Burning Out & A Way To Keep Your FIRE Blazing
I originally wrote this in June of 2019 after writing an article for another site, but it’s lived as a draft ever since. Then it felt in poor taste to post this during 2020 while the world was so chaotic. Now, I realize how unrealistic it is that burnout could cease to be an issue while we were collectively confronted by all sorts of insane circumstances. If anything, talking about burnout probably would have made a lot of sense! Regardless, burnout is starting to really resonate again regardless of the pandemic, and maybe even because of it in some ways.
Don’t Let Your FIRE Burn Out
I decided to update this now because I think burnout is something the financial independence/retire early (FIRE) community should be on guard for—our paths to FIRE don’t happen overnight! We can pour ourselves into all things FIRE, and if we’re not careful, have little-to-no balancing energy remaining to stay the course.
Spoiler alert: The myth of meritocracy we were raised on doesn’t exist. “Work hard in school, get a good job, live a good life”—sounds nice, but life is messier than this well-meaning advice allows. My frustration expressed here stems from the systems at the office from preventing improvement, despite my doubled-over efforts to make things better for the team of professionals I sit along side with in cubicle land. (And remotely during this time.)
Have you ever noticed that the people that work the hardest, aren’t universally at the top of the cubicle land organization charts? That working hard at your job doesn’t equate to the myth’s ‘living a good life?’
I was very frustrated after listening to The Burnout Generation written by Anne Helen Petersen on Audible. It was really well done—the book was great—but the message was hard to hear. I had been expecting it to be a sort of complainy-pants themed book—how could young people be so fraught with burnout as to be a burnout generation? Turns out I was the judgy-pants here!
Whose Dream?
Nice…
but no thanks
I listened to it twice. While listening, I was frustrated by how eye opening it was to package it all up together—how she was able to show the myth of busting your butt to get ahead is really just a myth. Often, Millennials are the punch lines of memes or office quips: they’re snowflakes, they’re entitled, they’re young/naïve/etc. But Ms. Petersen gives us a little more holistic context as to what’s going on with these 30-somethings. The promises of old: go to college (wrack up debt, probably before you have any real income at all), get a good job (work during your best hours of the very long day, for years, for someone else), and buy a house (cha-ching, are you sure you can afford that?), and don’t forget to fill that house with all the nice things to keep up with the Joneses (more debt on top of your debt to keep you working for someone else), with a sweet new ride to get yourself to and from work (and probably a car payment to keep you going to work each day)… Promises of a sort… sold as some sort of happy American Dream. Sounds more like debt shackles on top of debt shackles to keep your butt in your cubicle land seat.
And shout out to those working in the gig economy, especially in 2020 or 2021. I’m sure you’ve still got shackles from chasing meritocracy, but your unstable schedule means your butt is balancing all of this on a two-legged stool trying to make it all work! Props to your steely fortitude, my friend!
“Keep dreaming, you’ll get there if you keep working at it,” they say. No, thanks. That’s our nightmare. We’ll dream of working for ourselves, by starting to figure out ways to work for ourselves. By working nights, by starting our days a little earlier, by working a little harder on our side hustles on “days off;” we’ll work on our dreams rather than just dreaming for more.
Your dreams are really helpful for navigating your ‘Why for FI.’ Your dreams are great to inspire you, but they’re wispy, thin little things when you start to feel the burnout creep in! Especially if you’re busting your butt when you’re suspicious as to whether it will all pay off or not.
Burning out feels like running out of time, while running on empty
I’ve been writing, editing, and revising my resignation letter at work to quit my 9-5. A year later, and I still haven’t hit send because we’re not “there” yet, but I continually update the draft document. It’s cathartic, allowing me to codify my frustrations and the ignored solutions I’ve offered, while also serving as black and white motivation to get out that door, and onto living the life we’re trying to create for ourselves. It’s a crystal clear confrontation with my ‘if I can just fix this one little thing, things will get better’ brick wall… that same brick wall I beat my head against trying to just fix something.
No matter how hard we might work to change things at work for the better… turns out, things don’t actually change at work. We joke that with every re-organization, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Same office cubes. Same people. Same problems, just freshly arranged with a freshly printed off org chart. In less than three months, the problems have, again, percolated to the top. Six months later, after no change, rumors abound of a future re-org to ‘fix’ things so the knives come out to carve up the organization again…
Real Work
No, thanks. Ending the rat race is our primary motivator for campFIRE. Last year, my love and I listened to a BiggerPockets webinar, investigating ways of growing our passive income. The speaker referenced a quote I haven’t been able to track down, but it was along the lines of:
‘freedom is being able to do the real work.’ -BiggerPockets wisdom
That quote resonated, because homesteading is real work: there’s always tons on the to-do list, even more on the someday-wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if list, everything you tackle (outside of chores) takes twice as long as you’d figured when you penciled it down, and if you don’t do it, it literally will never get done. No one else is going to swoop in and clean up a homestead mess for you, unless you write them a fat check to trek all the way out to your place to do so! And we’re trying to be self-reliant and financially independent so no way will we write that check!
This work on the homestead, for us, is a lifestyle. As we grow our systems of self-reliance… to be as self-sufficient and independent as we can be… this “work” sure beats the heck out of sitting in a desk chair, working for someone else. It is certainly humbling to look in the mirror and realize you’re staring at the one to get this self-reliant work done, along with your significant other, of course!
This homestead work might not sound like early retirement to you, and that’s okay! While we think everyone should grow their food independence, we’re learning just how much work it is to try and grow your own food! Growing it is one thing, processing and preserving it is quite another!
Burnout is real. Things wear you down, no matter how hard you try to keep going, and that can make things really messy. You can snip at your colleague at work, you might break a tool from using it while your mind starts to pay attention to a different homestead problem, or you might get sick from wearing yourself out!
Combating Burnout
The good news is combating burnout can be really easy. Note that we said “can be.”
To combat burnout, simply write down what you’re doing, and then take a break.
The funny thing about our go-go-go culture, is that we don’t promote the value of rest and recovery enough, even though it is required to keep going. You cannot workout all day, every day, and keep making gains—your body will force you to allow it to rest in one way or another, eventually.
When you write down what you want to be doing instead of burning out, it can be really, really motivating to dig a little deeper, tighten your belt a little more, and push just a little bit harder to make those plans your reality and end the burnout for good!
And if there’s no boost of enthusiasm to get going after your list of tasks… TAKE A BREAK! I mean it. If you’re in a slump, sometimes the best thing you can do is embrace that slumpy feeling for a moment while you listen to the reasons why that are dragging you down deeper into the burnout muck. When you rest, your thoughts of ways to make things better will stir up energy within you to make things better.
A deep breath can go a very long way to reducing your stress and clearing your head. A series of deep breathes helps even more.
When we take a little break to tend to the fire, we look for fuel to feed that fire. When we’re on our long FIRE journeys, sometimes we need to take a break, make sure we’re headed in the right direction, and then get after it once we’ve recovered a bit. The path to FIRE is long, and probably full of all sorts of twists and turns. It’s not as fast as any of us want it to be, and it’s certainly much more complicated than the meritocracy myth shapes our expectations of how our futures will be.
Write down your motivations. Write down your tasks. Take a break. Take a whole bunch of deep breathes. Reflect on why you’re working so hard. And then, get after it! Financial independence is the freedom to do the real work, or whatever else it is you wan to do. Financial independence is freedom!
