Thank you all for your typo tolerance — they've all been fixed. (I was doing some care work yesterday and had less time than usual to triple-check everything, so again, thank you)
Maybe just be gentle to yourself - I've been thinking a lot about our tendencies as writers towards perfection. So what if there are a few typos that get corrected later? Readers know what you mean, and will keep reading! I think we all need to be a little more typo tolerance and police less on grammar/mistake issues.
Totally get it, *and* this does feel like an invitation to gently inquire whether you've considered hiring an editor for the newsletter. I appreciate your writing for its thoughtful, nuanced approach and I've found typos can detract from it. It's something I've noticed and thought about before, and just wanted to take the opportunity to share now.
Katie Hawkins-Gaar of My Sweet Dumb Brain (who I found through Culture Study!) pays an editor for her newsletter (I believe a percentage of the subscription income); and as a paid subscriber, I respect and appreciate it so much.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to figure out how to make this work - I could absolutely pay someone, that’s not the issue at all. It’s that I often finish writing the afternoon before publishing and then spend the subsequent hours tinkering and if asking someone to take a copy read at 7 pm PT isn’t a burnout ask, whew. I’ll keep thinking on solutions because it stresses me out too!
If only our brains could help us out more lol. I follow an old-school blog, and she writes a Sunday post each week **that she actually physically writes each Sunday and then immediately publishes** ... that'll never not astound me! I want her to have her Sundays back!
I used to always do this when the newsletter was something I did for fun while still working at BuzzFeed — I'd wake up and if I felt like it, I'd write for a few hours, read it over once, and publish! Now I spend a lot more time researching and outlining and thinking ideas through, but the writing itself often happens in the one or two days before the thing goes out into the world.
That’s a great idea! I’m in New Zealand and you have many readers from around the world that would be happy (stoked! Honoured!) to contribute in this way.
Currently an academic librarian at a university that is very quickly falling apart and in the process of trying to become a conservative culture warrior university (it's exactly as bad as it sounds). People are leaving at a good clip--and I'm among them.
The last day of the semester is also my last day. I can't do it anymore. I am part of a public facing unit, and now the one with the most experience due to turnover, but got told I wasn't in consideration to actually become department head/replace my supervisor who left earlier this year. And once I realized I'd be expected to run the department without a pay or rank increase and no official means/channels to move up, AND I'd have to train my new boss who would get paid more than me, I was done.
I have a job to get me by in the meantime and I'm looking for another position, but for the first time in years I feel at peace. I don't wake up dreading the day, and to me, that's worth everything.
...Are you me? I left my academic librarian job (at a state school in the Deep South that boasts Nikki Haley on the Board of Trustees, ugh) almost exactly one year ago because I was taking on the work of 3.5 positions and the final straw was they wanted me to interview against external candidates for the department head job I was already doing (for the department I created from scratch!) for basically no raise.
As someone talking to you from your own future - hang in there, it's so great! My current job isn't perfect either but it was a huge pay increase and reduction in stress. I feel like a completely different person than I was a year ago, I have hobbies and interests and time for my family now and such a solid sense of my own self worth for getting out of that place.
Happy to connect for a coffee chat over Zoom or something if you need to vent! Truly, your story sounds so similar to mine I did a double take at the date/username. :D
Whole treatise there about how we're managed by administrators who think of the academic library they had in the 60s or 70s and serving students who literally did a year of their schooling without leaving their homes. So it's impossible to meet the metrics that the administrators think are important because they are in no way reflective of what makes good service to current students (and most faculty/researchers). PLUS, when someone retires and was doing something that isn't actually busy/popular now, they just don't get replaced. Just because that person in that position wasn't doing anything impactful doesn't mean we don't need a person.
I think it will truly hit me on May 11th that I don't have to come back to this place ever again but even just making the decision to leave and starting the resignation process felt like a 10 ton weight off my shoulders. The next day I woke up actually refreshed and not exhausted for the first time in literal years!
Thank you! It look me a long time to get here and honestly, I should have left a while back but kept making up reasons to stay. I don't absolutely know what the future holds, but I'm actually excited to see what happens!
I got out of academic libraries (after spending the first 15 years of my career in them) about a year ago and I’m convinced it saved my life. I miss a few things about it but on net I am glad every day I feel like I got on one of the last lifeboats off the sinking ship of higher education.
I got my degree with the full intention of making academic libraries my career, worked in public libraries for 3 years and change waiting for a spot at my local university to open up, got a position here...and now four and a half years later I'm completely burnt out. It took me a long time to realize how truly despondent my job made me, and how despite the fact I deeply love my work and helping people...I need to divorce myself from "librarian" as my identity and re-learn how to be a person outside of my job.
And I think the move out of this job has saved my life in a very real way.
For the first time in my life, I have a purpose/passion job with ZERO burnout and it's for one reason and one reason only -- my boss. She *demands* that we prioritize our own lives and our own self-care, to an extent that I've never experienced before. Example: I scheduled a call with her for 4 pm on Monday, just hours before my Passover seder. This call was with an external consultant to help us raise money we desperately need (I work in higher ed for an initiative that relies on outside funding) and she began the call by saying we were ending the call and needed to reschedule. She said that Passover was about to begin (I was the only observant person on the call) and we simply could not prioritize work right now. She said GOODBYE very loudly, wished me Happy Passover, and ended the Zoom. This is one of a zillion examples I could give.
Thanks, AHP, for following this burnout topic so relentlessly. Reading your writing and the Substack comments have been so helpful for me processing my own burnout.
I was a pastor for a decade and left last fall after having my ordination removed for officiating a same-gender wedding. On top of the very real lack of pay and benefits, the ethical and moral weight of working in/for an institution that very clearly refuses to care about issues of well-being and justice is hard to quantify...especially when part of my job was to articulate and encourage the exact ethical and moral values that the institution refuses to enact. Maybe close to moral injury?
In the last few years, my denomination created and implemented a really innovative new guideline for clergy compensation, a calculator that takes into account local housing costs, considering health insurance and pension benefits FIRST (before base salary) and then spitting out, based on what the congregation is able to pay, the number of hours they can expect their pastor to work. It's literally life-changing. A guardrail-insistent structural change, and congregations HATE IT. Change requires so much effort from so many corners, and even the guardrails need guardrails, you know?
That calculator!! WHEW, I can only imagine how congregations would react — because the assumption is that the clergy member *has no other life* other than pastoring, obviously
Yes, and being a single clergywoman makes for a lot of interesting internal and external negotiation on this front. For instance, do I take a dish to the after-worship potluck? I DO enjoy cooking, but I am also already preaching, leading worship and being the pastor and good grief, somebody else can bring a casserole.
Yes! Whenever I was questioned about it, I told them that I was bringing the prayer, bc they always ask you to pray before the meal. But only women get asked.
Hello! Also a former pastor here (I write a Substack under another account called, creatively, Former Pastor). My denomination has had guardrails since I can remember, but congregations would always try to find a way around them. Now I’m working under a part-time contract that details exactly how much they’ll pay me for Sundays and by the hour. It’s freeing to know they’ll have to think about if they call me to do something, they have to pay me.
And for the rest of it, moral injury sounds exactly right.
Yes. I'm not sure I will ever be a pastor again, but I'm guest preaching a lot right now and the set fee for the clearly defined labor is so refreshing!
Another former pastor here! I still serve on a committee for our denomination and am constantly blown away by the *ahem* older members of the committee who are so surprised no one wants to become a pastor these days. I am zero percent surprised, given the unreasonable demands that are put on pastors, especially during the pandemic when we had to suddenly get good at virtual church. I started quiet quitting in mid 2022 and just stopped doing all the extra things that weren't in my contract. A lot of things fell through the cracks, but I realized how I was perpetuating this toxic work culture. Later that year I quit altogether and will almost certainly never go back.
My family was filled with Pastors. My grandfather was Senior Pastor at a huge church when my father was growing up. My father and his three siblings rarely spent any time with their father (never attended a parent teacher conference, never attended a game, never helped with any Scouting events) but he did take them "out west" on a camping trip every August. Because of those trips and their love of nature, my father and his two brothers became foresters and worked in the mountains of Colorado, Idaho, and California. My grandfather never really got over none of them being "called". My father told him that they all heard the "call" to be stewards of the land. There are so many demands on pastors, I am always amazed that anyone feels "called" anymore.
Oh wow. I have a lot of friends who are members of various clergies, and I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to set those boundaries and guiderails when people perceive your job to include constant availability. I actually spoke to a rabbi the other day who is retiring this year and she said it feels sort of weird to retire from a calling like it’s any other job—but also she’s ready to be done with the workload.
Constant availability, yes, and there's also something that I can't quite articulate yet about your entire existence being a commodity. It's a particularly hard role in which to separate the self from the labor.
My husband is an Episcopal priest and I came here to echo this. There is never a time when he cannot be “on” even if we’re gone (because what’s he going to do if someone calls or texts or emails that they’re experiencing a crisis, not respond?). But then there’s also the way that every part of your identity—and often your family’s identity—is subsumed by this role.
Another clergyperson here. (Just a little late to the comments!) I've found that it takes work to cultivate all of my other identities. I am a pastor, but I'm so much more! Celebrating this multiplicity makes everything better.
Absolutely. To a lesser extent I feel the same way as a musician—it’s a huge part of my identity but also my job now, and it’s also something that I use my body and personal emotions to do. Very challenging. Wishing you all the best however you choose to move forward!
Musicians are an interesting area to explore with this topic - part passion, part creative endeavor, part (poorly compensated) wage-work.
I recently attended a party where the guest of honor was an old friend of the host - a musician in town to do a show. The host urged the musician to get out his instrument and perform in her living room *three times* over the course of the long evening as new guests came and went. He seemed happy enough to do it, but I kept thinking - we're not paying him for this performance. He already did a paid gig earlier in the day! How do we mentally shift to see this as labor, not a hobby this fun person does at parties?
Yes, and amen to everything here! When I shared the passion piece (which really affected me) on Notes saying that we need to stop acting like it's normal for employers to expect us to do uncompensated work, someone noted that this makes sense for hourly workers, but what about salaried workers?
They asked, isn't it part of the agreement that you will work more than 40 hours since you are getting benefits like health insurance and vacation time? The fact that this makes sense to most people (including me for a long time) is insane. EMPLOYERS CAN'T EMAIL EMPLOYEES AFTER HOURS IN FRANCE. This applies to salaried workers. Health care is free in most of our peer countries, but we are supposed to work more than 40 hours a week to get basically a stipend from our employer for health insurance, still pay an insane premium and then a deductible, and then pay for the actual health care? Oh, and thanks for the two weeks off after working 60-hour weeks the rest of the year. Long story short you consistently get me riled up (in a good way).
I'm in Canada, where things are different, but as a salaried worker, we've always had both formal and informal flex time agreements. If you work more than your 40 hours, you bank it and take it off at the next opportunity.
Really, what salaried means here is that you don't get overtime for working extra, not that you've sold your soul and have to work for free.
I have worked in design and tech for 20 years, and this year design has been pronounced "dead" by the industry. It's a wild shift from where we started in 2008, when Steve Jobs was out there preaching the gospel of loving your work in the church of design.
Back then, tech was also an industry of passion — pixar even made a movie about it. (Big Hero 6) We were all going to usher in a better (maybe even PERFECT!) future and Great Design was leading the charge. Tech companies have quietly sunset some of the 'don't be evil' values, but culturally, there is still the sense that if you work in the industry, you are one of the chosen ones lucky enough to be drawing up plans for The Future. Bonfire of the Vanities, but with macbooks.
I personally hit rock bottom about 7 years ago after I had a kid and could no longer work 70 hours weeks at what I thought was my dream job helping women have more financial control, and my lack of time investment was clearly seen as a lack of passion for The Mission (albeit I must note that I kind of let it get that way — I was searching to fill a hole in my heart, and working hard had always been a good way to get the approval I was looking for.) But when I left it almost broke me. I didn't just leave the job, I left behind what I thought it meant to live a good life.
