Narcotics That Lead to Burnout
The Allure of Nostalgia and Despair in the American Workplace
Your job can be relentless. But being a person is even harder when you’re addicted to an idealized past and a despairing future. So says a recent book by Dr. Jamie K. Smith entitled How to Inhabit Time.
The driving question of this book—and of this week’s Mode/Switch—is not just “Where am I?” but “When am I?
Knowing your WHEN, as Jamie says, won’t make work easier. But it will rehab you from the addictions that lead to burnout and open you to the gifts that come with toil.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Craig: Two rising health communication professionals in the midst of the pandemic, one out in the northwest, one in Chicago, both doing med center intake in conditions of relentless toil. How does your book talk to them?
Jamie: It's an incredible thing what some folks carry in their work. So often we are trying to articulate deep affirmations of the goodness of work, but those seem blind to the fact that work is experienced like toil. What's most jarring and worrisome, of course, is when entire sectors or industries or professions seem to be unremitting toil. That is a sign that we have built bad institutions.
There is a certain sense in which, in this vale of tears, toil is not unexpected. It's not even unnatural. It comes with the warp and woof of a mortal life.
I think we have to figure out a way to distinguish that from toil that is systemic, because we have built institutions and systems that happily allow the burden to be borne by a few, while the rest of us enjoy our comfort. That’s not just a question of personal fortitude.
Craig: What I appreciate in your answer is that you’ve redirected it from, “What should this individual do?” to, “What are systems doing to that individual?”
Jamie: Moving to that systemic level is kind of unhelpful, because those who are experiencing the toil are often are not the ones who have the agency to shape the environments in which they work. It is still relevant to ask, “What are the resources for withstanding this?”
Craig: Your book suggests there are resources in wisdom literature.
Jamie: I think the teacher who wrote Ecclesiastes starts by counseling, “There is nothing new under the sun, and welcome to mortality.” And maybe that's a gift insofar as it's liberated from idealism. Now, maybe that's an old-man thing to say. But I think sometimes it's precisely our idealism that makes us most prone to burnout. To be gifted with a realism comes with capacity to not be so unsettled by the gap between what we were hoping and what's the case.
Craig: What’s really strange in Ecclesiastes is how toil and joy come together.
Jamie: Yeah, I think the teacher of Ecclesiastes is saying, “If you wake up to the ephemerality of our world—it frees you to be attuned to the gifts that are carried in it as well.”
Craig: When I find something that feels like gift, I want it to keep being gift. I’d like it to stay the same forever.
Jamie: I think the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is primarily, “Don’t cling to things and over-expect from them.” If you can get to a place where you're not clinging to things, you have a more openhanded approach. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, and your world isn't rocked by toil.
Craig: Are you talking about anything more than professional resilience?
Jamie: I think that [what I’m talking about is] different than, say, grit. I think grit is a kind of cult of self-sufficiency and willpower. Ecclesiastes holds out a way of cultivated dependence and receptivity.
Grit is a kind of cult of self-sufficiency and willpower. Ecclesiastes holds out a way of cultivated dependence and receptivity.
Craig: I like that pairing of gift across from grit. In today’s workplaces, Boomers, Xers, Millennials, and Zs each cling to a bygone era when things were better than they are now. “Back in the 50s and 60s, corporations really cared for their employees.” Or, “In the 80s, we could pay off our tuition.” “In the 90s, there was a surplus,” etc. I get it. It’s hard to avoid the hunch that things used to be better than they are now. But, geez, that gets tiresome.
Jamie: Nostalgia is a particularly alluring drug for us right now. You see this in our popular culture: Stranger Things cycles us back to the 80s.
What I think is tempting about nostalgia is that you basically get to invent a past. So, for me, the problem with nostalgia isn't what it remembers. The problem is what it forgets. This mythology of it-was-better-when is a refusing our fundamental call to live forwards and to keep building institutions and workplaces for the now, for the present. Being faithful now is much, much harder than remembering an imagined past.
Craig: Your book has three phrases in its subtitle: understanding the past, facing the future, living faithfully now. That's what you’re talking about here, too.
