TV Solves Our Organizing Problems: No Spoilers

TV Solves Our Organizing Problems is an advice column for organizers, using pop culture to solve our issues. This one is me justifying my poor fiction choices.

TV Solves Our Organizing Problems is an advice column for organizers, using pop culture to solve our issues. 

The Question:  I’m working on a campaign I believe in, with people I trust, and I think we have the opportunity to change something in my city. I’m playing a pretty major role in this campaign, and I feel like this is one of my first times where I feell like my interests align with the goals of the overall campaign. Sound great, right?

For some reason, every time I start working on this project? I freeze. All the things that are exciting about this project to me no longer feel possible. So I avoid it. It doesn’t feel like other times when I felt burnt out, where I had too much to do and not enough support to do it. But still, here I am. Avoiding work again.

What gives? 

— Burned Out Burner Account

Man, burnout is everywhere lately. 

My problematic productivity self-help faves Brene Brown + CalNewport both did episodes about it.

There are lots of Instagram wellness meme about why it happens, and how to deal.

Even legit media like the guardian is speculating on why so many people feel burnt out — because the end (vaccine) is near, and we can all start to process whatever happened during this pandemic, because our brains can only handle so much uncertainty, because sometimes you just can’t look at a screen anymore, no matter what is happening in the global unconscious.

Since I talk about burnout a lot, I thought I‘d have more to say in this time of public burnout awareness. 

But it turns out everything I’ve got boils down to:

“Yeah. sucks, right?”

But there is one thing I think the zeitgeist has wrong when it comes to burnout.

It’s not a problem with the work that you’re doing, or at least that’s not the only problem.

The real problem, the thing that I think actually causes for an hour, is when you think you already know the ending.

I’ve always read books, watched TV and movies, out of order. 

I look up the endings to horror movies on Wikipedia, a common “scared kid preparing for sleepovers“ move carried over to adulthood.

I read the last page before I start a book, demand full plot arc synopses of television shows from friends before I commit to watching them, and if you want to get really meta, in someways have committed my life to trying to guess the ending of our current story.

Who knows why.

Generalized anxiety?

Control issues?

Whatever. 

This habit has proven to be a test of my relationships, particularly when Ernestina takes the opposite, linear approach — even when she falls asleep in the middle (this is why she wanted to watch the entirety of the marvel movies in order).

Last week we watched Frida for the first time (I know. Am I even gay?)

At the part when her friend is like “you always read things in the wrong order,” Salma Hayek^ says, 

“it shouldn’t matter what order you read things in.”

I lit up. 

Don’t you love it when fiction justifies your bullshit? 

Ernestina rolled her eyes. 

Don’t be like that. She said. 

I think she was trying to say “don’t use the totality of magical realism or the phenomenon of Fictional Frida Kahlo to justify your anxiety disorder,”

But she fell asleep before she said it out loud.

So here’s the thing, Burned Out Burner Account.

You’re not writing about a project or a campaign that has some obvious issues, or is clearly a recipe for exploitation or injustice. In fact, you’re writing about something it sounds like should be working for you, where you’re excited about what you’re doing, think it matters, and have the mental space to make it happen. 

That’s a rare combination, so it’s probably even more stressful to feel burnt out. 

We could get all abstract here, and talk about how there’s no such thing as an ending or a beginning, the time is not linear, the world isn’t linear. 

Whatever.

But really, burnout comes from something that’s less about the work you’re doing (barring the obvious + impossible to overstate problems of alienated labor + how messed up everything is), and more about how you approach it.

Are you excited about whatever you’re doing, no matter how it turns out?

Are there opportunities for you to exercise control, no matter how small, along the way?

Does it matter to you if you know the ending or not?

H 

Got an organizing question you’d like pop culture to solve for you? Hit reply to this email, or send it to kappklot@gmail.com

alliterative pseudonym not mandatory, but it’s always appreciated.

^she says it because her friend is giving her shit for reading Marx before she read Engels. What a film.