If you’ve never felt burnt-out, I deeply envy you. Burnout is the latest workplace call to action given the continuation of remote work and it’s the herald that brought flocks of university students to therapy during the pandemic. For me it’s been a lifelong companion throughout my academic and now professional career.
Rather than delve into the science and psychology that I am neither qualified or experienced enough to regurgitate, I’d like to share some emotion and color on the subject through my personal experience. The stories are true. Gen Z is notoriously burnout, stressed, overworked, and yes, we do complain a lot. If I conceded to my egotistical nature, I would flex my resume and fill up paragraphs about all the work I managed to fit into my 3.5 years of college. As an alternative anecdote, I was interviewing at the company I currently work for doing a walkthrough of my resume where I highlighted my best three experiences like all good business schools teach you to do. When I got to my last bullet point, my future co-workers asked, “How were you able to do all of this?” Great question. The answer? Approximately 7 years of burnout-inducing hustle.
This all started when I was about 13 and I took the StrengthsFinder personality assessment as part of my first mentoring experience. My top trait was “Achiever”. From that day on, I soaked up every hint of achievement like a vampire obsessed over blood. Mind you, my teens were the Twilight and Edward/Bella days so that’s a totally legit metaphor. In high school, I was eternally compared to my valedictorian brother who got a nearly full-ride scholarship to a private college out-of-state. No pressure at all. But my second top trait in that personality assessment was “Competitor”. Therefore, it was only natural that I did whatever I could to be better, or at least grab up every achievement he did too. The Chin siblings got so many trophies, awards, and plaques that they now only occupy stacks of bins deep in closets. The important thing to note is that I strutted into Seton Hall’s “#1 in the country” business leadership development program as a past state officer of Washington Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) with 29 transfer credits from 8 AP classes.
In high school, I didn’t know what burnout meant. You were just stressed or tired and that was it. During the pandemic, TikTok taught me that I was a burnt-out gifted kid. This depiction of burnout was a lot more digestible than the scientific articles that hit with too much conviction and accuracy to be pleasant. Being a burnt-out gifted kid was a cultural phenomenon shared among Gen Z (the older range of us) that found themselves struggling to achieve as high as they once did. This version of burnout was fun to claim because it meant that despite having higher expectations to live up to, you were special. I took an academic placement test in 5th grade that told me I was special and earned me a coveted spot in middle school with the smart kid clique. In high school I took the maximum amount of AP classes and earned the max score on all but one. Never the sciences though, colleges wouldn’t transfer those credits. I didn’t stop with president of my high school’s FBLA chapter, I became the Puget Sound Region Vice President. I still have my fancy engraved nametag. I LOVED being seen as a “gifted kid,” something special. I didn’t care about popularity. I cared about what made me stand out which was usually achievements, grades, and what college I would end up at. When choosing a college, I went with the one that nobody else was going to, the one that would give me special treatment for being a gifted business kid. I was willing to move across the country to do so.
When I entered college, I was fine. Totally fine. Far from my family, I did the thing I usually do and the thing I’m best at: achieving. I bonded with one of my best friends because we didn’t waste time partying and we were both crazy enough to attend every extracurricular club’s intro session during that first month of college. I usually went for the free food. Did you notice that I thought socialization was a waste of time? Hmm yeah, it took me a while to notice too. By my second semester I was solidly filling out my resume and wearing my 4.0 like a badge that validated why I only had a handful of friends. I told myself I was totally fine with that. The next part is why I said “approximately” 7 years of burnout. I joined a sorority. Everyday my answer changes of whether I would repeat that decision or not. In hindsight, I realize that my academic course load had lightened due to the immense quantity of transfer credits I had, and I simply found myself without enough things to occupy my ambitions. A lot of my decisions in life stem from me being too bored, oops.
