Burnout at Scale

When I was planning this website, I thought my first blog post would be an attempt to answer the question “why is the first question Americans ask ‘what do you do for a living?'”, which is a question I’ve heard frequently from friends, colleagues, and new-met hallway track pals around the world for many years. I might still write about that topic at some point, but given the current state of global politics, it seems inappropriate to start off with at the end of 2025.

So instead, here’s my favorite conference talk I’ve given along with a transcript (scroll down a bit for that). It’s about burnout and trauma at work in the wake of the pandemic, and I wrote it in the fall of 2022 and gave it in December of that year at SREcon22 Asia Pacific. The conference theme was around scaling- they wanted success stories but also stories of failure, and the biggest failure story I’d seen was the human one that was all around us.

It might seem strange to say that a talk on such a painful set of topics is my favorite, and certainly I procrastinated some (a lot) of the reading that was required in order to write it. But once I got going, I found that the reading brought me hope and the writing even more so. I tried to bring some of this feeling to the content and presentation of the talk. If I had to characterize the delivery I tried to achieve, I think it would be “gentle bluntness and kind encouragement”.

I think this is the most broadly relevant talk I’ve ever given (no technical knowledge required). If you feel like you’re struggling under an increased burden from within and without, then I wrote this for you.

In this talk, I recommend doing internet searches on various topics around trauma and burnout if you want more information. How the world has changed in three years! I would not recommend a web search be your first port of call anymore, because I would not want to suggest that you seek advice on this from a large language model, or from a page summary or other computer-generated text. Instead, here are references that I used in my talk; I suggest reading them and looking at the sources they cite (book links are to WorldCat and are not affiliate links):

I am not a mental health professional (though I am trained in Mental Health First Aid, a course that’s offered in multiple countries and that I found to be very informative). I’m providing links to these materials to aid in research and education. If you need urgent assistance with any of these topics, please seek out resources in your local area!

SREcon rarely has a sponsor for captions, and they didn’t that year; I also don’t own the video and can’t add them myself, so I wrote a transcript of the video. My slides are also available.

For this transcript, I followed the rules given in the Government of Canada’s Digital Accessibility Toolkit as well as I could, but if you have any feedback about the accuracy or usefulness of this transcript, please do let me know.

[Opening animated slide:
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text: Proudly Committed to Open Access Research for Everyone]

[Presentation begins, first slide from presenter has the text: content notes]

Thanks for coming.

I have a couple of content notes to start with. I’m going to be talking about

the pandemic

natural and human-made disasters

health problems, injuries, or death

trauma, both accidental and inflicted on purpose

burnout

and capitalism

Hopefully the title and description of the talk prepared you a little bit. This is going to be emotionally intense. I will be discussing things that are current and raw for many people. If you need to leave at any time, including right now, please do so, please take care of yourself.

I am going to attempt not to cry during this talk, but if I fail, please know that I will be okay, that’s a sign of how much I care about this talk.

[Slide: Burnout at Scale: What to Try When You Just Can’t / Courtney Eckhardt (she/her or they/them) / @hashoctothorpe / (🐦and [Slack icon emoji]]

Welcome to Burnout at Scale: What To Try When You Just Can’t. I’m Courtney Eckhardt, I use she/her or they/them, you can find me on Slack and on twitter at hashoctothorpe.

[Slide: where this talk came from]

This talk, where did it come from? SREcon has been asking for stories of scaling during the pandemic, both the good and the bad. I haven’t been part of any successful scaling operations in the last few years, and I think we need to talk about some of the things that aren’t working very well.

[Slide: what has not scaled well / people]

People! Are having a really hard time right now. I am a manager, and both at work and in my personal life, I have been watching people including myself go through it. Individually and collectively, at home, at work, and in between, we are all nearly running out of coping skills, hitting walls, and falling down. We’re exhausted, afraid, lonely, angry, traumatized, and worried about the world and our future.

[Slide: what has not scaled well / ~~capitalism~~ our institutions]

I was gonna say capitalism, but I decided to be a little more specific- our institutions are not weathering this particularly well. The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, the restaurants we eat at, the governments we rely on for public health information and for drivers’ licensing, NGOs, shipping companies, basically every kind of organization that I can think of is struggling right now.

[Slide: and mostly, we can feel it]

And mostly we can feel that. We can feel it individually, most of us are having a harder time, we’re sort of monitoring ourselves and being like wow, I’m really struggling in this moment to find attention or grace or compassion. We can see that other people are having a harder time. We can clock the extra hours spent waiting on hold for “the next available agent- thank you so much for your call, please do wait”. Some of us have even gotten bored of talking about supply chain problems. We ask each other “Do you feel it? Am I imagining it?”

