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Category: [07] Poise & Purpose

Burnout, boredom, and the hunger for meaning in the work you do.

Chapter List

  • Significance Gap

    I am as bad as anyone when it comes to looking for meaning in what I do.

    I spend my days working towards significance.

    Oh sure, I write for the sake of writing, make art without care for anyone ever seeing it, and play music with my headphones on so that no one ever hears the sounds but me—but nearly all of it is in service to some future significance, I wager.

    We practice to improve.

    We groom our skills towards a purpose.

    We reach out for significance—which is something that cannot reliably be measured.

    What is significance? What is purpose? What is meaning?

    In a way it might be something parallel to the idea of wealth. Wealth is the acquisition of money in search of a tipping point from insufficient to more than enough. Wealth is relative. It’s a marketing term for banks. It’s an ineffable concept. For some wealth might simply be financial stability. For others wealth is riches beyond imagination. Wealth comes in a variety as diverse as there are people on Earth.

    Purpose is similar, I think. Meaning and significance are intangible and indefinable, and likely they mean something different for everyone who utters the syllables. There is a gap in communicating what my definition of significance is to you and vice versa. For some it might mean something personal or linked to a small community, while for others nothing short of worldwide fame and history shifting effort would suffice.

    My only advice then: define it for yourself.

  • Success Blindness

    Do you remember why you started chasing your art?

    Do you remember why you started taking photos, painting landscapes, composing music, or scratching out short stories in a dimly lit cafe?

    I’m sure a few people have stumbled across this blog and consider it a bit of navel gazing, culture-vibing, self-help sludge from a procrastinating wannabe, and maybe they’re right.

    I spend a small chunk of my day, nearly every day, doing some reflective writing on my hobbies and interests, and I do it for a very specific reason: I want to rekindle the memory of why.

    I want to keep the fire lit under the reasons I do any of this at all.

    I’ve felt burnout. I’ve encountered the darkness upon a long and lonely path and I know what it feels like to forget why you bother doing interesting things. Burnout cares not for strength of spirit or power of will. It only knows of despair and indifference. It wants you to forget the why. It wants you to overlook the origins of your passion and limit your recollection of the reasons you started out on the adventure in the first place.

    I stave of the darkness by writing these little short essays, often to remind even just myself of the answers to all those questions. I recall the beauty of a sketch gallery I wandered into in Dublin. I remember the vibe of yearning to play the violin whilst watching the symphony one winter evening. I recall listening to a beloved children’s author speak of the transcendent joy of the written word. 

    All of it lights against the darkness. All of it reminds me of successes lost to my own blindness.

  • Poise Purpose

    Three years prior to writing these words I was on the brink of a huge professional change.

    I’ve made a lot of excuses for that change over the span of time that followed it, but it was locked in step with the topic of this category of writing: finding purpose and keeping ones poise, and the side effects of failing in either or both.

    This isn’t a self-help blog, but it is very much the reflective writings of a guy who burnt out hard at his career because of a lot of big ideas that are in lockstep with both professional poise and purpose: that for many a job is a job, your salary could always be higher but you get the work done—but also that for many of us finding meaning and an honest life in our work can be an essential part of the balance.

    Burnout follows when that balance fails. And that balance is more precarious than ever when one pursues work that is already heavily skewed towards purpose and meaning, like creative pursuits, and away from salary and strict process, like creative pursuits.

    That doesn’t need to be a fatal blow to those efforts. At least, I think so.

    Under the category of Poise & Purpose I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Hard Change, two

    (Continued from Hard Change)

    Change is hard.

    The one thing you never really understand the gravitas of until it body slams you down to the ground of your own ambitions is that there is struggle at every level and with every step.

    I have been crossing the bridge of change for over two years as I write this having left what many would consider a cushy government job in search of something with far less bureaucracy and far more agency to do work that was (for lack of a better way to put it) morally and creatively positive. There are a thousand and one nuances to that statement and a career spanning twenty-five years stacked with as many successes as struggles, but in the end the yearning for something greater than being a cog in a machine won out.

    And what I have I learned is that so few respect that struggle. Those still on solid ground almost unanimously reject the very idea of crossing a bridge to something new.

    The other cogs in the machine often seem resentful.

    Those yearning to have their turn in the machine are often scornful.

    And the many who reject the machine itself are distrustful of anyone who ever participated in the machine at all.

    I stepped out of the machine to find a purpose for the second half of my life that was far across that bridge of change, invisible on the other side, though something of which I had heard through rumours might exist. What I suspect is that the bridge itself might be so long that the crossing of it is the destination itself.

  • Hard Change

    Change is hard.

    Until I went through the work of trying to rebuild my career from scratch I spent a tremendous amount of time looking across the bridge of that change and imagining what was on the other side. 

    Before I spin this little essay into a retelling of a whole “grass is greener on the other side” idiomatic fallacy of yearning, I will clarify: I think that yearning for change can be motivated by all sorts of things, and yes, visualizing the future state of your life in a positive way is one of those things. I also think there are a lot of reasons that people seek change in their lives and none of them are entirely right-thinking nor entirely wrongheaded, either. 

    Change is motivated by many things and each of those things is shaped by personal circumstance, individual and unique as fingerprints, combining the notions of our histories, our dreams, our hopes and our fears. And more so, I think that if you were to ask anyone to fully explain their motivation for change they might look at you with a distant stare and struggle to fully explain the deepest of those impulses to cross the bridge into something new.

    I have been walking across my own bridge for over two years now and I still cannot quite see the other side except in whispered rumours and hints of something interesting when the fog occasionally shifts and my vision clears long enough to look. It’s a hard walk. And an even harder one to justify to those still standing on solid ground.