For five years, the only post on my Instagram was a black screenshot that I uploaded in June, 2020. The caption was a quote by Audre Lorde that read: “It is not our differences that divide us, it’s our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences”. I have extremely vivid recollections of pacing around my living room, scrolling through endless stories and tiktoks talking about the death of George Floyd, fighting with my parents about it over dinner and continuously spamming my own social media with any way to bring awareness of the horrors of police brutality in America. While I had already pursued initiatives that could qualify me as an activist, this is, to me, the pivotal moment of when I started to understand the importance of using my voice to defend my thoughts and opinions, as well as the livelihoods of those surrounding me.
In previous years, I had already set myself to do a whole (perhaps petty) research project on sexist practice in one of America’s big-corps. This was a good-hearted yet naive attempt to fight back the patriarchy (and capitalism but I did not yet have the level of radicalization required for me to actually fully comprehend how these two were one and the same,) after my mom had to retire early from her sales job at a major corporation, a job she loved and was very proud of. In later years, my two little sisters and I harassed our parents into participating in the #NiUnaMas Paro Nacional. This was a national initiative in Mexico to bring awareness to drastic femicide rates. They had their first national women mass blackout on March 9th, 2020.
From here on out I started to engage in numerous conversations that became a part of my radicalization journey: How can collective organization lead to lasting changes? What role does social media play in causing an impact –– especially in a time where we are physically unable to organize in any other way? And, the debate that was the most divisive among my peers and I: “Where should we start our efforts towards change?” When we are fighting an uphill battle against corporate America, inhumane labor conditions, the ever growing prices of goods, police brutality, sexism, homophobia, and everything beyond the tip of the iceberg, choosing what wire to cut before the bomb explodes with no manual can be unbelievably suffocating.
In his article How Do We Keep Going? Activist Burnout and Personal Sustainability in Social Movements, Irish professor Laurence Cox, an interdisciplinary researcher and writer focused on modern social movements, says “one of the dubious joys of life in class society, and particularly in late capitalism, is the extent to which psychological overload has become a routine feature of ordinary lives.” Activists are even more susceptible to struggling with the adversary psychological obstacles created by this surplus of tasks to successfully conduct a revolutionary effort––especially considering the system is rigged against them (after all that’s why we are fighting.) There are a million fights that are constantly calling out for our attention. As generations get more comfortable with disruption of the system and accepting of diversity, even when you do pick a path to go down that initial excitement can die down pretty quickly when trying to keep up with the pressures of ordinary tasks that are essential for productivity under capitalism while juggling the many extraordinary hurdles that must be jumped in order to fight injustice.
The study, “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists: Symptoms, Causes and Implications”, published in the Journal of Human Rights Practice gathered evidence that showcased how activist burnout deteriorated the physical and emotional health of individuals, which alongside hopelessness have major impacts on the movements as well. These are not only a systematic reaction but in themselves symptoms of a “lack of attention to burnout and self-care in their activist communities, their deep sensitivities to the injustices they were battling in their activism, and infighting and tense relationships among … activists.” (Chen and Gorski 2015, p. 22)
One very popular criticism of modern activism is the performative nature of digital organizing. Going back to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, very quickly after George Floyd’s death, the conversation shifted from police brutality to the hypocritical potential for social media as a tool of spreading awareness where many would just reshare the post to their stories and not even actually engage with the cause. There is truth to this possibility. However, there is also an air of moral high ground when we judge people’s actions without creating space for a nuanced understanding of the cause behind ‘performative activism.’ In the most emotionally appealing argument, the internet has allowed every person with access to a device to be constantly bombarded with an influx of information. Many media critics such as Matt Taibbi, Noah Chomsky and even Walter Lippmann have been addressing for decades how polarization, emotional appeal and sensation sells, causing a disproportionate amount of tragic news over hopeful ones, adding onto the already existing mental health crisis that we experience currently, adding a layer of emotional burnout to the physical burnout. Many users who might be interested in doing the work of educating and spreading awareness around the social issues they are passionate about, simply do not have the time to carefully curate a social chain of information that they can be more actively pursuing as a means of activism.
