The End of Burnout by Jonathan Malesic

Author:Jonathan Malesic [Malesic, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520344075
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

Counterculture

6

We Can Have It All

A New Vision of the Good Life

Before I became a professor, I was a parking lot attendant. I had just finished my PhD program and couldn’t land an academic job. But I knew a few guys who worked at a lot across the street from the university, and they introduced me to their boss. Before long I was collecting money in a small, weathered booth behind a pizza place. Every day, I sat in the driver’s seats of the Volvos and Beamers of the professors I desperately wanted to be like, and yet the work I did felt as distant from theirs as possible.

I loved it. The work was easy, even fun. My boss cared about his employees and treated us well; he knew the job was not our whole lives. My coworkers were bright undergrads and grad students, several of whom were covered in tattoos, rode fixed-gear bicycles, and played obscure hardcore punk rock in the booth. A few were in bands themselves. I was older and un-inked, drove a bright blue Honda Civic, and read Kierkegaard. They called me the Pope, because as a religious studies PhD, I was the closest thing to a spiritual authority they knew. During the year I worked at The Corner Parking Lot, I fell in love with a woman who was also in a liminal stage of her career, and she brought me coffee and pastries to help me through my night shifts. She’s now my wife.

The contrast between my happiness in a low-status job and my misery in a tenured academic position points toward a way to end burnout culture. I expected being a college professor would fulfill me not just as a worker but as a human being. I expected it to be my complete identity, my vocation. Few jobs could ever live up to those expectations, though I had certainly absorbed the notion that the right academic job could. Of course, it didn’t live up to them, and I labored for years before the disappointment and futility became so much to bear that I quit.

By contrast, I had no lofty ideal of work as a parking lot attendant. I thought of it as just an undemanding way to make rent money. I didn’t expect to “engage” with the job. There is no real possibility of experiencing “flow” if you’re a parking lot attendant. There is no progressive challenge to collecting money in a booth. No one gets better at it over time. The only people who give you feedback are irate drivers trying to escape their fees. When I worked that job, I never sank so far into the zone that I forgot to eat; in fact, I spent much of my time in the booth, and much of my conversation with my coworkers, deciding what to order for lunch. (Usually pizza.) The job did nothing to foster the absorption in a task that supposedly makes work productive and the worker fulfilled. It was perfect.

I

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