[Slide: it’s real!]

Yeah! I feel it too! It’s real. It’s really happening.

[Slide: but what is “it”?]

But what is it? What are we all feeling? What’s making it harder for us to deal with our everyday stuff, the unusual stuff, the shocking stuff, and everybody else’s stuff? Can we define this problem?

[Slide: there are several factors / as always!]

As always, there are several factors.

[Slide: we all started in different places]

Whatever was wrong for us before the pandemic started still needed to either be addressed in that moment or may still be going on for us. So whatever we had going on at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, all of that stuff is part of the background of what’s happening to us right now.

[Slide: we all had different pandemics]

We all had different experiences during the pandemic

some of us were all alone

some of us lost people or pets to death

some of us lost friends or family members to conspiracy theories

some of us were struggling to take care of children or parents or both

some of us were working more than usual, some of us were working less or not at all

some of us lived with other people who were unkind, or abusive

some people are refugees, or their countries are at war, or experiencing civil unrest

and some of us got sick while others have managed to avoid it so far

[Slide: the places that we lived all did different things at different times]

Different countries, states, and cities had different responses at different moments. Sometimes that was due to local conditions. Sometimes it was due to different ideas about what made a good response. Probably none of us felt safe or endangered at the same time that our friends and family members felt the same way- even if we lived in the same household with those people!

The differences in pandemic response between regions and governments add up to a feeling of disconnection from people we love in other places. We went through this together, but we could not have had the same experiences at the same times, and some of our relationships may never recover from that increased distance.

And now, after most countries in the world have set aside pandemic response and declared the pandemic over, we are faced with understanding what happened to us, deciding whether we felt safe or protected, deciding whether we are angry or whether we just want to move on. Some of us are afraid that we can never move on- some of us have chronic illnesses or disabilities that may keep us in an ugly, isolated place indefinitely.

[Slide: if we feel betrayed by our leaders, that compounds the trauma]

This is “compounds” like “interest”. If we feel betrayed by our leaders, that compounds the trauma that we have experienced. It’s not just additive, it is multiplicative.

[Slide: some of us had other trauma before the pandemic / and some of us didn’t]

Some of us had other trauma before the pandemic, some of us did not. Some of us who’d had traumatic experiences had processed or integrated those experiences into the stories of our lives, and were able to apply those skills to this new situation.

But some of us had trauma and had not been able to integrate that into the stories of our- their lives, and now have more traumatizing experiences to try to understand on top of what they were already struggling with.

[Slide: but wait, how did we go from talking about burnout to trauma?]

But how did we go from talking about burnout to trauma? Before the pandemic, the SRE industry was talking a lot about burnout- both how to manage it on a personal level, and how to avoid inflicting it with org charts and oncall responsibilities. So we already were very conversant with this problem, we were already sort of working on it. People were already seeking solutions.

Now we’ve had a pandemic, which could also be described as a mass traumatizing event. Those of us who were burned out before the pandemic (myself very much included) have the emotional pain, fear, and stress of a pandemic on top of that burnout.

[Slide: burnout]

But also, let’s define some terms

Burnout is commonly understood to contain:

emotional exhaustion

depersonalization- the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion. When you see something happen in front of you and you think “I should feel bad about that and I can’t find it in me, I just feel numb”.

and a decreased sense of accomplishment or feeling that nothing you do makes any difference

That’s what we generally understand burnout to mean.

[Slide: how do you get there?]

How do you get to burnout?

You have the same emotions too intensely and for too long. People need variety in what they do and how they feel, and when you grind too hard and too long on the same things, you get burnt out.

This happens faster if your job (or your role in your family, or both!) is about taking care of other people’s needs.

[Slide: trauma]

Trauma. The shortest definition of trauma that I’ve ever heard is “when your nervous system is overwhelmed by more input than it can handle”. Something very upsetting, very startling happens, it takes much longer than the time that you were in that situation for your body to understand what has happened and where you are afterwards.

[Slide: PTSD]

PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, when your nervous system gets stuck under the weight of all that stuff and you can’t find your way out of the trauma, that’s what PTSD is, when you’re in this place where you’re continually having the moment that traumatized you come back to you in some way.

This can involve the classic symptoms of irritability and flashbacks, but also less cinematic symptoms that we don’t see in movies, like dissociation and derealization (moments when you aren’t sure what around you is real or fake).

