MODERN MUTING

Keys to Avoid Fall Burnout

Each Monday, Julio Vincent Gambuto presents “Modern Muting” — a weekly Medium story series dedicated to helping readers step back from all the bullshit of modern life, create quiet, re-evaluate, then go forward boldly. It’s 500 words a week of “self-help meets the system.”

Hey, hey, friends, colleagues, readers, and all peeps Medium,

Fall burnout watch. We’re six weeks into “back to” season, just three weeks into fall. That means we’re halfway to Thanksgiving. I know, time flies. Not my intention to rush it, just to check in. What’s your Halloween costume? No, I mean…how’s that grind? It’s been a particularly intense week in the world. Painful. So, it’s even more important to take that deep breath when it comes to managing work, home, family, and your intake of all things media, messages, pinging, ringing and dinging.

Here are two key ways to make it all more manageable: find ways to slow it all down and to put limits back in. These are the two major ways digital capitalism — what I call “click-up economics” — has put us all on autopilot, how it has trapped us all in the infinite loop of it all, running and running in that treadmill. First, it jacked up the speed of it all. We went from human speed to 1G to 2G to now “blazing fast” 10G. That means the utter nonsense in the whole system is flying at us faster than ever. And we’re running faster than ever to keep up with it — or dodge it.

It also made the world unlimited. It took away the limits of it all. We are no longer bound by predictable business cycles and rhythms, by the parameters of traditional personal and business communication, not even by the limits of the physical office. And we’ve been sold a very sexy story that unlimited equals good. Unlimited is the future. Unlimited is everything you want. No. This means the bullshit is never-ending. It has no bottom. It keeps coming at us, over and over and over, without fail.

So, here’s some advice. Look at whatever is driving you nuts, at this point in the fall. How can you slow it down? How can you take it from “speedy” and “instant” and “on-demand” and put it back into human time? Does that mean choosing a new cadence for it? A new frequency? Does that mean waiting to respond? Does that mean simply walking, talking, and…