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Inhaling Without Exhaling: An Anatomy of Burnout
Some years ago, watching television, I suddenly burst into tears. It was not even a great scene. An adult was saying to a high-school protagonist: oh, that must have been so hard; your heart must have suffered; you did well to bear it. Those three lines and I was weeping. They had not even been said to me.
There must be a part of me that wants to be comforted.— 2022, Facebook
At that time I was doing perfectly well, no problems at all. I lectured, I wrote papers, I sat in meetings. I had told no one that anything was hard. And yet somewhere inside me, it seems, someone had been sitting a long time waiting to hear those words. Burnout arrives that way. It does not come with the sound of collapse. It settles quietly inside a person who is doing fine, and then reveals itself all at once from some entirely unrelated direction. Might you be passing through such a season yourself?
The representative illness of this age is burnout. The sharpest insight into it belongs to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. We today do not burn out because someone exploits us; we burn out exploiting ourselves. Once there was a master who commanded. A boss, a discipline, said “you must.” But now we are our own master and our own slave. What moves us is not “you must” but “you can.” It looks like freedom. But this freedom has no end. However much is achieved, there is no “that is enough.” The person he calls the achievement-subject exploits himself though no one drives him, and mistakes that exploitation for freedom.
The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg called this age’s weary heart “the weariness of being oneself.” In a society that says you can become anything, failing to becomes entirely your own fault, and you collapse exhausted in the attempt to realize yourself. Han goes one step further. The real problem, he says, is not that the self falls short of its ideal but that the other — someone to lean on — has disappeared. If Ehrenberg said we are sick from failing to become ourselves, Han said we are sick because there is nothing but ourselves. And this book stands on the side of recovering that vanished other.
The night I wept watching a drama, I closed the post like this.
Life is hard, but we cannot go about showing that it is hard all the time. Because I am struggling is no reason to make others struggle. But when it is truly hard, there is likewise no need to pretend we are fine. Needing comfort is not a wrong thing. Just as being a strength to someone becomes new strength in me, we may sometimes receive help from others. That is what living among people is.— 2022, Facebook
When I wrote that, I had read no theory. I simply set it down on a night I cried watching a drama. But looking at it now, that last line is this chapter’s answer. The opposite of burnout is not more rest but someone to lean on.
Why is there no end? Recall the swelling we saw in Chapter One. The person swelling wants only to inhale. He stacks achievements, inflates his size, grips tight. But repeating the in-breath with no out-breath — that is hyperventilation, and that is the balloon’s expansion. Think of breathing. Inhale only, and you die. You must exhale to inhale again. Life is the alternation of filling and emptying. Yet the person chased by achievement refuses to empty. Stopping feels like falling behind.
To fill only is not growth but an expansion toward bursting.
There were people who said this three thousand years ago. The first hexagram of the I Ching, Qian, is pure ascent and creation — all six lines yang. Those six places are drawn as a dragon rising. It begins with a dragon submerged in water, climbs steadily, and at the fifth place reaches its height as feilong zai tian, the dragon flying in heaven. But the name of the last, sixth place is kanglong youhui: the dragon that has risen to the very top has regret.
Between the summit and the fall lies a single step. That the moment when there is nowhere higher to climb is the moment when only falling remains — that old book wrote it at the topmost place of the hexagram. Written another way, this chapter’s title is kanglong youhui. A balloon is weakest at the moment it is largest.
Think of the taiji diagram as well. At the place where the black is largest, a white dot is already set; at the place where the white is largest, a black dot. It means that what reaches an extreme turns back. The peak, then, is not a safe place. The peak is the place where direction reverses. Wisdom is knowing how to stop at the flying dragon, how to withdraw before becoming the dragon at the top.
The body records this truth honestly. In 2004 the psychologist Elissa Epel and the research team of Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn published a striking finding. In the cells of mothers who had suffered chronic stress caring for a chronically ill child over many years, the telomeres — the caps that protect the ends of chromosomes — were markedly shortened (Epel et al., 2004). It means that in proportion to the time we did not rest, our cells actually age faster. Exercise physiology adds one more thing. Muscle does not grow while you exercise. Muscle grows while you rest. We tear muscle finely by exercise and grow it thicker by recovery. Training that omits recovery is called overtraining, and a body driven without rest does not grow strong; it breaks down.
Here we must mark a subtle distinction. There are two kinds of stopping: the stop of collapsing in exhaustion and the stop chosen freely to catch one’s breath. The first is death; the second is life. The first stop gives birth to nothing; the second conceives what comes next — as an out-breath calls the next in-breath. A literary figure passes through here. Melville’s scrivener Bartleby repeats only “I would prefer not to” and fades into a silent immobility. He is often read as a hero of resistance; 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 giving birth to anything new.
Here lies the tragedy of the person who cannot rest. Never having learned the stop one chooses, he is seized at last by the stop he never chose — the halt of collapse. So what this book seeks is the second stop: not the standstill of burnout, but the out-breath’s pause that gives birth to something new. Then what is this boundary that makes us grow instead of swell, recover instead of collapse? Astonishingly, the answer is not far away. A single cell, the smallest unit of our body, already knows it. Let us follow that wisdom of the body now.
Notes for this chapter
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · Epel et al. (2004), PNAS 101(49):17312–17315 — chronic stress and telomere shortening · Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self · Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” · I Ching, Hexagram Qian, top line: kanglong youhui