40. Burnout is a Kind of Depression

Here's a model of human psychology: you're made up of lots of tiny fragments of self, and each of them has a budget for bidding on the next action you - the big person - takes. Each of them wants to pursue some specific goal, or have you do some specific thing. Whichever one wins, determines your next action. The crucial bit is this: they get paid out according to how well their suggested action turns out. If it goes well, then they get additional budget, and if it goes poorly, they lose their bid. For example, there's a fragment in you for making sure you eat, and another that wonders what it would be like to touch a hot stove. The first one probably has way more budget than the second one, because when you've eaten in the past, you felt better, but you might have touched something hot enough to burn you in the past, which caused the second one to lose whatever it bid on having you touch the hot thing.

Importantly, a fragment might fail to get paid out through no fault of its own. Suppose when you're young, the fragment for seeking social connections and friends bids - and wins! But then you get beat up on the playground, or the popular kid makes fun of you. Despite making friends generally being a good idea, that fragment loses its bid, and you might permanently become less social as a result. If that happens enough times in succession, that fragment might go nearly bankrupt, and lose the ability to determine your actions almost ever, for a very long time.

So what happens when some fragment representing a core drive loses its bid, and this makes you less able to have that fragment's action turn out well? For example, what if the very first time you ask someone on a date, the person you ask out not only turns you down, but makes fun of you, too? You might become less confident and less willing to ask people out, and this in turn might make you worse at asking people out, which makes it more likely that they'll turn you down, such that the fragment loses its bid more often... hopefully you can see where this is going.

This is one model of how depression can get going: one or more core fragments that in most people would have lots and lots of budget, instead have very little, due to traumas or random failures during formative years. Once enough core fragments lose their bids, even more of them start getting sucked into the vortex, because now you notice at a conscious level how much worse you are at important things than your peers, so your self-regard and self-confidence are shot, too. Maybe you even try to force yourself through (e.g.) playing games, or eating food you like, or hanging out with friends, but it's all washed out and gray no matter what you do. You try things that should work out, and they don't work, and you start to wonder whether you're shaped to take joy in anything at all. Maybe things get bad enough - your internal economy gets low enough in resources, as a whole - that fragments advocating things like "stop eating" or "stay in bed" or even "hurt yourself" begin to have enough resources, in a relative sense, to win bids.

The trick is, burnout looks like this, too. You take some action that's generally meant to be a good idea - working or doing research or seeing friends or travelling, say - and it fails to be fun or productive or garner you recognition. It leaves you tired and empty. It fails to pay out. So maybe you throw yourself into it again, as wholeheartedly as you can manage, but through some combination of lacking confidence, lacking effort, self-sabotage, bad mood, and sheer bad luck, it goes poorly again. And again. And again. You start to wonder whether this thing is worth it at all. You start to wonder why you ever enjoyed the thing in the first place. You start to suspect that actually there's no way for you to ever enjoy the thing again. Maybe you even have to keep forcing yourself to do the thing because it's necessary for you to live, or because you made promises to others. You end up with a kind of depression in miniature, or if you're especially unlucky, this kicks off - or worsens! - a depressive spiral. Burnout leads to more burnout.

So what do you do about this? Unfortunately, I don't know, though maybe suggestions about that will be the topic of a future post; we don't exactly have many reliably working treatments for depression. Worse, to an extent, depression and burnout make you dumber, less flexible, and enduringly less happy, energetic, and agentic... which makes dealing with your problems harder yet. Rest, relaxation, and random triumphs help, but none of them are a plan - the first two work very slowly and expensively and mostly through letting your fragments take something like a basic income so that you can recover, and the last one isn't a plan and might not even help. That said, taking burnout seriously as a mental health problem seems like a good idea.