It's not burnout if you just accept that maybe your job doesn't matter in the way that you thought it did

Some thoughts about the cold, unrelenting winter of work and careerism

It’s a new year, and it’s winter and dear lord it is so cold in a way that makes even just the regular, ordinary steps of life seem extra difficult. Getting out of bed is harder. Seeing friends and making plans is harder. Just going anywhere is harder. January in general just feels like the month of Doing Hard Things. People undertake resolutions, or a new push to go to the gym, or sign up to run a marathon, or god forbid do that Dry January bit. It’s all pretty bleak.. this focus on bearing down to do the hard, unforgiving stuff of life, and inevitably it leaves me thinking about . . . work.

Edward Hopper, Office in a Small City (1953)

I consider myself “millennial,” I suppose, but by most hard-and-fast definitions, I’m a year or two too old for the demographic. But my spouse and all the friends I see regularly were born in that 1985-1992 core Millennial Era, so I feel like I get a pass. I’m a Millennial Scout, if you will — blazing the trail of What It Means to Grow Old, just a few years ahead, out in front of my people.

And the thing is — I think there’s this change that happens with work, along about maybe age 38 or 40 or 42. I’m inclined to take a shortcut here and just write that “you get to an age all of a sudden and work doesn’t feel like it matters anymore,” but that’s not it. That’s not accurate. Work does still matter. A sense of accomplishment and discipline and “I did the tasks that needed to be done” — those all still matter. So I’m not trying to just dismiss that.

But like.. my job isn’t a thing I really identify with anymore. It’s not an extension of me and how I see myself. Or maybe it’s part of my sense of self a little bit, but certainly not to the extent that it once was. That change happened slowly and maybe (probably) the pandemic had something to do with it. But I’ve come to deeply feel this as a truth in the last year or so. My job, my career even, has been sidelined within my day-to-day headspace. It’s not center-stage.

First, a caveat: I have one of those graduate degree knowledge-workery jobs in the city. I take the train to my downtown office and for 7 to 10 hours each workday I live in a world of email and coffee breaks and Outlook meeting invites and occasional suit-and-tie performances. I circle back and touch base and close the loop. I send my work product up the chain. Whether this is a form of “privilege” or not is, I guess, debatable, but it’s definitely isolating in a particular kind of way. I don’t mean to dismiss other types of jobs or say that what I’m writing about here is a universal phenomenon. I just want to take note of the context here, and say other contexts exist and are surely very different.

I entered the world of office work in 2007, in St. Louis. I had just come out of graduate school, and the shock of transitioning to the office hit me pretty hard. It was so quiet and lonely and I couldn’t get over how much a sad little ham sandwich I brought from home for lunch each day quickly became the day’s emotional high point. A 40-hour M-F workweek was so fucking long how did anyone actually live a life outside the office?? Those years in St. Louis were not great, and I wasn’t sad to leave. Two years in, I moved to DC.

In DC — the city where I turned 30, the city where I think I gained a sense of who I am — I adapted to adult work life, and I found the place where I really belonged. Work no longer felt like it was crushing my spirit just because I had to show up five days a week (or at least, most days it didn’t feel like that). And of course, I know I’m not the first person to say this, but DC is also a city where a person’s job really takes on a certain importance. Everyone always says that “What do you do?” is the standard DC question that follows immediately after “Nice to meet you.” I guess that’s true on some level, but I never really minded it.

I had a job in DC, and it was a sexy, cool,¹ adjacent-to-politics job, and I liked that about myself. I don’t think I had a toxic, over-inflated ego about it (we all knew people who were like this), but in my own particular way I felt important. My job would put me in the room with important people, or in meetings with others who themselves would then go pitch what we said to the important people. Proximity to power left me and everyone else I knew with the low-key impression that.. maybe we, too, if we were lucky and things played out right.. could one day also be a fancy person. Or someone the fancy people needed to rely on. Deadlines, urgency, power and leverage, billions of dollars, all of it was right there and it mattered.

My friends were mostly work friends. We stayed out at happy hours till late at night, and we enjoyed telling each other work stories, and we reveled in work-related drama that inevitably involved some swaggery name-dropping. And even with my friends who were not coworkers, they had their own sexy political ecosystem they might be connected to on some level, and they were excited to share their own stories. We all felt that we were players in something no one else could really understand, and it was important and it mattered and we were the young people in our 20s or 30s who were at the center of all of it. It was only a matter of time before some or all of us ascended the ladder of DC importance and became truly someone to be envied and looked up to.

It was a great feeling, and I really did love my time in DC, but that’s all gone now and well … it’s not going to happen for me. There is no longer any ladder to ascend. Like.. politicians, actors, writers, c-suite executives, people in media.. they can all kind of chart a career that’s based on the next thing. “Is what I’m doing big enough? Will the next thing be bigger, or more important, or move me higher up the food chain?” There’s an anxiety that undergirds certain careers (and certain office cultures), and there’s a reason to really pour yourself into your work or neurotically compare yourself to other people because you have to make sure you’re keeping up, doing the best, etc.

But me? I’m now in my mid-40s, and I have a job that I like well enough, and it’s interesting, and occasionally it’s challenging and causes me to work hard. But . . . I’ve hit my stride, and my job isn’t going to become a thing in the “my career is really taking off now!” sense. It is what it is. I don’t mean that I have a dead-end job, or that it’s meaningless or I hate it. I don’t mean any of those things. But what I do mean is.. I don’t see my job growing in importance from here out. I’m midway between when I started work and when I’m (hopefully, one day) going to retire, and well… the opportunities for getting more out of life or gaining new experiences aren’t going to come from my job, I don’t think. Life is still rich and amazing, and there’s a ton of stuff I want to do and be a part of, but.. work just isn’t the pull for me that it was in my 20s and 30s.

All of this talk would have depressed the hell out of my 30 or 35-year-old self. I would have been crushed by the idea that you apparently just get to a point in life, hit a career wall, and .. give up? What the fuck. But that’s not how I see it now, and I don’t think I’m actually all that bothered by it. Work is work. It’s sort of like grocery shopping or doing laundry or anything else. It needs to be done, I want to do a good job at it, I certainly don’t want to be seen as “bad” at it, and I’ll take it seriously because I’m an adult. But that’s kinda where it ends. There’s no need to torture myself by saying it should be more than that.

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Anyway. Like I said.. it’s January, and this is the time of year to think about these hard things. Along those lines, I want to note that Oliver Burkeman is really having a moment. He wrote a book that came out a few years ago, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He was also on the Ezra Klein show last week talking about his book and about burnout. And Burkeman’s big pitch is that being caught up in life and in work is a myth. You will die with items left on your to do list. There is no sense of *control* that’s coming to your job or your life generally. Better to just accept that now and stop tormenting yourself with a sense of failure for not having figured it all out. And I think there’s a way in which that’s a particularly striver-y, Millennial-type concern to have. Like.. I have no doubt that Ezra Klein experiences far more career anxiety and has a far greater internal Need to Get Ahead than I do. But.. that’s a sense of self that can change over time for some people. I don’t mean to suggest that moving to Chicago and giving up a political DC job is the path to inner peace. But.. the work-centeredness of life can change. You can get to your 40s and just see it differently. And that’s not a bad thing.

There is no Great Success / Now I’ve Made It / Ultimate Fulfillment to be found in work. It isn’t there. A career is no way to make life inherently have meaning and make sense. Work is just work. Except, too, .. I think it’s also important not to over-learn this lesson. Work does still matter because pushing yourself and improving yourself and caring about things still matters. It’s still January. It’s still cold and dark and it’s time to be serious and take things seriously. The fun stuff of life will come soon enough. So yeah. I’ll keep going, I guess.

1. Cool in the DC sense, obviously. It was wonky. I was (and still am) a nerd. Please don’t think I’m in denial about this.