I work a rather demanding job and I’ve constantly been feeling tired and underperformant compared to my colleagues for the past few months. I keep evading responsibilities or putting them off until the last minute.
Many people would kill to be where I am. Yet, I show up every day unmotivated.
There were several stressful years leading up to my current job and I’m wondering if I’m burnt out at this point or if I’m just not pulling my weight.
Edit: Thank you all for your support and guidance. I haven’t given too many details here, but personal life has been moving along smoothly, chores get done, etc. But I definitely need to reconsider where I’m going with my job.
The big symptom unique to burnout is anger. Ultimately leading to blowing up at coworkers. If you’re not experiencing that it’s probably not burnout.
Depression and ADHD might be good thing to check for.
My humble opinion: burnout exists, laziness doesn’t
Laziness is a buzzword concept to describe way too many states of mind, downplaying the causes of lack of motivation.
I think there are some words that, if avoided, allow deeper investigation into important things, and “lazy” is in the top 10 of that list
There’s no such thing as “lazy”. It’s always, always, always a word used to make someone feel guilty for hitting a personal limit or threshold.
Even if you want to work on those thresholds and improve them, you can achieve that without framing yourself as fundamentally selfish and uncaring.
Lazy exists. I am a fully capable person, but some times I just don’t want to get up off the couch and wash the dishes, or finish painting the wall trim. Its not that I am sad, tired or depressed, it’s just I’d rather be doing something else or nothing else.
That’s not laziness, that’s looking after yourself and your own needs, and prioritising that over non urgent chores.
At some point, the balance changes, and you do the stuff.
And if the balance doesn’t change, and you always put it off, even when you shouldn’t be, there’s something going on behind it.
What going on is I don’t feel like doing it LOL.
I worked with a former autoworker, his job was inspecting roof seal adhesive and hitting the button for next car. He said he sat in a chair and read a book and would push the button with his foot. I asked how he could see roof glue, he said “I could not see it, I just pushed the button” . Too me that is the essence of a lazy person. It was not related to physical or mental overload, he was a sports guy etc. He just didn’t want to inconvienece himself with getting out of the chair or interrupt his book reading.
That’s not mental overload, it’s the opposite. It’s a job without mental stimulation, boring, repetitive and requires very little cognitive processing. And people doing jobs like that seek stimulation to escape perpetual boredom.
Give that guy a job that didn’t bore him to tears, and the picture would have been very different.
As I said, it’s always about hitting a threshold, and boredom is a threshold. And if an employer cares about quality, rather than the appearance of quality, they’d have designed that job differently.
