Is it really better to burn out than to fade away?

A friend sent me a quote a couple of days ago about burnout:

Burn out comes not primarily from doing too much, but from doing what we don’t really want to do – so that one foot is moving forward and the other foot is trying to run away’. – (from a book: sleeping with bread, holding what gives you life).

It got me to thinking and I started talking to other friends about it and looking around.

Another friend sent me a couple of useful links to resources about burnout (take the test, I found it thought provoking). One of the things that comes through from both sites is that burnout seems to be directly linked to two things – lack of meaning and lack of helpful fellowship.

http://www.docpotter.com/boclass-0toc.html

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_08.htm

I found a couple of things these articles were saying also quite enlightening:

Burnout occurs when passionate, committed people become deeply disillusioned with a job or career from which they have previously derived much of their identity and meaning. It comes as the things that inspire passion and enthusiasm are stripped away, and tedious or unpleasant things crowd in.

Burnout doesn’t occur overnight. It is a cumulative process, beginning with small warning signals that, when unheeded, can progress into a profound and lasting dread of going to work.

People caught in the burnout cycle withdraw. By cutting themselves off from friends and colleagues they deprive themselves of the support they desperately need.

I found a story from Philip Yancy helpful in thinking about this:

My pastor in Chicago, Bill Leslie, used the illustration of an old hand operated pump. He sometimes felt like such a pump, he said. Everyone who came along would reach up and pump vigorously a few times, and each time he felt something drain out of him. Finally, he was approaching a point of “burnout” when he had nothing more to give. He felt dry, dessicated.

In the midst of this period, Bill went on a weeklong retreat and expressed these thoughts to his designated spiritual director, a very wise nun. He expected her to offer soothing words about what a wonderful sacrificial person he was. Instead she said “Bill, there’s only one thing to do if your reservoir is dry. You’ve got to go deeper.” He realised on the retreat that for his outward journey to continue, he needed to give a higher priority to his inward journey.

One of the interesting questions raised for me by the first quote is that it places the emphasis on what we are doing.

Victor Frankl takes quite a different position in “Mans Search for Meaning”

“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the serf-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself–be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it.In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

I wonder whether that one of the challenges of what one of the articles calls the “Burnout cycle” is that its easy to find yourself in such a place of pain and discomfort that the pain and discomfort becomes the agenda.

Both Yancy and Frankl seem to indicate that the antidote to burnout is somewhat paradoxical – to put the focus somewhere else.

As I was musing yesterday I wonder if this is the kind of thing Jesus had in mind when he said:

Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?  Mark 8:34-35  (the Message)