Burnout

The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

Author
Hannah Proctor
Publisher
Verso
Year
2024
Collection
Work
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Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout not only as the sense of exhaustion and apathy that we commonly associate with it, but as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed. This version of burnout can’t be entirely resolved by rest or self-care that limits itself to the personal, but requires attention and consideration of public and communal practices, movements, and militancies. That is, recovery from political defeat is itself a political process. She argues for anti-adaptive healing—not healing that adapts the wounded to a broken world, but healing that transforms both the injured and the injurer, that looks to the possibility of a different world amidst the ruins of the present one.

Reading notes

Loss of an ideal

The word “burnout” has taken on so many meanings, become a kind of casual and generic refrain that seems to apply to everyone all the time, a condition of malaise and overwork that afflicts whole generations. But when first conceived the term had a more specific connotation.

Burnout in Freudenberger’s articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger’s concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the “loss of an ideal.” Burnout in the context of social justice projects thus often involves a process of mourning, according to Freudenberger. Returning to his earlier writings on burnout makes it clear that when understood as a malaise arising from politically committed activities, burnout cannot be equated with tiredness or stress.

Proctor, Burnout, page 92

In other words, burnout was defined more in the context of what Hannah Proctor terms the emotional experience of political defeat. Exhaustion was a component of that experience, marked also by the grief, anger, resentment, and despair that arises when an effort to create meaningful change is frustrated. Herbert J. Freudenberger, one of the early theorists of burnout, drew from his own observations working with patients at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic in New York City in the 70s and 80s. But as he and others worked with the term, it transformed into something else:

While in 1974 Freudenberger claimed that those most at risk of burning out were “the dedicated and the committed,” by 1989 he linked burnout to “the externally imposed societal values of achievement, acquisition of goods, power, monetary compensation and competition.” Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.

Proctor, Burnout, page 94

This shift also shows up in Byung-Chul Han’s writing about burnout, in which the source of burnout is an “achievement society” that drives people towards a reflexive and all-consuming self-exploitation. But notice how that shift works: where before the notion of burnout was located within a communal and political project, now it becomes something we’re doing to ourselves, absent the still unchanged political and material conditions which gave rise to the original term. There’s a kind of commodification of burnout here, transferring the subject of burnout (and so of sympathy and potential support) from activists to executives, and the source from intolerable inequities to personal psychologies. Which is not to say that burned-out executives don’t exist, but that the use of the same word for two entirely different circumstances serves to undermine the political critique inherent in the word.

The move is akin to the one made when imposter phenomena became imposter syndrome: where the former concerns an experience in the world (“phenomenon” meaning a thing which can be seen or observed), the latter is an invisible pathology, something that only occurs within someone’s psyche and is, to a large extent, their own problem to solve. The disparities of the system become internalized, the therapeutics personalized, the victims pathologized. And the system keeps doing what the system does.

Bench Ansfield writes that Freudenberger borrowed the word burnout from his patients, who used it to describe someone suffering the long term effects of chronic drug use. But Freudenberger turned the word around, associating it not with drug use but with the burned out buildings that then peppered the Lower East Side, a neighborhood terrorized by landlords setting fire to their own buildings, eager for an insurance payout and happy to let their Black and brown tenants pay the price. “But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings,” Ansfield writes. “Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed.”

Patient urgency

“Again and again,” writes Hannah Proctor,

I kept coming to the same conclusion, which provides no consolation at all: psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.

Proctor, Burnout, page 205

Proctor calls this quality “patient urgency,” and returns to it throughout her work on burnout—a work that retrieves burnout from the skincare industrial complex and brings it back to a dialogue about how our efforts to change the world are so often, and so cruelly, defeated. She is admirably unwilling to define the phrase in tactical terms, calling it only,

a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.

Proctor, Burnout, page 156

Importantly, this does not mean simply waiting about for social transformation—that old refrain that progress will happen in time, as if time was an ally working on our behalf. The urgency is in the present moment to act, even as we know those actions will need time to bear fruit, even when it’s unclear how or if they may do so. As I’ve sat with the idea, I’ve thought more and more of planting a tree: you need to plant it at the right time and in the right place, make sure it has enough water and light and compost, protect it from pests and people, but you must wait years for the first peach. Nothing will hurry it along.

And really, you ought to plant a whole grove, or scatter seeds about wherever you can, without ever knowing which ones will be trampled or lost to drought or wind, and which ones will, against the odds, grow tall and strong and true. To have patient urgency is, I think, to know that you must plant those seeds, that you must prepare the soil, that these things cannot wait. That the future we hope for waits upon us, today.