# Can't Even  Author:: Anne Helen Petersen ## Highlights > Burnout is when you hit the wall—but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going. It doesn’t happen because our to-do list gets long, or because we’re weak-willed, or because our kids won’t go to bed on time. Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it. It’s what happens when you feel that catastrophe could be around any corner and that there are no social safety nets to catch you. You keep doing all that’s asked, especially in your work, but the world around you recedes and dulls to gray. There’s just so little of you left. When we’re worried about elemental things—like where our next paycheck will come from, or whether a routine medical procedure will bankrupt us—our best selves are short-circuited. We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the little things when our basic needs are constantly threatened by endless precarity. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=37)) > In hindsight, I was absolutely, ridiculously, 100 percent burnt out—but I didn’t recognize it as such, because the way I felt didn’t match the way burnout had ever been depicted or described to me. There was no dramatic flameout, no collapse, no recovery on a beach or in an isolated cabin. I thought burnout was like a cold you catch and recover from—which is why I missed the diagnosis altogether. I had been a pile of embers, smoldering for months. ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=133)) > The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives. ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1247)) > As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” ([Location 1263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1263)) > Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.” ([Location 1298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1298)) > The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces. Silicon Valley thinks the “old” way of work is broken. It loves overwork. Its ideology of “disruption”—to “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it—is contingent on a willingness to destroy any semblance of a stable workplace. ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2219)) > Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them. Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working. That hour at a birthday party could be thirty dollars from Uber. ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2265)) > Slack thus becomes a way to LARP—Live Action Role Play—your job. “LARPing your job” was coined by the technology writer John Herrman, who, all the way back in 2015, predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack . . . is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”10 ([Location 2653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2653)) > People who do “knowledge work”—those whose products are often intangible, like ideas on a page—often struggle with the feeling that there’s little to show for the hours we spend sitting in front of our computers. ([Location 2663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2663)) --- Title: Can't Even Author: Anne Helen Petersen Tags: readwise, books date: 2024-01-30 --- # Can't Even  Author:: Anne Helen Petersen ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > Burnout is when you hit the wall—but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going. It doesn’t happen because our to-do list gets long, or because we’re weak-willed, or because our kids won’t go to bed on time. Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it. It’s what happens when you feel that catastrophe could be around any corner and that there are no social safety nets to catch you. You keep doing all that’s asked, especially in your work, but the world around you recedes and dulls to gray. There’s just so little of you left. When we’re worried about elemental things—like where our next paycheck will come from, or whether a routine medical procedure will bankrupt us—our best selves are short-circuited. We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the little things when our basic needs are constantly threatened by endless precarity. ([Location 37](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=37)) > In hindsight, I was absolutely, ridiculously, 100 percent burnt out—but I didn’t recognize it as such, because the way I felt didn’t match the way burnout had ever been depicted or described to me. There was no dramatic flameout, no collapse, no recovery on a beach or in an isolated cabin. I thought burnout was like a cold you catch and recover from—which is why I missed the diagnosis altogether. I had been a pile of embers, smoldering for months. ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=133)) > The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives. ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1247)) > As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.” ([Location 1263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1263)) > Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.” ([Location 1298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=1298)) > The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces. Silicon Valley thinks the “old” way of work is broken. It loves overwork. Its ideology of “disruption”—to “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it—is contingent on a willingness to destroy any semblance of a stable workplace. ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2219)) > Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them. Any time that you do take off is tinged with regret or anxiousness that you could be working. That hour at a birthday party could be thirty dollars from Uber. ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2265)) > Slack thus becomes a way to LARP—Live Action Role Play—your job. “LARPing your job” was coined by the technology writer John Herrman, who, all the way back in 2015, predicted the ways in which Slack would screw with our conception of work: “Slack is where people make jokes and register their presence; it is where stories and editing and administrating are discussed as much for self-justification as for the completion of actual goals. Working in an active Slack . . . is a productivity nightmare, especially if you don’t hate your coworkers. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either rationalizing or delusional.”10 ([Location 2653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2653)) > People who do “knowledge work”—those whose products are often intangible, like ideas on a page—often struggle with the feeling that there’s little to show for the hours we spend sitting in front of our computers. ([Location 2663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B081TRRXC7&location=2663))