Passion, Burnout, and Liking What You Write
Write what you like.
Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
From Thomas Carlyle’s vision of the Victorian work ethic, otherwise known as the gospel of work, to the twenty-first century’s increasing focus on developing a comprehensive self away from time spent in productive labor, the concepts of labor for pay versus leisure have always been at odds. Aspects of this ideological separation of work and ease have been complicated by questions of fulfillment and enjoyment, especially during the context of different historical situations.
To oversimplify a complex historical process, consider the following: Evolutionarily, leisure marks one of the first stages of a developing civilization, whereby nomadic humans could cease hunting, gathering, and looking after their daily needs long enough to set aside time for amusement and creativity. Several millennia later, with social and cultural norms prohibiting women to work or earn money of their own, an excess of leisure and entertainment led to proto-feminist critiques such Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792). Following the Industrial Revolution, an inquest regarding factory labor involving children, which took precious time away from a child’s ability to play, enjoy the fresh air, and nurture their days of innocence, eventually led to the passage of child labor laws titled the Factory Acts in England, and federal child labor provisions put in place by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the United States. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) exposed the exorbitant demands of constant labor upon the titular working classes of England, to the detriment of psychological and physical health, a subject which would later be seized upon by late-Victorian reformers, who believed that the humble population of the so-called “lower orders” suffered from an excess of monotonous work and not enough cultural taste or refined amusements.
The bottom line appears to draw a boundary in the sand between labor and ease or enjoyment, but as the record shows, this line also appears far more permeable and mobile, according to the circumstance, the type of labor, or the individual involved.
Recent years have seen an uptick in the number of thinkpieces and articles regarding attitudes surrounding labor, the evil necessity of jobs that demand working extra hours with no pay or generally being available around-the-clock, and the dangers of spending all of one’s energy on working for capital. A New York Times piece from the beginning of this year questions what it calls “hustle culture” and warns against “toil glamour” and the idolization of such an ideology; on the other hand exist concepts such as self-care, “treating yo’self,” and living a more mindful life lest one slip into the doldrums of a dreaded burnout — a term coined in the 1980s, but apparently most prevalent among those of my generation.
What does all this mean, then, for those of us who are working in fields because we, at one point in time, fell in love with literature, history, critical thinking, or theory, those of us who acknowledge that a love of reading is not nearly enough to see one through a graduate degree, or to ensure survival when one receives countless rejections of one’s writing and research efforts? In the realm of academia, we constantly stress the importance of a work/life balance, or a personal research / teaching load / service / life balance, but how many of the hats we wear during our daily lives need to be ones we love or enjoy?
How much of what we work toward reflects a long-ago snuffed out passion, and has become something we now only tolerate?
In the past six years while I worked on my doctorate’s degree in English, my sister has been cultivating her multiple handiwork-hobbies of hand-lettering, crocheting, and knitting. This year, her current project involves setting up an Instagram account, practicing daily, and beginning to take a limited amount of commissions, and attending workshops on how to set up a website. Although her main goal is to work on calligraphy and envelopes for weddings, graduations, and other special events, she has also made a number of looped-yarn products from cardigans, cowls, and cat-sweaters to blankets and rugs.
As is common with our generation, she still works a day job, terms her handicrafts a “side-hustle,” and has expressed the wish to eventually turn it into a small business. What once started as a hobby for the purposes of leisure has, over the course of several years and milestones of improvements, developed into something that will hopefully be able to turn a profit. From a sisterly point-of-view, this means I can commission as many scarves (for me) and sweaters (for my cat) as necessary, and also receive lovely hand-lettered envelopes in the mail, such as the one you see above. From my very millennial point-of-view, seeing her success gives me joy and strikes a personal chord of insecurity and anxiety.
What have I done, with these past six years of working in a graduate career, that has produced something hustle-worthy? Are the days of “writing what you like” or “doing what you love” over? Does it cheapen my work or sense of critical scholarliness, to view a publication as more valuable than countless drafts of personal writing, even though it is unlikely any of these efforts will directly and immediately yield a capital return?
Whether within the realm of topical conversations on work ethic or being overworked, it is tempting to consider hobbies, side hustles, or any type of leisurely activity as “productive” if there is a tangible product at the end of the process. If that tangible product can be assessed as valuable and assigned a particular cost, perhaps one can justify the amount of time and labor spent doing an activity one loves. At the end of the day, this kind of anxiety speaks the loudest about the stresses of working under the thumb of a capitalist system that only seems to prize what can be bought and sold.
As thinkers, teachers, and writers of all different stripes, one must imagine more than the amount of articles one has published, the number of books accepted by university presses, or the number of awards we apply for (and perhaps receive). Likewise, liking what we do, how we work, and what we write should not be an all or nothing approach: labor versus ease, work versus leisure, and productivity versus a lack thereof. It is impossible to put a price on creativity, imagination, critical thinking, or the feeling of stumbling upon the logical connection tying together all the chapters of one’s dissertation project. Passion fuels us all in the beginning, may a careful regime of self-care help us avoid burnouts, or recover with grace when we do fall into a slump, and may dedication and self-discipline carry us through.
Note from the Editor:
Vicky’s post this week brings up a very important current discussion in the humanities. As thinkers often embedded in critical theory and philosophical thought, the task of conceptualizing new worlds often falls to us. After we have settled ourselves into an understanding of our own worth — through the dedication, self-discipline, and self-care that Vicky notes — we are faced with further questions that deserve our address: Is the binary division between leisure and labor still the most useful model for discussing productivity in our contemporary moment? Does it serve to perpetuate harmful systems? Does this split further alienate academics and other creative/intellectual types from our labor? Who benefits from this model of labor and leisure? Who suffers? What sort of systems of power relations might we envision that do not revolve so heavily around capitalism’s obsession with material production, and how might such new systems change the way we think about ourselves as scholars, intellectuals, and educators? What might it look like if we take a page from queer theory and envision a model of production independent of binary oppositions?
These questions may seem daunting or overwhelming, yet they should also sound familiar. These are questions frequently asked by scholars working with Marxism, postcolonial critique, disability studies, queer theory, and critical race theory (amongst other fields). Clearly, these questions are not easily answered, but just as clearly, they are present and essential, deserving of our careful attention.
— Rhyse Curtis, Editor
Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.