It’s important to realize that not all people who have PTSD are aware of that (many people become aware of it over time). In addition, many people who have PTSD (especially if they were traumatized as children) don’t necessarily know what activates their trauma responses, and they may not realize when they’re dissociating or having other symptoms. I can’t give any advice about this as a general case, but if you want to talk about it, try to catch me privately later and we can discuss this a little bit more.

[Slide: anyone at all can become traumatized]

I’m going to pause in the sort of main storyline of this talk and note: having trauma is not about your personal willpower, your strength, or your perseverance. It’s not a personal failure.

Several people who have the exact same experience may not all end up traumatized, but there’s no one who cannot be traumatized. Trauma is not something to be ashamed of (at least as much as it’s possible for you to step out of shame about it), it’s something to be faced and addressed.

[Slide: it doesn’t matter what caused your trauma, it’s still trauma]

When I first began reading about trauma, one of the things that blew my mind was that some of the best clinicians studying trauma considered there to be no meaningful distinction between things like trauma from being a soldier, or being a prisoner, or being an abused spouse or child.

Some of the work the traumatized person needs to do to recover will be different (what kinds of trust or relationship skills they need to learn or repair might vary depending on what experience traumatized them) but the problem is basically the same and the path out is very similar.

[Slide: some routes to trauma]

Some routes to trauma:

isolation, fear, and stress, that’s the last few years for a lot of us!

gaslighting, some of us definitely experienced that

surveillance and control over your personal routines and your bodily needs, when you sleep, when you eat, when you use the bathroom, how much you eat

feeling both endangered and helpless to address that danger

[Slide: sideline: some other potentially relevant things]

And again, a brief sideline- there’s a few related concepts here that aren’t usually brought up in the context of either work or a pandemic, but I think are worth touching on briefly and you can do some research if you want to learn more:

Betrayal trauma is usually considered in romantic or familial relationships, but I think it’s relevant here because the people who feel betrayed by their government’s response to the pandemic, are showing to me what seem to be very similar responses to that, to people who were betrayed by a spouse or a parent.

Moral injury is usually understood in terms of war, it happens when you’re forced to either stand by or to participate in actions that contravene your values (or that contravene the values that you develop later on, causing you intense shame and remorse retroactively). I felt this very keenly in the first stages of the pandemic, where I could stay inside and I did, but tons of people with dangerous, low-wage jobs could not stay inside- and some of those people were also disabled or chronically ill. And I had a very hard time reasoning about like- what should I do to try to help? Was there anything I could do to try to help?

Survivor’s guilt is usually understood in the context of war or a natural disaster: it is the feeling of “why did I make it when my buddy or my family member didn’t? They should have lived, not me”.

If those things feel relevant to you, it’s probably a good idea to start with a web search for more information and potentially places to get help in your local area.

[Slide: what has been the prescription?]

Okay, so having talked about all of that, what are people telling us to do about this?

In the Western, English-language press, the prescriptions I’ve seen the most often are

“be more empathetic to everyone, everyone’s trying as hard as they can” and

“take a break”!

[Slide: BUT]

But there are a lot of problems with this!

The people who probably are going to follow “be more empathetic” are probably already doing it too much

You can’t be more empathetic to everyone, that’s not how people work

What does “more” even mean? do it harder? more often? how do you know when you’ve done enough “more”?

A rest, how do you take a rest? How do you take a rest when you have kids or parents to take care of, or your job just had layoffs and you have more work to do, or you were laid off and now you need to scramble for a new job?

[Slide: you’re only one person]

The biggest problem with the advice as given is that you’re only one person.

You have 24 hours in a day, you probably need to sleep about 8 of those, you need to spend about two more of those in productive downtime (exercising, doing a hobby, reading, playing a game), you need to eat, you need to work, you may have caring or volunteer commitments- there’s no spare time and energy to extract “more” from in an individual person’s life.

You, as a person, are zero-sum. There is an absolute cap on what you can do in a day and in your lifetime. It’s not the same as my cap, but we both have one, and doing more than that cap is only possible on a very short-term basis. You can get better at some things, so that it takes less energy to do them, but there’s pretty hard limits on that too.

[Slide:organizations have access to economies of scale, but they are not using them]

Organizations have access to economies of scale, but they are not currently using them. An economy of scale is when an organization gets really good at doing something it does a lot, and it can make that process more effective- it can produce widgets faster, or use less material to do it, or achieve higher quality. It does this by having lots of people so that individuals can take sick days or parental leave, so that you can share information, so that you can share skills, so that it’s not just all on one person.

[Slide: and employers are starting to demand more from us]

And on top of that, employers are starting to demand more from us- return to office, longer hours, layoffs resulting in more work, cuts to travel and other discretionary budgets that make teamwork harder to achieve.