In the sorority I developed an alter-ego of sorts as “Lil Chin” who did practically the opposite of what Achiever Amy did prior to sorority life. I thought it was a nice reprieve from the competitive business world I was engulfed in, but I soon found my groove and it took zero time at all for me to dream of being sorority president. However, this is where burnout creeped back in. Regardless of what people tell you, sorority positions are not elected strictly from merits but from social connections and loyalties. I had found an environment that wouldn’t give me what I wanted just because I was the most qualified. I would have to be friends with everyone and that was just ridiculous and uncontrollable. The rate of return on my social investment plummeted and I quickly pivoted right back to my hustle. With a little break from my break-neck speed of achieving, I had dived right back in with renewed vigor. A year after I rushed a sorority, I was commuting to New York City three days a week for an unpaid internship where I took notes and listened. Like a vampire when they start feeding on human blood, a frenzy began. A taste of my end goal (a job in NYC at a nice and tall office building) had me running full speed ahead.
The problem was that I was already burnt-out. I slowed for periods of time, like the sorority semester, but never stopped. Those video clips of Olympic athletes pushing through a fall or injury to finish the final lap of a race are super inspiring. What I was did was more like adding two extra laps to the race after twisting an ankle. From my freshman year of college to March of 2020 I operated at a pace of networking, curve breaking grades, and job juggling that felt as natural as breathing since I’d been doing it since high school. Burnout was not a new feeling for me. There was only one thing that could shake me from this pattern. A global freaking pandemic.
I went to my first live comedy show during a rainstorm in the summer of 2021. A comedian above the age of 25 joked that the worst kind of people are the ones who rave about how the pandemic was a good thing because it helped you slow down, take a break, and whatever else a man would say to describe self-discovery [insert better joke telling skills here]. My friend and I, two recovering burnt-out gifted kids, laughed VERY loud when nobody else did. Laughing because we had both said almost the exact same things earlier that week. Self-deprecating humor is core to a burnt-out gifted kid by the way. The joke was practically made for us.
At the tipping point of COVID in March 2020, another burnt-out friend of mine (yes, I have a lot) was also commuting to the city for an equally unpaid internship like I was. Our friendship and mutual struggle were a way to cope with the exhaustion and feelings of lack that accompany burnout, but it wasn’t quite enough. I could feel my collapse approaching. March was poised to hold that key week where my school load would ramp up at the same time my big internship project would launch, and I would entirely crumble and fall apart. Except neither happened and I crumbled for an entirely different reason.
I don’t want to pretend that my life was so super hard during COVID because it really wasn’t compared to what others had to go through. My internship was at an experiential marketing agency which basically meant entirely in-person and so my workload went from heavy to non-existent in less than a week. But I still had financial security and my professional career would survive. My classes went virtual, I had nothing to occupy my time, and I miserably missed my friends who were thousands of miles away on the east coast. But I still had my family as a support system. The reason I felt like my world had shattered and lost meaning was that my achievements fell through. I couldn’t girl boss in NYC because that fantasy didn’t exist in a COVID universe. I couldn’t thrive and achieve in college because Zoom University poked all the holes in my university experience that I needed to see. I had nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, and the results of my efforts let me down massively. I was exhausted emotionally, physically and mentally. With nothing else to focus on I became anxious, and I started languishing in a big, endless sea of blah. My need for competition and validation was overrun with a need to not die. So, I sat, watched TV, and waited for something to change. I was truly a burnt-out gifted kid.
But then came the pivot. With time to think and no tasks to accomplish I realized which things in my life were helping or hurting my overall life direction and goal. My resume was full because I refused to let go of the progress I made anywhere because I wanted to keep the achievement. Realizing that life isn’t like high school or a videogame, I stopped counting achievements like experience points and focused on earning the right ones. Classic quality over quantity situation. I dropped everything that wasn’t worth my time. If COVID got to steal time from my college experience, I wasn’t going to waste another second of it. I stopped running the brand of something I didn’t believe in anymore. I stopped giving to roles and people that gave nothing back. I stopped casting a wide net and hoping for a decent job and started asking for help to get exactly where I wanted to go.
