Burnout

By Kira Carrington

It’s like an old friend for so many, that feeling of bone-deep tiredness, the urge to go back to bed and sleep for another ten hours- two hours after getting out of bed. The need to go back to sleep or else chug two energy drinks after going to one class. Constantly hearing your friends talk about how tired they are (we’re all tired!).

As uni students, as former high school students, as people on the planet, we all likely know the feeling of being burnt out. It’s become a staple of the university experience, just another thing we all must live with and somehow battle through to get our degree. We put in hours of research, hours of note taking, hours of creating, learning skills from the ground up and honing them until we have a piece of paper that tells us we can now get paid for them.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to realise how much we do in these 3-to-4 years, we can only think about what we have to do next, but it’s a tremendous amount. On top of it all, we still have to work to live. Precariously balancing uni with working to just barely scrape by, oftentimes in nasty and exploitative conditions. Because we are students, it’s just what we have to do to get to the other side.

It feels like a hamster wheel we have to keep spinning no matter how tired we are, or else the whole thing falls off its hinges. There have been many times when I have thought about when we’ll be able to get off the wheel, when we’ll be able to pause for a bit and take a rest. The answer: you can rest when you’re old, rich, or, increasingly, when you’re dead. In this late-stage capitalist society, we are encouraged to work and work and work until we have achieved something noteworthy, something our parents can tell their friends about, NCEA, a degree or two, a high-paying job. Buying a house seems to be the arbitrary finish line, the big and increasingly unlikely goal, which, in a way, makes us almost want it more. I met someone at a party once who was a homeowner at 24 (and in Wadestown at that), after that bit of info came out people couldn’t stop asking him questions about how he’d done it. Such a rare success story from our generation, someone who has won at life.

But even then, we cannot escape the wheel, many working professionals have been more open about burnout in recent years. And while society encourages us to look after ourselves and take time to rest, in an era when time is money it feels like rest is something that only the wealthy can afford. Recovery from burnout will never come without at least a little guilt, at least for me. A passed-up opportunity, a blow to the bank account, a turned down social invitation.

But that doesn’t make rest any less important, simply because society does not find any value in rest, doesn’t make rest any less invaluable. So, the next time you wake up more tired than when you went to sleep, it’s probably best to stay in bed, hop off the wheel for a bit, those hinges are probably strong enough to last a day or so. Because without rest we are only surviving, not living.