Last night I ventured into Brooklyn to go clubbing at Basement. There was a tent set up at the top of the ramp for the bouncers to triage who could get in. The line for people without ticket was deceptively short: only 20 or so individuals waiting underneath a tent. I was surprised how the line for people with a ticket, even though it ran all the way to the sidewalk, was moving fast. The ratio of access between people with ticket and without ticket must have been 20 or 30:1. I ended up standing in line for almost 2 hours. The sunk cost fallacy really sinked in that night.
During that 2 hour sunk-cost period, I tried to distract myself by catching up on some Substack posts by the poet David Whyte. One of them, Burnout, really resonated with me. This paragraph characterizes a state of mind I am usually in after a typical workday:
The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life.
Another passage that resonates with me:
Burnout is diagnosed by exhaustion, often caused by calling on energies in work or family life, that are not native to my way of being: the necessity of having had to use my will to keep going hour after hour, day after day; of assuming goals that actually belong to other people and which I have stolen to my detriment.
That last part about keeping going hour after hour, day after day working for other people’s goals nails it. There is something therapeutic about being able to describe an emotion, to give it contours, color, and relief. It helps in managing it, and eventually change it.