I’ve been thinking about career longevity a lot lately. As regular readers of this newsletter will now (hello to our many new readers 👋🏽 ), I’ve had a really busy few months.
When I discussed this with a friend of a friend the other day, her response was to ask me if I had an income protection insurance plan (I don’t). She then proceeded to tell me about a good friend of hers who had been put on sick leave due to severe burnout symptoms.
Her suggestion was obvious – she thought I was at risk of developing burnout symptoms as a result of my hectic work schedule. Talk about jumping to conclusions, am I right?
Anyway, I know about burnout. Almost a decade ago, before this occupational phenomenon – the classification used by the World Health Organization – became as well-known as it is today, a work acquaintance of mine was put on sick leave by her doctor for more than a year due to burnout symptoms. She was one of my first colleagues, and the first person I ever shared an office with. We bonded over our feminism before feminism became fashionable and commiserated over the strenuous path associated with both our chosen professions (mine journalism, hers the arts). We were both fresh out of college, ambitious, and perhaps recognised in each other a certain “just you wait”.
So when we reconnected a few years later and she told me about her burnout, her premature return to work and subsequent even deeper burnout, it made a deep impression on me – the inexplicable rash she developed over her entire body, the debilitating exhaustion she felt for months on end, how she would sleep for hours and hours yet never felt rested. My ex-colleague ended up working part-time for several years, unable to sustain a full-time work reschedule as a result of the lingering effects of her burnout.
Since then, burnout has of course become more common. In Belgium, where I live, the number of people off sick with burnout increased with 66% between 2018 and 2021. Since then, a very good friend of mine was diagnosed with burnout, as has a relative.
Since then, I’ve seen also seen a lot of people lose themselves in their work, clocking hours that seem untenable in the long run, contending with stress levels that seem untenable in the long run, and experiencing a level of job dissatisfaction that seems untenable in the long run.
The reasons that people develop burnout symptoms are complex. At the same time, I see so many people around me – all of them thirtysomethings in creative, salaried jobs – who are in situations of chronic overwork. Talking to them, I regularly have to suppress the urge to grab them by the shoulders and yell: This is not sustainable. You are not superhuman.
You can only be in an unhealthy situation for so long before it starts to catch up with you in the form of, say, a burnout.
Something that I think has helped me arrive at a good work equilibrium (and possibly kept burnout at bay) is what I would describe as my long-game attitude.
It’s an attitude that was inspired by a video in which one of my journalism heroes was asked for early-career advice. The key thing, he answered, was to be tenacious and to wait for everyone else to more or less give up. He suggested he became successful because the peers he came up with gradually moved into other fields. That journalism, like a lot of creative professions, is not an easy field and that if you stick to it long enough, the competition thins out. I know that may sound dispiriting, but I took comfort in this. Sticking with it, I thought, is something I can do.
Setting up myself for long-term career success is the reason I decided not to take a salaried, journalism-adjacent job early on in my career as I knew I would probably get too comfortable and it would set me on a comms path. Playing the long game, for me, also means advancing incrementally, making small career changes so I slowly arrive where I want to be, on my own terms.
Playing the long game means looking out for myself; it means ensuring that situations of overwork don’t last for too long; it means saying no to assignments that I want to take on but just don’t have the time for; it means changing co-working spaces until I find one where I genuinely feel part of a little work family. It also means reminding myself that good enough is better than perfect (yes, you read that right), and that goes even for writing this newsletter.
I would encourage you to take a similarly long arc. I think this cannot only help you look after yourself and make better choices in the here and now; it can also help you take small, everyday steps toward your long-term career goal, whatever that may be.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on all the above. Are you in a situation of overwork at the moment and if so, how are you staying sane? Have you experienced burnout symptoms and if so, what do you think caused them?
Linda
What I’m reading at the moment:
It’s very easy to find articles about burnout that get a lot of things about it wrong. This is a great explainer if you want some sound, research-backed info.
This podcast episode of Hello Monday about the changing profile of work around the world. Since listening to it, I have asked every French person I’ve come across (i.e. one person) whether it’s really true that employees are not allowed to talk about work stuff during lunch. (She said it wasn’t.)
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