Burning out
It’ll almost be two months since I quit my job and being in what some might call a professional void. Devoid of immediate responsibilities I’ve started looking at doing things which give me joy without the feeling of an intimidating deadline. Mostly the need to be in a flow state sans the very definite goal. Doing things for joy of doing. The proverbial dog chasing cars.
I do acknowledge it’s an absolute privilege for me to do so at this point. While people around the globe are losing jobs due to the still raging pandemic I’ve gone smack in the face of stability and social norms. Primarily, the ability to do so comes from the fact that I have no dependents on me. My amazing parents, retired and living in Kerala, have sorted their lives out to the extent that I’m never forced to worry much. A result of the backbreaking work they’ve put in during their working years. And being by myself at this point, as I’ve noted earlier, puts me in charge of whatever spontaneous decisions I take. To wit, I do not endorse any of my actions or encourage people to “quit your job and live your life”. Most of those social media curated click baits are based on blanket statements with heavy assumptions on the amount of privilege that disregard the reality of the larger population. Hence the things I spew here are just excerpts from my journal sanitised (heavily) for public perusal.
2020 is a year a lot of us want wiped off the calendar due to the shitshow ushered in by the virus that hit the planet. For me it started off with quitting my previous job and joining a new place, a new role and a bag full of hope. Now the pandemic hit us all in very different ways. On relative terms, my life was hit with fairly few alterations. On a scale of 0 to health care workers on daily life being affected, mine was still at a comfortable 2. Working in tech, it was barely a scratch looking at it from a bird’s-eye view. In fact a lot of tech companies ended up flourishing during the pandemic due to the lack of a physical presence required to get things done.
So what was the tectonic shift I had to get acquainted to? Working from home in my pyjamas? It seemed like that was all. And years of cribbing and whining about how open offices are a major drain of productivity actually had me hopeful for a while. In hindsight, I was one of those obnoxious people who felt that the amount of social interaction in office spaces were a major deterrent to productivity. Let me embody my thoughts from that era in a meme:
So when the lockdowns started raining down and personal hygiene became optional I thought it’d be a great way to get cracking. Yes, the world was crumbling around us. Yes, the apocalypse was right at our doorstep. But hey, why not take this opportunity and get better at what I did for a living. With all those messy social office constructs out of the way I’ll end up developing way more, and churning out UX Plans and Design Systems at the speed of my thoughts. The possibilities seemed endless.
As a self-proclaimed introvert, I ended up not pegging social interactivity at the highest on my list. Many a time treating it as an optional commodity. A few frequent catchup video calls might be good enough, right?
I’ve got Netflix. I’ve got a few beers in the fridge. I can still cook up a mean p̶a̶s̶t̶a pack of instant noodles when I want. And I can always keep shuttling between work and fun whenever I felt like it. It didn’t sound too bad. In fact it felt like this was what I was building up to all the while. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
As the months inched by in deceptive stagnancy, I felt the idea of productivity which I started off with wasn’t exactly being met. In fact, all it did was peg the expectations way too high for me to meet them. I expected myself to work at a 150% higher productivity rate, adjusting for the fewer obstacles through the work day. No commute, no messy human interaction, none of the discomfort of having to wear pants, no time limits to when you can work on something. Whatever you do, you can just get to the point and get it done.
And to an extent it felt like it worked. There was a phase when I would work early mornings for a stretch, since they weren’t marred with the hassle of commute anymore. I had the luxury of taking tiny power naps when there were perceptive dips in attention span. Just to get back to crushing it full power. I’d miss certain evenings as day morphed into night, since I’d still be glued to the screen. Looking at the clock was only an exercise to calculate the time difference between the deadline and now.
And just like the concept of progressive overloads in workouts, each day I’d stretch dangerously closer to my dinner time. To make up for the lost hours, I started waking up way earlier. Somedays sitting on the laptop while brushing my teeth. Weekends, now barely eventful, were inadvertently filled with work. The ability to sit still and do nothing felt like some esoteric practice. I’d wake up at odd times in the night to check for pending Slack messages.
I’d hit refresh on analytics or other monitoring tools with one hand while navigating food somewhere approximately between my nose and mouth with the other. And every occasion I’d sacrifice a part of my day to open up slots of time, Parkinson’s law would kick in for work to expand and fill it. Work didn’t vanish the more I put allotted it time. In fact, the more I worked, the more work seemed to pile up. It was by design. And because of the greater momentum of getting work done, I used to look at others as modes of competition.
This is where things got slippery. Whenever I’d take a break, but then see someone still discussing work on a slack message, I’d snap out of it and get back. Cause I always felt the need to catch up. My brain worked like the oft-stereotyped asian dad, chiding me for the times I’ve relaxed and hence lost opportunities to work harder.
