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Inbreath Without Outbreath: An Anatomy of Burnout
During the year I spent my first sabbatical in Boston, I once watched my bank balance drop to sixty dollars while living next to one of the finest universities in the world. And yet the strange thing was this: even that hard-pressed, I could not stop. I drove myself to read more, write more, prove more—though no one had asked it of me. Looking back now, what burned me then was not poverty but a fear: that if I stopped here, I would become nothing. Might you, too, be passing through such a time?
The signature illness of this age is exhaustion—burnout. The sharpest insight into burnout is this: we of today do not burn out because someone else exploits us, but because we exploit ourselves until we burn out. Once there was a master who gave commands. A boss, a discipline, said, "You must." But now we are our own master and our own slave. What moves us is no longer "you must" but "you can." It looks like freedom. Yet this freedom has no end. However much we achieve, there is never an "enough." To borrow Byung-Chul Han's phrasing: the subject who chases achievement exploits himself though no one drives him, and mistakes that self-exploitation for freedom.
The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg called the weary heart of this age the weariness of the self. In a society that tells us we can become anything, failing to do so becomes entirely our own fault, and we collapse, exhausted, in the effort to realize ourselves. Byung-Chul Han goes one step further. The real problem, he says, is not that the self falls short of its own ideal, but that the other one might lean upon has vanished. In other words, if Ehrenberg said "we ache because we cannot become ourselves," Han said "we ache because there is nothing but the self." And this book stands on the side of recovering that vanished other.
Why is there no end? Recall the swelling we saw in the previous chapter. The one who swells wants only to breathe in. He piles up achievements, inflates his size, clutches tight. But to repeat the inbreath alone, without the outbreath—that is hyperventilation, that is the balloon's expansion. Think of breathing. Breathe in only, and you die. You must breathe out to breathe in again. Life is the alternation of filling and emptying. Yet the one chased by achievement refuses to empty. Stop, he fears, and he will fall behind.
To fill only is not growing but an expansion toward bursting.
The body records this truth honestly. In 2004, a research team led by the psychologist Elissa Epel and the Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn announced a startling finding. In the cells of mothers worn down by the chronic stress of caring for long-ill children, the telomeres—the caps that protect the ends of chromosomes—had shortened markedly (Epel et al., 2004). It means that, in proportion to the hours they could not rest, their cells were literally aging faster. Exercise physiology adds one thing more. Muscle does not grow while you exercise. Muscle grows while you rest. Through exercise we tear the muscle in fine tears, and through recovery we build it back thicker. Training that omits recovery is called overtraining, and a body driven without rest does not grow strong—it breaks down.
Here there is a subtle distinction we must draw. There are two kinds of stopping. The stopping of one who sinks down, spent, and the stopping of one who chooses, of his own will, to catch his breath. The first is death; the second is life. The first stopping gives birth to nothing, but the second conceives what comes next—just as the outbreath calls forth the next inbreath. Here a figure from literature drifts past. Melville's scrivener, Bartleby, repeats only the words "I would prefer not to," until he fades into a silent immobility. He is often read as a hero of resistance, but I read him as a portrait of burnout. His stopping is not a sovereign "No" but the powerlessness of one wholly burned out. He goes out without bearing anything new.
Here lies the tragedy of the one who cannot rest. Because he never learned the stopping one chooses, he is seized at last by the stopping he never chose—the collapsing halt. And so what this book seeks is the second stopping. Not the halt of exhaustion, but the stopping of the outbreath that gives birth to something new. Then what, exactly, is the boundary that makes us grow instead of swell, recover instead of collapse? Astonishingly, the answer is not far off. A single cell, the smallest unit of our body, already knows it. Let us now follow the wisdom of the body.
References
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · Epel et al. (2004, PNAS, telomeres) · Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self · Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"