Reframe Your Inbox (Flickers of Burnout Edition)

Hey everyone—let’s get right to it. Here are four things for this week: 1) some reflections on burnout; 2) an excerpt from my new article; 3) a brief book-related tidbit; and 4) a few pieces of high-quality internet content.

FIRST THING

As far as lockdown living goes, Erin and I are in a fortunate position. We have space to move around. We have a balcony. We have the resources to keep our fridge stocked and ourselves comfortable. We have stable jobs that allow us to work from home indefinitely. We have our health, and we have access to health care if we need it. We have each other for company, for support, and for many laughs every day. We have only ourselves to entertain and worry about. On balance, of course, we would choose not being in lockdown over being in lockdown, but we’re pretty lucky to be in the situation we are.

Even so, the last few months have proven tricky. In March, I wrote about how I was finding it difficult to carve out space to think. Last week I discussed my tendency to set wildly unrealistic expectations for what I can accomplish in a given amount of time. In the new foreword to Reframe the Day, I listed some of different ways in which I’m struggling to follow the practices I write about in the book. These challenges, along with my usual (and nearly always self-imposed) burden of trying to do too much, have been leading me directly down the path to burnout.

I’ve felt burnout plenty of times, and over the years I’ve gotten slightly better about recognizing its symptoms, from general irritability and exhaustion, to a tendency to greet new ideas, projects, or opportunities with instinctive skepticism, even cynicism, rather than open-mindedness or enthusiasm. Whenever I feel the internal fire (why do we use so many flame-related metaphors to describe work motivation?) start to diminish, I know that whatever I’m doing is unsustainable, and something will have to change.

Over the past month or so, as the early flickers of book-launch-plus-day-job-plus-lockdown burnout have begun to grow into sustained flames, I’ve tried to take steps to resist those flames while keeping my own fire burning (seriously—too much fire imagery). I’ve been saying “no” to new requests and declining potential commitments. I’ve been taking vacation days here and there so I can focus on one thing at a time. I’ve been trying to lower my expectations of my own productivity and make a conscious effort to spend time doing things that recharge me.

Yet for much of the past few weeks, I’ve also been spending every free moment either working on, or thinking about working on, miscellaneous book-related tasks—responding to emails, pitching to reviewers, crafting social media posts, sending out review copies, and so forth. This is a privileged position to be in, especially in our current moment. Plus, all of these activities are a necessary part of the promotion process, and for the most part, they’re enjoyable. But they’re wearing me down, and I’m increasingly seeing them as tiresome burdens, rather than the exciting opportunities they are.

One morning last week, I was really not feeling motivated to do any of this stuff. So I decided to put it all aside and instead spend a couple hours doing something I hadn’t done in a while: writing. Specifically, writing about something completely unrelated to Reframe the Day. Within a half-hour of starting a new article, I felt recharged and reinvigorated. I was fired up (there’s that fire again)—not just to continue the article I was working on, but even to return to all of the other tasks and responsibilities that had been weighing on me so heavily just a short time before.

I realized that I’d been using book tasks as an internal excuse not to start writing something new, which in turn left me feeling impatient with myself, defeated by what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance,” and, of course, increasingly exhausted and burned out. Then I spent some time writing, and the energy and motivation (and fire) came roaring back. It was like flipping a switch (on a gas-powered fireplace, you might say).

Working on that article didn’t fix anything, of course. Eventually, I think, the only “cure” for burnout will be to do less—ideally nothing at all—for a sustained period of time, not just a morning or a long weekend. But it was a timely reminder of the simple power that comes from taking a break, from spending some time creating, from devoting effort and concentration to a craft. It was also a great reminder of another way I feel extraordinarily fortunate: to have access to a craft that fulfills me, and to have the time and resources to devote to it.

SECOND THING

Reading about Barack Obama on the internet can take you to some strange and unsettling places. There are the conspiracies. There’s the vitriol. The resentment. The demonization and dehumanization. Follow these threads long enough, and you can find yourself in a pretty bleak corner of the web (or, perhaps, in the Oval Office).

But digging into the online archives of Obama-related content can also bring joy and inspiration. It can make you wistful and nostalgic. You’ll find videos that make you smile, videos that make you cry, and videos that make you smile even as you’re crying. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the past couple of weeks scanning the electronic universe of Obama content, and it’s been amazing. The result of those hours is the article I recently published on Medium: Life Advice from Barack Obama (Part I). Here’s an excerpt:

The job of president has (traditionally) required a lot of reading of a lot of different types of content. By default, though, the job doesn’t leave much time for reading books. And, one might assume, any spare time that is available for reading books would be consumed by material directly related to the job — a biography of a predecessor, perhaps, or a detailed look at a particular moment in history. Information and facts, in other words. Not stories. Not fiction. Not fantasy.

Yet throughout his time in office, President Obama read all sorts of books, including novels. “Most every night in the White House,” Michiko Kakutani reported in The New York Times, Obama “would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction… to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction.” In Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis observed that the desk in Obama’s private White House study was “piled high with novels.” Obama’s annual book lists have always included more than just nonfiction.

By all accounts, Obama’s interest in fiction predated not just his presidency but his entire political career. As a student at Occidental College, Craig Fehrman wrote recently in Literary Hub, “Obama read fiction because he wanted to experience psychological interiority.” In the mid-80s, Fehrman noted, Obama even “started writing fiction of his own, eventually completing several stories he shared with his fellow organizers.”

Why would this interest in fiction follow him to the White House? Obama explained in a two-part conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson (who he endearingly calls one of his “pen pals”) published in The New York Review of Books. “When I think about how I understand my role as ‘citizen,’ setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels,” Obama said. “It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”

During his presidency, “fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and was a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country,” Obama told the Times. “I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction. It exercises those muscles.”

You can read the full article on Medium: Life Advice from Barack Obama (Part I).

THIRD THING

Earlier this month, I had a great conversation with Gregg Clunis for his podcast, “Tiny Leaps, Big Changes.” Check out part 1 of our conversation here and part 2 here (or just search for “Tiny Leaps” wherever you get your podcasts). Looking for more Reframe the Day content? It’s all on my website.

FOURTH THING(S)

“The perceived legitimacy of protest and dissent is shaped by who is doing the protesting. Screaming, gun-toting white people can demonstrate with little resistance. Mourning black people, on the other hand, are liable to face state violence.” That’s Jamelle Bouie in his latest newsletter.

“The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s elite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.” That’s Evan Osnos in The New Yorker. (For more on this, check out part six of my “radical rethink” series.)

“I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn’t just endanger businesses without even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board terminations. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off. There’s a right way and wrong way to do this.” The Onion gets it just right.

As always, thanks for reading.

—Adam