However, a pivot is just a pivot. Instead of running deeper into a hole, I started climbing out. Out of a very, very deep hole. I still think I’m in this metaphorical hole. Burnout permeates to your mindset so it can’t be solved overnight or over the course of a year. One of its lingering affects is my belief that I need to maximize my time and energy. Operating from a mindset of “COVID took away my time, so I have to cram twice as much stuff in to compensate” was not exactly healthy. But it was better than before because this time I included socializing with less and less focus on achievement. A step in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong, I still achieved. I got my full-time NYC job in a nice and tall office building that I was dreaming about.
Remote work was a fresh new evil that nobody knew how to control. To indulge my TV obsession for a minute, there’s a Star Trek: Lower Decks episode (available on Paramount+) that encapsulates this energy. Season 1 episode 3 features Boimler a lower decks employee who operates by-the-books with maximum efficiency and volunteers for more work. He also happens to be the reason why the entire ship’s crew begins to work with tight schedules and timed tasks that lead to such incredible and widescale burnout that the ship gets overrun by a rather weak alien species and they’re helpless to stop it. But Boimler is thriving, completing tasks right on time and working happier than ever. When universities pivoted to online learning and internships were virtual, I was pretty much Boimler. Thriving while others were having a terrible time. In hindsight this is when I started to maximize. Maximizing is my new kryptonite.
Maximizing allowed me to be just as burnt-out, a little more self-aware this time around, because I was doing all my regular things in half the time. I stuffed my resume full because by not needing to leave my house or even my room I could get twice as much done in a day. My achievement-driven burnout had simply adapted to a constant maximizing of productivity. I wanted to be the most productive student and employee as possible. I still do.
So… did I really learn anything? Yes and no. I take breaks but I’m not great at it. I try to allow myself flexibility from my expectations and I try to stop maximizing these expectations. Burnout is still ingrained in my mindset because while I write all these things about my progress my default settings are still stuck in burnout mode. In February, I had to take a day off work because I had another of what I like to call my “burnout fevers.” I literally tire and work myself to a point of physical exhaustion where my body develops a fever for 24 hours. Every time I panic, take a COVID test, realize it’s burnout, then spend 24 hours watching TV and doing nothing else. The next day I bounce back, go back to work and hope that I manage my stress better next time. I’ve done this so many times I once wrote out a list for my doctor. It happens about every three months and there is always more than one big source of stress in my life. One time it almost ruined a trip to Paris. This February I went to Palm Springs, CA during the long President’s Day weekend to maximize my paid holiday regardless of the unlimited paid time off policy my employer has. It took me two whole days just to relax. Once I did, I sat pool side in the sun and within two hours I was too terribly bored to be enjoying myself. Even on vacation, I felt I wasn’t maximizing my time. My inability to vacation properly, and the fact that there’s a “right” way to vacation in my mind, indicates that burnout doesn’t only apply in the workplace.
I suspect I’ll write another blog post on workplace burnout because I don’t think I can ever escape burnout at this point. People want to talk about it, solve it, and get rid of it. I highly doubt they’ll get it right on the first try and that certainly sounds like blog-worthy material. Overall, I think burnout is part of my story and who I am. For me, it is not a trend, it is not new, and it takes too much effort to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’d like to round out this post with a list of things I know now (and sometimes act on) that I didn’t understand before my COVID pivot.
- I don’t have to be productive all the time
- Everyone is operating on different timelines with different goals
- My time is valuable, I should treat it as such
- People make it worth it, not achievements.
As you may have guessed, I was/am feeling a little burnt-out recently and this blog is meant to be stress relieving instead of stress inducing. Therefore, I do not commit myself to any schedule or any quotas, simply goals and loose expectations that I change just about as often as I post. I hope this insight into my history with burnout inspires others to investigate their own internal biases about achievement and productivity. I also highly recommend therapy.
Authentically,
Amy Chin
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