovery, and is sometimes claimed as the inspiration behind TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. At its heart is a 20 minute slow movement that Beethoven called “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the deity”, a hymn of transcendent beauty. Andrew Clements
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Games
When you are exhausted by life, even playing video games can feel like a chore; most adults have found themselves staring at a library of unplayed sale purchases, despairing at the idea of starting any of them. There is, for me, one perfect game for this state: Stardew Valley, which is about running away from a city job to live a slower life on a rundown farm, growing crops, tending animals and embedding yourself in the local community. Unlike others in this genre, there is no pressure to constantly optimise, make money and upgrade. You can just subsume yourself in it and enjoy the chill vibes.Keza MacDonald