Reignite Your Zest for Life
Hey there. This is Marvin. What you are about to read here is my personal experience. This is not a scientific paper. I’m not sharing a medical opinion. I write this from my heart and with love for my fellow humans.
And I hope my words here will reach those people burning themselves out by doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, just like me. And inspire them to do the work to reignite their zest for life.
Down and out…
My friends said I should be happy. My mom was proud. My university in Germany used me as the poster child: the first student landing an auditing job in New York’s investment banking world. I wanted more.
More approval. Growth. I kept pushing forward. Studied more.
Went to China, Mexico, and South Africa. Then back to New York.
I chased what I read somewhere was the dream, and tried to make it mine.
At only 26, things came crashing down for me.
Every day, I felt more lonely and isolated. Unreal. My thoughts attacked me, all the time. I was stuck inside some surreal world that had no connection to present reality. I felt like I was in a goldfish bowl, unable to jump out. I spoke through fake, role-playing masks, hiding my true thoughts, all the time.
Until, one day, I broke down.
There were several mini-breakdowns before. Little warnings here and there. I did not notice them. I was too busy trying to make an impression. On this day, I collapsed. Physically. I lay on the ground, unable to move.
My young body gave up. It pulled the emergency brake.
As I lay there, I cursed myself for being weak.
In retrospect, this day marked a turning point and I am eternally thankful to my body.
I had overridden my body's wisdom for so long, and now my body was finally beginning to override my mind.
I kept fighting against myself for three more months in New York:
“This is right for you. Stay. What else would you do? Just wait until summer. Wait until the next raise.”
Then, with my last strength, I pulled the parachute.
I quit my job, packed, and moved back to my parent’s house, dealing with the hangovers of a decade-long character bender.
Fake it til you break it.
In our faced-past, hyperconnected, capital-driven world
…many human beings are living-out a disembodied role that does not suit them.
That means they work very hard at being a certain way. Portraying an ideal picture.
This can be some ideal we picked up somewhere along the way.
A problem comes in if this ideal we want to portray is in direct conflict with our current reality.
Simple example:
If I feel sad and I want to be seen as happy, I have to invest a lot of energy. I have to tense up to repress the true feeling of the moment. And I have to invest even more to pretend. I work twice as hard for a dubious payoff. That’s because most people can tell something is off anyways. Who are you really fooling?
That’s right.
We might be able to pretend for a while, but long-term “faking til you make it” wears us down. It costs a whole lot of aliveness and creative energy. And we are doing this for someone else’s idea of how we should be.
We are sensing, feeling, living organisms before we are the idea we have of ourselves & our job role.
If we think our body is the one who got it wrong, we are in for a lesson.
I know some people who:
Pride themselves in not having time to eat
Want their minds to live in a literal machine
Compete over who can sleep less
Think cheating on partners is normal
Would never leave a meeting to pee
Say emotions are for little girls
I was the person sitting at a desk until midnight because I did not want to leave first.
The level of disembodiment in the modern workplace is shocking and, sadly, normalised.
And the only only beneficiaries are Pharma Inc. and Rehab Co.
At the core of this is us trying to live up to inhumane standards and expectations…
… and justifying them as necessary to “make a living” and “pay the bills”.
We got the money, and we don’t know how wealth feels.
Here is how I like to view Burn-Out
Burn-out is the continuous fight against your inborn human nature.
It’s not an external force, it’s the killing of your unique life flame.
An inside job, so to speak.
I worked so hard on trying to be someone I was not, that my body gave up.
What burned me out was not the work itself.
It was the additional hard work I did of performing a phoney role, all the time.
It was the constant pretending that I was an “accounting-enthusiast” when in reality, I wanted to be outside. Climb mountains. Go to Ecuador. I burned myself out by keeping a lid on the natural and healthy reactions my body had to unnatural and unhealthy ways of being.
I doused my own flames with the thousand “Yeses” that wanted to be “Nos”.
All the times I force-smiled when I wanted to hide and cry.
And all the times I forced myself to open the office door when I wanted to run away.
Have you ever seen a candle’s flame slowly dying under a glass?
For me, burn-out was like that.
I extinguished my own flame under a thick, self-made glass of
Pretenses and lies
On-going role-play that went against my body
Performing in ways I learned in books
Repressing feelings
Micro-managing other’s opinions of me
Analyzing every thought I had
Burn-out is the on-going dimming of your own fire…
… until it goes out.
You are temporarily unavailable. Mailer demon. Out of office.
Reigniting the flame…
Luckily, I was not at the end of my candle.
Far from it. Today, I am more energised at 36 than I ever was in my twenties.
In all areas of my life, I am thriving…
… and I am doing so much more than I did.
The flame of life, luckily, is self-reigniting. By default, it wants to burn and blaze with other flames. Flames are like that. They want to flicker and dance and flare-up and glow together. My work was to recognise all the ways in which I stopped my natural burning. All the ways I stifled my flame.
Burn-out was doing all the wrong things for the right reasons.
I had to go back, clean out my past, and reconnect to what I really wanted.
The biggest challenges for me were…
Learning to say “No”
Knowing and saying what I want
Expressing so-called negative feelings
Without these three skills, I dare to say you are going to suffer.
And here is the big question.
How am I doing financially?
Today, I have more money than I ever had working in jobs I hated.
I don’t have to compensate all that much.