Activist Burnout

[talktooloose]

I'm listening to a remarkable documentary about burnout among activists. It's centered around the suicide of bike activist and former Toronto mayoral candidate (he came second to Mel Lastman), Tooker Gomberg, but includes many interesting interviews with current and former activists.

It's on the Sunday Edition podcast, about 40% of the way into the show.

There is a lot for me to learn here about my own motivations and my own furies. Enlightening.

Comments

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Oh, I believe in activist burnout, for sure. So much so that I think I shall avoid said podcast. ;-)

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Understood. What interested me most was the point about how unprocessed anger motivates a lot of activists, and the activism itself is not an effective way for them to process. One burnt out activist was moved to say that she thought her fellows might well create as bad or worse a system as the one they hoped to upend.

It made me think about my own anger and how my activist zeal is too often about venting rather than solving.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Oooooh. Maybe I'll have to check it out after all.

One of the things that really made me hit the wall was when a bunch of local activists, all of them people I considered friends, were in two camps about something, feeling let down by each other, and came to have a "work it out" meeting *in my living room*, which they asked my partner to mediate, but which actually devolved into a lot of fingerpointing and venting at each other, telling my partner to stuff it when he tried to calm people down, and ....

I mean, ick. Good people tearing each other up because they'd made some mistakes and hurt each other, and ALL their unresolved anger and resentment transferred to each other over it.

It was pretty much my last gasp working with any of those folks. I had to look at the hamster wheel of rage too many of us were on and find a way off it.