Corporations were running pretty lean before the pandemic, and now (the large ones especially) are dramatically leaner. Some have had layoffs (quietly or loudly), and organizations are struggling with more people getting sick even if they haven’t had layoffs.

This means that the advice to us as people- “be more empathetic” and “take a break”- is telling us as people to figure out how to solve a problem that is created at the level of the leaders of the organizations we work for. The solution to the problem of organizations is being pushed out to employees, customers, vendors, individuals, to figure out.

[Slide: that’s not a problem we as individuals can solve]

And that’s not a problem that we as individual people can solve. Those of us here, at this conference, who are mostly not executives? We can’t solve this problem for our employers or for society, even if that responsibility is being put on us. We probably can’t cause our employers to hire more staff in order to cover for more sick time, we can’t give ourselves more leave, we can’t implement a 4-day work week, we can’t raise our own salaries.

That’s depressing and scary to come right out and say, but I think it helps to name problems, especially ones that we can’t solve ourselves. It can be easier to remind ourselves that this problem isn’t of our making and cannot be directly addressed by us.

[Slide: what about self-care?]

Another brief sideline- self care! What about self care? Self care has recently gotten a pretty deservedly bad rap- you can’t bubble-bath and face-mask your way out of depression or poverty.

And disabled activists point out that a lot of things that are suggested to us as self care- “oh get y’know, get a membership at the spin club”, or like “go do barre”, or other things, um, yoga! -in fact require money, time, and energy to access, which can make things worse! How often do you clean your tub so you can have a nice relaxing bubble bath? I never have the energy to clean my tub, it’s always gross!

Activists also point out that putting the burden of self-care on the individual makes people responsible for managing themselves when institutions don’t want to help them.

So here we are again, with institutions pushing the problem out to individuals to solve.

[Slide: putting the burden of self-care on the individual makes people responsible for managing themselves when institutions don’t want to help them]

I’m going to highlight that last point one more time: putting the burden of self-care on the individual makes people responsible for managing themselves when institutions don’t want to help them

[Slide: so that’s where we are]

So that’s where we are. It sounds really grim when I lay it all out like that.

And it is grim.

We are in a very tough place, and we have to acknowledge the truth of that in order to start finding our way out of it.

[Slide: now what?]

So what do we do next?

[Slide: let’s go back to empathy for a moment]

I want to go back to empathy for a moment. People tend to think that being listened to, feeling seen and heard, will make them feel less lonely. If you know that other people know who you are as a person, what you love, what you’re good at, that can feel very warm and very comfortable, and it can feel like your community is really with you. But the research shows it’s only part of what you need, because if you’re the one who’s doing all the talking, you’re not making a connection with other people.

[Slide: so you need to give empathy to make connections]

So you need to give empathy in order to make connections, as well as receiving it. You need to listen to other people, fully, in such a way that you do feel some of their feelings, some of their joy and their pain and their fear and their hope. This is very hard and also very painful sometimes, but it’s the thing that helps make connections, create community, and cause you to not feel so alone.

[Slide: in order to address loneliness]

In order to address loneliness, you need multiple, mutual connections. You need more than one person with whom you share things that are important to you and difficult for you to talk about, and that they share those things about themselves with you. People who you can talk to honestly. People who listen to you honestly and who you listen to honestly.

[Slide: you need to be able to listen actively]

You need to be able to listen actively. If any of you have seen some of my previous talks about retrospectives, I’ve talked about how to do active listening, including in 2019 in Singapore [SREcon19 Asia/Pacific]. There’s a bunch of great resources about it [active listening] online, but basically you need to be able to listen to people and let the conversion be about them, their feelings, their needs- not jumping in to compare experiences, not giving advice, not trying to cheer them up.

You need to be available to them, without being completely pulled into the feelings that they’re having- so present with them, but not also yourself in crisis because of what you’re hearing.

This is really tough! It takes practice and it takes instruction. And I’ll get to some more resources about that in a little bit.

[Slide: not just romantic partners and coworkers]

Ideally you should have relationships that are reciprocal in this way on average, right, where you have a good, sort of, over time understanding of each other and you’re both sharing and it’s not very unbalanced where one person is doing all the talking and the other is doing all the listening.

And I cannot stress this enough, they can’t just be coworkers or romantic partners!

Starting with your coworkers or your romantic partners is a fine place to start, but make a real effort to meet neighbors, people at conferences, friends of friends, or to reconnect with people you’ve lost touch with.

