A basket at my front door holds myriad masks – the first colorful homemade ones, the convenient yet not environmentally minded disposable ones, some designed for outdoor sports or with cute sayings or particularly comfortable elastic. Like the baskets of winter hats and gloves I always fear putting away to soon before the final storm of the season, it will stay probably longer than needed.
As trappings of the pandemic start to fade away, it’s clearer what’s left. And as we add the regular things back in – commutes, parties, travel – it turns out many of us are experiencing a strange, lingering feeling that has different names, but is a form of the same malady – burnout.
A new article in The Atlantic, “By Now, Burnout is A Given,” suggests we treat burnout not just as something that can be fixed with a day off or even a vacation, but as a true medical condition.
At TTBOOK, we explored this aspect of our lives in the show we’re re-airing this week, “Everything is Exhausting.” You’ll hear from Anne Helen Peterson, who wrote “Can’t Even: How Millenials Became the Burnout Generation,” and Katrina Onstad about what it means when weekends and weekdays are all the same. We hope instead of making it seem bleaker than before, it helps you realize as we move into this next stage of our lives, how many of us are feeling shades the same thing.
–Shannon