Working in a Burnout Culture

For over a decade, I have heard from many high-achieving high school students tell me that it was not worth the time and effort to get a high GPA and go to a very prestigious school. It is not that they do not see the immediate reward of their hard work; a lot of them do and are grateful for it. Yet, the amount of stress, unnecessary anxiety, and exhaustion that came from their maximum efforts were too overwhelming. To put it plainly, they lacked joy. And these very same students had the same mentality when they went to college. They also got into excellent graduate schools or high-paying jobs. Now that some are in the workforce, they live the same way they lived for most of their lives: to live simply for the weekend when they can escape from the arduous circumstances that they are in. In school, that meant drinking at parties or whatever they could do that would result in intoxication. They needed a release, a feeling of some kind of pleasure because it seemed that their childlike joy was being taken away from them.

Now, there are a lot of things to be said here. Colleges, for the most part, deceive students by giving an empty promise that they can belong to a community forever. And what happens after college depends not on where they can belong and create a community, but on what job opportunities they receive. Some may even have faith or have a steady commitment to Sunday Mass. But it is difficult for them to be informed by the faith, to let the faith of the Church change the way they think about their work. To put it in another way, they do not perceive in what way their work is part of their vocation. And when we live any aspect of our lives without the awareness of vocation, we become afflicted by the dominant mentality that what drives our lives is success. What this produces, partly, is what I see in young adults now: burnout. They are already exhausted even when they have not begun creating a family and a home, with feelings of uselessness and emptiness.

There are many ways to combat this, but it may be that the very structure and worldview we are living in, which is the view that power and success are the main criteria of work, inevitably result in feelings of dissatisfaction and meaninglessness. It is easy to analyze life in terms of success or failure. Even the Christian life can be reduced to whether one practices virtue or has been let down by one’s vices again.

The response to this “burnout society” (Byung-Chul Han) is not trying to gain more control of one’s own life, but having the attentiveness to the call of Christ within one’s own work. It is an attentiveness that comes from being encountered by the appearance of Christ. It is beautiful when Scripture tells the story of Peter and the other disciples encountering the Risen Christ after feeling exhausted because “they caught nothing” (Jn. 21:3). It is precisely when they felt useless that Christ appears and meets them. He does not demand that they escape from their work or from their circumstance. It is not as if they merited or did anything for Christ to come to them. Christ, in His absolute freedom, displays His merciful love by helping them to begin their work again. Work becomes a response to a living Presence Who calls, Who prefers, and Who knows them deeply.

Peter then sees that, in his obedient faith, work becomes fruitful when it is a response to Christ. When he sees the amount of fish caught after his loving response to Christ, he immediately drops his net and jumps into the sea to meet him. It is his recognition that Christ is the Lord, the One who governs the world, that permitted him to detach from the results of his work. What allows him to detach from his success, what allows him to recognize the meaning of his work, is his affectionate love for Christ, an affection drawn out by the epiphany of Christ. For human work to be fruitful, one must be able to perceive that God still intervenes and works in one’s life and all of history. In the end, one must be certain that fullness of life and love are possible because He is faithful to His work of creation. It His work that one participates in. And His work is the unfolding of His merciful love within history, a love that continuously recreates life so that one can delight in the beautiful truth and beautiful good of all things.

One must see that one’s work comes from being preferred to work in His salvific tenderness towards the whole cosmos. What allows this certainty to grow is silence and prayer. Silence is contrary to activism. It does not mean that one is necessarily successful with one’s work when one does silence. It is also not the absence of thoughts, worries, or any feelings. Silence is the restful acceptance and receptiveness to the sweetness of the presence of God. It is not the absence of words, but the fullness of heart that makes one contemplate the face of God. And it is not simply that one must make and fight for the time to be with God, but it is because one has encountered His tender presence that draws one to desire silence. It is in encountering Christ in one’s life that allows one to be drawn into silence, full of awe, sorrow, and gratitude.

The more one practice silence, especially when one reads Scripture and the lives of the saints during silence, one begins to learn to see the whole and what is essential. The more one listens to the Word, the more one realizes life and history do not consist in success and failures. The ups and downs, the joys and anxieties—all of these things are in front of the face of God, are embraced by Him. All of history, all of life, is before God. To let Him order life in the ways and in the time that He wants, then, is the most fruitful way to live. Silence is giving time the space to give birth to what is true.

Work is nothing else but letting one’s silence fill the world. One can work and be restful at the same time because what regenerates the soul is the certainty that God continuously prefers and wants every aspect of one’s life to be filled with endless joy. Rooted in silence, work awakens one’s personhood. Personhood is the reception and recognition of the gift and task given by God, for personhood and mission coincide. Refusing God’s gift and task is to refuse to be a person. What is needed in this culture of boredom and activism that produce burnout is the emergence of personhood, which is the event of one’s graced history reawakening the human heart to be open to the patient, competent love of God.