The Issue of Perpetual Burnout
Lately I’ve been tired. Very tired. Between classes, studying in the library, and hanging out with friends, the college experience has been unenviably exhausting. This weekend I came home to catch my breath and get way from it all, but not without considering my current situation.
I firmly believe that I’m not the only person that feels this way. We go to bed late, get up early, work all day, and repeat the cycle over and over again until we have nothing left to give.
Burnout, according to Google, is defined as, “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” In my mind, burnout is a moment of exhaustion where I cannot go on any longer. It is the singular moment when the last straw breaks my back. But if I’m being entirely honest, even though I’ve been busy, I’ve not actually been working to the point of exhaustion, yet for some reason I still feel this way. I wonder if instead of burnout being a singular collapse, if it can also be a lifestyle? Is is possible to live life in a perpetual state of burnout?
In GenChem 1, we recently started a chapter about quantum mechanics, learning about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a moving particle at the same time. Although this seems entirely unrelated to this issue of burnout, please bear with me. What if this same principle can be applied to our everyday lives? If we’re entirely focused on where we’re going in life, it is entirely impossible to know where we are in the present moment. If we are concerned about what life looks like next week, next year, and in the next decade, then we lose focus of what is happening right before our very eyes.
I’ll admit that I’ve struggled with this for as long as I can remember. In middle school I used to save all of my writing assignments until the last moment, making arrangements, in advance, to set time aside to complete the work. As a sophomore in high school I planned out every college course I wanted to take before graduation, making tables and graphs to reflect my GPA and where I needed to improve. And even now as a freshman in college, I’ve spent countless hours thinking about what next summer looks like: whether I’ll be working or taking summer classes, or both! I’ve deeply consider what I want my life to look like in the next decade. And all of this planning and preparing has left me exhausted. Maybe even burnout.
This is where the connection is made between inspiration and perpetual lack of motivation. As we push ourselves artificially beyond our limits, we begin to lose a sense of who we are right now. Our inspiration fades away, and we are left disinterested with the present.
I know this personally and profoundly. The more I think about the future, the worse my grades fall. The more time I spend researching future careers, the less interested I become in my actual coursework. My inspiration has faded to nearly nothing, and in that I’ve become burnt out.
Perhaps you’ve felt this same way. And if so, then I ask you this: What inspires you? What can you do to become more present in the moment? What makes you stop worrying about inflation or the future of your dead-end job?
This looks different for everyone, but I know that my balance has been off lately. The allocation of my time has been messed up, and as a result, my grades have slumped. I need to be present in the moment, inspired to do what I love today, before I start thinking about life beyond college. Living in a perpetual state of burnout changes the way we see the world. It is entirely necessary to identify these issues today, before our lives adapt to this new, soulless way of living tomorrow.