Burnout is cultural
There will be some gold in why you burned out in the past or are currently feeling the overwhelm of life’s daily pressures. There is always a personal piece playing out in the bigger game of life.
AND
Burnout is cultural.
On the macro scale, we live in a society underpinned by a patriarchal, capitalist supremacy; where profit, material wealth and success are more important than lives. Where our public services are focused on crisis intervention or responding to emergencies rather than preventative care and wellness, so our taxes can go towards atrocities many of us do not support.
On the micro, this plays out as:
- Praising people for overextending themselves to meet someone else’s need
- Pedestalising those who martyr themselves for the ‘greater good’
- Normalising rescuing and people pleasing
- Persuasion, emotional manipulation and an general inability to hold a 'No'
This list is not exhaustive.
Many of us are exhausted.
We are taught to produce at all costs, even if that compromises our health.
I recall one job where I worked as a lecturer at a university and they put me in such a disgustingly pressured situation that I learned and understood the notion of 'death by work'; a term coined in Japan (Karoshi).
Whilst I had some personal learnings to be responsible for here, the employer took no responsibility for the culture of toxic burnout they had created and continued to ignore and benefit from, despite the staff 'dropping like flies', partly due to the futility of advocating for themselves. They're only priority was 'bums on seats' because that meant money.
This has sadly shown up in many different forms in my life experience and of course it's in us too, because "hell, some of us need money to survive".
Well, I'm leaving all that behind.
I stand for the dismantling of this in myself and others by building and deepening the skills I believe are fundamental for a shift to occur:
- Deep inner-listening.
- Somatic / bodily awareness, including nervous system awareness & resourcing.
- Awareness of boundaries and needs.
- Conscious pause, presence and slowing down.
- Rest and digestion / integration.
- Self-holding in discomfort / learning to be with edges with more breath and presence.
- Self-advocacy and advocacy for those who need / want it.
- Maturing the parts of us that want to get our own way (humility and compassion).
- Becoming a 'safe' person for someone to say No to (learning to hold rejection and disappointment with grace).
- Approving and encouraging people to take breaks and to honour their boundaries, needs, pace and rhythms - even if it isn’t convenient for us or our profits / outcomes.
- Building cultures of care that are mindful of the nuance needed to avoid becoming cultures of control.
- Honouring the seasons and cyclical nature of energy flow and creation.
There's more... It's a start. Is there anything I missed or you'd add?
These skillsets require building and are way more nuanced that I can portray here, but you get the gist I hope.
And I say building, because I am aware of how delicate this road is. To actually move ‘from doing to being’ personally and collectively is in fact immensely uncomfortable, painful and unfamiliar. Some of us will be better at it than others, some of us will be more privileged in it than others etc, but it's possible.
Let us all come to embody the revolution within.
With love,
K x