[Slide: let’s take a moment to talk about catastrophizing]

Another little sideline: I want to take a moment to talk about catastrophizing. The pandemic has been a mass traumatic event, and trauma leads us to catastrophize- to be sure that the next shoe is on its way and the impact will be way worse. You’re just waiting, waiting, something is gonna happen, it’s coming, I know it, the next pandemic is right around the corner, we’re all going to be back in our apartments for ever.

Try to walk yourself back from that edge.

It’s especially tough in this field because so many of us got where we are professionally by being aware of the worst case scenario at all times and making sure that other people are aware of it too. But remind yourself that catastrophizing makes it hard or impossible to get benefit from good things that happen to you! If you’re catastrophizing, if your brain is fixated on the next bad thing that is absolutely coming for you, you are not going to experience the joy of having a friend hug you. They will hug you, but you won’t- it won’t be recorded.

And catastrophizing is contagious- it drags other people into the space of “we’re all gonna die”, which doesn’t help, right? [Presenter laughs]

[Slide: okay sure, that all sounds convincing enough / but how do I do it?]

So that all sounds (hopefully) convincing enough! But I haven’t really talked about how you do any of this, so that’s what I’m going to talk about next.

[Slide: the highest-level overview]

This is a very high level overview, it’s not super detailed. I was really looking at time as I wrote this, and I’m also trying to stay away from giving direct medical advice, so most of this is going to be about things that I think will make everyone’s life a little bit better.

[Slide: Chapter 1: try to help yourself]

The first part is to try to help yourself.

[Slide: pull back where you can]

And the first thing I’m gonna say is pull back where you can. We’re all in this place of giving as much as we can give, more than we can give, we’re burned out, we’re afraid. Conserve your energy. If you go around extending personalized active listening to everyone you meet, you will burn out (maybe you already do this and you already have, if so I’m very sorry).

Be selective about when and where to deploy the full active listening experience- it’s not appropriate with strangers, it’s not always appropriate at work, it’s definitely appropriate with your partner(s), usually appropriate with close friends or family.

Societies develop scripts for ordering coffee or buying dinner or buying a charging cable or whatever for a reason. Use these scripts, try to be pleasant or at least polite, you know, even if you’re not really emotionally in the room while you’re doing these things, and as long as you aren’t snapping at retail workers, try not to worry about it too much. Literally try to put any anxiety that you have about dealing with relative strangers and doing the relatively normal things that we all are getting used to trying to do again- try to keep any anxiety out of, like, the forefront of your mind, try not to dwell on it. If your mind tries to get you fixated on how you said one word funny or the barista gave you an odd look? Nope! If you possibly can, wrench your mind onto another topic, and try to put the concern about those stranger interactions down. We’re all pretty weird at this point in the proceedings, myself very much included, and it’s very very unlikely that the stranger in question is remembering your possible misstep- they are probably fixated on the thing that they think they said wrong.

If you DO find yourself snapping at retail workers… that’s probably the time to do a little incident retrospective with yourself about the interaction. What happened? When did it start to go badly? What could you try to do next time instead that might lead to a different outcome?

[Slide: if you don’t know how to listen actively, learn to do that]

If you don’t know how to do active listening, there are places like- there’s guides online, but also, you can get actually trained in some places. There’s something called Mental Health First Aid, which was first developed first here in Australia. It is a program to educate people on how to respond to people who are in crisis. It covers people with depression or suicidality, people with anxiety, people with psychotic disorders (that’s hallucinations), people who are struggling with drugs.

There are courses in the US and Canada as well, there may at this point be online courses that you can take or you can join from another country. These courses will give you the skills to actively listen to someone who is in crisis at the moment and help you figure out how to connect them to more help if what they need is more than just a listening ear for what they’re going through in this time.

[Slide: try to make connections / (even superficial ones)]

Try to make connections with other people, even superficial ones. If you’re lonely and short on friends, reach out to people you miss and haven’t talked to in a while. Try just greeting your neighbors if you don’t usually. If you walk your dog, try to talk more with other people walking their dogs. Attempt brief, positive interactions with strangers- don’t try to prolong them, try not to upset anybody, cause we’re all in a place where we’re dealing with a lot of stuff right now, but try to practice your social skills in very short bursts. If it goes well, you’ll get a little burst of like, happiness, like, I just talked to a person and I smiled at them and they smiled at me! And it just comes naturally from your body, you don’t even- if you are ready for it, you don’t even have to look for it, it’s there waiting for you.

[Slide: if you don’t have a hobby, get one]

If you don’t have a hobby, I cannot recommend getting a hobby highly enough! If you don’t have a small thing you do for fun, preferably that makes an object of some kind, try to find one.