Jamie: I translate those into the three beats of inhabiting time well: reckoning, discernment and hope. The reckoning is, “What do we do with the history? How do we get thrown into this present? What got us here?” But the whole point then is to discern: “What are we called to? How are we called to live out of vocation, a calling? What does the world need of us today?” And then, we have to carry that forward into a future. “What does it look like to be faithful moving forward? The hope piece is animated by a vision of what a flourishing creation would look like, what a fullness and wholeness for our work, our lives, our shared commitments would look like. That’s the magnet that pulls us out. I've been picking on nostalgia. I think despair is an equally powerful narcotic today. The refusal of hope shuts down imaginative possibilities.
Craig: One the young professionals I've talked to noted that some of his coworkers and colleagues had a habit of what he called optimistic nihilism. They were basically despairing, but they were getting as much as they could in the moment. “Yeah, capitalism sucks, but you know, I gotta get mine.”
Jamie: I think we've heard this before: “Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow we die.” What worries me about that is not just that I think it's wrong about the world. I think it's corrosive of the human. It’s a way of living that eats away at what in us longs for fullness and significance and care and solidarity and justice. It just strikes me as ultimately unsustainable from an existential point of view, and I do think that that often sort of leads to a certain kind of crisis right: “Oh, all the acquisition and consumption that was going to entertain me in the meantime of our demise—it turns out that doesn’t really work.”
Despair is a powerful narcotic today. The refusal of hope shuts down imaginative possibilities.
Craig: I’m thinking about those times when I have felt flippant toward everyday life and work. I can manage that for a bit, but it's hard work to be flippant.
Jamie: The writer David Foster Wallace used to say that irony was an emergency measure that we turned into our staid everyday condition. We think it’s a shield, but it turns into a cage. I think it explains a lot of anxiety and despair amongst folks.
Craig: Something I've learned from talking with young and rising professionals, people in their first decade of work, is that not infrequently, they live and work with a deeper sense of dread than I did when I was in my first decade of work. How would you advise rising professionals to love their work and their lives, even though they know there’s a possibility of losing both? The actuality of losing both.
Jamie: Yeah. Wow, great question. I think the place you're coming from is exactly right, by the way. As much as we might be critical of it-was-better-when nostalgia—that doesn’t mean there aren't changes in history, right? We are in a different moment. And I'm with you: I can't imagine being 25 today.
To the question of how to love your work when you know you'll lose it--
Craig: Let me ask a follow-up. I see two routes that people take on this in the contemporary discourse on work. One is, find work you love. The second is, just don’t love your work, ‘cuz it’ll break your heart.
Jamie: I'm very sympathetic to those who are saying “Hmm, I keep being told to love my work, but it doesn't seem to love me back.” I just want to say I get that. There's a kind of privilege that's not available to so many people for whom work is toil, right? Work is the way to pay the rent: “How can I love slinging tacos at Taco Bell?”
At the same time, such moments of significant joy and meaning are bound up with my work, so I don't want to deny that possibility. I'm thinking of a friend who's a carpenter. There are many days I'm jealous of his work. He's creating spaces that people are living in and he's shaping conditions of possibility for relationship and conviviality and aesthetic beauty.
It seems to me that we are probably best poised to love our work if we are loved and love in spaces outside of our work. So I think one of the things that worries me is discourse that would make work more all-consuming than it should ever be. Basically, Google and Facebook don't ever want you to go home. So, they give you an entire life that you could live in the office. That's the totalitarian experience of work that we should be nervous about.
I am best in a place to both enjoy my work and absorb the toil of it when I am finding love and meaning outside of that, in friendships, relationships, church communities of other sorts. I have the least margin to deal with toil at work if I am not sustaining and investing in the friendships and relationships that remind me that my value does not come from my work.
That's a long way of saying, I don't know if the answer is internal to work. If our work gobbles up everything such that we don't have space and margin in our lives—this god is asking too much of us.
I can enjoy my work and absorb its toil when I am finding love and meaning outside of my work.
Craig: Last question. Has anything surprised you in today’s conversation, as you’ve directed the insights of your book towards an audience of rising professionals?
Jamie: Maybe it’s helpful for young professionals to know, we see how hard it is for you. I want to affirm and confirm the challenges and difficulties that they're experiencing. Hopefully there's a certain solidarity that arises from that.
The other thing I'll say is, we owe you a better world. We made the world that these young professionals inhabit. And I want to say, I'm sorry. We owe you more than the burden of your being authentic. It’s on us to seek you out, to be in relationship with you, listening to you, and if we can, offering you gifts from later seasons in a life.
Craig: Thank you, Jamie, for keeping the gift in motion.
Jamie: Great questions. Thanks for the conversation.
Who I’m Learning From
