Lexical Gap No. 25: Kaizen

Burnout, the baseline temperature of my generation

burnout

I've been thinking a lot about burnout recently.

I suppose I could say it all began when I read How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen (an excellent read, by the way, and I also highly recommend all of Anne Helen Petersen's writing, especially her stuff about celebrity), but in all honesty, burnout had been a persistent, niggling little worm in my brain for most of 2018.

Burnout manifested itself in little ways, signs so small that I could have overlooked them or found any number of excuses. Why I suddenly fell off the earth in terms of maintaining this newsletter. Why Kelly and I went on a very extended and unplanned hiatus for our PubCrawl podcast. Why I couldn't seem to read anymore.

Why I found myself completely and utterly unable to write.

I had no time! I could say. And that was certainly true. Between travel and promotion, finding long enough gaps of time in my own house to work was hard enough, let alone time inside my own head. I'm a crazy…