Book Review: "Exhausted" by Anna Katharina Schaffner

It's currently mid-May and yet again, it's pretty warm in the country. I mean, apart from that I have had this book sitting around on my Kindle for some time now and totally forgot about it. It's a book about dealing with burnout and though I find it makes some good points, they are points that other people have already made. However, they are also workable - not a lot of them feel like they are coming from a place of privilege and she definitely sees the reality and the irony in the fact that everyone hates their jobs and yet, nobody can actually leave them. If you're like me and you believe that the fat cats at the top are, by design, keeping the people beneath them tired and miserable so that they continue consuming stuff made by the same (or similar) fat cats - you will love this book.

I enjoyed the way in which the author initially went through what the term 'burnout' means. She doesn't just talk about it in the modern day, in fact she actually states that throughout history there have been different forms of this weird existential crisis to do with work and they have often dealt with it...well, questionably. But, I think it is safe to say that modern burnout is the one that the author really wants to go through as illustrated in the chapter 'B is for Burnout'. She looks specifically at people who work in health and education and states:

"People working in health and education tend to be driven by altruistic rather than materialist motives. And the higher our expectations, and the more we associate our professions with purpose and meaning, the greater our despair and suffering when reality bites."

I think this is very true for people who keep, how do you put it, throwing shit at the wall hoping that it sticks without any chance of slowing down soon. This often creates a lack of purpose and meaning whilst also creating a huge amount of fatigue and mental health issues in the profession. I would say that perhaps nurses have it the worst. They were just so constantly on during COVID that I am surprised that there were so many who chose to stay in the profession.

Another great chapter is called F is for Failure in which the author details what it means to fail and how we should be allowed to fail and pick ourselves up more because every time we make a failure we learn from it. But, the difference is that in the millennial era as our parents saw all industry close and collapse, outsourced to various countries who commit slave labour on their own people - these parents also went in hard when it came to making sure their kids grew up perfectionists. This meant a traumatising fear of failure mixed with a culture that won't let them make any mistakes.

She writes about how Trump also uses the same rhetoric and I don't know about you...but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a lot of fans. I can't imagine why. He seems like a great guy 😒...

"In his books, being a loser was the worst thing anyone could be - worse than being uncaring, a liar, amoral of even a criminal. The Trumpian loser is supposedly someone who either loses their money and power or else squanders opportunities for maximising them. Losers are too weak to succeed in a societ in which the strongest and smartest, or, more accurately, the most ruthless, thrive."

I think we can all agree on 'most ruthless' but 'stronger' and 'smartest' might have to be revisited because those two words definitely do not describe the current POTUS. But this is the same rhetoric which was used against the millennials when they entered the recession era world of work. This was notably after the fact we were raised to believe we should study all the way into university and beyond and then, we would get a really nice job at the end where we could really make a difference. The fact that this categorically didn't happen also adds to the fact we are generation burnout. Trump adds into the really terrible rhetoric in which you just keep blowing smoke up your own ass instead of actually trying to solve the damn problem. But, that is definitely on-brand for Donald Trump.

Another chapter called M is for Memento Mori shows us that the author understands that life is finite and we all want to do something that gives us purpose. In previous chapters, she speaks about how hobbies should be things we enjoy for the fact we enjoy them. We shouldn't be trying to earn money from them, we should not be doing them for someone else, we should not even be doing them in order to gain anything except for pleasure from them. As a millennial, if the hobby doesn't include the term 'side hustle' then I don't understand it. I think that this is a great idea, but it isn't practical. For example: I like to write book reviews for the fact that I like to talk to people about books. Yes, I do this because I like it. But it just happens to earn some money too. So if I'm doing it primarily for pleasure, does it still count? According to the author, no.

All this amounts to where in Memento Mori, the author seems to understand that if we are not reminded of how finite our time on earth is constantly then we probably won't remember it. This is the idea when it comes to the detachment from our purpose, detachment from our work and this bleeding of work into home life which has caused further detachment. It is therefore suggested that the aim of meaningless work is there to get us to forget why we are alive - making humans almost disposable. It is quite a weird thing to say because I like the sentiment but there are definitely people doing slave labour that perhaps are encouraged even more than that to forget that they are some sort of valuable human being.

All in all, I think that it is a pretty great book if you really want to think about the way in which modern life has sought us out to make sure that we are constantly paying but never receiving. The very beginning of that is that we pay universities by doing things we love and then going into meaningless but stressful jobs. Then, we are expected to do things we hate for the rest of our lives whilst paying everything back until we die. It's eye-opening.