Avoiding Burnout

When we spend every moment self-optimizing, life becomes exhausting.

Modern life is hard.

This is one of those statements I would have scoffed at a few years ago. After all, I have a supercomputer in my pocket. My parents are in their 60s and aren’t dying from the Bubonic Plague or old war wounds or a common cold that medicine has not yet learned how to treat. By historic standards, those of us living today have it pretty good.

But nonetheless, I think there’s something intensely hard about modern life that isn’t often captured in traditional metrics of a society’s health.

One aspect that makes modern life so hard is that many of us struggle with burnout. Writing for BuzzfeedNews, Anne Helen Petersen calls burnout “the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location.” She describes burnout like this: “Burnout is of a substantively different category than ‘exhaustion,’ although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.”

Sound familiar?

One of the big problems with modern life is that each of us has a to-do list seven miles long. Each individual task might feel easy—I can schedule an oil change online, with the click of a button—but there are also so many tasks.

This feels especially acute around the holidays. The holidays are supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation, but few of us feel this way. There are chores to do and meals to prep and gifts to buy and the holiday spirit to share with our loved ones. There are complicated relationships to navigate and ruffled feathers to smooth over and cleaning and dusting and cooking and cleaning in order to host friends and relatives. There are endless errands to run. All of this on top of our regular jobs. Even if each individual task is easy, the cumulative load can feel exhausting.

This sensation might be most visible during the holidays, but for many people it’s a year-round phenomenon. There’s always more to do.

In You Are Not Your Own, philosopher Alan Noble chalks this phenomenon up to the fact that so many of us are trying to self-optimize. We’re trying to chart the course of our own destiny. We’ve internalized the idea of being all that you can be (as Noble puts it, the goal of humans in modern society is to “Use all of the techniques and methods perfected by society to improve your life and conquer your obstacles”). This idea sounds noble, and encouraging, and self-affirming, but in practice it leads to exactly the kind of endless to-do lists that so many of us struggle with.

After all, if the goal of our life is to be all that we can be, then every moment is an opportunity to be better. Every moment is an opportunity to spend more time at the gym, or lose a little bit of extra weight, or invest more in our children’s education, or push harder at work, or do more to build our brand, or optimize our investments, or fix something around the house, or or or….

There’s never any down time. There’s never any time to just be. Because every moment of simply being—every moment of what Josef Pieper calls Leisure—is a moment in which we could be self-optimizing and we’re not.

For Noble, the deeper problem that leads to an ethos of trying to be all that you can be is what he calls the philosophy of “I am my own and I belong to myself.” Essentially: we’re trying to chart our own course in life.

The problem, as Noble and countless other theologians have pointed out, is that charting our own course is existentially terrifying. When we let the weight of the world rest on our shoulders, we find that it’s heavy indeed.

I’ll use myself as an example. Suppose I wanted to chart the course of my own life. I would have to take responsibility for seeing and preventing every major and minor obstacle that might come my way. Here’s what that life might look like (all examples below are based on things I’ve actually done, before God showed me a different way).

I’m doing prison ministry, so I should probably train 20 hours per week at martial arts. What if one of the prisoners attacks me? I need to be ready.

I have a good career as a freelance author, but I should be using my free time to seek out more clients. What if I lose a client? I need to be ready.

I make good money, but I should be using my nights and weekends to earn more. My wife and I want to have kids in the next couple of years, and what if that’s more expensive than we think? I need to be ready.

I’m a good bridge-builder, but I should be spending more time sharpening my skills. What if at Christmas dinner someone says something bone-headed, and tensions flare? I need to be ready to smooth things over.

The problem with trying to chart our own course is that life is inherently unpredictable. We can’t plan for every contingency, and our attempts to do so can suck up every spare moment and then some.

The problem with trying to be all that we can be is related. We can always be a better version of ourselves. Our attempts to be better—all the time, in every way—can suck up all of our spare time and energy and still leave us feeling inadequate.

Both mentalities lead to burnout.

So what’s the cure? For Noble, the cure to burnout is to turn our lives over to God.

There’s something profoundly easeful about turning our lives over to the divine. For one thing, I don’t think God wants us to suffer from burnout and exhaustion and a to-do list seven miles long. Theologian Jamie Winship talk about the Sabbath, not as a single day of rest amid a turbulent week, but as a model for how we ought to live our lives. In “Find Rest and Purpose on a Monday“ he says that “the Sabbath day is to remind you how you should be all the time. At rest.” The idea is to work “from a place of rest, mirroring Jesus’ peace in the midst of a storm.”

In describing life with Him, Jesus offers us words of reassurance that feel, if anything, even more necessary now than they must have to his first-century followers:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, NIV).

This has been my own experience. When I orient myself towards being closer to God—when I decide that that’s my only real goal for the day, and that whatever else I do will have to flow out of that desire—life becomes easeful. I find peace, and comfort, and relaxation. The important things of the day still get done: I still make enough money, for instance, for the simple reason that God isn’t going to invite me into a way of living that leaves me and my wife bankrupt. But the unimportant things simply slough off of my back.

For example, when I orient myself towards being closer to God rather than towards trying to handle all of life’s burdens on my own:

I still train at martial arts, but I don’t spend 20 hours per week trying to be the best fighter around. Why not? Because God tells me that my skills and my strength and my reflexes aren’t where my protection comes from when I’m volunteering in prison, and I believe Him.

I manage my existing clients, but I don’t obsess over bringing in more. Why not? Because God tells me not to worry about it; my clients like me, and if one does fire me, then He’ll have a plan in place at that time to guide me into something better.

I make good money, but I don’t spend nights and weekends trying to bring in more. Why not? Because I know that God has a plan for my wife and I to have children. When the extra financial burdens that accompany children become relevant, He’ll guide us into a solution.

I don’t waste time worrying about what I’ll say if tensions flare up at Christmas dinner. Why not? Because I worship a God of peace. If tensions do flare, and if God wants to invite me to co-labor with Him to heal things, then the right words will come at the right time (Matthew 10:19-20). There’s no need to stress beforehand.

To be clear, by no means am I perfect at living this kind of easeful, unburdened life where I surrender my will to God and everything important gets done at the proper time. I can and do screw up. Sometimes I spiral worrying about losing clients or about what to write; I know that said spiraling is counterproductive, but somehow I do it anyway. Noble and every other theologian I’ve spoken to say the same thing: surrendering completely to God is the work of a lifetime, and none of us are perfect at it.

But for all that I’ve only taken a few halting steps down this path of surrender, it already beats the brakes off of my old way of trying to manage all of life’s vicissitudes under my own power.

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