A while ago Eli mentioned in passing during another discussion that a recurrent theme of my blog is that it’s important not to burn out and as part of that it’s important to take care of oneself. That remark surprised me a bit, I was like “do I really talk about it that much?” and also like a sort of “oh yeah, that *is* something I think is really important.”
I wrestle with this a lot, in large part because I’m often a guilt-motivated creature. I think personally that guilt gets a bad rap a lot of the time. I think if feelings of guilt and obligation result in positive actions then they’re a good thing. Now, sometimes they can result in negative actions or other negative outcomes, in which cases they’re not a good thing. It’s all about the end results on this one, as far as I’m concern. This relates a bit to my disconnect from various conversations or assertions I’ve bumped into along the lines of “radical politic activities should be celebratory!” I just don’t buy it. There’s a lot of really crucially important activities which are mostly annoying, frustrating, scary, depressing, and so on.
Recently I’ve been wrestling in particular with feeling bad and guilty about scaling back my level of activity. At other times I’ve poured in what is for me a lot of energy and time into stuff, topping out at 40-50 hours a month, with the result in part of shortchanging a variety of other important commitments. For a while now I’ve just not felt like I’ve had it in me to do that anymore, at least not right now. There are two key components of the stuff I’ve backed off on that make the guilty feelings stronger. One is that the activities involve people I have relationships with. It’s much harder to feel like I’m not living up to an obligation to a person I know well and care about than it is to feel like I’m not living up to an obligation to a stranger. The character of the obligation is different, or at least feels different. Second, the activities I’ve backed off on feel like they make a relatively big difference to the people involved (so they’re important) and they also feel like something where I could make an impact. (I don’t, for instance, feel particularly guilty for not doing anything about landmine proliferation or global warming or the Iraq war as they all feel so big that I don’t see an effective avenue for actually making an impact on these issues.)
Ah well. We’ll live.
Bad time to back off. We are in a crucial historical moment which will determine future of loved ones. There should of course be shared sacrifice but there is no time to quibble.Left will fail to capitalize because everyone was “too busy”.
Comment by troutsky — February 2, 2009 @ 11:12 am