Perhaps an essential element to many of the conversations surrounding capitalism and general frustrations in a modern internet era is this constant grind, in hopes of results. We never know how long the path to the reward can be. In a world where the working class has no capital to buy the control of their own livelihoods, we can never know the turns and surprises in our path to success. This constant fight for better conditions has been an arduous journey. When we are not used to appreciating the journey on its own – despite what the final outcome may be— it is easy to lose hope.
To add on to that, now corporations and capitalism have co-opted activism. A good example of this is the concept of self-care, which developed its roots thanks to Black feminist members of the Black Panther Party during the civil rights movement. Figures such as Ericka Huggins and Angela Davis used practices like yoga, meditation and mindfulness especially while incarcerated. (Takyi-Micah 2023) In 2016, Tricia Herset founded The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines the liberating power of naps, engaging with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing.
Now it is slyly packaged into lavender kits with bath bombs, relaxing oils and journals to fill. Activists are perpetually in need of ‘rest,’ and the options we are offered are only in an individual, purchasable sense: meditation apps, face masks, a quick escape before returning to the grind. When we are constantly exposing ourselves to the emotional labor required to continue this uphill battle, care work is the invisible glue keeping the movements alive –– but instead of being a communal refusal of exhaustion as the default state of resistance, we try to fight in a capitalistic battleground. We look for the pauses and moments of connections as “soft” or “secondary” issues that tend to fall onto feminine, queer and BIPOC organizers whose cultures are deeply rooted in these fading practices.
Burnout is not something that just happens to activists, it functions for the system. When movements wear out, power consolidates. The constant influx of news produces a feel of urgency that suffocates any long-term-solutions thinking, and when exhaustion finally sets in, we blame ourselves. We internalize failure instead of identifying design. Capitalism benefits from political fatigue being turned into personal inadequacy. We start to think we should be doing more, we could be doing more and don’t stop to consider how the system has been built to make us feel this way, but this exhaustion is the data. It is proof that we cannot liberate ourselves through the same logic that exploits us.
It’s time that we challenge activists to see rest not as a threat of revolution but as a part of resistance. To understand that any action can be a productive action despite the size of its impact. To allow ourselves to take a step back for others to step up. Some ways that we already see groups organizing this kind of collective care are mutual aid networks that cook meals, host healing circles and neighborhood bail funds that rotate leadership. We need to see acts of compassion as infrastructures of endurance, with community building and engaging in understanding as the pillar to all other organized activism. Radical rest doesn’t mean disengagement.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t continue to be involved with the action initiatives that form part of the revolution but understanding that radical, revolutionary rest is the acknowledgement of the working class not owing anything to their employers or communities but can only find sustainable and energizing care in community spaces that hold space for that yearning of care and change untethered to the results it yields. As we fight to get to the end line, we cannot forget to enjoy the race. A dialectical resistance is one that evolves through contradiction––holds rage and tenderness, exhaustion and renewal, fight and rest. The goal isn’t to eliminate fatigue but to transform how we respond to it: collectively, compassionately and consciously.
Sociologist Lucas B. Mazur concludes in his 2024 article “The desire for power within activist burnout. An illustration of the value of interpretive social science,” that burnout is more prone when power––understood in this case as change––is a main driving force for activism. Among the 197 activists that answered the questionnaire, resilience is suggested as a tool to counteract exhaustion. (Mazur 2024, p.8-9) The grain of salt that I would love to add to this conversation is thinking of the revolution not as the outcome that we hope to achieve but the small actions that might or not lead us there and the joy in doing so. Lets steal from the latin american revolutionaries and as Zapatistas and Che Guevara’s spirit, remind ourselves the importance of love and joy as the cradle of resistance.
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” — Václav Havel
References:
- Chen, Cher Weixia, and Paul C. Gorski. 2015. “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists: Symptoms, Causes and Implications.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 7 (3): 366–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huv011.
- Mazur, Lucas B. 2024. “The Desire for Power within Activist Burnout. An Illustration of the Value of Interpretive Social Science.” Sociology Compass 18 (2). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13186.
- Takyi-Micah, Natasha. 2023. “Origins of Self-Care and Why Activists and Advocates Need to Practice It.” Communitysolutions.com. April 10, 2023. https://www.communitysolutions.com/resources/origins-of-self-care-and-why-activists-and-advocates-need-to-practice-it.
- “The Nap Ministry.” 2024. The Nap Ministry. November 9, 2024. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/.