The Unsolvable Problem of Burn Out

autistic or not, rapid intensification smokes us all

It’s noon on a Saturday in October. Gray and I are in a coffee shop in upstate New York, taking a break from cleaning out their grandparents’ house, which we have to sell to pay for their care. We’ve been sifting through a lifetime of accumulated trash for a week now, choking on dust from the back of cabinets that probably hadn’t been cleaned out since 1995, bagging up clothes and boxing up dishes and hauling everything we can to the thrift store.

I am having a moral and existential crisis thinking about all the trash we’ve had to make,¹ and Gray, swamped with work, has hit delirium. My mom texts me a screenshot: a red cone of uncertainty cutting across where they live in Florida, with one word. Crap! 

“There’s another hurricane,” I say out loud, in line at the counter. Gray orders us as much caffeine as we can get while I pull out my phone and type hurricane florida into the search bar, a digital habit of mine every year from June through October. “It doesn’t have a name yet.” Tropical Depression 14, but they’ve picked out a silly one: Milton. I flip to an article, the tagline a quote from meteorologist Brian Norcross, of Hurricane Andrew fame:

“I don’t like the way this is developing at all, and it’s going to happen pretty quickly.”

Ugh, hate this! my mom texts, and I write back, me too. 

On Monday, I’m cleaning out a bedroom closet (shoebox full of old greeting cards, stuffed bear in a wicker chair, a purse full of seashells for some reason) and Gray yells from the other room: “Do you know it’s a Cat 5 now?” I get deja vu. Two years ago, a text from Gray’s brother: They’re saying this hurricane is going to hit us tomorrow. Ian happened so fast. The next day I watched the beaches I grew up on get swallowed by the ocean on TV. 

Back in Philly, I spend Wednesday flipping between storm chasers and NBC-2 in bed, exhausted after the drive, barely making it through a shower. Everyone is livestreaming for disaster clout, asking for likes and follows while they show strangers their streets beginning to flood. I can’t stop thinking about rapid intensification.

Storm strength used to be more predictable, but warmer water in the Gulf of Mexico has changed that in my lifetime. In the same water, Chevron is using new technology that allows them to drill into the deepest sea for more oil that we can burn on the highway. This is so we can keep the economy growing, supposedly forever, a delusion of life without limits.

Algorithms are a direct product of this — they were invented to help us do more work, faster. Now they power social media feeds that generate revenue through advertising and attention capture. All of this digital activity burns through water and fuel, although that’s hard to see. 

“Speed alters perspective,” Robert Hassan writes in Empires of Speed. “This means that the actual interrelation of things, images or processes can disappear, become blurred or unconnected altogether.” Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler attempt to make these connections more visible in their project Anatomy of an AI System. Of personal AI assistants like Alexa, they write:

..each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.

They argue that we should view our media not just as tools or extensions of ourselves, but as ‘geological processes’ driven by the extraction of earth’s resources. Offshore oil rigs churning up hot water churning up monster storms churning up homes churning up disaster content churning us up. 

This summer was a perfect storm of uncertainty and routine disruption. It burnt me out, but I didn’t want to admit it. Like the capitalists eating up earth, I also avoid my own limitations. I start waking up tired after ten hours of sleep, doing circles in the grocery store, confused. Did I tell you this already? I probably did. I try to form a sentence but it comes out in gestures. I try my best to push through all this. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it! goes the cruel motivational speaker in the corner of my brain. Other people need things, but not you! There comes a point, inevitably, where my body turns in on itself. Force stop.

Because I am autistic, it takes much less activity for this to happen to me than most people. The chronic fatiguers talk about having an energy envelope, and being careful to stay within it. It’s a helpful concept I’ve been trying to use, but self-management doesn’t always work. In an accelerating world, burnout is a bit of an unsolvable problem.

Research into burnout started in the helping professions — people who take care of other people for a living. It was first introduced in 1974 by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who spent his nights working in a free clinic that offered mental health, drug, and STI treatment in New York City’s East Village. He noticed that the staff in his clinic, who worked day jobs and volunteered nights, were especially prone to burnout.

“The physical signs are easy to spot,” he wrote. “For one, there is a feeling of exhaustion and fatigue, being unable to shake a lingering cold, suffering from frequent headaches and gastrointestinal disturbances, sleeplessness and shortness of breath.”² He also described an inability to contain emotions — more yelling and crying — paranoia, risk-taking, substance abuse, cynicism, and stubbornness (because change feels overwhelming).

In her book Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, Hannah Proctor traces the evolution of the term:

“Burnout in Freudenberger's articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger's concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the 'loss of an ideal."³

Over time, Freudenberger’s conception of burnout would shift along with his career, from ‘politically engaged free clinic volunteer to corporate consultant’, Proctor writes. The term bled out of the helping professions into a wider economy oriented around service work. According to the historian Matthew J. Hoffarth, by the 80’s, people who worked with people were all at risk of burnout. Freudenberger’s 1980 self-help book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement framed the issue as a personal problem to be managed by ‘self-awareness and self-protection’. 

Hoffarth writes:

“Freudenberger called on his readers to stop agitating for social change, and instead find fulfillment through changing their perception of the environment.”⁴

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I keep going back to Empires of Speed. Hassan writes that we live in a cyberculture, built on the hopes that computing power would give humanity more control, in the service of more efficient economic growth. Acceleration blurs our vision of the past and the future, creating what he calls a hypernow, ‘wherein humans (error-prone individuals) tend to cope imperfectly.’

One effect that Hassan proposes of life in hypernow is what he calls ‘abbreviated thinking’. There is so much going on, so fast, that we can’t possibly think deeply about it all, so we cut thinking short, and we act prematurely. There’s little time to mull, ponder, or critically reason — all necessary for democracy to actually work. Hassan argues that liberal democracy, designed in the tempo of the 18th century, is too slow for neoliberal capitalism. 21st century politicians can’t make laws fast enough, so capitalism eats democracy, and power centralizes for efficiency’s sake.

That’s why the technocapitalists fund the christofascists in America, and why business leaders backed fascist uprisings in Europe. It’s not some shadowy conspiracy — the government isn’t making hurricanes with secret technology, Russia isn’t stealing our elections — it’s just market logic. Endless growth requires speed, extraction, competition, and mass death.

Rapid intensification.

Rapid intensification.

Rapid intensification.

The phrase gets stuck in my head.

Every body burns out. In this, I am not special; I just have a lower smoke point. In burnout, I look up words about burnout for comfort. They say that engaging in your interests is one way of recovering, so I pull up the autistic archives: a 2005 post by Mel Baggs called Help! I seem to be getting more autistic! ⁵

“The fact that some autistic people lose abilities with age is well-documented, but it is not always discussed in clear ways,” Baggs begins. 

“Most people have a level to which they are capable of functioning without burnout, a level to which they are capable of functioning for emergency purposes only, and a level to which they simply cannot function. In autistic people in current societies, that first level is much narrower. Simply functioning at a minimally acceptable level to non-autistic people or for survival, can push us into the zone that in a non-autistic person would be reserved for emergencies. Prolonged functioning in emergency mode can result in loss of skills and burnout.”

Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling so much with coherence this year. It’s become harder to fit things together. I feel more lost, more often. Sometimes this is referred to as ‘skill regression’, although not everybody likes that term, or finds it accurate. Autistic writer Cynthia Kim frames it as a part of ‘fluid adaptation’:

“If life changes, we many need some time to readapt. Find the new pattern. Figure out the rules. Test out strategies to see what works. In the mean time, other things may fall apart. We lose skills. We struggle to cope with things that had previously been doable under more predictable conditions. This is not regression to an earlier developmental stage, it’s a process of adapting to new challenges and it’s one that we do across a lifetime of being autistic.”⁶

In a review of autistic internet posts, masking was the most common reason reported for burnout.⁷ Baggs speculated that it’s possible ‘the people most capable of passing for normal’ would experience the worst burnout, and there’s some research to support that idea.⁸⁹¹⁰ It’s tempting to tie this thread back to the 1980’s managerial concept of burnout — that it’s something that happens to people who work with other people, and that it can be helped by ‘self-awareness and self-protection’. But, again, burnout under rapid intensification is inevitable.