I started reading up more and more on mitigating with the inability to work 10/10 all the time. Every time I failed to hit some personal milestone meant some degree of failure. And even if I did hit it, I’d feel that I had it too easy. I was trying to embrace some warped version of the hustle culture.
The M. Night Shyamalan twist in all this was the fact that I was the one who put all this pressure on me. There was no external human being breathing down my neck asking me to get things done. The expectations I was trying to meet were all offsprings of my own thoughts. But I didn’t understand what I was trying to prove. Or to whom. I still carried on with a weight on my chest. A knot that grew tighter each time I pushed harder for some elusive goal I’ve was trying to ascertain. And at the end of it, I kept feeling like I had nothing to show for it.
Something snapped in me at that point. Each evening started feeling extra exhausting as I pushed through. The knock brush sound of slack pings started terrifying me. Each alert would just throw metaphoric coals into my organic furnace to accelerate my beating heart, an out of context vestige of the primeval fight or flight response. My smartwatch would congratulate me on commencing what it feels is an aerobic workout as my brain contemplates on levels above DEFCON 1.
I’d often take a swig of whiskey to take the edge off and signal my brain to relax. If that wouldn’t help I’d try and meditate. But meditating while being anxious is just a practical method to experience time dilation first hand.
The ebb and flow of these anxious currents at the beginning seemed fairly constrained. The storm usually followed by moments of serenity as the worst passed. But gradually the brain, like a drug addled teen, found ways to augment this experience by longer runs of anxiety. The ones where you question when or if it will end.
This is where things started getting more intense. And even though I was conscious about the approaching burnout, I tried the fight fire with fire tactic as a means to face the problem head on. My internal logic stated that If I get used to being in this situation from prolonged exposure, then it’ll become the new normal and hence I’d be less affected.
Calling it my internal logic at play might be misleading. Since in the throes of this ordeal, I turned to look at the tenets of stoicism as some sort of a guiding compass. I tried reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, but it just turned out to be one of those books you pretend to nod along while thinking deeply about why Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants. There was no dearth of comprehensible reading material though. I embraced Ryan Holiday and Pigliucci as stoic guides. I internalised the obstacle is the way ideology as a means to harden myself to the issues thrown at me. I had the phrases Momento Mori and Amor Fati plastered across my cellphone. Which in my defence is okay cause things sound way smarter in Latin!
But this plan of hardening backfired. What ended up happening is that I‘d dismiss my own needs to take breaks as a means to push through the obstacles. My brain was applying the obnoxious gym poster logic of reiterating No pain, No gain and Go hard or go home, while I was struggling to keep myself intact.
Even when a friend pointed out that I was being too hard on myself, I still felt that I was being too weak for others to notice. The relentless self abuse that I inflicted to push through the mental strain always flew under the radar. But the tipping point came soon when I heard of an ex-colleague down with Covid and had to take around 3 weeks to rest and recover. Instead of sympathy, I felt jealousy. And in that moment a thought bubbled up: I don’t mind being sick and bed ridden for a while just to get some time for myself.
It had to come to that. Being okay with facing a threatening disease just as a means to get some breathing space. That’s when it all crumbled. Even though I snapped out of the thought, the feeling lingered. I had completely ignored a part of me that wasn’t able to bear it. And in all the attempts to be a stronger version of myself, I completely forgot how to switch off from work. I now had to acknowledge that part of myself, for myself.
A lot of the introspection that followed was unwieldy from the awkwardness of having to treat yourself with care. I got fairly used to cracking the whip on myself since there was an internal understanding of equating contentment with stagnancy. So moments of elation were met with guilt. And as I talked to more people about it, the more I got to know how ubiquitous this feeling was.
The way the pandemic has affected our society is fairly irreversible. And we are currently stuck in the middle trying to adapt ourselves to the paradigm shifts of societal functioning. It was bound to be rife with obstacles and the ensuing anxieties from involuntarily being a part of a radical change. And in all those external occurrences we do tend to ignore looking inwards. Somehow for a lot of people it ends up being the last place you look.
And so in order to recuperate from the feeling of being bogged down, I took a break from the system. As a means to heal and restructure priorities and to gravitate more towards things that give me some joy.
In retrospect, quitting work and being forced to face uncertainties does seem like a bit of an extreme step for recovery. Something I could’ve avoided by just communicating more with others and specially with myself. By being realistic and understanding my own limitations. Not seeing those limitations as weaknesses, but a framework to work with.
Giving myself more time and not overpromising at the cost of my own health. I did get external help while afflicted, but i was too ensnared in seeking immediate gratification. And that’s definitely not how therapy works.
It gives me utmost joy on seeing various companies taking steps towards acknowledgment of employee burnouts by reducing working days and having stricter shut off times in the evenings. We’re all still in the initial phase of understanding the dynamics of the upcoming professional paradigm. But hopefully we’ll be able to get through much faster, if we could all just mute those damn slack notifications!!
