Detachment Is Not Burnout
After my last post, which was about detachment, someone responded with this:
It’s called burn-out. Some of us power through whether or not its painful, and some of us take our ball and go home. I see it really as a vetting process. (In motherless) Ooooh-w did you think you get to impose your bourgeoisie habitus upon the proles living in trailer parks, section 8, and in the shelters? My sweet summer child. Are you having trouble “detaching” from the oppressor way of life and mindset laid out by Paulo Freire? Do you think Jane Addams looked at the situation and threw her hands up like, “fuck it.”?
I need sharp, true-believer leftists by my side. So, the burn-outs can detach all they want. I’ll stand beside my comrades who carry the torch, and I will die for them whether it’s in a hail of gunfire or suffering and both mentally and financially broken. We protect us. We uplift us. We empower us. We rule us.
Burnout generally refers to a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged stress, often paired with a sense that what you’re doing isn’t actually working. This comment is a good example of someone who mistakes absorption for engagement, and I believe the author keenly demonstrates that they will eventually burn out brighter than most.
I’ve dealt with burnout. I’m a “content creator” by trade. For a lot of my adult life, my YouTube channels, books, posts, and related stuff were my income. My actual “pays my rent” job is also in content! If there is anyone who can tell you about burnout, it’s people who make content for a living. It’s supposed to be fun, but it eventually becomes a bit of a monkey’s paw situation.
It’s why I stopped pursuing making my content as a job. Could I rebuild it to what it once was? Absolutely. Is it worth the effort? Not to me. I believe it would require compromise and dedication to a watered-down version of what I want to say, a separation from my full intent. I don’t want to put the effort I put into things I care about into half-assed shit that pulls punches—not only for the sake of people’s feefees/algorithms, but also to reduce the effort it takes to produce content on a schedule.
And what I’m outlining in the previous post is specifically a response to burnout. Burnout is what happens when you stay attached to outcomes you can’t control, push past your limits anyway, and then collapse. It’s not a moral failure. It’s not a “vetting process,” as that person said. It’s a predictable result of how you’re relating to what you’re doing.
As I said in the last post, people really have trouble with the concept of “detachment.” I have had trouble understanding what it is in the past, and am not pretending I “just got it” or some such nonsense. But detachment isn’t stepping away. It’s stepping away from the idea that your emotional state should rise and fall based on whether the world does what you want. To put it another way, it’s stepping away from control.
That distinction seems to really bother people. And I think I have an idea why.
We live in a kind of fandom-driven social reality. You don’t just interact with things, you identify with them. You pick a side, you attach to it, and it becomes a source of meaning, identity, and stability. Politics is one of the places where this shows up most clearly—and thus content and politics are not so different; everything is affected by these dynamics.
And when everything works this way, boundaries start to look like betrayal. If someone says, “I’m not going to tie my well-being to outcomes I can’t control,” it registers as an attack.
Here’s a real attack on that mode, though: if effectiveness were the metric by which things were measured, contemporary politics is useless horseshit. It’s ineffective nonsense that doesn’t go anywhere because people have been trained on metricizing visibility.
Instead of evaluating things in terms of durability, sustainability, and interdependence, it’s measured by the intensity of what you say, support, and whether you actually “do something.” The priority is not whether anything works or lasts, but just that people “participate.” People don’t assess the outcomes of their actions, instead they measure compliance, how well people demonstrate alignment.
My next book is about fandom. My last documentary is as well.
To cut to the chase: if your model of engagement requires you to be constantly overwhelmed, constantly reactive, constantly pushing past your limits, then what you’re describing isn’t strength. It’s a system that consumes the people inside it.
This is “dedicated leftism.” This is what “the left” thinks it needs to be doing.
But people drop out when they are engaged in a way that couldn’t last. I am proposing a means of engagement that can. One that isn’t obsessed with “solutions” and understands we do not control the outcome. The leaders of the various revolutions knew why they were fighting, not how things would end.
We can engage without trying to control everything. We can care without taking on responsibility for outcomes we can’t determine. We can use our energy to actually think, rather than just endlessly yell the ideal outcome with other people who say “fuck yeah!”
If anything, detachment makes eventual change possible. And it doesn’t ruin your life. What that comment advocates for will.
This makes a good point. MN Atty Gen Keith Ellison at a Friends of the Boundary Waters told the crowd all the ways they could release their emotions by going to more rallies and writing more letters. Wtf is HE doing to protect the BWCAW? Blaming Republicans and Putin.
Agree that your emotional state shouldn't be dependent on whether the world does what you want. But continuing to engage with healthier emotional boundaries is only partial detachment. And engaging in any capacity will impact your emotions to some extent. Engaging with tools and systems and messaging owned by our oppressors means that our engagement will be used to continue to oppress us in one way or another. If everyone stopped engaging with political content on the internet we'd have so much more time to pay attention to the shit happening right under our noses, in our communities, in real life. And they are mutually exclusive because at the end of the day we are humans with limited capacity, everything is a trade off. Engagement is a distraction.