It might take several tries to come up with something that sticks. Try taking a life drawing class or a digital illustration class or a pottery class or a woodworking class. Try to create something with your body that is not about your work.

If you’re a parent or caretaker, try something very small- sketching for 5m a day or a very little cross stitch project.

At first it probably won’t be any good, but try to find something that you like the process of so that you can stick with it long enough to enjoy the feeling of getting better at it, and liking what you produce.

This helps you recover from burnout because it gives you small feelings of success on a regular basis and from trauma because it gives you more control over your life and your surroundings. It helps you feel effective and accomplished, even in a very small way, even just a few minutes at a time.

And if you choose a group activity or something that involves a class, you can attempt small, positive interactions with the people that you meet there.

[Slide: ask yourself: am I on the high side or the low side of this power differential?]

I’m not going to try to talk about privilege as an overall concept, because we’re all from different places, interacting with different people, and privilege is pretty situational a lot of the time.

Because it’s situational though, if you take a moment to consider in any interaction that you’re having, you can usually figure out if you are on the more or less powerful end of that interaction. For instance, right now, I am on this stage, talking to all of you, and you are listening to me, so in this context, I have more power. But later, when I take my mobility scooter out to eat in the park, I will have significantly less power in every interaction with a walking person than I do right now. If I were your manager, I would have more power in our 1:1s, but if we were to go out to dinner as a team, I would have to worry about whether I could enter the restaurant in a way that you might not have to worry.

If you examine your position relative to the other person or people in the interaction that you’re having and you discover that you are on the high power side of it, try to do more. Listen more carefully, extend more empathy, offer specific help if you can. Not like “if there’s anything I can do” – like, that’s something that we say, and it’s something that we mean, but it’s something that it’s hard to take advantage of as the person receiving “if there’s anything I can do”, because when you hear that, you’re like “oh i don’t know, is there something? that you could do to help me in this moment?” And that’s distracting and it sort of takes us out of the emotional context, and puts the work on the person that you’re trying to help to let you know how you could help them.

If you are on the low side of the power differential: pull back a little bit. People who are less powerful in a given interaction tend to offer more emotional and executive labor in response to that power differential. They can feel it, they’re like oh, I need to help more. See if you can do a little less, see if you can reserve some of that energy for other parts of your life.

The goal here is to even things out just a little bit slowly over time.

[Slide: when you have a good interaction, have a nice little wallow in those feelings]

When you have a good interaction with somebody, take a moment and just feel how nice that was. Feel the reward that your body is giving you for having a pleasant conversation, getting a nice coffee, sitting in the park. We’ve probably all heard people tell us about practicing gratitude but that is not what I mean here. What I mean is that trauma and burnout lie to us about the world- about whether we are appreciated or loved or respected. They encourage us (or force us) to fixate on bad interactions- so this is what I was talking about earlier where if you’re catastrophizing, you can’t feel the rewards that your body is giving you for having a good interaction with another person.

So when something goes well, try to take a moment and just feel in your body the good feelings that come from it. You’re not thanking someone else for your good luck, you’re not praying, you’re not like- acknowledging your good fortune in some way- you’re just taking a moment to enjoy the reward that your body is giving you for what you just did. Take a moment to notice and truly be with those feelings.

Remind the mean voices in your brain that there are good things in the world, for you and for the people around you.

[Slide: try NOT to wallow in feeling helpless]

Try NOT to wallow in feelings of helplessness. The biggest things a person can do in order to try to avoid taking trauma with them out of a bad experience are:

look for a way to have a sense of purpose

and maintain connections to people who care about you

In studies of prisoners of conscience, who were imprisoned by states for their beliefs, the ones who did the best were able to retain a sense of connection to people who loved them and maintain their sense of purpose in their confinement.

That doesn’t mean that a sense of purpose should be grandiose (like “I’m gonna kick this in the TEETH I’m gonna WIN I’m gonna SURVIVE”). It can be very small and possibly it should be. A sense of purpose can be found in reminding yourself that staying inside is boring and lonely and might feel impossible, but it is the thing that you can do to help right now, so you’re going to do it.

[Slide: when you find yourself catastrophizing]

When you catch yourself catastrophizing, take a little bit of time to explore that feeling. Is there something new you can learn about your situation from the disaster scenarios that are running through your brain? If so, great- try writing them down and keeping that information around, maybe share them with other people if the scenarios that your brain is coming up with are relevant to more than just you.

But if there’s nothing new- run through them all, acknowledge that your brain is worried and trying to help keep you safe, and then try to turn your attention to other things.

