#5 The Politics of Rest - Burnout & Procrastination
Dear friends and colleagues, dear faraway nearby,
Where are you landing at the end of this month? As you might be aware May is internationally celebrated as Mental Health Awareness Month and there have been some interesting conversations happening. I've been working for the past weeks on an exhibition called "Fernweh" (a term that is so very German and difficult to translate, it comes down to the bodily ache to travel to some distant place just for the sake of being somewhere else) at the Magda-Bittner-Simmet Foundation. We've been talking a lot about the difference of vacation and travelling, the concept of rest and the impact of the tourism industry in scheduling downtime. We talked a lot about how we barely have unstructured time, in particular as the pandemic has blurred so many lines and demands a constant state of being alert.
Then last week I was able to catch two fantastic presentations at the School of Commons, a community-based initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, located at the Zurich University of the Arts. One presenter was Jess Henderson, who shared her research around toxic productivity culture though her project Band of Burnouts. Band of Burnouts is a fascinating a transdisciplinary study of the concept of burnout looking into it as a collective rather than individual experience, and taking the somatic aspect into account. The second presenter was Charlotte Friedli who talked about procrastination.
All of these encounters and some more have informed the thoughts of this month's letter. As always I use this space to connect some loose dots and would love to hear about your relations to these topics.
Procrastination We live in times where unscheduled time is often coined unproductive. We try obsessively to stick to "good habits" forgetting that thinking in habits might actually remove us from the cycle we're in and the needs connected to this present moment (I wrote about that in #1 Routine is the death of relational thinking). If you're like me obsessed with notebooks and planners you might have heard about the bullet journalers who tracks about everything and where planning becomes often sort of a procrastination method for actually doing the thing you're so meticulously planning every step of the way. Planing as procrastination, yes, as long as the method feels productive we just coin it differently.
Procrastination is still a term with a productive direction, we are just often quite frankly overwhelmed or don't exactly know how to start. Writer Austin Kleon calls it "productive procrastination"
Can we reframe procrastination as a form of rebellion creating unscheduled time in an overstimulated time?
How much insecurity and overwhelm is the at the core of stretching the beginning of a task?
Burnout
Burnout is something real. Our demands increase often on a daily base and for many the spiral of anxiety and adjusting to the working condition during this pandemic lead to this numbness that many describe as burnout. We won't find individual solutions to collective problems (I wrote a bit more about that in The Privatization of Stress. And that being said, burnout, anxiety and mental health are still conditions that many are frightened about to talk openly. I do see this hesitation in particular in underrepresented communities who are already vulnerable to toxic systemic conditions. My grandmother and mother, both Spanish emigrants were never able to access the language of burnout, they just had to stretch themselves in often very xenophobic working conditions as a method of survival. Claiming rest is a concept that both only claimed after their retirement (there is so much more to talk about here about motherhood, female experiences of burnout and migration)
And then there is this other more modern language of burnout connected to hustle culture where so called failures to get incorporated into a success narrative. It's often in these stories where privileged folks talk about how they overworked themselves into burnout and how that changed their perspective. This turning point lead them to write this book/ create this course [insert whatever sellable product that creates massive revenue but that rarely provides solutions for any systemic conditions.]
How can we reimagine work outside of the toxic influence of productivity culture?
What does the framing of burnout say about our working culture?
Politics of Rest
As some might know I come from a lineage of Spanish/ Portuguese emigrants. Rest is an interesting aspect in these cultures, the siesta, a short nap after lunch to avoid the hot summer hours in the afternoon, used to be for a long time part of the culture. The tradition originated, like in many other areas around the world with a hot climate, out of necessity of people who worked in farming to avoid the burning sun. And by the way, the concept didn't originate in Spain but in Italy but it's interesting how the concept became an integral part due to the history of blue-collar culture in Spain:
“The word siesta comes from the Latin sexta,” explains Juan José Ortega, vice president of the Spanish Society of Sleep and a somnologist - an expert in sleep medicine. “The Romans stopped to eat and rest at the sixth hour of the day. If we bear in mind that they divided periods of light into 12 hours, then the sixth hour corresponds in Spain to the period between 1pm (in winter) and 3pm (in summer).” [...]
