Fighting Burnout with Money
The most popular talking point that sucked me into the financial independence (FI) movement in late 2017 was the idea of getting off the hamster wheel. “Get out of the rat race! Get off the hamster wheel!” (Apparently we’re all analogous to small rodents.)
My brain didn’t hesitate to make the jump from “working all day every day” to “never working again”—at no point in my deep dive (which spanned multiple months, many podcasts, a few books, and far too many rants to people who didn’t care) did I stop to ask whether or not my goal was extreme, or if there were a less extreme middle ground, or if there were aspects of work I enjoyed.
FI/RE just sounded appealing as I traipsed back and forth between work and home every day in the dark that winter, spending all my time inside a building with fluorescent lights.
Burnout (and subsequent guilt about the burnout)
After only a year, I began to feel symptoms of (what I learned later was) burnout. According to WebMD, burnout is the condition in which, after extended periods of feeling “swamped,” you’re unable to escape feelings of general overwhelm.
I didn’t understand why I felt this way. I found myself struggling to stay focused, needing frequent breaks, feeling tired all the time, and having emotional flare-ups over work stuff.
It sounds whiney, I know—working a “fake email job” in a climate-controlled office would hardly register as “work” to my meatpacking ancestors who probably stood knee-deep in questionable fluids for 12 hours each day, but something felt inescapably meaningless about the barrages of email threads, Powerpoint decks, and back-to-back 30-minute “touch bases.”
“It became clear to me early in my career that it wasn’t enough to just work hard—I had to look like I was working hard.”
On one of my first work trips, an older colleague told me, “You have to remember that perception is reality. Even if you’re doing a great job, if someone sees you at your desk scrolling on your phone, leaving early, or coming in late, they’re going to think you’re not working hard. People talk.”
You’d think working from home for three years would’ve helped to alleviate this (and in some ways, it did!), but the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the reason we were all working from home (and how) meant these feelings intensified.
The expectations at work didn’t slow or cease because we were taking calls from our living rooms. The pressure to prove we were still working hard in the face of furloughs escalated, and new “productivity” software emerged to fill the gap: Microsoft Teams, the proliferation of Slack and Zoom, and other chat apps that meant you were now accessible at all hours of the day and night. Ironically, this somehow replaced actual productivity with a sort of endless toiling; LARPing your job as opposed to actually doing it.
It became clear to me early in my career that it wasn’t enough to just work hard—I had to look like I was working hard. Work meant two things: Actually performing, and performatively performing. The latter was more exhausting than the former.
The crazy part?
All things considered, I had a great job. I had (what I thought was) my dream job, so I couldn’t pinpoint the source of my existential dread.
I vastly underestimated how mentally draining—yet somehow bizarrely un-stimulating—it would be to work 9–5 in a big corporate setting.
And nothing makes burnout worse than feeling guilty about feeling burnt out. My guilt (“I should just be grateful I have a job at all!”) intensified as more time passed.
I had been so excited to begin my career that I couldn’t understand why (only a few years in!) I was already feeling disillusioned. I was a sitting duck for financial independence propaganda.
None of this would’ve mattered if my livelihood hadn’t literally depended on it
In retrospect, it’s clear the exhaustion was a byproduct of my personal safety and security being wholly tied up in not just the job, but also in others’ perceptions of me.
The constant maintenance of perception (or occasional bouts of apathy) wouldn’t matter so much if our livelihoods didn’t feel like they depended on those perceptions.
You could make the case that none of this stuff would’ve actually been materially detrimental to my career or impacted whether or not I received a paycheck—but tell that to a neurotic 22-year-old with no money who doesn’t know any better and just signed her first 12-month lease.
It’s no wonder the financial independence movement became so attractive to me, because it promised both freedom and reprieve from all of this posturing.
There’s just one rather obvious problem: It can take a really long time to achieve. So long, in fact, that many young people throw in the towel before they begin—ironically enough, the polar opposite approach to “gunning for financial freedom” is “conceding in the first inning that you’ll never reach it and just spending everything you make while the going’s good.”
As writer Kayti Christian points out, it’s pretty challenging to get off the hamster wheel when the hamster wheel pays your bills, but the fundamental mistake is allowing those bills to swell larger and larger, rendering the hamster wheel that much more necessary.
“We move through life differently when we’ve self-insured our own safety and security.”
Most of us do not freely choose to engage in behaviors that lead to burnout, we engage precisely because we feel we have no other choice.
It feels as though we can’t turn our back on the late-night email or the unread message, because what if that person gets angry and then what if someone else finds out you’re not responsive and then what if next quarter you don’t get promoted and then what if you can’t afford your mortgage and what if, what if, what if—
Our security is so intrinsically tied to our jobs that disengaging when feeling burnt out doesn’t seem like a safe or responsible option. If we lose our jobs, we don’t just lose our income: We lose our healthcare. We lose our retirement plan (or rather, the ability to contribute to one). We lose our identity, in some cases.
Sometimes, it’s hard to deny that true safety and security in the US often looks a whole hell of a lot like just having a bunch of money.
When we talk about this in the context of financial independence, we usually mean the ability to do something extreme—like quit a job. But my perspective on true independence has evolved: It’s not about disengaging completely, forever. True independence is more impactful than that. It enables you to move about your work and life in a way that isn’t rooted in fear of it all crashing down.
We move through life differently when we’ve self-insured our own safety and security.
“I don’t need this” is a life-changing perspective with which to approach your career. It allows you the ability to change paths at any time—and money grants you access to that gated area of invincibility behind the velvet rope more directly than just about anything else.
This is the moat that money can build around you. It’s permission to separate your work—your livelihood—from your most fundamental needs, and behave accordingly. Saying what you actually think, taking time off when you actually need it, and doing what you actually want to do.
This is why I pursue financial independence. Not because I think next week (or even next year) my moat will be wide enough, but because it never will be if I don’t keep digging.
Money is power—and it’s the kind of power you can seize for yourself with enough saving and investing. Nobody in upper management has to give it to you.