Last year, when the tech industry laid off nearly 300,000 people, I watched as that same pain smeared all over LinkedIn. It was heartbreaking — all these passionate people who had worked so hard and been taken for granted, utterly shocked by how disposable they felt. The posts felt more like they belonged at a memorial service than on a professional networking platform.
I think the problem with passion jobs goes much deeper than the roles we typically think of as care work — Americans believe that work should be their passion, no matter what kind of work they are doing. How much you earn, how hard you work, how much you give are still our main measures of assessing whether we're living a good life.
We must demand more from our employers and our government — but I also think that there is individual work to be done around deconstructing how we define success and how we spend our time. Revolution happens in systems because it is happening in small conversations at home and with friends as well.
I wrote a piece on the high-performing-school-to-all-consuming-tech-job pipeline and the effects this kind of passion=work=money mindset is having on kids and adults alike, might be related:
I hit two of these buckets - I’m a former teacher turned tech professional and just got laid off (while 4 months pregnant)…. And I’ve never been happier. My partner is so excited to “have me back and present”. I worked in PR at a global tech company that constantly had crises requiring me to be “on call” at all hours of the day and night. I had calls with EMEA at 7 am and then calls with APAC until 10pm sometimes. I was constantly told how lucky I was to work in tech - which only led me to work harder to prove that I belonged there. The burnout is very very real. (I’m very interested in reading your piece on high performing school to all consuming tech job pipeline - this is 100% me!)
I’m privileged to be able to take some time to rest and recover while I focus on a healthy pregnancy, but it’s really hard to “take a break” (how long does it take to cure burnout?) and really tough to not feel like I should be looking for what’s next right away. The pressure to continue to prove myself is competing with my need for true self care and it’s a daily battle!
GIRL IT IS SO HARD!! (also congrats on that new baby!!)
I relate to the calls you're talking about — I'll never forget I'd taken the day off for my birthday and the CEO called me back to back until I got out of the shower to answer the phone. Everything was always a manufactured fire drill.
Motherhood saved me — my husband was also happy to welcome me back to the present lolol.
It's a process and it's an intense one. Therapy really helped me — so did Martha Beck's book The Way of Integrity and The Work by Byron Katie. I had so many thoughts that had become reality — both books helped me learn how to question what I thought was important, and slowly come back to knowing myself again. It's still a work in progress, but I think of it a lot like recovery from any other addiction. I will always have that urge to seek out approval — I just need to know about it and manage it.
If you're up for it, I'd love to hear about your experience some time!
Just read your article Melissa and holy moly did this line speak to me:
“ But when we’re conditioned from childhood to see every difficulty as a personal problem that can be overcome if we just apply enough effort, we never develop the internal compass that tells us when trying hard is in our best interest and when it’s a trap set to take advantage of our need for approval.”
This is the very trap I fell into.
You’re a talented writer and managed to capture this moment and feeling so well. Thank you so much for sharing this and the book recommendations. I’m planning a trip to Powells (my local amazing bookstore) to pick them up today!
aww thanks so much Rhiannon!! This made my day. I keep these notes in a folder for myself when I'm struggling to feel motivated. Let me know how you like the books! (PS, I know Powells! My husband went to Oregon and we have one of their coffee mugs in our cabinet. 🫶🏻)
All of this. Tech was never great at avoiding burnout, but I think before the layoff-pocalypse there was at least some sentiment that we didn’t want to push folks past a certain point because there were so many opportunities for them to move on to if it got to be too much. Now it feels like we’re in “you’re lucky to have this job” territory, with all the abuses and insanity that come with that mindset.
IMO tech is almost designed with the assumption you work really hard for a few years, make a lot of money, then quit for a year or two to relax, then do it all again until you’re in your 40s/ max early 50s, at which point you hope to have enough to retire. It’s a super weird industry
There was some metric a few years back about the average time on job in SF was 3 years - which is the time it usually takes for a start-up to either get bought or fail.
God this is so right — it has gotten SO MUCH WORSE. I was recruited recently for a start-up job that I would have been offered 10 years ago and when I asked the recruiter if I was the right fit, she told me I could "work my way up" over the next few years to earn… my current title, position and compensation. Thank you, next!
This is beautifully articulated and I agree with / relate to all of it so deeply. I worked in generative UX research, which I loved - as a kid, I wanted to be an investigative journalist slash therapist slash children’s book illustrator, and I kind of WAS all those things! I also hated it. I didn’t actually *have* therapy training, so the intense things I’d hear from participants in sessions - and be actively eliciting! - I didn’t know how to process or compartmentalize. And it started to feel really, really exploitative - to be seeking out evidence for things like, this fitness tracking platform is being used by teenagers to support disordered eating patterns in these heartbreaking ways - and then have the research shelved with no action. Checking a liability box, then continuing knowingly on.
That all said - I was VERY attached to it, identity-wise, and also (to be transparent) financially! I struggle to figure out where these 300k tech workers are going to GO. There aren’t other fields that offer at least a veneer of purpose plus high salaries. Not to be “won’t someone think of the techies?!” - overall, an enormously privileged bunch - but I do worry about how this is all going to shake out.
I think all the time about whether I need to go back and get therapy training just because of how intimate a user interview can become. I've been in session with someone when suicidal ideation was on the horizon and truly was afraid I might do damage because I didn't know how to help.
RE: Where will they all go?? I think a LOT of folks did the bootcamp path to design because it was a growing industry that seemed to have no bottom — it paid well and you needed less technical knowledge than engineering to get in as a junior. I don't know where many of those folks will end up, but I do think that the skills are valuable outside of the industry — it will just take some work to figure out how to reposition things.
FastCo had an interesting article the other day on how design has been replaced by Strategy, which also seems like another patch for "we got money and we don't know what we're gonna do with it" in the AI space where the UI is consistent, but the strategy of the product and it's impact on society needs someone who isn't fully motivated by money to attend to it.
I do love our job in the end, and I feel grateful to do it. I'm just glad I no longer feel so grateful that I'm willing to be exploited for it.
Oof, yes - I’ve also had the experience with a participant voicing suicidal ideation, and I had another who
appeared to be experiencing domestic violence and signaling for help. The intimacy is shocking, and we’re not equipped to handle it! On the other end of the spectrum, I had a male participant who raised my hackles from minute 1 - but who the client insisted I continue speaking with - expose himself in the middle of a session. That was the last straw for me and I left the industry soon after.
Thanks for sharing that resource - and your own writing - looking forward to reading!
I work in elections. Not politics. The actual operations of running elections. I used to be the head if a county elections department and was in charge of candidate filing, ballot preparation, hiring and training poll workers, managing polling places, tabulation, and reporting results, and more. After 2020, I left that job and moved to the state level. In 2022, I left that job and started going to therapy where I realized that I was completely burned out.
And I'm not alone! The entire election community is burned out. Turnover is at an all time high. The stresses involved in this work only increase. And I'm not even talking about the political nonsense. Doing more with less is the unofficial elections motto. And yes, most election administrators are women earning low salaries. Some of them have multiple job duties with elections only being a portion of their jobs.
I now work as a consultant and help people who are still doing the front line election work so I still get to be close to the work but not too close. And yet, I'm feeling the signs of burnout again. I work for a consulting group of type A overachiever who are seemingly always on the clock. I do consider this passion work and I struggle against my own internal voice saying "do more." But I'm also reading articles like yours and trying to do self therapy, by meditating, walking, taking breaks, scheduling vacations, cross stitching, reading fiction, setting boundaries, etc. I can't wait to the other comments here because I'm learn some new ideas. If I have one idea that can help others, it's this: I turned off notifications on my phone for work email and slack. Best. Decision. Ever.
This makes me think that there's some kind of connection between burnout in these passion fields and the growing public distrust of the institutions that make up the passion fields. When you no longer get the satisfaction of your work going smoothly AND you no longer get the kind of public gratitude traditionally offered to people in your field AND you have to deal with outright hostility towards your institution or towards yourself for working within that institution that people don't trust...all of that compounds into a huge burden.
And then when people don't trust the institution, they don't want to fund it, creating problems of insufficient staffing, insufficient pay, and insufficient benefits. When both the material and the abstract, emotional rewards of work are gone, what else is there? No wonder people are so burnt out!
(Some of the distrust of institutions is absolutely warranted. The rest of it is purposefully stoked by culture warriors.)
I definitely think you're on to something here. That explains the burnout in schools and healthcare and other service industries.
A lot of what I used to do when I worked in the government offices was in the name of transparency. I tried to do tours and I explained our processes endlessly, but that doesn't matter when people with louder megaphones are saying everything is rigged.
I spent a long time feeling bad about my burnout feelings because I compared myself to others and thought I didn't have it so bad. No one had threatened my life or my family - as has been done to many others in my field - but I had to learn that my trauma was still valid. Even now, I question if I want to keep doing this work. But today is a good day and I'll stay in the fight.
Different field but I also made the jump from working directly in the trenches in my sector to working as a consultant in the same industry. I’m fascinated to hear about the burnout following you since it seems like making this switch often results in happier working conditions (or at least it has for me). Do you think the second round of burnout as a consultant is due to the intractable issues in your field, or internalized work habits, or something else?
I think it's because of the unique situation we're in with politics in this country and the neverending flow of misinformation for grift. I, of course, don't mean that my profession is harder or worse than others, just that the current atmosphere probably provides some of the reasons for the burnout following me into the private sector. Yes, I make more money and have lessened the stress related to paying bills or the ability to buy a house or even to afford some of the self care stuff like massages or vacations. I don't know how to turn off my brain and relax without guilt. And I am sure I brought some unhealthy work habits with me - like FOMO for one.
My sister is a county clerk in Wisconsin who started as a deputy clerk in 2016. She’s never experienced an election that wasn’t complete chaos. And our voters just approved two referendums to restrict resources for election administrators even further.
Thank you for the work you’ve done and the work you’re doing, and take care of yourself! 💖
Yep I'm aware of the Wisconsin ballot measures. It's all so frustrating. I hope your sister is staying sane and upbeat and taking care too. Thanks so much for your comment!
Yesssssss! I am a college professor in a passion field—and many of my students are double-majoring, so it feels even more like they’re in my department for the fun and joy and passion of it all.
I don’t have that much power at the moment to change the official culture (first year visiting professor!), but I set very clear communication boundaries, including what time I stop answering emails and texts from students (it’s one-on-one teaching so texting is not uncommon). My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind. I was also lucky enough to have a fantastic colleague tell me up front not to let this job take over my life, and to let him know if I ever felt that the load was overwhelming, because it’s not important enough. As I tell my students, we take music very seriously but at the end of the day, it’s not neurosurgery or figuring out climate change.
The other thing that’s going on right now is that the classical music industry is actually on fire, after an article came out exploring 10-year-old rape allegations against two male members of the New York Philharmonic, leading to their victims and other female players who stood up for the victims not receiving tenure in the orchestra. So having this passion for an industry that is so, so inequitable feels a little dissonant (no pun intended).
Anne, I'm touring colleges with my son, and the number of times the admissions folks have said some version of "professors here make themselves available to students AT ALL HOURS, give out their phone numbers, answer emails late at night if you have questions on an assignment" is just completely GROSS.
What’s funny about that is that my students LOVE that I set boundaries. Like, it’s not as much of a selling points for these kids as the schools think it is. When I announce in class that I stop checking emails at 7, I get snaps and YAS BOUNDARIES from my undergrads. Because i think if I model setting boundaries, it’s easier for them to also set boundaries.
I feel like young people today are so much more in touch with mental health strategies and concepts, they're pre-disposed to be supportive of someone modeling that behavior. There's also a more basic thing at work, where people feeling uncertain in a new environment (like newly independent college students) are eager to have direction about what is appropriate behavior. So you making a rule clarifies for them what is socially acceptable in this new situation.
Yes! They like specifics. Sometimes it feels like spelling things out that never seemed to get spelled out before, but if it’s in writing they know for sure and there’s never a question about it. Anything I can do to make their experience smoother, I’m happy to do—other than answering their texts after 7 PM.
agreed--I've had next to no pushback on my boundaries from my students. sometimes I have a student as their question a couple of times over a weekend or space of a few hours, but it is fine.
interestingly, it is my peers in the department who have the most issue with these
Thank you! I have some policies about same-day cancellations (which I am going to change because I’m actually really bad at enforcing them…because sometimes they reach out and I’m like, oooh, a free hour today would make things easier for me), so I want them to know that I WILL see when they emailed me when I check my email in the morning. And if they text me late (and I’m not like, in bed), I will “like” the text so they know I saw it, and then respond in the morning.
It’s voice lessons—it feels very fraught for them sometimes and it makes a difference to people’s lives but in the scheme of the world it’s not hugely impactful.
Oh yeah, the performing arts sector is a *nightmare*. The first part of my career was spent at an opera and theatre company (in admin) and honestly the blatant and constant racism and sexism was overwhelming. Basically if the artistic direct/CEO/whatever is not actively sexually assaulting someone its pretty par for the course (even in some cases *when* they are everyone just looks the other way). Also the stuff I saw was not happening in like the 90's it was in 2019!
"My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind." I'm cryinnnnnng, that is so funny but so real.
My seventh year of teaching was over, I loved my school and my kids, I was at the point of where I was forming lasting relationships where my kids who were now graduating college were still texting and asking for life advice. Maybe I could expand my program, or get a student teacher, I thought.
Then we lost students and teachers got cut - I was gone, because the arts die first. I was forced into an elementary school with forty five kids and no support per class, funding everything from my own pockets. It was almost a relief when a family emergency meant that I quit and moved back to my childhood home.
I didn’t think I was burned out. And yet - I’m sleeping well for the first time in a decade. I’m reading for pleasure for the first time in years. I actually played a video game the other day!
I still get to be with kids, managing the teen section and programming of a city library. But there’s so much less red tape, so many fewer forms. I can talk to a teenager about his future without the nagging thoughts of “yeah he has his state tests coming up soon, gotta do my yearly training for those and start planning how testing will disrupt my lessons”. I can just focus on him and his needs.
My coworkers are quitting in droves. I used to be judgey, a pretentious feeling of “well I’m doing okay, I guess they just couldn’t cut it”. Now I’m just glad to see them in their new jobs with smiles on their faces, and my heart breaks for the students that don’t get to have teachers who feel genuinely happy in their lives.
God that's familiar. I didn't think I was burned out when I couldn't sleep at night because my mind was churning over all the things I would need to do the following day. I didn't think I was burned out when I couldn't stop checking my Slack on Sunday afternoons. I didn't think I was burned out when everyone else quit, I just thought I was tougher. I was better because I could hold out and suffer longer than everyone else.
Thank you for everything you did for your students — and libraries are the best. Congrats on getting out!
YES. The same systems that make faculty burned out and feel like they have to work 24/7 are often amplified for staff because they have to navigate those same systems AND be the buffer for the faculty navigating those systems.
When I've had direct reports, if they mentioned how Dr. So and so needed something from them at midnight for a presentation at 8am (for example), I'd have to help them set boundaries to not drop everything because Dr. So and so didn't have their shit together. But also, Dr. So and so is also burned out and is working in a clinic with inadequate coverage and teaching responsibilities and grants to write and research to do and so it's no wonder they don't have their shit together. It's an impossible bind.
My department literally has one admin for a department that has 5 different concentrations with 25+ faculty. Oh wait, she’s also expected to help with advising because there is little training for faculty and no school advisors. It’s insane. The person we have now is so good and her job and I don’t want her to ever leave, but it’s so unsustainable even when compared to my own unsustainable workload as an assistant professor. Higher education is a mess.
Libraries and the library workers that comprise them are suffering from similar challenges faced by peers in teaching, nursing, and other social work professions. Factors such as mission creep; low or stagnant pay; defunding of initiatives for addressing systemic racism; a growing misunderstanding of what library workers do; and the indelible burden of trying to redress the archival debt of unquestioning whiteness (in our systems of cataloging, approaches to teaching, practices of hiring and retention) have destabilized the profession. There is a growing movement towards helping library workers be more trauma-informed in not only how they work with the public but also how they approach one another as colleagues and caring humans. This is a necessary corrective to administrations that rely so hard on data-oriented storytelling that they forget the messiness of the people we are—and those we are in community with as a service industry. There are also grassroots organizing efforts to help library workers unionize but as we know, such efforts can take years and steady momentum. But these are bandages in a country where rising economic inflation, climate change, and growing distrust of governmental institutions have spread wildly. This conflagration is a threat that we have and haven't fully experienced.
As for me? The way out is in. Being present, accountable, and when possible, boundaried. Being open to what we can do individually to make the workplace more humane but also attempting to influence those in power to lead with love and grace. It's small. It may not lead to much. But it keeps me treading water.
I work in a librarian (as a librarian/archivist, but not in a public-facing role) and our system has definitely been focused on trauma-informed service and aware of burn out these last few years, but what this mostly means is scheduling a lot of mandatory trainings that add even more to people's workloads. Everyone was truly losing their shit during the "how to avoid/cure burnout" sessions when there are so many other structural things that would have a bigger impact on staff capacity and energy levels.
Yea, I feel like libraries are still very much in the "ways you can fix burnout yourself!" programming lane. Because if you try HARD ENOUGH you can fix it yourself.
Woohoo! I'm in an MLIS program right now with aspirations toward public librarianship, and we're talking a TON about vocational awe and the labor of librarians. Talking about systemic change? Less so. But I'm hoping to start more of these conversations during my second year.
I was also working in the humanitarian field before this and ended up choosing librarianship over social work... mostly because I could do both in a library and the work would be positioned more positively. And yet, given the ~wild~ discourse around book banning and criminalizing librarianship, I feel I'm jumping into another dumpster fire. While I'm intimidated by the cycle of fresh energy to cynical burnout, I believe that young people need to enter this profession and start actually transforming it. We'll see how that works in practice, but I'm excited to dive in.
100 percent this, branch librarians are basically expected to be social workers in the system where I work (I work for a library but am not a librarian). They are unionized but the pay is honestly criminal for the high cost of living. I've thought about going back to school to be a librarian for many years but I know how much they make and I would be taking like a 40 percent pay cut (I work in fundraising) which is just not sustainable for me.
Library work is social work. Social work that you are in no way trained or compensated adequately to deal with. I only made it 5 years in public libraries before getting burnt out and moving to archival work so I could be behind the scenes.
Thanks. I am inspired to think this way via my friend Beck, who's written about it as part of her work for the Center for Digital Thriving. At the end of one of her posts she writes: "Go there. Do that. See what happens next."
No, it's not the answer to the massive problems of being underpaid, unrecognized, micro (and macro) aggressed upon, or overtasked. Your mileage will most definitely vary. But I've found it helps to wonder and poke at why we feel the way we do, and then think about what could be done over time and through sustained efforts to effect sustainable change.
This isn't a foolproof way to be in this world. There's a lot of unresolved grief that sometimes transforms into anger before shifting back to grief. Do this enough times, though, and that discipline of showing up and being curious can ease the anxiety.
Anyone using golden girls gifs gets it — thank you for sharing this! I am saving it for a read later.
I also love your practicality here — there isn't a fool proof fix, but that's also exciting because that means that the patches are worth the effort too. It's all about getting the reps in and being patient, which our culture is not interested in.
Sharing a conversation between museum consultants Rebecca Shulman and Mike Murawski as featured on the Agents of Change substack (and referenced by Rob Weisberg and his newsletter Museum Human for today, April 26) on burnout in a sister profession, museums, and the understanding that burnout is not individual but rather organizational:
The term is not mine. Much like Fobazi Ettarh's term "vocational awe," archival debt is a concept that has been defined and articulated with far more scholarly experience than I: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol10/iss1/8/
As a teacher, I can confirm and want to restack every word in this piece. I’ve been writing about this myself. We have to stop just “looking for the helpers” in situations of dire need, as Mr. Rogers once said, and start really seeing their humanity and their needs as well. We can’t just ignore care workers until we need them, tell them that if they “really care” they’d work for free, and then act surprised when very few people can actually stay in their care work sustainably given all that.
My industry (vet med) is in the process of eating itself alive through private equity.
So far, all I have managed to do is be an example of someone who doesn't bing drink at conferences to cope.
It feels like a very big problem, that I am very alone in solving. Because the answer is ALWAYS start your own hospital. And frankly, that is a terrible answer.
I have ideas but...trying to get people together to form a more cooperative type work environment requires...people to cooperate. And if 25 years in vet med has taught me anything...it is that people don't really want to cooperate. They want to be right.
My mom is a staff member in an optometrist's office. It was an independent practice for 20 years before the owner sold it to a PE-owned corporate entity in 2020. Since the new management took over, it's been a burnout machine. Management actually tells employees that they're not in the business of healthcare, they're in the business of retail (because their profits come from selling glasses and contacts). They also cut staff hours to minimize their labor costs, so the office is constantly operating without enough workers to adequately serve the number of patients on the schedule.
My mom, who is a few years from retirement, is deeply demoralized. She loved this job and derived a lot of satisfaction from helping people in her community see better! But now she feels taken for granted, overworked, and disillusioned with the greed of her corporate overlords (who, of course, manage according to financial data and have never met anyone who works in this office or any of their patients).
I'm sorry to hear this is happening in veterinary medicine too. We have three senior rescue cats, and are so grateful for the wonderful vets who take care of them.
Both of these examples are insane to me! I am vaguely aware of private equity buying and ruining a lot of things, but I had no idea it extended to things like vet med and optometry. How do those businesses or industries come back from that without PE burning it to the ground first!?
From what I know about the private equity business, the typical strategy is to pool a bunch of money from investors, use it to acquire a bunch of small/independent businesses in the same industry, and consolidate as much of their operations as possible to reduce expenses and increase profits (you can buy supplies/inventory at reduced prices because of high volume, educe headcount by concentrating certain responsibilities for all of the offices in one role, etc.). Consolidation also reduces local competition, which generates more revenue for the dominant player. The end game is *usually* to then sell that consolidated business entity to a buyer for enough money that the PE outfit delivers returns to their investors (although I guess in some cases the PE entity retains ownership because the revenue is worth it to them).
How do we stop/discourage that? I think it's really complicated. PE often swoops into industries where individual business owners are struggling to stay afloat (often a person who is a great doctor may not be a great business owner -- different skill sets, both highly demanding!). And there are tons of factors that go into that; skyrocketing commercial rent prices, other costs increasing, labor market challenges, lack of a successor to take over when the business owner retires, etc. etc. I think there probably needs to be more done to support small independent businesses from a policy standpoint, and/or to restrict the kind of large-scale acquisition/consolidation that makes PE's business model lucrative.
This is exactly vet med. I just read today that a corporate/PE practice pays about 1/5 of what a private hospital pays for vaccines. How can a private company compete?
Our saving grace is that most PE is staggeringly bad at running vet hospitals. They can't keep vets and the turnover basically eats all their savings from scale.
Similar - I have two relatives who are Chiropractors and both went to work in chain offices as first jobs and it was insane. In the early 2010's the budgeted time for each patient was 5 minutes - she was scheduled to treat12 patients per hour. By 2020 it was down to three. Both only stayed long enough to make a business plan and branch out into their own practice. Obviously being a small-business owner is a very different challenge than being a care provider, but preferable to seeing so many patients a day that it's just a blur.
