Burn Out vs Burn Bright

One time my roommate in college walked into our apartment and looked at me, with my hair all crazy and wearing the same pajama, shirt, robe, coat combo I had been wearing for the past week, and said, “Jason—I think you’re depressed.”

I said, “Really? I don’t feel depressed.”

But who knows? Maybe he was right. So I went to therapy.

It was great. But we discovered that I wasn’t depressed. At least not clinically depressed.

I had a friend who was clinically depressed for a while. A few years ago she was on enough anti-depressants to kill a small horse. To me, that’s depressed.

Sometimes I hear people when they’re sad, or having a bad week or something and they might muse out loud: I think I’m depressed.

Turns out, in the words of Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, that they were just really bored.

I’ve noticed the same phenomena about the phrase “burned out.” I hear this phrase get thrown around a lot. I hear it used by people who are not burned out. They’re just tired and struggling with how to motivate themselves. Or maybe they have a bad attitude. These things are not fun—and they are potentially dangerous and could potentially lead to burnout. But it’s not actually being burned out.

I can’t help but think of how using such a powerful phrase to explain potentially solvable problems can become self-fulfilling.

What if we used less dramatic words to explain our less dramatic moods in an effort to declare to anyone who might be listening that our moods will not conquer our spirits?

In LA we always joke about fighting off colds. “I will not allow myself to get sick!” we say. What if we applied the same can-do gusto to our anxiety, our sadness, or struggle to remember why what we’re doing is important?

How might that affect our own perception of our moods? How might not misapplying burnout actually save us from burning out?

The good news is that most things we attribute as burnout can actually be overcome in really beautiful ways and can actually make us healthier people in the process.

Beauty Project

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Avant-Garde Demands Buy-In

I was trying to think of a clever way of getting to my point. But I couldn't think of one.

So this is it: the more 'avant-garde' defines a community the less accessible it becomes.

'Innovative' doesn't have to mean weird. Being the R&D of a movement doesn't mean that what we create is unintelligible to the people in our community. When something doesn't communicate, we can't just celebrate that what we created was so 'cutting edge' that people didn't even get it. People have to understand what we're doing, not to make them happy but so that we can lead where they were made to go.

Everything that happens on stage has to communicate. Avant-garde has a place, but it can't be center stage for very long, because avant-garde wasn't made to lead.

It's the icing, but it's not the cake.

Unless we process people along the way. We can be the most innovative, creative, and-- yes-- avant-garde community in the world...

But we have to take our community with us.

We have to explain to them what we're doing and why. We have to do it over and over and over again until they get it. And once they get it, we have to explain it again so that they don't forget.

Why? Because that's what someone, somewhere did for us.

...and because that's what leaders do.

Money Makes Us Happier

Religious leaders and Spiritual Gurus were wrong. As it turns out, money does make you happier.

A study done in 2004 by Ed Deiner and martin Seligman entitled “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being” discovered that money can buy happiness, and—on average—often does.

But only for the poor.

The study revealed that there was a direct correlation between money and happiness in societies that have a per capita income of $10,000 or less. Societies making less than this are on average less happy. Societies with a per capita income of $5,000 are less happy than $7,000, and so on.

But the correlation stops at $10,000. That means that communities that have $10,000 per capita are just as happy as those communities with $100,000 per capita.

In his book, “Deep Economy” Bill McKibben notes that since more money doesn’t necessarily make the already wealthy happier, why do we put so much time and energy into creating more and more resources for ourselves?

McKibben argues that since More doesn’t equal Happy then we should begin to question the momentum of our economic policy that is bent on always, always pursuing More over Better. It’s irrational, he argues, to keep pursuing More just because that’s what we’ve always done.

But I know why people continue to pursue wealth even if it doesn’t make us happier. I know why we stockpile and work and earn and produce and consume. It’s not to make us happier.

It’s to make us powerful. It's to make us strong. It's to make us safe.

What would you rather be? Happy and in danger or Secure and sad?

Either way, apparently, the extreme poor have neither.

I can't remember win...

[When I moved from the Carolinas to Massachusetts for school] most of the white Southerners at the time could recite long lists of battles lost and won and argue over the relative merits of Confederate generals. In the North, nobody knew or cared very much about the war, even in a school where many of the students bore surnames made glorious by the exploits of their ancestors in Union arms.]

Walter Mead in his book God and Gold calls this observation 'victor's amnesia.' Mead's point is that there is a tendency for winners in conflict to move past the pain, triumph, and struggle of the past and to move on toward a hopeful and 'peaceful future'-- a pax nike-- one winners forced into existence.

Losers, on the other hand, remember with great pain and agony the trials of defeat. They memorialize it in their history and culture. 'Let us never forget what they did to us!' becomes a mantra and is increasingly ingrained into the cultural ethos as the victors become villains and the vanquished become victims.

Think about it: who usually says 'let's just let bygones be bygones'? The Winner or Loser? Always the winner. Why is it that winners are so eager to forgive and forget?

Because they won.

This doesn't make the victor more virtuous. In fact, often times a victor's willingness to move on is an indictment of their unwillingness to look at their mistakes. They're not seeking to forgive and forget. They want to forget, and so they forgive.

I can't help but wonder: when Jesus defines the essence of kindness as embracing those who do not embrace us, I wonder if he would redefine the essence of victory as embracing those who did not win?

If we can only remember who they were...