Today is "Baby Friday" -- but why not pre-dread the Sunday Scaries?
Today's post title brought by a former coworker who used to call Thursdays 'baby Fridays' and plan her weekend launches accordingly.
We've been dealing with the Sunday Scaries in our household, an ongoing journey in mapping the borderlands between logic and anxiety. The most effective strategies seem to be closing out our weekend with some quality time together and kicking off Monday with an extremely carby-licious breakfast treat.
In an uncanny coincidence, the Atlantic recently had an article on the Sunday scaries and one interviewee, Buzzfeed journalist Anne Helen Petersen, said:
"I don’t think there's anything that's timeless about [the Sunday scaries],” Petersen told me. “Burnout and the anxiety that accompanies it are so much about living under our current iteration of capitalism and about class insecurity.”
Petersen has a book coming out soon based on her viral Buzzfeed article of January 2019, "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation."
Twenty-eight years earlier, a 1991 article in the New York Times, "It's Sunday Afternoon and Here Come the Blahs," offered this take on Sunday blahs and burnout:
Dr. Herbert J. Freudenberger, a Manhattan psychoanalyst who has written books on situational anxiety and job burnout, said: "I hear about it from patients who are very unhappy in their jobs, who fear going to the office on Monday morning to prove themselves all over again. It has increased in recent years because of the unpredictability of what's happening to the economy."
To be fair, the Atlantic article also referenced the New York Times article, framing the 1991 Sunday blahs as a mild jitter compared to today's modern Sunday scaries. In a feat of editorial restraint, nobody inferred anything about the then twentysomething Gen X adults being too slacker-y to have any strong feelings about work.
To be fair, if someone feels perpetually tethered to their work email via mobile devices, the old days of being occasionally unreachable must seem like paradise. But that daydream presumes everyone had a job and it diminishes another cohort's experience of living through a recession and tepid recovery.
And thus Gen X erasure continues. This is rich, coming as it does on the heels of Ada Calhoun's book about the tremendous psychological and logistical stresses Gen X women are experiencing. As she wrote for Time in January: "Gen Xers not only sleep less than other generations— studies often find us to be more anxious than previous generations. Nearly 60% of those born between 1965 and 1979 describe themselves as stressed about subjects like their finances and caring for loved ones."
(Emphasis mine. Just to, you know, remind folks that burnout wasn't invented in 2019.)
Although author Douglas Adams wasn't a Gen Xer, he did write what I consider to be the seminal Sunday Scaries description for that generation:
“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
That's from 1982's Life, the Universe and Everything.
The recent rise in burnout rhetoric coincides with a rise in tools designed to help mediate a person's relationship to technology. Microsoft's been working on this since 2017:
The phenomenon of feeling ‘on’ 24/7, exemplified by small moments like this one, shows no sign of slowing. According to the General Social Survey, the proportion of employees who report that their job sometimes or often interferes with family life increased by 23% from 2002 to 2014.
This phenomenon is compounded by the rise of flexible work arrangements - according to a 2015 study by SHRM, an increasing number of organizations allow employees to telecommute and work flexible hours. These arrangements have shown resoundingly positive results, but they also create a strong imperative for organizations to openly discuss norms around work hours; the definition of 'after-hours' work increasingly varies by individual, making it more onerous for teams as a whole to establish concrete boundaries between work and personal life.
Teams that proactively hold conversations around after-hours work and collaboration are likely to do a better job attracting, retaining, and motivating the best talent.
And Google followed suit in mid-2018 for its G Suite customers.
As with all technology, the tool is only as good as the user's deployment of it. All the research findings in the world won't matter if your company is run by the kind of management that wrongly conflates performatively long hours with "working hard," despite all evidence that reasonable working hours and taking time off are ultimately better in both private and corporate settings.
(For a look at a company that's doing it right, check out this Twitter thread on project-management company Basecamp. This tweet stands out: "This was all done working ~40 hours per week. Taking vacations. Having hobbies. Watching movies. Playing video games. Working out. Going out. LIVING A LIFE. This incessant mythologizing of entrepreneurs as these singularly-focused heroes is bunk and bullshit.")
Given the cultural pathologies of American workplaces, there's a not-zero risk that tech tools meant to help people gain some control over their schedules will actually be used by employers to examine the data and work metrics, then "optimize" people for their own good instead. We're in the cultural moment of self-care rhetoric and lifehacking and #doingthings and a dozen other social currents that sent the confusingly wrong message that you are wholly in control of everything that happens to you and there's no reason whatsoever to examine the systems you're locked into. In the era of employee wellness programs, having your employer "helpfully" try to optimize whatever free time you're allowed away from your laptop is not an implausible scenario.
Imagine what the Sunday Scaries will look like then.
FURTHER READING
Video Games Are a To-Do List You Play (The Cut, February 25, 2020) -- “One of the three basic human needs is a sense of autonomy, a sense that we’re able to control things ... [tasks-based 'grind' in videogames] is repetitive, and chore-like, but at the same time, you’re able to check them off and say ‘I’ve done that.’”
The False Promise of Morning Routines (The Atlantic, December 2, 2019) -- "Being productive in the morning is not simply a matter of strength and determination. While everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, not everyone has the wealth to make time for an hour on the treadmill by delegating tasks to personal assistants, nannies, and chefs."
Are Gen X Women Being Squeezed Out of the Workplace? (Fast Company, December 14, 2015) -- "It was Gen X women who paved the way for work-life balance–maternity leave, nursing rooms at work, flexible hours -- and it is often their strong commitment to family that prevents them from going after a promotion, because they feel they need to take care of their kids or their elderly parents first."
Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks (Harvard Business Review, April 28, 2015) -- "Women who had trouble with the work hours tended to simply to take formal accommodations, revealing their inability to be true ideal workers, and they were consequently marginalized within the firm. In contrast, many men found unobtrusive, under-the-radar ways to alter the structure of their work. In doing so, they were able to “pass” as ideal workers, evading penalties for their noncompliance."
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).