That is wild, and my mom talks about the same thing. Her employer budgets like 10 minutes for an eye exam, which is fine if you're just doing a routine checkup for someone who has no vision problems, or whose glasses prescription hasn't changed. But as soon as someone has an issue that needs diagnosing, it's not enough time. And forget about sticking to the schedule if there is even ONE elderly patient coming in -- not only do they move more slowly and take longer to complete diagnostics, but often they are lonely, and they relish the chance to chat with someone who cares for their well-being. It makes me so angry/frustrated that some number cruncher on Wall Street ignores all of that important human context and limits those interactions because they only care about maximizing their profits.
I know this doesn't address the system-wide problems in vet med, but as a frequent flyer at my vet (2 medically needy dogs, 1 senior dog, 1 cat), would you be willing to share a few insights as to how owners can support you and your colleagues more effectively? The vets I have dealt with in the past have gone above and beyond to support and guide the choices I have made as a pet owner and my animals would be dead or in much worse shape today without their guidance. I have been lucky in that I have a wonderful DVM-owned hospital and a large university-owned hospital in close proximity to me, so I haven't had to get care through a chain. Other than like, being polite and collaborative, and maybe bringing donuts for the office when we can, if you have any insights into how pet owners can do better I would be all ears.
2) Leave positive google reviews at the practice calling out individuals by name. If you see a negative or mean review, please call that person out in a way that is safe for you. We have been bullied to death.
3) Buy your drugs through us. The amount of unpaid labor that Chewy and PetMeds gets out of veterinarians is...discouraging. Seriously...it is hours of our time every week.
4) On your town FB page when you see someone saying that "vets are so expensive" pipe up and defend us. The average paid vets make half of what the lowest paid MDs make and we are held to the same standards of medical care. Unless you are seeing the practice owner, the vet you are seeing is AT MOST gonna see 22% of the bill in front of you. It isn't the associates that are raking in the dough for the amount of work we do.
5) if we say, please, your pet needs trazadone/gabapentin/clonidine so that we can work safely, say yes. Then...spread the word on social media that having a vet experience where no one was at risk of getting bit is worth putting your pet on meds!
6) Learn about NOMV and the rates of suicide in our profession. It's weekly. And the professional in front of you might have just lost a colleague. It's hard to express how that suicide rate reverberates in the survivors.
And letters to us get passed around and saved, long past the time when the donuts are stale and stick on the counter. Write a note thanking the people who were in your appointment. We put them up in the back and re-read them...a LOT.
This is great info, thank you so much for taking the time to write it up. You’ve given me some things to think about and some concrete action steps, I appreciate that so much.
I was wondering where the vet med folks were at in this conversation! Vet med is definitely on fire in many different ways. I love it but after 16 years I had to step away. Going to a different clinic is definitely not a good solution. It’s an industry wide/cultural problem.
I was in a passion job until December, but the rare one that historically tried to protect work-life balance. We weren't supposed to work *too* many hours. When we were on vacation, we were on vacation (if the boss saw you send an email or pop into slack, you were reminded to go be on vacation). But it was nonetheless a burnout factory because management was lousy.
There was like one good manager in each department and they were always the person who was relied on to fix what was broken but not given the authority to keep it from getting broken to begin with. Upper management set the policies, and the policies constantly changed without ever consulting the people doing the work day to day or offering any solid rationales for the changes. More than once the way a policy change was conveyed to non-management was when we were essentially told we'd been doing it wrong for two weeks since a policy change we hadn't been told about.
Unless you were a manager, your expertise was not appreciated -- you were to unquestioningly do the bidding of managers, even though in many cases they were less experienced/credentialed/qualified than non-managers. (These sharp distinctions between managers and non-managers showed up when non-managers dared to unionize. Top management saw that as a personal insult and mentally divided the company into two teams, even though to that point a lot of the managerial titles had been handed out kind of haphazardly so there wasn't a ton of distinction.) It's amazing the way you can not be working outrageous hours and have plenty of vacation time and be in a passion job and love your immediate coworkers and still have the soul absolutely sucked out of you every single day.
Wow! You could be describing nearly every job I've ever had. And your last sentence...phew...that is exactly the feeling. Even when you're doing work you love, it sucks the life out of you when you're not supported, appreciated, and given adequate authority or autonomy.
I worked for a couple years a copy editor for scientific manuscripts, and the work itself was fine but the company I “freelanced for” (middle man between freelancers and the journals) was just AWFUL to interact with. Literally exclusively negative feedback (there was a spreadsheet with everyone’s mistakes in it). 48 h turnaround. I’ve published academic papers! That shit moves so slowly! There is no need to set arbitrary short deadlines for the freelancers! Copy editors in general get so little respect and it’s just, as you say, soul sucking.
People feel SO PERSONALLY victimized when someone has the nerve to stand up and say "this is too much for all of us." Seems like stockholm syndrome.
I've been both that employee and that manager — absolutely enraged when someone else wouldn't see how hard I was working and realize they'd better shut up and get back to it. It's so toxic and sometimes you don't even know you're doing it until you finally hit your own wall.
It's the MINDSET that work matters above all else and I think your story really proves it.
I’m surprised to not see more health care workers commenting here. Healthcare is a burnout extravaganza no matter where you work. I worked in family medicine for three years and while I was there eleven other providers came and went. It’s madness. Now I’m in a “passion” job in sexual/repro health and TBH I do love it but every single person is underpaid and particularly among the non-licensed support staff it’s basically just a rotating door with folks leaving after 6-12 months. The other thing about passion jobs is that folks coming in often put the org up on a pedestal and then are disappointed to find that we have all the same workplace problems as everyone else 🙃
Yes! I am a nurse and the level of burnout I felt in 2019 when I left was life altering... and I dodged the 2020 draft of horrors. I went into another "passion" job with a non-profit and got paid nothing and worked so much. I now work for the government and am finding balance but it is hard. I think any caring field lends itself to burnout but knowing someone can (and this literally does happen) die if you don't pick up the slack is an attack on your humanity. It is just not sustainable.
I was scrolling to find fellow health care workers here, because it literally feels like the safety net of this work is frayed down to threads. I'm an OT working in a SNF and like many in this setting, have been doing this for years because i adore working with older people. I loathe productivity requirements, being forced to pick up patients for therapy simply to bill their insurance, and the constant difficulty of trying to do a job with no supplies (because administrators don't want to spend money on stuff that people actually need--of course they will happily take people's money though). And it's like that everywhere.
I was also scrolling looking for healthcare - it’s so hard not to stay late or to take lunches because you can see a direct and significant impact of you Not Doing Thé Thing Right Now (I work in a rapidly progressive neurological diagnosis so everything does feel now or never with severe impacts of care delays… but also there aren’t enough staff! And no one believes that and just keeps asking us to be more efficient …. When people facing devestating circumstances can’t (and shouldn’t!) be efficiencies … and if I leave, it’s so much worse for the people I care about so much.
I'm a pediatric subspecialty physician in an academic hospital system. My job is rife with difficult cases and sad decisions, but it's a passion job for me. Because I can essentially only have this job at a big academic center, my pay/benefits are at the mercy of the system and my vacation time is laughable. Everyone knows pediatrics is undercompensated compared to other medical specialties but you're just supposed to be fine with it, because of your passion for the job.
I try to do my best to model boundaries for my trainees - I work better in the evening/night, but that doesn't mean they should respond to emails after hours. I talk about plans to have fun and ways to have a good work life and a restorative home life. I hope I can keep this up. We have the same issue with licensed and non-licensed support staff, and I wish we had more continuity. We have had some great folks come through who I wish could stay but are truly undervalued.
I forgot to write all the difficult decisions that have to be made because of the system. Logging into the system after hours to figure out what antibiotic a parent can afford for their kid because the standard one isn't covered. Peer to peers for denied standard of care imaging. Children whose insurance isn't accepted, or who don't have insurance and don't qualify for charity care. All these things weigh on you.
I was also scrolling for healthcare like where my peeps!! I work at a large metro-area health department. After all of the blather about strengthening local public health to be ready for the next pandemic, we lost revenue during Covid and things are actually worse now. I love what I do but it’s hard to feel like my work means something when we are not adequately compensated and management could really care less. I do my best to push back and make things sustainable for me but there is huge social pressure to never miss work no matter how sick you are - I still struggle with this.
Ha! I went from SRH to healthcare! SRH ruined my mental health, and I love my job at a health system. I am not a medical provider though, so my experience working in healthcare is completely and totally different. I feel so horribly for medical providers. I support their work in various ways, and see how tied their hands are in terms of the care they want to be a able to provide, and the care they can actually provide in the confines of the system they must operate within.
I work in a vocational rehab for clients with TBIs and it is the same. Everyone who works there adores the clients and the work for the most part, but after a big merger there's no humanity left. Some of the managers are great, but things like dress codes and "tardies" for an underpaid job like this are just demoralizing. And it's no surprise that it's a rotating door, but no one seems to care enough to fix it.
I know I’m late to the party but I am another burnt out healthcare worker. I am a hospital nurse of barely two years and my mental health is has been significantly affected by my career.
What saves me from burnout is I do the maximum amount I want to do, which some weeks is the bare minimum. When I got a new job with a very "passionate" boss, I worried that my clear boundaries (I don't have outlook alerts on my phone, sorry) would read as not caring. But I just listen to feedback. As long as my boss and coworkers think I'm doing a good job, I tend to worry much less about how many hours I applied myself that week. This shift in focus to external results, external feedback vs the guilt loop in my head helps me just work less. and better!
And finally, just a few minutes before reading this piece I saw this post script in an email signature from a Chief of Staff of a City Agency (govt can often be low paying "passion work")
"Please know that I respect boundaries around personal time, well-being, caretaking, and rest. If my email reaches you during these moments, please prioritize your time and respond when it's convenient for you. I encourage you to prioritize self-care over immediate email responses. Rest assured, I am committed to the same principle."
Thank you all for your typo tolerance — they've all been fixed. (I was doing some care work yesterday and had less time than usual to triple-check everything, so again, thank you)
Maybe just be gentle to yourself - I've been thinking a lot about our tendencies as writers towards perfection. So what if there are a few typos that get corrected later? Readers know what you mean, and will keep reading! I think we all need to be a little more typo tolerance and police less on grammar/mistake issues.
Totally get it, *and* this does feel like an invitation to gently inquire whether you've considered hiring an editor for the newsletter. I appreciate your writing for its thoughtful, nuanced approach and I've found typos can detract from it. It's something I've noticed and thought about before, and just wanted to take the opportunity to share now.
Katie Hawkins-Gaar of My Sweet Dumb Brain (who I found through Culture Study!) pays an editor for her newsletter (I believe a percentage of the subscription income); and as a paid subscriber, I respect and appreciate it so much.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to figure out how to make this work - I could absolutely pay someone, that’s not the issue at all. It’s that I often finish writing the afternoon before publishing and then spend the subsequent hours tinkering and if asking someone to take a copy read at 7 pm PT isn’t a burnout ask, whew. I’ll keep thinking on solutions because it stresses me out too!
(And I *wish* I could write posts a week in advance - but my brain doesn’t work that way right now)
If only our brains could help us out more lol. I follow an old-school blog, and she writes a Sunday post each week **that she actually physically writes each Sunday and then immediately publishes** ... that'll never not astound me! I want her to have her Sundays back!
I used to always do this when the newsletter was something I did for fun while still working at BuzzFeed — I'd wake up and if I felt like it, I'd write for a few hours, read it over once, and publish! Now I spend a lot more time researching and outlining and thinking ideas through, but the writing itself often happens in the one or two days before the thing goes out into the world.
Is it possible to hire someone a few time zones away?
That’s a great idea! I’m in New Zealand and you have many readers from around the world that would be happy (stoked! Honoured!) to contribute in this way.
I can't believe that it took me this long to remember time zones exist — going to think about how to execute this!
Bwahahahahahaha ... SAME. Here you and I are like, well that sucks there's no good solution. 🤦
Hard agree (from a reader in London and shortly moving to BC, Canada) - I volunteer as tribute!
Oof, that's tricky ... I have no ideas or suggestions lol!
Currently an academic librarian at a university that is very quickly falling apart and in the process of trying to become a conservative culture warrior university (it's exactly as bad as it sounds). People are leaving at a good clip--and I'm among them.
The last day of the semester is also my last day. I can't do it anymore. I am part of a public facing unit, and now the one with the most experience due to turnover, but got told I wasn't in consideration to actually become department head/replace my supervisor who left earlier this year. And once I realized I'd be expected to run the department without a pay or rank increase and no official means/channels to move up, AND I'd have to train my new boss who would get paid more than me, I was done.
I have a job to get me by in the meantime and I'm looking for another position, but for the first time in years I feel at peace. I don't wake up dreading the day, and to me, that's worth everything.
...Are you me? I left my academic librarian job (at a state school in the Deep South that boasts Nikki Haley on the Board of Trustees, ugh) almost exactly one year ago because I was taking on the work of 3.5 positions and the final straw was they wanted me to interview against external candidates for the department head job I was already doing (for the department I created from scratch!) for basically no raise.
As someone talking to you from your own future - hang in there, it's so great! My current job isn't perfect either but it was a huge pay increase and reduction in stress. I feel like a completely different person than I was a year ago, I have hobbies and interests and time for my family now and such a solid sense of my own self worth for getting out of that place.
Happy to connect for a coffee chat over Zoom or something if you need to vent! Truly, your story sounds so similar to mine I did a double take at the date/username. :D
Whole treatise there about how we're managed by administrators who think of the academic library they had in the 60s or 70s and serving students who literally did a year of their schooling without leaving their homes. So it's impossible to meet the metrics that the administrators think are important because they are in no way reflective of what makes good service to current students (and most faculty/researchers). PLUS, when someone retires and was doing something that isn't actually busy/popular now, they just don't get replaced. Just because that person in that position wasn't doing anything impactful doesn't mean we don't need a person.
Leaving a toxic job and finally not waking up dreading the day is a form of heaven I’m so glad you get to experience!
I think it will truly hit me on May 11th that I don't have to come back to this place ever again but even just making the decision to leave and starting the resignation process felt like a 10 ton weight off my shoulders. The next day I woke up actually refreshed and not exhausted for the first time in literal years!
Congratulations to you on your next adventure. That sounds so hard. Glad you get to discover a new chapter!
Thank you! It look me a long time to get here and honestly, I should have left a while back but kept making up reasons to stay. I don't absolutely know what the future holds, but I'm actually excited to see what happens!
I got out of academic libraries (after spending the first 15 years of my career in them) about a year ago and I’m convinced it saved my life. I miss a few things about it but on net I am glad every day I feel like I got on one of the last lifeboats off the sinking ship of higher education.
I got my degree with the full intention of making academic libraries my career, worked in public libraries for 3 years and change waiting for a spot at my local university to open up, got a position here...and now four and a half years later I'm completely burnt out. It took me a long time to realize how truly despondent my job made me, and how despite the fact I deeply love my work and helping people...I need to divorce myself from "librarian" as my identity and re-learn how to be a person outside of my job.
And I think the move out of this job has saved my life in a very real way.
For the first time in my life, I have a purpose/passion job with ZERO burnout and it's for one reason and one reason only -- my boss. She *demands* that we prioritize our own lives and our own self-care, to an extent that I've never experienced before. Example: I scheduled a call with her for 4 pm on Monday, just hours before my Passover seder. This call was with an external consultant to help us raise money we desperately need (I work in higher ed for an initiative that relies on outside funding) and she began the call by saying we were ending the call and needed to reschedule. She said that Passover was about to begin (I was the only observant person on the call) and we simply could not prioritize work right now. She said GOODBYE very loudly, wished me Happy Passover, and ended the Zoom. This is one of a zillion examples I could give.
What a gift your boss is!
Thanks, AHP, for following this burnout topic so relentlessly. Reading your writing and the Substack comments have been so helpful for me processing my own burnout.
I was a pastor for a decade and left last fall after having my ordination removed for officiating a same-gender wedding. On top of the very real lack of pay and benefits, the ethical and moral weight of working in/for an institution that very clearly refuses to care about issues of well-being and justice is hard to quantify...especially when part of my job was to articulate and encourage the exact ethical and moral values that the institution refuses to enact. Maybe close to moral injury?
In the last few years, my denomination created and implemented a really innovative new guideline for clergy compensation, a calculator that takes into account local housing costs, considering health insurance and pension benefits FIRST (before base salary) and then spitting out, based on what the congregation is able to pay, the number of hours they can expect their pastor to work. It's literally life-changing. A guardrail-insistent structural change, and congregations HATE IT. Change requires so much effort from so many corners, and even the guardrails need guardrails, you know?
That calculator!! WHEW, I can only imagine how congregations would react — because the assumption is that the clergy member *has no other life* other than pastoring, obviously
Historically, it seems most pastors(men) have a wife, who essentially is an entire unpaid bonus position to benefit the pastor/ church.
Yes, and being a single clergywoman makes for a lot of interesting internal and external negotiation on this front. For instance, do I take a dish to the after-worship potluck? I DO enjoy cooking, but I am also already preaching, leading worship and being the pastor and good grief, somebody else can bring a casserole.
Yes! Whenever I was questioned about it, I told them that I was bringing the prayer, bc they always ask you to pray before the meal. But only women get asked.
I'M BRINGING THE PRAYER. I'm dead. I love it.
Hello! Also a former pastor here (I write a Substack under another account called, creatively, Former Pastor). My denomination has had guardrails since I can remember, but congregations would always try to find a way around them. Now I’m working under a part-time contract that details exactly how much they’ll pay me for Sundays and by the hour. It’s freeing to know they’ll have to think about if they call me to do something, they have to pay me.
And for the rest of it, moral injury sounds exactly right.
Yes. I'm not sure I will ever be a pastor again, but I'm guest preaching a lot right now and the set fee for the clearly defined labor is so refreshing!
For sure! I don’t think I’ll ever be full time again, but filling in works right now for me too.
Also, just want to say that it absolutely sucks that you got defrocked for performing a wedding.
Another former pastor here! I still serve on a committee for our denomination and am constantly blown away by the *ahem* older members of the committee who are so surprised no one wants to become a pastor these days. I am zero percent surprised, given the unreasonable demands that are put on pastors, especially during the pandemic when we had to suddenly get good at virtual church. I started quiet quitting in mid 2022 and just stopped doing all the extra things that weren't in my contract. A lot of things fell through the cracks, but I realized how I was perpetuating this toxic work culture. Later that year I quit altogether and will almost certainly never go back.
Thanks to all three of you for this! I left the ordination process a few years ago because of this. Lately I've been tempted to go back, but...
My family was filled with Pastors. My grandfather was Senior Pastor at a huge church when my father was growing up. My father and his three siblings rarely spent any time with their father (never attended a parent teacher conference, never attended a game, never helped with any Scouting events) but he did take them "out west" on a camping trip every August. Because of those trips and their love of nature, my father and his two brothers became foresters and worked in the mountains of Colorado, Idaho, and California. My grandfather never really got over none of them being "called". My father told him that they all heard the "call" to be stewards of the land. There are so many demands on pastors, I am always amazed that anyone feels "called" anymore.
Oh wow. I have a lot of friends who are members of various clergies, and I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to set those boundaries and guiderails when people perceive your job to include constant availability. I actually spoke to a rabbi the other day who is retiring this year and she said it feels sort of weird to retire from a calling like it’s any other job—but also she’s ready to be done with the workload.
Constant availability, yes, and there's also something that I can't quite articulate yet about your entire existence being a commodity. It's a particularly hard role in which to separate the self from the labor.
My husband is an Episcopal priest and I came here to echo this. There is never a time when he cannot be “on” even if we’re gone (because what’s he going to do if someone calls or texts or emails that they’re experiencing a crisis, not respond?). But then there’s also the way that every part of your identity—and often your family’s identity—is subsumed by this role.
Another clergyperson here. (Just a little late to the comments!) I've found that it takes work to cultivate all of my other identities. I am a pastor, but I'm so much more! Celebrating this multiplicity makes everything better.
Absolutely. To a lesser extent I feel the same way as a musician—it’s a huge part of my identity but also my job now, and it’s also something that I use my body and personal emotions to do. Very challenging. Wishing you all the best however you choose to move forward!
Musicians are an interesting area to explore with this topic - part passion, part creative endeavor, part (poorly compensated) wage-work.
I recently attended a party where the guest of honor was an old friend of the host - a musician in town to do a show. The host urged the musician to get out his instrument and perform in her living room *three times* over the course of the long evening as new guests came and went. He seemed happy enough to do it, but I kept thinking - we're not paying him for this performance. He already did a paid gig earlier in the day! How do we mentally shift to see this as labor, not a hobby this fun person does at parties?
Yes, and amen to everything here! When I shared the passion piece (which really affected me) on Notes saying that we need to stop acting like it's normal for employers to expect us to do uncompensated work, someone noted that this makes sense for hourly workers, but what about salaried workers?
They asked, isn't it part of the agreement that you will work more than 40 hours since you are getting benefits like health insurance and vacation time? The fact that this makes sense to most people (including me for a long time) is insane. EMPLOYERS CAN'T EMAIL EMPLOYEES AFTER HOURS IN FRANCE. This applies to salaried workers. Health care is free in most of our peer countries, but we are supposed to work more than 40 hours a week to get basically a stipend from our employer for health insurance, still pay an insane premium and then a deductible, and then pay for the actual health care? Oh, and thanks for the two weeks off after working 60-hour weeks the rest of the year. Long story short you consistently get me riled up (in a good way).
I'm in Canada, where things are different, but as a salaried worker, we've always had both formal and informal flex time agreements. If you work more than your 40 hours, you bank it and take it off at the next opportunity.
Really, what salaried means here is that you don't get overtime for working extra, not that you've sold your soul and have to work for free.
I have worked in design and tech for 20 years, and this year design has been pronounced "dead" by the industry. It's a wild shift from where we started in 2008, when Steve Jobs was out there preaching the gospel of loving your work in the church of design.
Back then, tech was also an industry of passion — pixar even made a movie about it. (Big Hero 6) We were all going to usher in a better (maybe even PERFECT!) future and Great Design was leading the charge. Tech companies have quietly sunset some of the 'don't be evil' values, but culturally, there is still the sense that if you work in the industry, you are one of the chosen ones lucky enough to be drawing up plans for The Future. Bonfire of the Vanities, but with macbooks.
I personally hit rock bottom about 7 years ago after I had a kid and could no longer work 70 hours weeks at what I thought was my dream job helping women have more financial control, and my lack of time investment was clearly seen as a lack of passion for The Mission (albeit I must note that I kind of let it get that way — I was searching to fill a hole in my heart, and working hard had always been a good way to get the approval I was looking for.) But when I left it almost broke me. I didn't just leave the job, I left behind what I thought it meant to live a good life.
Last year, when the tech industry laid off nearly 300,000 people, I watched as that same pain smeared all over LinkedIn. It was heartbreaking — all these passionate people who had worked so hard and been taken for granted, utterly shocked by how disposable they felt. The posts felt more like they belonged at a memorial service than on a professional networking platform.
I think the problem with passion jobs goes much deeper than the roles we typically think of as care work — Americans believe that work should be their passion, no matter what kind of work they are doing. How much you earn, how hard you work, how much you give are still our main measures of assessing whether we're living a good life.
We must demand more from our employers and our government — but I also think that there is individual work to be done around deconstructing how we define success and how we spend our time. Revolution happens in systems because it is happening in small conversations at home and with friends as well.
I wrote a piece on the high-performing-school-to-all-consuming-tech-job pipeline and the effects this kind of passion=work=money mindset is having on kids and adults alike, might be related:
https://onpurposeproject.substack.com/p/whats-lost-from-winning?r=f96pn
I hit two of these buckets - I’m a former teacher turned tech professional and just got laid off (while 4 months pregnant)…. And I’ve never been happier. My partner is so excited to “have me back and present”. I worked in PR at a global tech company that constantly had crises requiring me to be “on call” at all hours of the day and night. I had calls with EMEA at 7 am and then calls with APAC until 10pm sometimes. I was constantly told how lucky I was to work in tech - which only led me to work harder to prove that I belonged there. The burnout is very very real. (I’m very interested in reading your piece on high performing school to all consuming tech job pipeline - this is 100% me!)
I’m privileged to be able to take some time to rest and recover while I focus on a healthy pregnancy, but it’s really hard to “take a break” (how long does it take to cure burnout?) and really tough to not feel like I should be looking for what’s next right away. The pressure to continue to prove myself is competing with my need for true self care and it’s a daily battle!
GIRL IT IS SO HARD!! (also congrats on that new baby!!)
I relate to the calls you're talking about — I'll never forget I'd taken the day off for my birthday and the CEO called me back to back until I got out of the shower to answer the phone. Everything was always a manufactured fire drill.
Motherhood saved me — my husband was also happy to welcome me back to the present lolol.
It's a process and it's an intense one. Therapy really helped me — so did Martha Beck's book The Way of Integrity and The Work by Byron Katie. I had so many thoughts that had become reality — both books helped me learn how to question what I thought was important, and slowly come back to knowing myself again. It's still a work in progress, but I think of it a lot like recovery from any other addiction. I will always have that urge to seek out approval — I just need to know about it and manage it.
If you're up for it, I'd love to hear about your experience some time!
“Manufactured fire drill” lord, the accuracy!
Just read your article Melissa and holy moly did this line speak to me:
“ But when we’re conditioned from childhood to see every difficulty as a personal problem that can be overcome if we just apply enough effort, we never develop the internal compass that tells us when trying hard is in our best interest and when it’s a trap set to take advantage of our need for approval.”
This is the very trap I fell into.
You’re a talented writer and managed to capture this moment and feeling so well. Thank you so much for sharing this and the book recommendations. I’m planning a trip to Powells (my local amazing bookstore) to pick them up today!
aww thanks so much Rhiannon!! This made my day. I keep these notes in a folder for myself when I'm struggling to feel motivated. Let me know how you like the books! (PS, I know Powells! My husband went to Oregon and we have one of their coffee mugs in our cabinet. 🫶🏻)
All of this. Tech was never great at avoiding burnout, but I think before the layoff-pocalypse there was at least some sentiment that we didn’t want to push folks past a certain point because there were so many opportunities for them to move on to if it got to be too much. Now it feels like we’re in “you’re lucky to have this job” territory, with all the abuses and insanity that come with that mindset.
IMO tech is almost designed with the assumption you work really hard for a few years, make a lot of money, then quit for a year or two to relax, then do it all again until you’re in your 40s/ max early 50s, at which point you hope to have enough to retire. It’s a super weird industry
Never seen it put like this before but that exactly encapsulates my experience in the industry
There was some metric a few years back about the average time on job in SF was 3 years - which is the time it usually takes for a start-up to either get bought or fail.
God this is so right — it has gotten SO MUCH WORSE. I was recruited recently for a start-up job that I would have been offered 10 years ago and when I asked the recruiter if I was the right fit, she told me I could "work my way up" over the next few years to earn… my current title, position and compensation. Thank you, next!
This is beautifully articulated and I agree with / relate to all of it so deeply. I worked in generative UX research, which I loved - as a kid, I wanted to be an investigative journalist slash therapist slash children’s book illustrator, and I kind of WAS all those things! I also hated it. I didn’t actually *have* therapy training, so the intense things I’d hear from participants in sessions - and be actively eliciting! - I didn’t know how to process or compartmentalize. And it started to feel really, really exploitative - to be seeking out evidence for things like, this fitness tracking platform is being used by teenagers to support disordered eating patterns in these heartbreaking ways - and then have the research shelved with no action. Checking a liability box, then continuing knowingly on.
That all said - I was VERY attached to it, identity-wise, and also (to be transparent) financially! I struggle to figure out where these 300k tech workers are going to GO. There aren’t other fields that offer at least a veneer of purpose plus high salaries. Not to be “won’t someone think of the techies?!” - overall, an enormously privileged bunch - but I do worry about how this is all going to shake out.
NAILED IT.
I think all the time about whether I need to go back and get therapy training just because of how intimate a user interview can become. I've been in session with someone when suicidal ideation was on the horizon and truly was afraid I might do damage because I didn't know how to help.
RE: Where will they all go?? I think a LOT of folks did the bootcamp path to design because it was a growing industry that seemed to have no bottom — it paid well and you needed less technical knowledge than engineering to get in as a junior. I don't know where many of those folks will end up, but I do think that the skills are valuable outside of the industry — it will just take some work to figure out how to reposition things.
FastCo had an interesting article the other day on how design has been replaced by Strategy, which also seems like another patch for "we got money and we don't know what we're gonna do with it" in the AI space where the UI is consistent, but the strategy of the product and it's impact on society needs someone who isn't fully motivated by money to attend to it.
I do love our job in the end, and I feel grateful to do it. I'm just glad I no longer feel so grateful that I'm willing to be exploited for it.
Oof, yes - I’ve also had the experience with a participant voicing suicidal ideation, and I had another who
appeared to be experiencing domestic violence and signaling for help. The intimacy is shocking, and we’re not equipped to handle it! On the other end of the spectrum, I had a male participant who raised my hackles from minute 1 - but who the client insisted I continue speaking with - expose himself in the middle of a session. That was the last straw for me and I left the industry soon after.
Thanks for sharing that resource - and your own writing - looking forward to reading!
This is insane!!!! Holy moly. I feel like we should exchange war stories 😂
I'm working in AI strategy from the human-centered, social responsibility perspective; may I DM you?
Yes! How cool :)
I work in elections. Not politics. The actual operations of running elections. I used to be the head if a county elections department and was in charge of candidate filing, ballot preparation, hiring and training poll workers, managing polling places, tabulation, and reporting results, and more. After 2020, I left that job and moved to the state level. In 2022, I left that job and started going to therapy where I realized that I was completely burned out.
And I'm not alone! The entire election community is burned out. Turnover is at an all time high. The stresses involved in this work only increase. And I'm not even talking about the political nonsense. Doing more with less is the unofficial elections motto. And yes, most election administrators are women earning low salaries. Some of them have multiple job duties with elections only being a portion of their jobs.
I now work as a consultant and help people who are still doing the front line election work so I still get to be close to the work but not too close. And yet, I'm feeling the signs of burnout again. I work for a consulting group of type A overachiever who are seemingly always on the clock. I do consider this passion work and I struggle against my own internal voice saying "do more." But I'm also reading articles like yours and trying to do self therapy, by meditating, walking, taking breaks, scheduling vacations, cross stitching, reading fiction, setting boundaries, etc. I can't wait to the other comments here because I'm learn some new ideas. If I have one idea that can help others, it's this: I turned off notifications on my phone for work email and slack. Best. Decision. Ever.
This makes me think that there's some kind of connection between burnout in these passion fields and the growing public distrust of the institutions that make up the passion fields. When you no longer get the satisfaction of your work going smoothly AND you no longer get the kind of public gratitude traditionally offered to people in your field AND you have to deal with outright hostility towards your institution or towards yourself for working within that institution that people don't trust...all of that compounds into a huge burden.
And then when people don't trust the institution, they don't want to fund it, creating problems of insufficient staffing, insufficient pay, and insufficient benefits. When both the material and the abstract, emotional rewards of work are gone, what else is there? No wonder people are so burnt out!
(Some of the distrust of institutions is absolutely warranted. The rest of it is purposefully stoked by culture warriors.)
I definitely think you're on to something here. That explains the burnout in schools and healthcare and other service industries.
A lot of what I used to do when I worked in the government offices was in the name of transparency. I tried to do tours and I explained our processes endlessly, but that doesn't matter when people with louder megaphones are saying everything is rigged.
I spent a long time feeling bad about my burnout feelings because I compared myself to others and thought I didn't have it so bad. No one had threatened my life or my family - as has been done to many others in my field - but I had to learn that my trauma was still valid. Even now, I question if I want to keep doing this work. But today is a good day and I'll stay in the fight.
Different field but I also made the jump from working directly in the trenches in my sector to working as a consultant in the same industry. I’m fascinated to hear about the burnout following you since it seems like making this switch often results in happier working conditions (or at least it has for me). Do you think the second round of burnout as a consultant is due to the intractable issues in your field, or internalized work habits, or something else?
(Oops just saw the part of working for overachievers in your new role! I can see how that could create burnout conditions, the sequel!)
I think it's because of the unique situation we're in with politics in this country and the neverending flow of misinformation for grift. I, of course, don't mean that my profession is harder or worse than others, just that the current atmosphere probably provides some of the reasons for the burnout following me into the private sector. Yes, I make more money and have lessened the stress related to paying bills or the ability to buy a house or even to afford some of the self care stuff like massages or vacations. I don't know how to turn off my brain and relax without guilt. And I am sure I brought some unhealthy work habits with me - like FOMO for one.
My sister is a county clerk in Wisconsin who started as a deputy clerk in 2016. She’s never experienced an election that wasn’t complete chaos. And our voters just approved two referendums to restrict resources for election administrators even further.
Thank you for the work you’ve done and the work you’re doing, and take care of yourself! 💖
Yep I'm aware of the Wisconsin ballot measures. It's all so frustrating. I hope your sister is staying sane and upbeat and taking care too. Thanks so much for your comment!
Yesssssss! I am a college professor in a passion field—and many of my students are double-majoring, so it feels even more like they’re in my department for the fun and joy and passion of it all.
I don’t have that much power at the moment to change the official culture (first year visiting professor!), but I set very clear communication boundaries, including what time I stop answering emails and texts from students (it’s one-on-one teaching so texting is not uncommon). My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind. I was also lucky enough to have a fantastic colleague tell me up front not to let this job take over my life, and to let him know if I ever felt that the load was overwhelming, because it’s not important enough. As I tell my students, we take music very seriously but at the end of the day, it’s not neurosurgery or figuring out climate change.
The other thing that’s going on right now is that the classical music industry is actually on fire, after an article came out exploring 10-year-old rape allegations against two male members of the New York Philharmonic, leading to their victims and other female players who stood up for the victims not receiving tenure in the orchestra. So having this passion for an industry that is so, so inequitable feels a little dissonant (no pun intended).
Anne, I'm touring colleges with my son, and the number of times the admissions folks have said some version of "professors here make themselves available to students AT ALL HOURS, give out their phone numbers, answer emails late at night if you have questions on an assignment" is just completely GROSS.
What’s funny about that is that my students LOVE that I set boundaries. Like, it’s not as much of a selling points for these kids as the schools think it is. When I announce in class that I stop checking emails at 7, I get snaps and YAS BOUNDARIES from my undergrads. Because i think if I model setting boundaries, it’s easier for them to also set boundaries.
I feel like young people today are so much more in touch with mental health strategies and concepts, they're pre-disposed to be supportive of someone modeling that behavior. There's also a more basic thing at work, where people feeling uncertain in a new environment (like newly independent college students) are eager to have direction about what is appropriate behavior. So you making a rule clarifies for them what is socially acceptable in this new situation.
