Hi, friends! Thank you for being here tonight.
I'm excited to talk about the archaeology of burnout.
I did spend my summer in a pit and it was
a good choice, I think.
I'm back.
So I was here last time a few years ago, talking about burnout, when I burnt out from travel,
and it was actually really helpful
to process here, so I appreciate that.
I was like... cool. I went through another burnout. I got toasty.
I'll come back and process here again. I should say though,
last time I waited a year, and this time I've been back at work for two weeks
and it turns out that was a terrible mistake.
Because I don't really know what I've learned
yet, and I'm still pretty toasty.
So we're gonna roll with it.
But yeah.
It's still happening.
Okay.
So eight months ago I started realizing I was burning out.
There are a lot of different symptoms folks get.
And a lot to talk about, like, how do you know if it's work versus stuff at home,
but in this case, we were absolutely sure
it was work.
A lot of the stuff I dealt with was...
I was asleep at work all the time.
Which is not normal.
I want to be awake in my office.
It's uncomfortable to be asleep in front of
others.
I've really had this desperate need to escape.
I would be in a meeting and I would be like...
Let me out! Free me!
You might say that's normal. That's me every day, Kara.
That's us under late stage capitalism.
But I actually like meetings. I want to be in them.
And I did not anymore.
I would have done anything to escape them.
I became pretty disconnected and disillusioned.
And in a lot of cases, burnout is caused by
a lack of control or a toxic environment and stuff like that.
But I was really resistant to the idea that
I was burned out, because I was really supported.
I have amazing teammates.
Everything was going great.
Our new CEO totally rocks.
Tell everyone.
My boss was really supportive.
And I really liked the projects I was working on.
I was like...
That can't be work burnout.
I was feeling honestly better about work and
my personal life than I had felt in years.
And when my colleague told me...
He was like look, when you run a race, you
get hyped up, full of endorphins, adrenaline,
we'll combine them to adorphins, and you do
incredible things.
You can pass the finish line.
You're like...
I'm down.
I'm out.
You have to recover.
It's the same thing with really difficult
or traumatic experiences, where you don't
kind of often deal with those experiences
when they're happening.
Even if it's years down the line, you wait
until you're in a safe spot.
For me, I had a really tough few years at
work and I hadn't felt super safe, so the
moment that everything felt really safe and
really good, and finally was where I wanted
it to be, everything came crashing down.
Which was deeply embarrassing for me.
I was like... Cool.
So I've worked at this company for seven years.
And now I am a lifeless husk.
And as companies should do, they will take
my husk and they will throw it in a nearby ditch.
And stop paying me.
And I will die there.
But something that my dad kept saying...
That my dad said to me last year...
It kept coming back to me.
Hearing him say this.
You know, there used to be an old trash pit
behind the lilacs, right?
I did not know that, dad.
Thank you.
No one told me.
31 years of life.
I had to wait for 30 for you to tell me this.
So where I grew up, I grew up in Vermont.
And I grew up on the land that my dad grew
up on, my grandparents lived on.
There's a lot of family houses there.
It's not weird.
Now I'm adult, people are like...
Oh, a compound!
It's not a weird thing.
It's a rural thing.
Anyway...
And I tried so hard to work.
And my body was totally giving out on me.
But when my body collapsed, all I could think
was of going back and sitting on that land
in Vermont, which I go back to several times
a year, but it was different.
Just being on that land, digging a hole, and
finding that trash and just letting the earth,
like, hold me or swallow me or just in some
way make me whole again.
I think the ultimate animalistic need for
grounding and roots.
So I needed a break pretty bad.
Oh, sorry.
Okay. So I was like... cool. Work? Hear me out.
I'm going to leave.
Just for some months.
I'm gonna go dig in a hole.
And then I'll come back.
But also I still need to pay my mortgage.
So sabbatical?
And they were like...
Whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no.
That's called medical leave, my friend.
So I had envisioned this like...
Oh my beautiful sabbatical.
I'm this glamorous trash fairy.
And now I was like...
Oh, no.
Agh, okay.
This is more like the work will use me up
until there's nothing left and like...
Oh, we broke her.
Well, come back in a few months and we'll
see if you're worth any money.
So I still don't know if I've been paid for
the summer.
It's fun.
It's really fun.
But either way, I needed to get out.
So I emailed my entire company with what I
was doing and why.
Logged out of everything.
Deleted my to-do list and shut my computer.
And I also emailed everyone all the signs
of burnout and how to get a break.
(applause)
How am I gonna get in trouble? I live in a hole!
So I dug my hole.
A little bit of backstory.
Okay.
So the house that I grew up next to, my grandparents' old house, was built in the late 1700s.
As a farmhouse. It's an old block house.
Wooden beams held together with wooden stakes
and slowly other houses were built along it
when people were like, oh, I actually don't want to freeze to death.
And I basically...
Where I was staying with my parents -- I basically
just stayed there for a few months and didn't
really leave the land.
I also can't drive and there's no public transit.
So where was I gonna go?
And this was...
Really interesting. I was like...
I'm gonna stay here. What is there for me to see? What is there for me to do?
And it turns out, everywhere there is always
trash. Lots of trash.
We have been throwing stuff on the ground
for tens of thousands of years.
If you look at the last 13,000 years in Vermont,
humans have been throwing trash on the ground.
Native Americans, the Abenaki, specifically
in Vermont.
I got really into Abenaki trash.
If you look from a Euro-American perspective, in the 19th Century, what do you do with your trash?
You throw it out your kitchen window. You just peel right out the window.
That's pretty cool.
And by the 20th Century, we got pretty into
burning trash in barrels and then throwing
the barrel trash in a trash hole.
So there's trash everywhere.
And by the 60s, then if you're in an urban
place, the city, you give them your trash.
They burn it in a barrel and they throw it
in a hole.
By the 60s, the government is like...
Maybe everyone shouldn't just be burning trash all day, I don't know.
Some things changed.
So our trash pit -- I've got living memory.
My dad remembers it from when he was young in the early 60s.
I've got oral history.
My great-grandfather shot rats in it as a
child, which is a story inexplicably handed down.
One of the few things I know about my great-grandfather.
And I bought a metal detector for no reason other than to be like...
Yep, there's a lot of metal down there.
That worked pretty well.
There's my spot.
And here is the ultimate grounding exercise.
People asked: Did you find gold?
No.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I did not find any gold.
I have spent so long thinking why gold could
possibly be on my property, and there is none.
So for y'all treasure hunters out there, take
a step back.
Go somewhere else.
The other big question is everyone is like...
Oh my God.
You're gonna find a skeleton.
No, no, no.
I hope not.
First of all, because that is literally my
phobia, is finding a skeleton.
And second off, that's the one thing that
stops the dig.
Nothing is as bad as finding a skeleton.
You have to stop digging and call everybody
and it's over.
No more digging.
So no worries.
No skeletons in this presentation.
We got that out of the way.
What there was...
Was trash.
A lot of trash.
Here's some fine examples of trash.
A bottle.
That is an inkblotter, and that is part of
a Clorox bottle.
I know.
Really the goods.
So what the hole I dug looked like...
You had to dig about 60 centimeters down to
even hit trash, because it got filled in after
they were done with the trash pit and they
decided it was gross and they had six kids
and didn't want them all falling in a hole
full of broken glass.
I don't know.
And then they rototilled it for vegetables,
which seems like a weird place to grow vegetables in my opinion, but that's fine.
So the trash kind of starts in the early
60s and where I dug it went down to the late 40s.
The last couple, 48 to 52, was just hundreds of
beer bottles.
And I just dug one little hole.
It went in every direction.
We know there is trash from the teens, the 20s, the 30s in there, we know there's 19th Century trash on the property.
I didn't find any of that.
I got to just chill in the 50s.
I'm not going to take you through a hundred
pictures of trash that I found.
I didn't even take that many pictures.
It was an exercise for me.
But it was also a family activity.
It was grounding for me but it was amazing
to bring aunts and uncles and cousins and
say like, Get in the hole! Let's see what we threw away 70 years ago.
Why not?
And you can't break it. It's trash.
Nothing of value in there.
There's musical notation, printed information,
and hand written notes with...
What do you call them?
Pencils?
From my great-grandfather, who was a music
teacher and a musician.
He would have had that in a bundle of papers
and it would have burned.
And then it would have become charcoal quickly
enough, to actually preserve what was on the
paper, which I think is super cool.
That's an instance where paper...
Record is around from 70 years ago that would
totally have disintegrated.
I couldn't help but throw that in.
But most it was like...
I got a bottle, I got someone's old sunglasses.
A really gross jar full of liquids.
Liquids everywhere.
Trash is nasty.
I would sit there being like...
Why am I in here?
This is terrible!
Its lots of broken glass.
Rusted metal.
But not discernible.
It's old cans.
My family didn't have money for metal that
wasn't old cans.
And ash.
I don't know.
Super gross.
So I think a lot of people imagined that I
was like Stanley Yelnats in Holes, digging all day long,
just digging everything up, which is cool
and stuff, but no.
I'm sleeping.
This is mostly sleeping.
There's a little bit of digging.
I dug...
The hole I dug, I'm sure someone could have
dug in one day instead of two months.
I'm recovering.
I'm literally on medical leave.
So most of my time was actually spent just
sitting outside the hole.
Just being...
Just existing.
Just thinking.
I want to push back at the idea that I went
and did something productive and super cool.
And I got a lesson out of it, and then I cataloged
everything I found.
Because I didn't.
I just sat in a chair and slowly...
Recovered.
For months.
Jenny O'Dell in her book How to do Nothing
says: The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn't to return
to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.
This book came out this year and I read it,
in the second half of my burnout sabbatical.
And it explains all of these very well written,
very smart reasons for things that my body
just animalistically needed to do that I could never have explained in a way that sounded reasonable.
So if I recommend one thing, read this book.
It's really incredible and it made me feel
like I wasn't totally just off in another planet.
But most of it...
I went to the beach a lot, and I walked along
the beach and I looked at things.
I just looked at the beach every day.
It changed. It was different.
It kind of rotated around.
And the closer I looked, the more I saw...
Until I guess... I don't know.
I guess everything was right there.
As a kid, I would pick up a lot of trash.
I have this red ski coat and I got it because
it had so many pockets and I would pick up
trash off the ground and put it in the pockets
until I was a round trash tomato.
I just saw so many possibilities in it.
I realized that you weren't supposed to pick
up trash and put it in your pockets until
you were round.
So as a teen I picked up rocks.
And there was unrestrained infinity.
If you look into a rock for long enough, you
can see everything.
You just keep going and going and going and
going.
That was too much.
So I stopped doing that.
That's a no-go.
As an adult, I said...
Cool.
I'm gonna take these possessions I can't sort, shove them in my garage,
and they will live there, and that's that.
I'm gonna push all that out.
It was all too much.
I was either sucked in or I had to look away.
There was always too much substance to everything.
And this is why I feel like for me my summer
was...
Being able to put my phone down, because I
was able to look long and slowly and closely
at things without getting bored.
And without getting lost.
Which is a strange and difficult thing to
talk about, and I can't define it better.
But...
I think it's mostly what I did.
Also a lot of sorting ceramic shards from
the beach.
This is my life.
And a lot of learning to see human-worked
stone.
The start of the summer...
I looked for two months for an arrowhead or
anything like that, without finding one.
And by the end of the summer, I could find
one like every other walk.
It was a really...
And a huge shoutout to Dr. Fred Wiseman who taught an amazing class on indigenous Abenaki
in Vermont that helped me get perspective
on that.
I learned to follow webs without needing to
own them or understand them.
Letting go...
I feel with the internet, it's like Reddit.
Cool.
I read a headline.
Now I own it.
I have it.
I'm gonna use it in conversation.
I'm gonna get you.
But looking at pieces of trash was just like...
So physical.
You could kind of follow the trails without
getting lost.
Because you're still right there.
I found some crinoid pollen fossils, biology
of life forms millions of years ago.
You're looking at mushrooms.
Mycelial networks.
The wood wide web.
You're like...
Oh, the forest is one being!
But there are some nails, 20th century nails, manufacturing changes during the Industrial Revolution -- that's why.
Everything leads you on.
Sewer piping tile fragments!
Pretty exciting, because you're thinking about waste management history!
So what?
There isn't a lesson to this.
This would be totally invalidated if I found
a valuable archaeological object and got a
job working in National Geographic's trash
pits or whatever.
This wasn't productive.
The whole point was that this wasn't productive
under capitalism.
This had to be something that was separate.
I'm probably not gonna be paid more.
I'm gonna be paid less.
This is not a TED Talk where some White lady
gets up and is like...
Do the one thing I did.
Which is called privilege and you'll be fine!
I can't.
But I got closure.
I dug a hole and I filled it back in and I
threw away most of the trash in a modern waste disposal way.
Put my favorite pieces in a little museum.
In the book Burnout, Emily and Emilia Nagaski
talk about trying to complete a stress cycle.
They didn't mean it quite in this way, but
for this, this was completing this large stress
cycle of my burnout, of going through the
process of digging and filling in a hole.
I'm sure I'll reflect differently on this
in the future.
Right now, I'm still...
It's still really raw.
This is still a really wet wound.
But thank you for coming and thinking and
listening.
