In the crash landing of burnout, old routines and habits, these technologies by which people cope with the myriad of tasks and decisions in everyday life, all of a sudden stop working. Life is out of step, out of sync, habits are drained of content, become meaningless or mysterious. Lars expressed it like this: ‘It’s damned hard to be on sick-leave, all of a sudden you’re without routines and it was the routines that kept life running at work. It feels like the floor is pulled away from under you.
A striking theme in the interviews is the constant return to questions of overload at home and in the office. The daily burden had been transformed into new kinds of stress, a body in constant pain or a state of sensory and social overexposure. The TV screen flickers too much, noises are too loud, smells too strong. You want to retreat to the bedroom and draw the curtains and just lie in the dark.
In a life crisis like burnout, people often experienced a very dramatic change of pace. Before their collapse they had felt a manic satisfaction of having ‘total flow’, coordinating many tasks; now all of a sudden they had lost so many of the skills of keeping everyday life going. The body would not obey order, the autopilot had stalled and even minor tasks became huge projects. One thing that was lost was the old skill of multi-tasking (see Löfgren 2007). They had survived juggling their work and home life by being able to do many things at once.
In an autobiographical novel a freelance journalist, Felicia, describes her breakdown into burnout. She remembers interviewing a female hotel manager who told her how she constantly developed her talent for multi-tasking. By buying a headset for her mobile she could vacuum her whole home while taking incoming enquiries from work. ‘This is something for me,’ Felicia thinks. But that was in the old days when she could combine any amount of work. Today it is no longer possible for her to eat pizza and watch television at the same time, cook food while talking on the phone, or sort out the dirty laundry while sitting on the toilet. ‘Maybe I am becoming a man,’ she thinks, ‘I can only do one thing at a time’ (Dahlgren 2005: 71).
Collective Collapse
There are, however, even more dramatic breakdowns of everyday rhythms and routines that face whole communities that go through a major crisis.
In her ethnographic study War Within: Everyday Life in Sarajevo under Siege the anthropologist Ivana Maček (2000) follows how the web of everyday routines collapsed as the city of Sarajevo became beleaguered during the Balkan wars. A new life of heavy bombardments and an ever-present fear of snipers drastically changed the rules of everyday life. All of a sudden the most basic routines of everyday life disappeared. A constant improvisation was needed to keep life going and the vulnerability of an everyday life that has been taken for granted emerged. The supplies of water and electricity became totally erratic; you had to spend a lot of time searching for a water supply and improvising new techniques for cooking and heating. Everyday routines like preparing a meal could become complicated tasks, calling for both innovation and patience. Can you make a small fire on the balcony? What would work as a water carrier?
108
Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren