my celebrity thing
my glasses seem to throw things off a bit. some of them are flattering. others, i don't know who they are. :)
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my glasses seem to throw things off a bit. some of them are flattering. others, i don't know who they are. :)
for a long time i've been pissing and moaning about "this country" and what i hate about "the mentality of this culture" and how i don't think i'm cut out for the work force.
dlf sent me an awesome link: Can't get no satisfaction: In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith
i haven't read all of it yet (hah!) but it's already proliferating little epiphanies through my tired brain.
it pegs on why i resist so much. why i've been angry for so long. I HATE ENFORCED RELIGION.
it's part of why i've had a hard time going to churches at times, especially rapidly growing ones since they tend to have the narrowest view on faith. the cost of maintenance is all the people you trample and lose along the way.
for a long time, i've been one of those.
as parakkum points out, "the work emphasis in your program has been rather religion-like" which i've been fighting for a long time. and honestly, it's the most exposure i've had to it, too. this might be why angela is able to navigate it better than i have, the way she handled BBC (a nice, but strict church) better than i did.
maybe it's because america started out as a christian country way back in the day when they separated church and state so that they could all worship in a variety of ways (now they give it a new name, ideology, and persecute once more). with the absence of god in the general conscience, the position seems to have been replaced by work and money. and those who don't follow are the newfound heretics that are punished.
well... i don't believe in your god. especially since i already have one. screw you all.
i'll find my way through this crisis of faith, the way i did with church when i was younger. and i will have an answer custom-fit for me.
(update: quotes from the article in the extended)
"Colleagues tried to persuade him to stick it out. 'But for the most part, I've resisted coming back,' says Farber. 'I've never been able to find that same sense of satisfaction.'"
(this is quite similar to how i felt once i left the med school track. something in me had fundamentally changed such that medicine wasn't as satisfying an outcome anymore)
"'Yet even as I was writing," he says, 'I had this sense that I really wanted to finish it so that I could go on to something else. I felt somewhat bored, and somewhat depleted. I'd said all I wanted to say.' He ponders this point. 'I guess,' he says, 'I lost the sense that it was important.'"
"The term was first coined by a psychoterapist named Herbert Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from Graham Greene's novel A Burnt-Out Case. ('I haven't enough feeling left for human beings,' the book's numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his journal, 'to do anything for them out of pity.')"
"While working at a free clinic for drug addicts in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that hte volunteers, when discouraged, would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less."
"Back in the seventies, when people marched into the world with convictions about changing it, burnout was considered a noble affliction. It meant that you'd depleted yourself while helping others."
"Because many of these people were idealists, and because they worked with the hradest-luck cases, they were highly susceptible to disillusionment. Those who burned out were not only physically and mentally exhausted; they were cynical, detached, convinced their efforts were wrothless. They held themselves in contempt. Worse, they held their clients in contempt. They began to loathe the same people they originally sought to help."
"In 21st-century New York, the 6-hour week is considered normal. In some professions, it's a status symbol. But burnout, for the most part, is considered a sign of weakness, a career killer."
"My clients are perfectionists...They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose,' [Alden Cass] continues. 'Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn't match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout--they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.'"
"There's a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got."
"According to the New York Bar Association, turnover rates among mid-level associates in this city's law firms is 36 percent. The whole system is predicated on burnout. Why even bother treating associates well?"
"Work, after all, is a form of religion in a secular world. Burning out in it amounts to a crisis of faith."
"'Like in Silicon Valley,' [Maslach] says. 'It used to be the case that people would say, 'You're burned out? You don't like the job? So quit. I don't run a country club. But what was happening was the best and the brightest wanted to opt out. They started saying 'I can't do this; this is not a life. They'd go to the Midwest and start a pet-food store.' Maslach adds that when she did interviews at NASA, she noticed similar problems there. 'So suddenly, these places were saying, 'Whoa, what do we need to do to get these people?' Getting the most out of the people didn't actually mean getting the best. That'sd when there was a new wave of interest in burnout.'"
"Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp:
- working too much
-working in an unjust environment
- working with little social support
- working with listtle agency or control
- working in the service of values we loathe
- working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback)
"...burnout isn't necessarily a result of overwork."
"...'crisis in self-efficacy,' which to me suggests that head-banging feeling of struggling mightily for too little or (worse) nothing in return."
"...'the failure of the existential quest'--that moment when we wake up one morning and realize that what we're doing has appallingly little value."
"...'the gap between expectation and reward'... Peopl with more modest aims for themselves seem less prong to disillusionment."
"Those loathe to say that any one profession burns out more than others--to her, it's more a question of how well we fit in our jobs--Maslach found in her early work that the critical burnout period for most social-service angencies was between one and five years on the job.) Interestingly, Stuart Marques, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, notes that 45 percent of New York City public-school teachers have left their jobs by year five.)"
"In her early work, for intance, Maslach found tha tyounger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad...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 tha tmarried 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...It's much easier to disproportionately invest emotional an dphysical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back."
"Pines's work has also shown that people in fiercely individualist societies are more prone to burn out."
"Of course, Maslach also found tha tthere are certain types--depressives, people with problems with anger or anxiety--who are more prone to burn out...'I think one of the reasons people burn out is because they take jobs that they hope, consciously or unconsciouly, will help them overcome unresolved childhood issues,' [Pines] says. 'But instead of healing the childhood wound, work reopens it."
"...one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn't just work overload but 'work-home interference'--a sociologist's way of saying we're receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth."
"The great paradox of efficiency is that the more we speed up, the more acute our frustrations when we're forced to slow down. Is it not possible that these ambient frustrations function as chronic stressors, and--in some subtle but crucial way--contribute to feeling worn out?"
"If one of the surest recipes for burnout, as Michael Leiter has said, is the sensation of inefficiency--particularly if we're still epxending energy and seeing little in return--then there may be something about the modern office that conspires to burn us out."
"In 2005, a psychiatrist at King's College London did a study in which one group was asked to take an IQ test while doing nothing, and a second group to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn't much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stone.
That's right. Stoned. Those people were literally burned out, and they did better.
'There is something about interruption that meakse people especially unproductive.'"
"John Robinson, the University of Maryland sociologist who calculated those expanding lesiure hours for the time-use survey, arguese that our obsession with efficiency at work has unforutnately seeped into our attitudes toward leisure, with the multitasking of our downtime as the loony and paradoxical result. We run on the treadmill while listening to music while watching TV. We cook while flipping through a magazine while yakking on the phone. All of which raises a question: If our leisure isn't restorative, aren't we more apt to burn out?"
"'In seminary, I did a bit of depth psychology.' DeGarmo had never studied it before. He was assigned Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and found himself beguiled by Carl Jung's theories about hte opposing parts of our personalities. 'I remember Jung saying tha thte general trajectory of your life is to work to your strength in your younger life, going great guns to establish yourself at whatever you're doing,' he continues. 'But at some point in the midlife, the other part of your peresonality--the feminines instead of masculine, or whatever other opposing trait--is looking for expression. And if you don't allow it to express itself, you're not, in effect, going to become a whole person. Brittle is the word he uses...So it occurs to me that maybe people who are burbning out are bumpping up agianst that phenomenon that Jung talks about,' concludes DeGarmo. 'There masculine bumping up against the feminine, or th eright brain against the left. Whoever you are.'"