Nobody enjoys burnout.

It’s painful, upsetting, and massively disruptive to your life. Burnout is more than just the exhaustion of having too much work or the stress of having too many responsibilities. It usually features these things, but they are made all the worse by being colored by disappointment. The disappointment that your dream job, relationship, or activist project turned out, in reality, to be horribly exploitative labour, a repetition of the last one, or dogged by disorganisation and systemic resistance. But burnout is common, and some of us end up with it over and over again. So, it is worth asking, how did we get here? What promised pleasures draw us past the point of too much labour and personal investment with little or no reward? This time, we are going to talk about burnout as we experience it in a society of what Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism. A society that tells us there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. And we are going to see what Deleuze’s theory of masochism, as an attempt to control and indefinitely postpone pleasure by implementing contracts with sadistic institutions, tells us about how capitalist realism exploits our vulnerabilities and desire for meaningful enjoyment to keep us too burnt out to challenge it.

Bring your own worries along, and a pen and pad, and together we’ll take a little step closer to figuring out what the fuck is going on?

The workshop will be facilitated by Macon Holt, a cultural theorist and writer and the founder of Aesthetic Theory.

(tickets include one refreshment)