On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay

This blog did so many hits last week that the host platform experienced timeouts. I've been invited onto podcasts, and offered both small technical projects and journalism work, of all things. It was a crazy time. But the internet moves on, as it always does, and I am left, as we all always are, to figure out what to write about next.

The thread that runs through the emails I get is, surprisingly, one about mental health, though I didn't recognize it as such at first. Consider:

The first few times I received emails like this, I thought of them purely as commentary on how out of place people feel when they're surrounded by the strange dysfunction that descends upon most organizations. But then other people write in to tell me that they're burned out after going through the above for long enough, which gives the whole thing a much more concerning overtone. One meeting too many and now they can't work — they feel terrible because office work is so much easier than manual labour, but brain.exe has stopped responding. Students write in to talk about how they're terrified of what happens after university, which is obviously somewhat comical to those of us who have graduated and realized that only a tiny fraction of the population cares about university performance1, but probably doesn't feel so fun for the student. Trans people talk about struggles with homelessness and unemployment. For some people, a good start is "I don't feel like dying today".

There has been a point in my life where I ended every day in the dark, staring at a wall for an hour or two straight, trying to figure out why everything felt awful.

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