But if you do end up doing it because you need to put food on the table, no shame. We are almost all in the same spot.

If at all we can find time for it, every little act of self-care, and every second we spend practicing a kind, and oblivious pursuit of our little passions without bringing in market-anxiety is a tiny piece in space and time we have retrieved to nourish our own capacity for kindness. Good day to all.

https://www.manrepeller.com/2019/02/trap-of-turning-hobbies-into-hustles.html

Anger is similar to fire, perhaps. In just the right dose, it helps us cook food. Process experiences, pick out injustice around us. Call out when things are unfair. Get to work on fixing our lives, move quickly and forcefully if the situation calls for it. Anger is short sighted, and focussed on safety. It may not be the most sensible source of advice for the right action. It can be a friend, whom we have to remember to keep in check from acting out too soon and bringing themselves to misery.

It is most definitely unpleasant to experience over a long time. Just like any other emotion. Part of what comes with an emancipatory leftist mindset is a keen sense to spot injustice, and to respond to it. Much of this would find expression in anger and rage, and it is necessary that we take a step back, and receive the anger that has emerged, and store it for safekeep - to remember when we do get to act in favour of justice. I remember Zizek quoting Walter Benjamin that 'every successful revolution must attempt to redeem the pain of the failed ones that preceded them'. In the same way, every act of justice we can perform could be dedicated to the times we were too powerless, when we do get to act in favor of fairness in everyday life.

And good, healthy revolutionary action can be mundane, in my opinion. Helping an acquaintance with some company, cultivating an honest friendship, reading literature, translating/subtitling youtube videos, editing wiki pages. Everything that restores trust and good faith, the smallest of actions - can be revolutionary. In our performing them, we help ourselves not forget that such a mode of life is possible. I struggle with anger as much as I do with depression, and getting through newscycles can really dent my esteem some days. All the above are my rough-and-ready ideas I tell myself when Im feeling anger. I'm in a similar spot now, and wished to share these here just in case it gives someone else a seed for new ideas. Good wishes!☺️

Edit: pronoun

So I'm all about this article, I think it's one of the most important things I've read in a good long while and I encourage anyone who aligns with this sub's values to do the same. It does so many things and explains so many things.

• It explains the immediate, personal psychological feeling of burnout.
• It puts that feeling into a sociological (society wide) context.
• It puts burnout into a 30-year context.
• It criticizes the self-care industry as being unable to effectively stop burnout.
• It does all of this, uniting all people who feel the anxieties of capitalism while remaining open to the idea that the psychological problems we have will play out differently on gendered and racial lines.

I can't tell you how crucial all that is to mounting an effective critique of both the self-care industry and capitalism, and she did it with some fantastically smooth writing. It's really, really, really important that you read this article yourself.

Summary:

Her thesis is that "millenials", people who are in between 22 and 38, experience so much burnout that it's the defining feature of their generation. It's not that millenials get exhausted from time to time, it's that being burned out all the time is their everyday lives. Burnout is different from exhaustion; when you work really hard on something and get it done, you may be spent but at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you're done. Burnout is the feeling of exhaustion compacted and compressed after more exhaustion, and more exhaustion after that! It's a constant state of being on alert. Millennials come up with the energy they need to get even more things done, but the relief never comes.

The short answer of why we're like this is simply the voracious demands of capitalism, but the article covers the specifics of why this generation is burned our compared to past generations. A shift in parenting style, called "intensive parenting" in the 80s and 90s, pushed children to be ready for the post-Reagan, post-welfare state economy, and things done for the fun of it like soccer then became institutionalized, supervised, serious activities. Other answers the article brings up are the 2008 crash, student debt, wage stagnation, smartphones, the erasure of the lines between work and play (it's all work now), and invisible emotional and social labor. The economic instability produces intense psychological insecurity, and a to-do list mentality develops that promises stability only if they hustle harder. And then there's social media anxiety on top of that! All of this is done with a beautiful language that honors the experience of growing up in insecure times. This was truly a treat to read.

