languishing, burnt out, and depressed, OH MY!

My piece in High Shelf Press and...some thoughts.

Hello hello,

Today, I have words for you, some published 1.5 months ago in High Shelf Press, some festering in my mind’s eye since then and scribbled out today.

I’d love for you to read the piece, “Am I languishing, burnt out, or do I need MDMA?” first.

Gosh, need more encouragement? One reader of the piece said, “I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or do both.” Wow, pretty skillful of me. Anyway, the answer is do both.

OK, now that 2 minutes have gone by and you’ve read, laughed, and cried, here are some brief thoughts on 500 silly, weird words and mental health.

First off, I wrote this in June of 2021. When I found out the piece was getting published in March of this year, I worried that some of my cultural references would be outdated. But dogecoin and Selling Sunset are back! And the Deep State will always be around.

Whatever pandemic stage we were enduring in spring 2021, the think pieces on mental health were largely as contrived and pointless as ever! As a Depressed Person living under Late Capitalism, I often find it vexing when people come up with new, useless words for FEELING LIKE SHIT (languishing) or harping on euphemisms for CAPITALISM IS WORKING US TO HELL (burn out). It’s usually just depression or capitalism…or you’re a little bummed for a week or two and you’ll be just fine.

“Wow, Arthur, you seem angry.” Ha ha ha, lol, HAHA. Of course I am.

‘Burn out’ is a term thrown around by media, employers, and others in power that, intentionally or not, explains away the very systems of power responsible for life structured around work and over-work (Capitalism). PTO, if you have PTO, doesn’t cure ‘burn out,’ because we then return to working and living in a society that so de-prioritizes care and well-being.

The phrase ‘burn out’ is imprecise, serves no function, and keeps minds away from the heart of the issue. (Not that I would ask you to read any more, but this New Yorker piece from May 2021 on burnout is intriguing. It meditates on the uselessness of the phrase burn out and its history)

As for ‘languishing,’ I saw an article in the New York Times discussing this ‘not-so-well known’ sociological/psychological term that described that ‘pandemic feeling of not thriving but not depressed.’ Maybe I was annoyed because it was an essay, again, void of discussion of larger systems that left people ‘languishing’ or depressed or whatever. Maybe I was annoyed because mainstream publications love to publish news you can’t use by organizational psychologists at Wharton with a TED podcast. 

And MAYBE if we all had a little more access to MDMA or shrooms to treat mental health issues (and maybe if capitalism fell), we could do away with such silly phrases.

Now, back to sitting in the dark and eating my parboiled cauliflower.

- Artie