[Slide: when people reach out to you / try to reach back!]

When people reach out to you, try to reach back. When we are burnt out and/or traumatized, it can seem like the best thing to do is to stay away from other people- either because they don’t care about you enough to “put up with you” on a bad day anyway, or because you don’t want to bring them down.

It is critical to resist this urge.

When someone reaches out to see how you’re doing or ask if you want to meet up, try to reply, and try to find a way to say yes. Try things like “can we get takeout and stay in today, I’ve had a bad week but I still want to see you” or “thanks for asking- I’m not fine right now, can I tell you about it?” or “I’m not fine right now and I don’t want to talk about it, can we watch Schitt’s Creek again?”

Try not to blow up your social life because your brain is lying to you about how much everyone hates you [presenter laughs].

[Slide: if there’s a little voice / that tells you people can’t be trusted]

And if there’s a little voice in your head that tells you that people can’t be trusted, that no one’s there for you, that there’s only you to take care of you- that might be true, and if it is, I’m very sorry. A lot of the advice in this section is geared toward proving that little voice wrong, and strengthening your connections with other people.

If you have that little voice, it’s important to try as hard as you can to ignore it, and to search for people who will help you take care of you, and who you can help.

[Slide: consider mental health care]

Finally, consider seeking mental health care. This is tricky- it’s different in different jurisdictions, what is available may or may not be helpful in general or to you. You may have to make a judgement call about whether you want to actually go through this and think about what it would mean if you did get care but there are problems that would come up for you later, or if the care that you receive is not the care that you want. So that is something that’s very individual to your own circumstance and the place that you live, and so I don’t want to say that you should seek mental health care. But consider it.

[Slide: Chapter 2 / try to reach out to other people]

Next, try to reach out to other people. There’s a new kind of fear response that’s recently been defined called “tend and befriend”. The classic two fear responses that we are all used to hearing about fight and flight, right, so something goes wrong, are you gonna punch it or are you gonna run away. There’s also fawn, which is a slightly more recent formulation, which is- are you gonna punch it, are you gonna run away, or are you gonna try and please it, “I’m so sorry, don’t hurt me”.

Tend and befriend has recently been added to this list, and it’s what I observed myself and most of my friends doing at the beginning of the pandemic. We reached out to our closest friends, to people we hadn’t spoken to in years, to neighbors we barely knew, and to strangers, asking

are you okay?

do you need anything, can I help?

will you tell me if you do find that you do need help?

Many of my relationships changed for the BETTER over the course of this pandemic, as I set up recurring audio or video calls with friends I had previously only spoken to when I was visiting their city. I had a rich support network before, but now it’s even deeper and more vibrant. This is something that can help everybody.

[Slide: sometimes, this will fail 😞]

But sometimes it will fail. Some of the friends I reached out to had become conspiracy theorists.

Some were pulled under by the weight of traumas past and present and either shut me out or were cruel to me.

And some didn’t respond. There’s a lot of reasons that might have happened. Personally I don’t completely hold that against them, I’m sort of waiting to see what happens as we all come out of this.

[Slide: this fucking hurts]

But that can fucking hurt. There’s no way around it- when tend and befriend fails, it’s quite painful.

[Slide: but it succeeded much more than it failed]

But it succeeded for me, and for the people I know, more than it failed. And that helped me survive the pain of the failures.

[Slide: if you really aren’t sure how to reach out / consider volunteering or activism]

If you aren’t really sure how to reach out, if none of the suggestions that I gave- reaching out to old friends or talking to your neighbors or to other people walking dogs, if none of those feel right to you and you’re still trying to make connections, consider some kind of volunteering or political activism. Find a cause that matters to you and try to figure out how to get involved. Try to get involved from the bottom, not the top- don’t try to start a whole new NGO to address ocean microplastics (unless you have significant expertise in filtering ocean microplastics, then maybe, but that probably won’t serve what we’re trying to get to here). Volunteer to serve food at a community center. Try to do something that’s humble and helpful and brings you into contact with people that you can feel that you are making a difference for.

[Slide: back to the original problem / why are we being told that more empathy fixes what’s wrong with our world?]

Back to the original problem: why are we being told that more empathy fixes this?

1. it individualizes the problem- makes this big societal issue one that single people are supposed to solve ourselves. It is a faux solution that keeps people busy.

2. BUT it’s also the only solution. We are social creatures, and we can only hold ourselves and our communities together by creating and tending social bonds. This is a time of incredible disruption for those bonds, coming after a long period of emphasis on only the bonds of economics. We have to try to restore our bonds with each other as human animals.

[Slide: this is all so. much. work.]

