27 Jul Hello Enoughness, Meet Burnout
via Thrive Global by Pooja Motti
As an investment banker in the early 2000’s, when the clock rolled around to 5pm, my day was just getting started. While the senior MD’s were checking their watches to see what express trains could get them home at a reasonable hour, myself and the other junior staffers were gearing up for a grueling night ahead – pillows at the ready in case we needed to nap under our desks before sunrise.
Burnout in the banking industry was acceptable and inevitable. The job was self-selecting: If you didn’t want to deal with it, you’d need not apply. Unproductive face-time, needless fire drills, and unwarranted deadlines were embedded in the culture and buoyed by management. If I wanted to keep my job and the nice paychecks, I had to figure out a way to deal with burnout.
Fast-forward fifteen plus years and although I’m now my own boss, burnout is still trying to flirt with me, desperately angling for a way to stay relevant in my life.
This time, burnout isn’t being thrown at me by the external powers of office culture and politics, its being kindled by those nefarious feelings of “not enoughness” that live within all of us.
The feeling of not being “enough”, a neologism with a yet undetermined source, has quietly made its way into modern society at pandemic levels, slowly chipping away at the innate human joys that come from indulging in “unproductive” time – dare I say rest time.
When we don’t feel like we’re enough – not worthy, not valid, not good enough when compared to our competition – we often push ourselves to work even harder. We force ourselves to put in more hours at the computer screen and more late nights in exchange for more anxiety, fewer vacations, and less sleep. The upshot? More burnout…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE