This is the point of the evening when you start seeing shadowy figures out of your periphery.
Your body's been here for around 13-14 hours, you think. You measure time in buckets of green coffee—Two remain, ready to go into the roaster hopper. Roasting those, plus cool down, means an hour to go before you leave for another hour commute home. Your body is here, yes, but your mind is on the ever increasingly desperate task of brainstorming a way out of this mess you've been in for the last few years. You reach for solutions as they figure-8 back—Your brain laid flat and rejoined in a möbius strip of rumination.
Get a bigger roaster, well meaning friends say, unaware of the 100k price tag. Solutions are easy to see, if you have money. Squint, and you can see the solutions perched on a ledge across a canyon—You can get there if you cross that wire.
So much precarity. No margin for error.
Your mom called and asked what you were doing for the long-weekend. You said, oh just a bit of roasting. You can feel the confusion and pity through the crinkled sound. As you end the call you hear, "Don't work too hard". What can you do—It's keep roasting or the whole thing falls apart. Keep roasting, and you keep paying the loans, and your rent that goes up each year as you tell yourself how lucky am I.
And you miss your friends. But how lucky am I...
Cogs in the Megamachine
Some people trap themselves with golden handcuffs, some find themselves in other work arrangements that seemed free on the surface, like freelancing. My trap was a thinking that a bootstrapped, undercapitalized small business, producing physical things, would be sustainable to run longterm.
The chronically online, remote work zeitgeist—The remote workers, the class behind screens (maybe that's you), have a bone to pick.
The souls left to tend to physical matters (farming, roasting coffee, restaurant workers, wine makers, nurses, healthcare workers) are so caught in the gears of the social machine that you simply don't often hear from them aside from a reach from the depths of X or threads.
And don’t get me started on “quiet”-quitting, eating, vacationing (anything).
To say we're burnt out is not capturing the full scope of our reality. It feels like we chose the wrong game and the door is locked behind us in an escape room game we never asked to be part of.
An easy quip is to say that we should get different jobs, but, to say we built our own cages isn’t telling the whole story. And besides, if we all took that advice, then who would then feed us or heal us?
A couple weeks ago, I read
's prescient essay "Why Everything is Becoming a Game", punching through the curtain, revealing all the ways we participate in covert games when we engage in social media. The ending felt tidy when he points out that "Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free." We can choose the games we play.I want to change the aperture and look at the cage itself -Are we not also in a cage? One that we don't immediately see (like our environment)? I want to question why the games themselves architected by TikTok, Ig, X etc are being created in the first place. I want to look wider, at the ocean we all swim in. What are the incentives underlying all the burnout the majority of us feel?
Why work so hard to keep a population so tired?
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), a social philosopher (writing on cities, urban planning and much more), introduced the concept of a hybrid human/machine, "the social and bureaucratic structure that enabled a ruler to coordinate a huge workforce to undertake such vast and complex projects."
This social machine or the Megamachine shapes our world and uses humans as machine parts to carry out initiatives that take considerable cooperation and amalgamation.
Maurizio Lazzarato's "Capital Hates Everyone"(The MIT Press 2021) takes this concept further, with capitalism as War Machine. This machine has one MO - "to expand", and will use all means to do so. We'll bailout banks because we need to "save the economy", meanwhile restaurants and small businesses fail, teachers stretch their grocery budgets and the unemployed stay on the sidelines as corporations lay off thousands. Within the capitalist "War Machine", if we're not growing, then the machine is broken, and we need to get it working again no matter what it takes.
With Lazzarato's description of the War Machine, we can translate every social media comment to "I am for you" or "I am against you". There is no nuance. It is the war machine at work. There's a dominated and dominator. Gurwinder seems to agree when he calls Twitter/X "an endless state of mutually assured distraction"[...]“the culture war”.
Once you see it, it's everywhere.
Off and online, as if we've been compelled to participate by the programs themselves. There's constant lack of agency, as through we're "cogs".
I would go to the protest but I have to work. I would eat healthier, but I don't have time. I'd love to choose less plastic packaging, but I can't find the time to source other options. I already worked 13-hours in my small business but the customer expects this to ship out tomorrow so we just have to power through.
Burnout is a dissonance between what I know in my heart to be important, and what I find myself doing
Burnout happens in the dissonance with knowing this reality is here but not having the energy to grapple with it and claw back some autonomy. I'm caught in the gears of the machine but I don't yet know the way to connect to others in order to pull my way out.
We have become sentinels of the war machine, and we're ensnared in its gears. But we don't have to be cogs. We can be something else entirely.
Metaphor as a path out of the machine
Words shape worlds. So let's choose a better metaphor.
Our culture is obsessed with making things into machines (perhaps since we're already ensnared in one) whether we acknowledge it or not.
What if we make our work, ourselves, into gardens? What would that look like?
Permaculture garden as body
Things planted with permaculture gardening practices in mind end up helping to grow other things. Networks of mycelium work as collective to propel the living machine. We're there to nudge things along, to adjust so the wheel turns, but we're there to feed it and be fed all the same.
It's not endlessly expanding. It's symbiotic and sustaining.
There should be no linear perpetual line going up and to the left.
Toby Hemenway's "Permaculture City (2015), effectively hands us a how-to manual for living in community and acting relationally. We become a permaculture community in all aspects: food of course, but also where and how we live, how money is circulated, group dynamics, power and authority.
It reads as utopia.
It feels fuzzy and totally unrealistic.
There is one thing I’ve identified for myself though. I feel like it starts by being real with how burnout feels, sitting with that, shutting off the part of me that thinks I’m a cog.
Allow my garden body to speak.