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Quote by Dean Spade

“Burnout is the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work, and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety. If it were just exhaustion we could take a break and rest and go back. But people who feel burnt out often feel they cannot return to the work or that the group or work they were part of is toxic.”

Quote by Dean Spade

Work

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

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Author

Dean Spade
Dean Spade

Dean Spade, born in 1977, is a writer whose work primarily focuses on social issues such as gender, race, and class, exploring their manifestation in law, politics, and social movements. more

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“Lately, it's really been bothering me that, I don't know, the way people work like this every day from morning to night is kind of weird. Hasn't it ever struck you as strange? I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don't have to think at all. It's like I just put my brain in a locker before I start work and pick it up on the way home. I spend seven hours a day at a workbench, planting hairs into wig bases, then I eat dinner in the cafeteria, take a bath, and of course I have to sleep, like everybody else, so out of a twenty-four-hour day, the amount of free time I have is nothing. And because I'm so tired from work, the "free time" I have I mostly spend lying around in a fog. I don't have any time to sit and think about anything. Of course, I don't have to work at weekends, but then I have to catch up on the laundry and cleaning, and sometimes I go into town, and before I know it the weekend is over”