“I’m out of ideas and have zero motivation to even get to a point where I feel inspired,” she wrote, responding to a request by The New York Times for people to describe their work- related challenges in Month 13 of the pandemic. (She asked that her last name not be used so as not to upset her employers.) Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.
“I feel fried,” said Erin H., a social media and event coordinator at a Midwestern university, whose work once inspired and excited her but currently seems like an unpleasant cocktail of boredom, dread and exhaustion. But that doesn’t mean work itself is easy, or fun. In the scheme of things, people who have jobs are lucky. In the most recent Household Pulse Survey, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 37 percent of those surveyed reported feeling anxious or depressed (in 2019, the figure was 11 percent). In this very bad year, of course, there are gradations of loss: loss of homes, of health, of income the deaths of family members and other loved ones the absence of security. “People are saying they’re less productive, less engaged, that they don’t feel as successful,” Mr. Twenty-two percent said they were depressed, up from 17 percent last April, and 37 percent said they felt stressed, up from 34 percent. In total, 34 percent of respondents reported feeling burned out, up from 27 percent last April. The study was based in part on interviews with 2,651 employees. The company’s most recent Employee Benefit Trends Study, conducted in December and January, found that workers across the board felt markedly worse than they did last April. “Malaise, burnout, depression and stress - all of those are up considerably,” said Todd Katz, executive vice president and head of group benefits at MetLife. Call it a bout of existential work-related ennui provoked partly by the realization that sitting in the same chair in the same room staring at the same computer for 12 straight months (and counting!) has left many of us feeling like burned-out husks, dimwitted approximations of our once-productive selves.
I have more time and fewer obligations, yet I’m getting so much less done.”Ĭall it a late-pandemic crisis of productivity, of will, of enthusiasm, of purpose. I’m doing so much less than I normally do - I’m not traveling, I’m not entertaining, I’m just sitting in front of my computer - but I am accomplishing way less. “I feel like I’m in quicksand,” she explained by phone from California, where she has been under quasi-house arrest for the last year. “Good morning to everyone,” she tweeted recently, “but especially to the sentence I just rewrote for the tenth time.” Like many of us, the writer Susan Orlean is having a hard time concentrating these days.
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