Yes! They like specifics. Sometimes it feels like spelling things out that never seemed to get spelled out before, but if it’s in writing they know for sure and there’s never a question about it. Anything I can do to make their experience smoother, I’m happy to do—other than answering their texts after 7 PM.
agreed--I've had next to no pushback on my boundaries from my students. sometimes I have a student as their question a couple of times over a weekend or space of a few hours, but it is fine.
interestingly, it is my peers in the department who have the most issue with these
I love the language about the late-night email and going to bed with peace of mind!
Thank you! I have some policies about same-day cancellations (which I am going to change because I’m actually really bad at enforcing them…because sometimes they reach out and I’m like, oooh, a free hour today would make things easier for me), so I want them to know that I WILL see when they emailed me when I check my email in the morning. And if they text me late (and I’m not like, in bed), I will “like” the text so they know I saw it, and then respond in the morning.
It’s voice lessons—it feels very fraught for them sometimes and it makes a difference to people’s lives but in the scheme of the world it’s not hugely impactful.
Oh yeah, the performing arts sector is a *nightmare*. The first part of my career was spent at an opera and theatre company (in admin) and honestly the blatant and constant racism and sexism was overwhelming. Basically if the artistic direct/CEO/whatever is not actively sexually assaulting someone its pretty par for the course (even in some cases *when* they are everyone just looks the other way). Also the stuff I saw was not happening in like the 90's it was in 2019!
"My syllabus says that there is no singing or music emergency that cannot be handled in the morning, so send the late night email if you need to and then go to bed with peace of mind." I'm cryinnnnnng, that is so funny but so real.
I didn’t think I was burned out.
My seventh year of teaching was over, I loved my school and my kids, I was at the point of where I was forming lasting relationships where my kids who were now graduating college were still texting and asking for life advice. Maybe I could expand my program, or get a student teacher, I thought.
Then we lost students and teachers got cut - I was gone, because the arts die first. I was forced into an elementary school with forty five kids and no support per class, funding everything from my own pockets. It was almost a relief when a family emergency meant that I quit and moved back to my childhood home.
I didn’t think I was burned out. And yet - I’m sleeping well for the first time in a decade. I’m reading for pleasure for the first time in years. I actually played a video game the other day!
I still get to be with kids, managing the teen section and programming of a city library. But there’s so much less red tape, so many fewer forms. I can talk to a teenager about his future without the nagging thoughts of “yeah he has his state tests coming up soon, gotta do my yearly training for those and start planning how testing will disrupt my lessons”. I can just focus on him and his needs.
My coworkers are quitting in droves. I used to be judgey, a pretentious feeling of “well I’m doing okay, I guess they just couldn’t cut it”. Now I’m just glad to see them in their new jobs with smiles on their faces, and my heart breaks for the students that don’t get to have teachers who feel genuinely happy in their lives.
"I didn't think I was burned out."
God that's familiar. I didn't think I was burned out when I couldn't sleep at night because my mind was churning over all the things I would need to do the following day. I didn't think I was burned out when I couldn't stop checking my Slack on Sunday afternoons. I didn't think I was burned out when everyone else quit, I just thought I was tougher. I was better because I could hold out and suffer longer than everyone else.
Thank you for everything you did for your students — and libraries are the best. Congrats on getting out!
It's not talked about as much as faculty members, but administrative support staff at universities are also overworked and burnt out.
Absolutely! Admin staff are the backbone of higher ed, and are so overworked and underappreciated.
absolutely! I was in a university admin role for 3 years before quitting and it was a MESS. and minimum wage to do everyone else's job!
YES. The same systems that make faculty burned out and feel like they have to work 24/7 are often amplified for staff because they have to navigate those same systems AND be the buffer for the faculty navigating those systems.
When I've had direct reports, if they mentioned how Dr. So and so needed something from them at midnight for a presentation at 8am (for example), I'd have to help them set boundaries to not drop everything because Dr. So and so didn't have their shit together. But also, Dr. So and so is also burned out and is working in a clinic with inadequate coverage and teaching responsibilities and grants to write and research to do and so it's no wonder they don't have their shit together. It's an impossible bind.
My department literally has one admin for a department that has 5 different concentrations with 25+ faculty. Oh wait, she’s also expected to help with advising because there is little training for faculty and no school advisors. It’s insane. The person we have now is so good and her job and I don’t want her to ever leave, but it’s so unsustainable even when compared to my own unsustainable workload as an assistant professor. Higher education is a mess.
Libraries and the library workers that comprise them are suffering from similar challenges faced by peers in teaching, nursing, and other social work professions. Factors such as mission creep; low or stagnant pay; defunding of initiatives for addressing systemic racism; a growing misunderstanding of what library workers do; and the indelible burden of trying to redress the archival debt of unquestioning whiteness (in our systems of cataloging, approaches to teaching, practices of hiring and retention) have destabilized the profession. There is a growing movement towards helping library workers be more trauma-informed in not only how they work with the public but also how they approach one another as colleagues and caring humans. This is a necessary corrective to administrations that rely so hard on data-oriented storytelling that they forget the messiness of the people we are—and those we are in community with as a service industry. There are also grassroots organizing efforts to help library workers unionize but as we know, such efforts can take years and steady momentum. But these are bandages in a country where rising economic inflation, climate change, and growing distrust of governmental institutions have spread wildly. This conflagration is a threat that we have and haven't fully experienced.
As for me? The way out is in. Being present, accountable, and when possible, boundaried. Being open to what we can do individually to make the workplace more humane but also attempting to influence those in power to lead with love and grace. It's small. It may not lead to much. But it keeps me treading water.
I work in a librarian (as a librarian/archivist, but not in a public-facing role) and our system has definitely been focused on trauma-informed service and aware of burn out these last few years, but what this mostly means is scheduling a lot of mandatory trainings that add even more to people's workloads. Everyone was truly losing their shit during the "how to avoid/cure burnout" sessions when there are so many other structural things that would have a bigger impact on staff capacity and energy levels.
Yea, I feel like libraries are still very much in the "ways you can fix burnout yourself!" programming lane. Because if you try HARD ENOUGH you can fix it yourself.
Woohoo! I'm in an MLIS program right now with aspirations toward public librarianship, and we're talking a TON about vocational awe and the labor of librarians. Talking about systemic change? Less so. But I'm hoping to start more of these conversations during my second year.
I was also working in the humanitarian field before this and ended up choosing librarianship over social work... mostly because I could do both in a library and the work would be positioned more positively. And yet, given the ~wild~ discourse around book banning and criminalizing librarianship, I feel I'm jumping into another dumpster fire. While I'm intimidated by the cycle of fresh energy to cynical burnout, I believe that young people need to enter this profession and start actually transforming it. We'll see how that works in practice, but I'm excited to dive in.
100 percent this, branch librarians are basically expected to be social workers in the system where I work (I work for a library but am not a librarian). They are unionized but the pay is honestly criminal for the high cost of living. I've thought about going back to school to be a librarian for many years but I know how much they make and I would be taking like a 40 percent pay cut (I work in fundraising) which is just not sustainable for me.
Library work is social work. Social work that you are in no way trained or compensated adequately to deal with. I only made it 5 years in public libraries before getting burnt out and moving to archival work so I could be behind the scenes.
I love this. "The way out is in."
Thanks. I am inspired to think this way via my friend Beck, who's written about it as part of her work for the Center for Digital Thriving. At the end of one of her posts she writes: "Go there. Do that. See what happens next."
No, it's not the answer to the massive problems of being underpaid, unrecognized, micro (and macro) aggressed upon, or overtasked. Your mileage will most definitely vary. But I've found it helps to wonder and poke at why we feel the way we do, and then think about what could be done over time and through sustained efforts to effect sustainable change.
This isn't a foolproof way to be in this world. There's a lot of unresolved grief that sometimes transforms into anger before shifting back to grief. Do this enough times, though, and that discipline of showing up and being curious can ease the anxiety.
https://becktench.substack.com/p/the-obstacle-is-the-way
Anyone using golden girls gifs gets it — thank you for sharing this! I am saving it for a read later.
I also love your practicality here — there isn't a fool proof fix, but that's also exciting because that means that the patches are worth the effort too. It's all about getting the reps in and being patient, which our culture is not interested in.
thank you for sharing! 🫶🏻
Mimosa, I just read this post and thank you so much for introducing me to Beck! I love everything about her and this post. How cool. Thank you!
Beck is a kind human, and I'm grateful for having met her. I'm glad her work resonates with you.
(AHP, proper resonance usage noted!)
Also working in the archives/library world. You mention below -- just adding a link to Fobazi Ettarh's "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves": https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
Sharing a conversation between museum consultants Rebecca Shulman and Mike Murawski as featured on the Agents of Change substack (and referenced by Rob Weisberg and his newsletter Museum Human for today, April 26) on burnout in a sister profession, museums, and the understanding that burnout is not individual but rather organizational:
https://agentsofchange.substack.com/p/from-passion-to-fatigue-navigating?publication_id=452263&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&r=dvun3
I’m going to remember “archival debt.”
The term is not mine. Much like Fobazi Ettarh's term "vocational awe," archival debt is a concept that has been defined and articulated with far more scholarly experience than I: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol10/iss1/8/
Thanks for posting this--I remember this great presentation at SAA 2022, didn't know they had published an annotated transcript.
As a teacher, I can confirm and want to restack every word in this piece. I’ve been writing about this myself. We have to stop just “looking for the helpers” in situations of dire need, as Mr. Rogers once said, and start really seeing their humanity and their needs as well. We can’t just ignore care workers until we need them, tell them that if they “really care” they’d work for free, and then act surprised when very few people can actually stay in their care work sustainably given all that.
My industry (vet med) is in the process of eating itself alive through private equity.
So far, all I have managed to do is be an example of someone who doesn't bing drink at conferences to cope.
It feels like a very big problem, that I am very alone in solving. Because the answer is ALWAYS start your own hospital. And frankly, that is a terrible answer.
I have ideas but...trying to get people together to form a more cooperative type work environment requires...people to cooperate. And if 25 years in vet med has taught me anything...it is that people don't really want to cooperate. They want to be right.
My mom is a staff member in an optometrist's office. It was an independent practice for 20 years before the owner sold it to a PE-owned corporate entity in 2020. Since the new management took over, it's been a burnout machine. Management actually tells employees that they're not in the business of healthcare, they're in the business of retail (because their profits come from selling glasses and contacts). They also cut staff hours to minimize their labor costs, so the office is constantly operating without enough workers to adequately serve the number of patients on the schedule.
My mom, who is a few years from retirement, is deeply demoralized. She loved this job and derived a lot of satisfaction from helping people in her community see better! But now she feels taken for granted, overworked, and disillusioned with the greed of her corporate overlords (who, of course, manage according to financial data and have never met anyone who works in this office or any of their patients).
I'm sorry to hear this is happening in veterinary medicine too. We have three senior rescue cats, and are so grateful for the wonderful vets who take care of them.
PE has invaded the dentists, the FUNERAL HOMES...everything. It's the enshitification of all of our services.
Both of these examples are insane to me! I am vaguely aware of private equity buying and ruining a lot of things, but I had no idea it extended to things like vet med and optometry. How do those businesses or industries come back from that without PE burning it to the ground first!?
Cooperatives. A business model where people in a community have GP and urgent care in a cooperative model.
It is doable, I've got the business model...but like I said...in order for a cooperative to work, people need to cooperate.
From what I know about the private equity business, the typical strategy is to pool a bunch of money from investors, use it to acquire a bunch of small/independent businesses in the same industry, and consolidate as much of their operations as possible to reduce expenses and increase profits (you can buy supplies/inventory at reduced prices because of high volume, educe headcount by concentrating certain responsibilities for all of the offices in one role, etc.). Consolidation also reduces local competition, which generates more revenue for the dominant player. The end game is *usually* to then sell that consolidated business entity to a buyer for enough money that the PE outfit delivers returns to their investors (although I guess in some cases the PE entity retains ownership because the revenue is worth it to them).
