Money date No. 29: Doing what I love through collective burnout

We’ve got to take care of ourselves — not just get by.

This is coming late-ish today, because, like I’ve said, summer gets a hold on me! I’ve had a lot going on this week, and then I took a bike ride instead of writing this newsletter earlier. I hope that’s OK with you! Because I think I need to make decisions like this to survive.

Everyone I know and everyone I follow is in some stage of burnout lately, and we’ve got to take care of ourselves. The unfortunate thing about burnout is that, often, taking care of yourself means dropping every commitment except the bare minimum, and the bare minimum ends up being the stuff that makes you money and, so often, the stuff that fuels the burnout. I’m trying to keep my burnout from taking away things I cherish, like this newsletter. And that means letting this work shift around my needs so it doesn’t become just another stressful obligation.

This feels like a particularly important moment to learn how to weather burnout, because I don’t think this is the kind of burnout we can individually rest and bounce back from. We’re experiencing a collective, cultural burnout that’s going to weigh on all of us for a long time. We can’t just push through this and wait to rest on the other side; the other side is too far away. Anne Helen Petersen’s piece on feminist exhaustion this week discussed this collective burnout well. It has me better understanding our deep need to step back and lighten life’s load as much as possible — especially as women, queer folks, neurodivergent people, all the misfits who’ve been carrying an extra heavy load for so long already.

This might sound dark, but I don’t feel that way, actually. It’s liberating to make rest and (real) self care a priority!

---

💡 Inspired by a Healthy Rich contributor, a money date is an exercise I crafted for You Don’t Need a Budget. Subscribers can follow along in a private space after the paywall, and I encourage you to steal my questions to guide your own reflections!

---

What’s the most joyful thing you did with money this week?