The Idealist's Survival Kit. 75 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout

My book “The Idealist’s Survival Kit. 75 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout” is a “tool kit” designed to support people engaged in meaningful work to keep sane and address stress and burnout.

A kind of “unGuide to doing good stuff and keep sane”.

People with daring vision and edgy ideas pour their soul into their projects. We strive for meaning and fulfilment and we can’t do that on a 9 to 5 schedule. So we are freelancers, change-makers, entrepreneurs, activists, humanitarians. Riding the edge. On the edge the temperature rises sometimes…and if we are not careful and get too close “to the sun”, just like Icarus, we risk burning “our wings”. We run out of steam and enthusiasm. We become jaded and cynical. In other words we burnout.

What many people ignore is that burnout is a problem of the system, of the “community”, not just of the individual.

When individuals burnout it is a symptom that they are part of a community that is not caring for its people. We see this problem among “do-gooders” who tend to focus on fixing things out there and pay little attention to the emotional texture of life.

Stewardship of assets will not change the world, if we forget to care for one another.

Here’s a link to my book which you can also order in bookshops if you don’t like Amazon.

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Having struggled with being bi-polar in the past: I love this!

How do you envision the unGuide to come together? Would it make sense to just start a wiki page collecting information?

Hi @mihi, missed this :slight_smile:
Are you coming to the OpenVillage festival about care in october? If so, that would be a good opportunity to approach this guide systematically, as many in the community are figuring out ways of preventing burnout and depression in a support community.

Alan’s story of how one can take effective action as an externality of having gone throuhg the rabbit hole is pretty amazing.

Ping @bistra! I just came across this older post and thought you might enjoy the read, for your Burnout camp this summer.

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