Burnout babies

Posted on | January 18, 2007 | 2 Comments

There was some great feedback from the last post – thanks. I’m still interested in pursuing some of the bigger questions in it, especially since I think they got a bit sidelined in the Brisbanalia. I particularly want to hear more thoughts on the structures of support available for those many people in Australia who are not necessarily hetero and/or intent on procreating at the moment – whether or not this is an ideological position, a transitory state or just the hand life happens to have dealt. There are so many of us, and yet so few voices that speak on our behalf.

Two things this morning add to my thinking on this. Firstly, Julia Gillard’s comments on the impossibility of political longevity for women. The media response has taken the greatest of lengths to avoid the simple point Gillard made (and that feminists have been making for decades): in Australia (NB Bettina, not the countries where women have been successful in politics) women have to decide how to combine having children with having a career – men don’t. The society as a whole is structured such that a universal question becomes a matter of personal ‘choice’ which brings with it the risk of treason. The worst of the commentators continue to perpetuate the fallacy that there is a category of feminist who is simply anti-kid, and that’s that, as if women just walk around in a vaccuum from the time they decide what to do with the information that their ovaries function. But as De Beauvoir wrote: ‘The history of an individual is not a fatalistically determined progression: at each moment the past is reappraised, so to speak, through a new choice, and the “normality” of the choice gives it no preferred value—it must be evaluated according to its authenticity.’ This has to be considered in light of the fact that: ‘Woman is not allowed to do something positive in her work and in consequence win recognition as a complete person. However respected she may be, she is subordinate, secondary, parasitic. The heavy curse that weighs upon her consists in this: the very meaning of her life is not in her hands.’

Secondly, this great NYT article on burnout that I found through 43 Folders. Evaluating the research, author Jennifer Senior writes:

‘Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.’

Senior then goes on to fret about how many emails she answers in an hour, and how New Yorkers have led the world in normalising the cult of busy-ness. Yet she seems to have trouble connecting the dots. After all, it’s always other people that have trouble with ‘work-life balance’.

All of this makes me think that what I’m really asking you to do is help me write the contents page for a new book that will harness our purchasing power as ordinary Australians to outsell The Labour Market Ate My Babies. It will be called The Office So Too Loves Me Back: Just Not In Ways You Count. Or perhaps, Groovy Kind of Love: Getting Laid and Maybe Even Hitched in The Cubicle Years. Let’s start a list in the comments, and if you don’t think you’re the target market, then maybe you shouldn’t be reading blogs on work time at your office computer…

Category: Gender, Reading, Work

Comments

2 Responses to “Burnout babies”

  1. Kirsty
    January 18th, 2007 @ 12:51 pm

    My first thought is of a line from a Martha Wainwright tune: “I have no husband, I have no children, I have no reason, to be alive…” That always makes me laugh.

  2. Kirsty
    January 20th, 2007 @ 9:17 am

    My second thought–a long time between thoughts, I know, and it’s not a particularly original one–is that nieces, nephews and the children of friends have lots of love to give and are very happy to receive it, as are the parents when you offer to babysit.

    I think I probably agree that the office doesn’t love you back, particularly in the climate of casualised and contract labour of the current academic environment. To go with the metaphor: it’s a selfish lover who is quite unforgiving if your performance isn’t up to scratch–even when you’ve put all your effort in.

    I have increasingly come to believe that it’s really important to cultivate some good friendships with colleagues who are in similar situations, who understand the pressures of RQF performance and who won’t judge you in those moments (and it often is just a moment, not a constant state of unhappiness and unfulfilment)when you really need to cry, bitch and moan.

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