How do we stop/discourage that? I think it's really complicated. PE often swoops into industries where individual business owners are struggling to stay afloat (often a person who is a great doctor may not be a great business owner -- different skill sets, both highly demanding!). And there are tons of factors that go into that; skyrocketing commercial rent prices, other costs increasing, labor market challenges, lack of a successor to take over when the business owner retires, etc. etc. I think there probably needs to be more done to support small independent businesses from a policy standpoint, and/or to restrict the kind of large-scale acquisition/consolidation that makes PE's business model lucrative.
This is exactly vet med. I just read today that a corporate/PE practice pays about 1/5 of what a private hospital pays for vaccines. How can a private company compete?
Our saving grace is that most PE is staggeringly bad at running vet hospitals. They can't keep vets and the turnover basically eats all their savings from scale.
Similar - I have two relatives who are Chiropractors and both went to work in chain offices as first jobs and it was insane. In the early 2010's the budgeted time for each patient was 5 minutes - she was scheduled to treat12 patients per hour. By 2020 it was down to three. Both only stayed long enough to make a business plan and branch out into their own practice. Obviously being a small-business owner is a very different challenge than being a care provider, but preferable to seeing so many patients a day that it's just a blur.
That is wild, and my mom talks about the same thing. Her employer budgets like 10 minutes for an eye exam, which is fine if you're just doing a routine checkup for someone who has no vision problems, or whose glasses prescription hasn't changed. But as soon as someone has an issue that needs diagnosing, it's not enough time. And forget about sticking to the schedule if there is even ONE elderly patient coming in -- not only do they move more slowly and take longer to complete diagnostics, but often they are lonely, and they relish the chance to chat with someone who cares for their well-being. It makes me so angry/frustrated that some number cruncher on Wall Street ignores all of that important human context and limits those interactions because they only care about maximizing their profits.
I recommend this recent book on PE: These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs--And Wrecks--America by Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
https://bookshop.org/p/books/these-are-the-plunderers-how-private-equity-runs-and-wrecks-america-joshua-rosner/18982999?ean=9781982191290
I know this doesn't address the system-wide problems in vet med, but as a frequent flyer at my vet (2 medically needy dogs, 1 senior dog, 1 cat), would you be willing to share a few insights as to how owners can support you and your colleagues more effectively? The vets I have dealt with in the past have gone above and beyond to support and guide the choices I have made as a pet owner and my animals would be dead or in much worse shape today without their guidance. I have been lucky in that I have a wonderful DVM-owned hospital and a large university-owned hospital in close proximity to me, so I haven't had to get care through a chain. Other than like, being polite and collaborative, and maybe bringing donuts for the office when we can, if you have any insights into how pet owners can do better I would be all ears.
There's actually a ton of great advice in this pod I did with Karen Fine re: all the ways vet medicine is broken (and why) https://crooked.com/podcast/my-industry-is-failing-veterinary-medicine-edition-with-karen-fine/
that was a great podcast. Dr. Fine is amazing.
There are a couple of things that help...
1) Be nice to the customer service reps.
2) Leave positive google reviews at the practice calling out individuals by name. If you see a negative or mean review, please call that person out in a way that is safe for you. We have been bullied to death.
3) Buy your drugs through us. The amount of unpaid labor that Chewy and PetMeds gets out of veterinarians is...discouraging. Seriously...it is hours of our time every week.
4) On your town FB page when you see someone saying that "vets are so expensive" pipe up and defend us. The average paid vets make half of what the lowest paid MDs make and we are held to the same standards of medical care. Unless you are seeing the practice owner, the vet you are seeing is AT MOST gonna see 22% of the bill in front of you. It isn't the associates that are raking in the dough for the amount of work we do.
5) if we say, please, your pet needs trazadone/gabapentin/clonidine so that we can work safely, say yes. Then...spread the word on social media that having a vet experience where no one was at risk of getting bit is worth putting your pet on meds!
6) Learn about NOMV and the rates of suicide in our profession. It's weekly. And the professional in front of you might have just lost a colleague. It's hard to express how that suicide rate reverberates in the survivors.
And letters to us get passed around and saved, long past the time when the donuts are stale and stick on the counter. Write a note thanking the people who were in your appointment. We put them up in the back and re-read them...a LOT.
This is great info, thank you so much for taking the time to write it up. You’ve given me some things to think about and some concrete action steps, I appreciate that so much.
I was wondering where the vet med folks were at in this conversation! Vet med is definitely on fire in many different ways. I love it but after 16 years I had to step away. Going to a different clinic is definitely not a good solution. It’s an industry wide/cultural problem.
I was in a passion job until December, but the rare one that historically tried to protect work-life balance. We weren't supposed to work *too* many hours. When we were on vacation, we were on vacation (if the boss saw you send an email or pop into slack, you were reminded to go be on vacation). But it was nonetheless a burnout factory because management was lousy.
There was like one good manager in each department and they were always the person who was relied on to fix what was broken but not given the authority to keep it from getting broken to begin with. Upper management set the policies, and the policies constantly changed without ever consulting the people doing the work day to day or offering any solid rationales for the changes. More than once the way a policy change was conveyed to non-management was when we were essentially told we'd been doing it wrong for two weeks since a policy change we hadn't been told about.
Unless you were a manager, your expertise was not appreciated -- you were to unquestioningly do the bidding of managers, even though in many cases they were less experienced/credentialed/qualified than non-managers. (These sharp distinctions between managers and non-managers showed up when non-managers dared to unionize. Top management saw that as a personal insult and mentally divided the company into two teams, even though to that point a lot of the managerial titles had been handed out kind of haphazardly so there wasn't a ton of distinction.) It's amazing the way you can not be working outrageous hours and have plenty of vacation time and be in a passion job and love your immediate coworkers and still have the soul absolutely sucked out of you every single day.
Wow! You could be describing nearly every job I've ever had. And your last sentence...phew...that is exactly the feeling. Even when you're doing work you love, it sucks the life out of you when you're not supported, appreciated, and given adequate authority or autonomy.
I worked for a couple years a copy editor for scientific manuscripts, and the work itself was fine but the company I “freelanced for” (middle man between freelancers and the journals) was just AWFUL to interact with. Literally exclusively negative feedback (there was a spreadsheet with everyone’s mistakes in it). 48 h turnaround. I’ve published academic papers! That shit moves so slowly! There is no need to set arbitrary short deadlines for the freelancers! Copy editors in general get so little respect and it’s just, as you say, soul sucking.
People feel SO PERSONALLY victimized when someone has the nerve to stand up and say "this is too much for all of us." Seems like stockholm syndrome.
I've been both that employee and that manager — absolutely enraged when someone else wouldn't see how hard I was working and realize they'd better shut up and get back to it. It's so toxic and sometimes you don't even know you're doing it until you finally hit your own wall.
It's the MINDSET that work matters above all else and I think your story really proves it.
Congrats on getting out!
I’m surprised to not see more health care workers commenting here. Healthcare is a burnout extravaganza no matter where you work. I worked in family medicine for three years and while I was there eleven other providers came and went. It’s madness. Now I’m in a “passion” job in sexual/repro health and TBH I do love it but every single person is underpaid and particularly among the non-licensed support staff it’s basically just a rotating door with folks leaving after 6-12 months. The other thing about passion jobs is that folks coming in often put the org up on a pedestal and then are disappointed to find that we have all the same workplace problems as everyone else 🙃
Yes! I am a nurse and the level of burnout I felt in 2019 when I left was life altering... and I dodged the 2020 draft of horrors. I went into another "passion" job with a non-profit and got paid nothing and worked so much. I now work for the government and am finding balance but it is hard. I think any caring field lends itself to burnout but knowing someone can (and this literally does happen) die if you don't pick up the slack is an attack on your humanity. It is just not sustainable.
I was scrolling to find fellow health care workers here, because it literally feels like the safety net of this work is frayed down to threads. I'm an OT working in a SNF and like many in this setting, have been doing this for years because i adore working with older people. I loathe productivity requirements, being forced to pick up patients for therapy simply to bill their insurance, and the constant difficulty of trying to do a job with no supplies (because administrators don't want to spend money on stuff that people actually need--of course they will happily take people's money though). And it's like that everywhere.
I was also scrolling looking for healthcare - it’s so hard not to stay late or to take lunches because you can see a direct and significant impact of you Not Doing Thé Thing Right Now (I work in a rapidly progressive neurological diagnosis so everything does feel now or never with severe impacts of care delays… but also there aren’t enough staff! And no one believes that and just keeps asking us to be more efficient …. When people facing devestating circumstances can’t (and shouldn’t!) be efficiencies … and if I leave, it’s so much worse for the people I care about so much.
Ugh!
I'm a pediatric subspecialty physician in an academic hospital system. My job is rife with difficult cases and sad decisions, but it's a passion job for me. Because I can essentially only have this job at a big academic center, my pay/benefits are at the mercy of the system and my vacation time is laughable. Everyone knows pediatrics is undercompensated compared to other medical specialties but you're just supposed to be fine with it, because of your passion for the job.
I try to do my best to model boundaries for my trainees - I work better in the evening/night, but that doesn't mean they should respond to emails after hours. I talk about plans to have fun and ways to have a good work life and a restorative home life. I hope I can keep this up. We have the same issue with licensed and non-licensed support staff, and I wish we had more continuity. We have had some great folks come through who I wish could stay but are truly undervalued.
I forgot to write all the difficult decisions that have to be made because of the system. Logging into the system after hours to figure out what antibiotic a parent can afford for their kid because the standard one isn't covered. Peer to peers for denied standard of care imaging. Children whose insurance isn't accepted, or who don't have insurance and don't qualify for charity care. All these things weigh on you.
YES. If only it were as simple as evaluate > diagnose > treat.
I was also scrolling for healthcare like where my peeps!! I work at a large metro-area health department. After all of the blather about strengthening local public health to be ready for the next pandemic, we lost revenue during Covid and things are actually worse now. I love what I do but it’s hard to feel like my work means something when we are not adequately compensated and management could really care less. I do my best to push back and make things sustainable for me but there is huge social pressure to never miss work no matter how sick you are - I still struggle with this.
Ha! I went from SRH to healthcare! SRH ruined my mental health, and I love my job at a health system. I am not a medical provider though, so my experience working in healthcare is completely and totally different. I feel so horribly for medical providers. I support their work in various ways, and see how tied their hands are in terms of the care they want to be a able to provide, and the care they can actually provide in the confines of the system they must operate within.
I work in a vocational rehab for clients with TBIs and it is the same. Everyone who works there adores the clients and the work for the most part, but after a big merger there's no humanity left. Some of the managers are great, but things like dress codes and "tardies" for an underpaid job like this are just demoralizing. And it's no surprise that it's a rotating door, but no one seems to care enough to fix it.
I know I’m late to the party but I am another burnt out healthcare worker. I am a hospital nurse of barely two years and my mental health is has been significantly affected by my career.
Spouse of an ER doc here! The burnout is real. When I read that article about moral injury, though, that was an eye opener.
What saves me from burnout is I do the maximum amount I want to do, which some weeks is the bare minimum. When I got a new job with a very "passionate" boss, I worried that my clear boundaries (I don't have outlook alerts on my phone, sorry) would read as not caring. But I just listen to feedback. As long as my boss and coworkers think I'm doing a good job, I tend to worry much less about how many hours I applied myself that week. This shift in focus to external results, external feedback vs the guilt loop in my head helps me just work less. and better!
And finally, just a few minutes before reading this piece I saw this post script in an email signature from a Chief of Staff of a City Agency (govt can often be low paying "passion work")
"Please know that I respect boundaries around personal time, well-being, caretaking, and rest. If my email reaches you during these moments, please prioritize your time and respond when it's convenient for you. I encourage you to prioritize self-care over immediate email responses. Rest assured, I am committed to the same principle."
I love it, especially from someone at the top.