And that’s a lot of work. I want to acknowledge that everything I’ve outlined here is both only the highlights reel and a lot of work [presenter laughs].

[Slide: if you do all that / what do you get?]

But if you do all of that, if you start down this very hard road, and you try to do this work on top of EVERYTHING else you have going on… what do you get?

[Slide: hope]

I think that my definition of hope is “the knowledge that the future can and will be different from the past”.

Humans need novelty and variation in what they see and what they do.

If we can say that burnout comes from doing the same thing too hard for too long

and trauma comes from danger and unfairness that we don’t know how to resist

then hope, allowing the future to be different from the past, is both something that we truly need AND it is part of the solution to both of those problems.

[Slide: and joy!]

And also I think that this can bring you joy. Connecting with other people in a positive way satisfies our inner primates! Research on humans conclusively shows that we are a social species- we will literally wither and die without help from each other, and that’s not just the physical help, it’s the emotional help, it’s the social connection. And without BEING ABLE to help each other, someone who cannot help other people, who’s given no opportunity to do that? Will also waste away. We are an altruistic species- we give things to each other because it feels good to give, because the act of giving sustains us emotionally. Just look at any person who’s feeding seagulls or Canada geese or bin chickens, like- [audience laughter] they’re not doing doing that [presenter laughs] because- they’re not doing that for any external reason, they’re doing it because it feels nice to give food to an animal who is excited to get it, even though we shouldn’t be feeding them.

Capitalism makes us afraid to give, afraid to connect with people whose needs might be greater than we can help individually.

But we don’t have to (and we cannot) solve another person’s entire problem on our own!

We can, and we must, join together to help each other solve our collective problems together. I don’t know exactly what that will look like… but I know that if we can do it even a little, it will be amazing and rewarding.

[Slide: things I didn’t have time for (I’m sorry)]

There’s a lot of things I didn’t have time to go into [presenter laughs] I’m going to namecheck a few of them quickly and we can talk about it afterwards if you’re interested.

elite panic is the name given to the response of a government when there’s a natural disaster or something else goes wrong and the government moves in to try to forcibly reestablish control. This often compounds the tragedy because the powerful want to retain power through a tragedy that could upset the power structure.

when a natural disaster or other major event happens, some people hoard and other people share- and which camp you or someone else is in is determined by whether you believe people are inherently selfish and cruel or whether you believe people are compassionate or altruistic.

it may also depend on who, in this world, is a person to you. Am I, on my mobility scooter, a person to you? Or only while I’m on this stage, showing that I am a productive member of society?

Feelings- feelings are temporary. Feelings that feel bad to experience might not be bad for you, and feelings that feel good to experience might not be good for you. Feeling sad, feeling guilty, feeling ashamed, those can be sites of growth. Feeling smug, feeling full of yourself, feeling like you really got this, those can also be sites of growth if you don’t got this.

Feelings- don’t argue with them in yourself or others, but do ask questions about where they came from and what meanings they might have. It’s not always clear why feelings are happening, sometimes you really have to dig.

And completing the stress cycle- how to deal with the stress held in your body after you address a problem like a mature, capable adult instead of hitting the person who’s upset you.

and more

[Slide: Further resources]

These are the books that I read to put this talk together. If you want to take a picture of this slide you can, but also the slides will be available later on Slack, on Twitter, on the website. There is a lot here. I have just scratched the surface of all the things that these books say. They’re all fantastic books, I definitely recommend them, and the Wired article is actually an excerpt from a book.

[Slide contents

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

Let’s Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale (also the Death, Sex, and Money podcast)

Wired: Why Are Rich People So Mean? at https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-rich-people-so-mean/

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Lewis Herman, MD

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski]

[Slide: Acknowledgements:]

I have some acknowledgements, especially to my college peer counseling crisis line, which is where I learned about active listening, and started on this path as like a 19 year old, to being on this stage in front of you today giving this talk.

And many people who have taught me about teaching and how to be present.

[Slide text:

My college peer counseling crisis line, for teaching me about active listening

Suzette Haden Elgin, for teaching me about language

Kathy Sierra, for teaching me about learning

And all of these people for helping me learn how to teach:

The Ally Skills Training, developed originally by the Ada Initiative

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at http://yarnharlot.ca

Franklin Habit at http://franklinhabit.com/

Marc Mancuso at http://www.marcmancuso.com/%5D

[Slide: Questions?]

And that’s all I have for you today. [audience applause]

[Closing organization info:

USENIX logo
Bringing the Advanced Computing Community Together Since 1975

Join us at http://www.usenix.org]

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