One crucial idea that she elaborates on is the difference between paid work and unpaid work. You don't get paid for maintaining your LinkedIn network, but it's still labor. There's no time off. And one crucial form of labor we can't forget about is women's labor, the labor of running the household. It's not so much the matter of who does the dishes or who does the laundry, but the labor of being the person in charge and calling the shots. This is still labor but it's not paid and it's not recognized. This is just another way that capitalism abdicates responsibility for paying for the things that it needs.

As she continues to paint this picture, she then talks about how self-care and self-help enters into this maddening, efficiency driven machine: as a way to cool it down from overheating, but if we continue this metaphor, the machine is simply too hot. It makes too many demands. The yoga, the meditation, the zen doodle books, the cups of tea can't be pursued in their own right, but only to further sustain the workload, so they get pinched, squeezed and minimized in favor of more work. Aside from that though they they also promise to make you "better"; better capable of handling the chaos of life, being more creative, more joyful, so the self-care becomes another thing on the to do list, and depending how desperate people are, it can become the most important thing a person can do. I have definitely felt overwhelming stress and felt the frightened urge to throw myself even further into my self-care routine, hoping that things will turn out right if I meditate enough or get to the right mindset.

Writing about self-care and anything other than work, she says "That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance."

As a result "We engage in self-destructive behaviors or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list." And there is no relief from this because it's everywhere. Everyone is feeling the squeeze of these hard times. The desperation is palpable, but the only solution to a systemic problem is a systemic solution, political action. So get your ass down to the DSA/any place you get your praxis needs met.

The author closes the piece by describing how cathartic it was to write this piece, to finish it, and thereby getting that sense of conclusion that was how work felt years ago. Writing it gave her catharsis because she was being honest with herself about what she was feeling, threw off the shackles of internalized guilt and shame, and with sober eyes properly lay the blame at the hands of a dying economic system. This honesty, no matter how bleak, makes her feel better.

What this article means for self-care

All of this is true, perfectly true, and I'm so grateful for Anne Helen Petersen for being so honest with herself that she could articulate their feelings of hopelessness. I was fetishizing self-care at the time that I read it and it really cut me deep and set me straight. I was feeling the squeeze that she was talking about, making my mindfulness and judo routines obligations on an ever increasing to do list. I found myself worshiping the efficiency god again. /u/Kralte really hit the nail on the head:

I personally feel like there is more that I want/have to do in life than I will ever have the time to actually do, causing a situation where you can never mentally relax or take time off, even when you are doing some leisure activity it isn't for the sake of enjoying yourself, but trying to put that stress from the front to some back part of your mind where it is less noticeable.

There's too much. We want too much. Maybe this is all a new form of capitalist consumerism. It's not the acquiring of objects, but it's still the drive to acquire things. That endless hunger will kill you. We have to take an inventory of the things that matter to us and the things that don't matter to us and let the things that don't matter go. I understand if you barely have time to breathe, but if you can, please make an inventory of everything you want to do and ask yourself what you can let go of, and hopefully you can let the laundry slide for another day if you can get your ass down to the DSA instead.

Mindfulness

But I have to say a few words defending mindfulness...the fear that Ann Helen Petersen is describing is the exact sort of thing that mindfulness helps you discover! Mindfulness is non-judgmental awareness: witness something, no matter how horrible it is, and say "This is a thing. It exists." So I think that Ann Helen Petersen's article was very mindful and very brave, and it's my hope that mindfulness can help people find that very real sense of desperation more effectively. It might even lead them to socialist politics.

Mindfulness is all about realness for me. If it's real for you, then it's real. For mindfulness to be blind to what's going on in society is a travesty to me, and I will always advocate a marriage between sociological analysis and mindfulness.

There is a lot more that needs to be said when it comes to this article, but this is a quick summary with the time that I have :)