"From its Roman origins, the siesta became a cross cultural phenomenon, but it was Spain’s peculiar historical working hours that gave Spaniards, perhaps more so than most, the opportunity to fit the infamous nap into their day.
Traditionally, the Spanish working day was split into two distinct parts: people would work from 9am until 2pm, stop for a two hour lunch break and return to work from 4pm until around 8pm. This disjointed day came about because in post Civil War Spain, many people worked two jobs to support their families, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon. The two hour break allowed workers, especially those in rural areas, time to rest or travel after the first job ended.Then between the early 1950s and early 1980s, Spain experienced unprecedented migration from rural areas to its cities, where the majority of its citizens now work. Here, few people have a siesta, but the long working day appears to have remained ingrained in the culture."
From: It's time to put the tired Spanish siesta stereotype to bed [BBC]
Today the reality is that the siesta tradition is something that according to studies the majority of Spaniards rarely do and that has been sacrificed due to neoliberal demands. It is true that most businesses and retailers shut down around 2 p.m and remain closed until around 5 p.m, with the exception of bars, restaurants, and large department stores, which remain open to allow people to gather and eat during siestas, or run errands. People return to work around 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m., and stay until around 8 p.m.. What is a wrong is the assumption that Spaniards work less due to this "lazy lifestyle" (read this is a really toxic framing). Actually it's totally contrary according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Spaniards rack up 1,686 hours at work each year while British workers do 1,538 annually and the Germans work just 1,368 hours a year.
Now there is this really toxic neoliberal framing that longer working hours equal more productivity and this is simply not true. Hustle culture wears constant busyness as a batch of honor, it preaches velocity and provides hacks to function on less sleep, cooking in batches and to eat meals that support productivity. The brain becomes trained to always be active and always churning out idea after idea after idea. It's a culture of never enough.
We associate hustle culture with ambition but enoughness is not the end of ambition. Feeling into the concept of enoughness is actually deeply connected with pleasure and the idea of plenty instead of scarcity. It's a feeling that feels revolutionary to claim.
Nicole Manganelli, Founder & Designer of radical emprints
wrote this poem inspired by Mary Oliver's Wild Geese
A few things I've been working on
I wrote about the photographer and architectural theorist Susanne Hefti who has been studying the impact of authoritarian politics on public spaces [German]
I worked on the first digital edition of this year's fair Art Karlsruhe. I did a public presentation about women in the arts [German] and an English tour including some personal highlights.
Reading
The Very Real “Motherhood Penalty” in the Art World
What Should We Call the Great Women Artists?
Austin Kleon on How to index your work so you never lose an idea again.
Podcasts
Tricia Hersey from the Nap Ministry on Rest as Resistance
I think we're so obsessed with the idea of hearing from young people achieving success early á la 30 under 30 etc. that we forgot to include a more reflected perspective from older people. There are a few podcasts that include this wisdom in their shows like Sugar Calling with Cheryl Strayed (writer of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail) who calls a writer she admires in search of insight and courage — all over the age of 60 — to ask the questions like: How do we stay calm when everything has been upended? How do we muster courage when fear is all around us?
I'm really excited about the 70 Over 70 podcast: a show about how we make the most of the time we have left. Max Linsky talks to 70 remarkable people, all over the age of 70, not just about their past but their lives right now. These are conversations about the big questions we all ask ourselves, no matter how old we are. What does it mean to live well? What are we still searching for? And how do we learn to let go?
What are your thoughts on the Politics of Rest - Burnout & Procrastination? As always, I'd love to hear from you. Just drop a line replying directly to this letter or get in touch via anabelroro@gmail.com.
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In Rest, Joy and Solidarity,
Anabel