The World Health Organization characterizes "burnout" as feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job and reduced professional efficacy. Such a definition of course assumes that one had mental connection to one's job and positive feelings about it to begin with, only the exhaustion part applies equally to all workers. Burnout in other words is a problem of the age of the labor of love and it's no surprise it is often discussed in the context of nonprofit or political workers. These workers are expected, like Ashley Brink was, to give their lives over to the work because they believe in the cause, but it becomes harder and harder to believe in the cause when the cause is the thing mistreating you.

This part really stuck out to me, because as a librarian who is in the weird liminal space of nonprofit + political work, burnout has been on the library profession quota for many, many years. While I could talk about what causes burnout for my occupation all day and can assume some similarities to related occupations, I would love to ask to others comfortable to share: what is something that has caused burnout in your job, that maybe the collective wouldn't know or think about? Feels very open-ended here, but what I'm learning while reading this is that systems partly succeed in our inaction in discussing and being transparent with one another about our work.

For myself and probably for most libraries (though I'll speak to public), our burnout is really related to being the end-all-be-all place for things that are beyond our scope of abilities, funding, staffing, education, etc. We are constantly inundated with people saying "they went to {X} and they said go to the library, so help me with this thing!", which like... no, 1) we don't do X and 2) i bet that person has never been to a library. Yes, we are a great central point to help the community find other resources, but we cannot be every resource.