It’s Not Burnout — It’s Grief.

Is everyone having a bad time at work?

Before a moth steps into its cocoon for metamorphosis, it goes through the uncomfortable process of shedding its skin. This shedding process is essential for its growth. Once the larva has shed enough layers, it’s ready to step into the cocoon from which it emerges anew.

Work as I once knew it no longer exists.

My relationship with work has had a quiet ending. It’s like we’re in a relationship that’s over, but we’re still living together, politely navigating our final days. The magic I once felt for work is no longer there. A gentle malaise has set in, and I know I’m not alone.

I’m surrounded by smart and ambitious people who are good at this thing we call work, and they’re struggling. I can’t recall a conversation I’ve had recently with someone who’s told me that they’re enjoying their work. There’s a collective feeling of stagnation and despair. Is anyone thriving? Growing? How wild, in this climate, to ask: is anyone feeling fulfilled?

News of layoffs is forever surrounding my social circles. It seems that everyone is either at threat of one now or sometime soon. It’s been this way for a long time, and we’ve given up on the hope of some form of bounce back. Making money out of a creative career has long been a challenge, but now this challenge seems to have come for the jobs that were supposed to be a safe bet, too. Even those who work in the gigantic technology companies that are conducting this new world aren’t safe.

The work malaise has come for us all.

I love working when it’s going well. I find it fun and purposeful. I still believe, as was the intention laid out in the work podcast I co-hosted, Is This Working?, that the quality of our work impacts the quality of our lives. Unfortunately, since launching that podcast in 2019, a series of catastrophic world and economic events and the increasing adoption of AI have repeatedly put work under threat.

The trouble is that the problem isn’t just me. If it was, I could fix myself. When what’s happening to work is coming from forces outside of my control, then what can I do? There’s a helplessness to our work experience right now and all we can do is sit on our hands, try to keep the jobs we have and simply… wait.

It feels criminal to be this far into my career and still find work both scarce and mundane. I hit a crisis point in the middle of doing some work I didn’t want to do and I shared my frustrations on a voicenote to my former podcast co-host and friend,

Anna Codrea-Rado

.

I told her I felt like a failure. I’d failed financially and creatively, and now the work I did that used to feel seamless also wasn’t going well. I want my work to go back to what it was before, I told her.

Anna told me that what I was saying sounded like grief. She was right.

We don’t know what the future of work is going to look like, but we do know that AI has changed the game. This isn’t about whether AI is good or bad. Like all new technologies, it’ll be a mix of both. But when you consider the economic and political turmoil of the last few years and even how a trip to the supermarket is painful as grocery prices are skyrocketing, it’s no wonder that we’re feeling so adrift. My heart is heavy as I grapple with it all. All change is a loss, and I’m grieving for work as I once knew it.

There’s a person in me somewhere who’s confident I’ll adapt and find something new to do. However, first I must grieve. I’m not sure how aware we are of the death of work as we understand it today. We’re anxious about our jobs, sure, and we’re aware that it’s bleak out there. Yet have we accepted it’s over?

It’s like someone has died, but we haven’t found the body. Can we have the funeral? Where is our closure? We know an ending is coming, we just haven’t named it yet.

Perhaps it’d be easier if work came crashing down and we had no choice but to rebuild it from scratch. Instead, we’re just getting by and surviving enough to carry on. To be surviving has become a privilege, as it’s so bad out there. To want to flourish at work seems like a desire from a bygone era.

We’ve gone beyond burnout. When burnout hit the zeitgeist with ‘How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation’ by

Anne Helen Petersen

, it was 2019, and the world was a very different place. At the time, we were disillusioned with work, exhausted from the hustle and capitalist lies. We wanted to rewire our brains and reframe our definition of success. However bad burnout may be, we had some control. We could choose to stop. The problem with work now is that it’s no longer about our toxic relationship with it, but that work itself is crumbling, soon to no longer exist.

Meanwhile, our future lies in the hands of a crazy few, a sour combination of tech and political leaders whom I don’t trust that much. So that anger, that resentment, that frustration and boredom that you’re feeling are all appropriate responses to the work climate that we’re in.

When it comes to work, I’m not totally fine, and neither, I imagine, are you.

The reality is that most of us laptop work people will have to change what we do. There’ll be some things that will survive and others that won’t. The cinema has outlasted Blockbuster (video rental) stores, for example. Plumbers will be fine as long as people can afford to pay them. In general, we’re bad at predicting what will happen, but it’s something I’m already thinking about: what can I offer that a robot can’t?

But before that time, I must process my grief.

I’m sad. I liked what I was doing before. It’s a struggle to let go of things that we like. During this sea of change, I believe that alternative therapies will continue to rise in popularity, and I find myself increasingly seeking out these practices. I like to do conscious connected breathwork sessions every so often to revisit old traumas and release emotions. I usually cry and let something out. But most recently, I froze. My hands clenched up like claws. I spoke to my teacher about it afterwards, who told me there was something I was refusing to let go of, and I couldn’t work out what that could be.

Until now.

I must let go. I must grieve. I must sit in the discomfort of not knowing what the future of my work will look like. It’s painful and it’s messy but I must shed my skin to grow and prepare for what’s next. It’s only then I can sit in the stillness of transformation.

As Glennon Doyle once wrote, ‘Grief is a cocoon from which we emerge anew.’

With love,

Tiff x

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