The literature on autistic burnout is consistent in pointing outward to discrimination and lack of material support instead:

“Participants described burnout as happening because of life stressors that added to the cumulative load they experienced, and barriers to support that created an inability to obtain relief from the load. These pressures caused expectations to outweigh abilities resulting in autistic burnout.”¹¹

Autistic burnout, then, is part of the wider crisis of care, one that the political theorist Nancy Fraser has identified as a major contradiction of capitalism — the system needs the unpaid labor of care work to function, while at the same time, it makes that work increasingly harder to do. We haved an ‘inability to obtain relief from the load’, but for a lot of us, care work itself is part of that load. It is difficult, under capitalism’s rapid intensification, in our isolated homes and our exhaustion, to care for each other — but more care is what we need.

I think of how Proctor describes the political activists in her book:  ‘fucked up people trying to transform their fucked up realities and often getting even more fucked up in the process.’ Another contradiction: we need the world to change if we want to get better, so we have to fight to change the world, but it is difficult to fight when we are burning out, exhausted, and depressed.

In mainstream therapy discourse, healing is often framed as adapting — being flexible, and using our plastic brains to become more resilient. But this also means accepting the world as it is, adapting to gross injustice. So Proctor proposes something else — anti-adaptive healing, ‘a form of healing that does not equate getting better with adjustment to or acceptance of existing social conditions.’ Not being fixed, flexible, or resilient; fucked up and fighting, anyway.

What does that look like now, as the far-right takes power in America, as oil companies drill from the Gulf of Mexico to Gaza, as bombs warm the planet? I don’t know. I’m more of a scribe than an organizer. I do know that it is a collective, international fight, one that will require us to unionize¹² and connect with our neighbors. Like burnout, there is no way out alone.

Before Freudenberger started writing self-help, he recognized this:

“..we cannot prevent burn-out, but we can certainly help to avoid it as much as possible and when it does happen to one of us, to admit it, ask others for help and take some time off for ourselves.”

For me, getting through burnout is what Freudenberger said: ‘the loss of an ideal.’ Accepting there are things I won't get back. Dropping the mask. Getting more autistic. Finding that space in the ruins where the mushrooms come through, and making the cracks wider for them.¹³

I take a break from doomscrolling to let the dogs out; it’s 75 degrees outside in October, and the pineapple sage I’d planted next to the compost pile in the spring has blossomed in our absence. It’s four feet tall and covered in huge crimson spikes. Six weeks out of town for care work meant leaving the crabgrass to take over, but I hear something rustling around in the brush — mice, probably, or shrews. I put two black cherry tomato plants in the ground this year, but my rot gave me a third, Romas that I recognize from the supermarket.

One of the cherries is withering, while the other has gone rogue, sprawling out of her bed and reaching across the lawn. There are little red fruits everywhere, and my dog takes to snuffling through the grass for them, munching the juicy things at me with her mouth open.

salvia elegans

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1. crying about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, etc

2. Freudenberger, Staff Burnout

3. Proctor, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat

4. Hoffarth, The making of burnout: From social change to self-awareness in the postwar United States, 1970–82

5. thank god it’s not just me.

6. There’s a novella by Davey Davis that predicted this way that we would watch disasters on our screens, The Earthquake Room. I think about it a lot.

7. https://musingsofanaspie.com/2013/12/19/autistic-regression-and-fluid-adaptation/

8. What You Are Hiding Could Be Hurting You: Autistic Masking in Relation to Mental Health, Interpersonal Trauma, Authenticity, and Self-Esteem

9. Autistic Adults' Experiences of Camouflaging and Its Perceived Impact on Mental Health

10. The combination of autism and exceptional cognitive ability is associated with suicidal ideation

11. What Is Autistic Burnout? A Thematic Analysis of Posts on Two Online Platforms

12. I recognize this is probably not helpful if you (like me) are disabled and either freelance, do gig work, or are unemployed. check out the Debt Collective, or maybe a local tenants union. pick an issue you care about, and there’s definitely a group already working on it you can join.

13. “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout