The Youth Burnout

What is burnout?

The so-called burnout is something very luxurious. First of all, I have no spare time to have burnout now. Because I have to be busy with work and running around every day. Besides, ninety-nine percent of the people in society cannot have burnout. And it costs a lot of money to chew the taste of real burnout. Why? Because the helplessness and desperate state of mind that comes with no money is far from burnout.

In the youthful burnout that people often talk about, there are people who call it youthful burnout when they have no money to go to the movies and stay on the second floor of a simple apartment with nothing to do. But it is still doubtful whether this can be called burnout. In fact, the so-called real burnout is the exclusive property of the noblemen of Wuhou, and only these people know the real horror of burnout. The person who is in a trance on the second floor of a simple apartment is suffering from both disposing of himself and dealing with youth, passing the days of doing nothing in a state of sometimes melancholy and sometimes cheerfulness, so that he still gets nothing. Burnout, on the other hand, is something that people who have everything feel only when they are completely useless. Wilde once said, "There are two types of misfortune in the world, the misfortune of having nothing and the misfortune of having something in its entirety. The latter is more unfortunate." The latter, which is more unfortunate, is burnout.

However, the so-called youth is the state of not having something yet, the state of longing, the state of longing, and the state of possibility. The vast fields of life and fears unfold before their eyes, and although they still have nothing, they can occasionally have a feeling of having everything in their fantasies. Contrasting this feeling with the above definition of burnout, it becomes clear that the so-called burnout of youth is a contradiction in language itself. In fact, youth cannot have burnout, and the feeling of burnout is the opposite of the meaning of youth.

The loneliness of youth

If this is the case, why do people use the word youthful weariness? Because it is a playful and somewhat worrying expression. That is, it is the word for melancholia, yet with a certain sweet feeling.

People often see the figures of young men and women with lonely faces on the park benches or at the street corners. Although they are men and women, but each is not related. They are at least in pairs of couples strolling, their faces show a glowing look. This kind of glow, in fact, is not weariness, but youth with a very rapid pace and loneliness not to compromise each other to produce.

Rather, I would like to talk about the loneliness of youth. Why? Because there is nothing like youth to feel loneliness more intensely, and there is nothing like youth to live in harmony with loneliness. Youth tastes loneliness in one moment, and when it is about to get out of it, it disappears in a moment and falls back into it. Youth is not a state of solitude. That is, one can neither fully enjoy mutual intimacy, live together in harmony, and live comfortably and successfully together, nor can one become accustomed to such a state. The kind of loneliness that at first glance looks like burnout appears there. By loneliness, we mean the feeling of being buried alone in this spiritual life together. But at the same time, it is also the state of being in such a spiritual community that one will have more longing than others. Young people have a stronger longing for this state than others. While longing, they are not satisfied with this longing.

Let's assume that there is a young girl here. This young girl is convinced that she cannot love anyone else. She really cannot love anyone. She occasionally walks with her male friend, goes to the movies, and goes dancing. However, when this male friend showed her love, her own love immediately cooled, and she felt as if he was a monster full of hateful desire, her illusions immediately disillusioned, but became to hate him. So she immediately returned to solitude, and in solitude she chewed something like weariness. She had nothing to gain, but she was still tasting burnout. To be correct, she was tasting something like burnout.

She has a fear of life. This fear makes her just want to close herself off. The contradiction between this feeling of self-imposed isolation and the feeling of trying to go deeper into that isolation and move forward always leads her to loneliness and becomes the root cause of her mantra that life is meaningless. At this time, she puts some kind of blurred distance between herself and her life. She tries to rest peacefully in the middle of it. She will say, "Lonely. She knows that once she has love, she won't feel lonely. However, she did not find the object of love. So, she can't help but say, "I'm lonely. It's so lonely", and finally closed herself up again.

She looked up at the spring sky and the white clouds, and gazed at the green woods. However, none of these scenes brought her any joy, as if she was rejecting herself. So, she herself neither advanced nor retreated, as if in a state of suspension, becoming hazy. She thought to herself: If only she could become a whole non-existence. But she did not have the courage to kill herself. She thought: If only she could become a cloud of smoke and disappear without a trace. However, she could not disappear. It was as if she was practicing the invisibility ...... method, and she sat blankly by the window with this state of mind. So, spring gradually passed, and she called this scene the weariness of youth. However, what exactly does this mean?

Three Ways to Enrich Solitude

In the path of life, one often encounters many situations in which the person who pretends to be the most honest is actually the most cunning. The people who seem to be the most cunning are actually the most honest in their work. This is one of the amazing things that we learn when we walk into society.

When students are students, they are not yet social beings, so they are also the times when they just abuse honesty. So the laziest people and the most cunning people were able to abuse honesty and get by without being seen.

We often meet young girls and young men who have an honest face, who take life seriously, who do not condone the slightest sin, and who do not tolerate the slightest dirt. They hate the so-called adults and impeach them for their dirty deeds. Nevertheless, the adults are engaged in some work, while they are not yet working. In other words, they are still in a state of youthful burnout. What I'm trying to say is that this burnout appears sincere about life, but is actually, in many cases, a sly self-justification. It is a kind of self-preservation that does not put itself in harm's way. So, as a way to enrich this burnout and loneliness, people read.

And the problem is the method of reading. I have carefully reviewed my own reading in my youth, and it was a time when I never had to read for self-justification. In other words, there was no time when reading was as helpful and easy to grasp as it was at this time in my life. Most young people read books without objectivity, without criticism, for the sake of reading only books they like, making their own conclusions first, or even reading only books that cater to conclusions. On the surface, this kind of reading seems to be bent on exploring what one does not understand, but in reality, in terms of results, much of it is reading as described above. We novelists know how to pander to such readers from a commercial perspective. Sadly, it is not unheard of for novelists to write only to cater to such readers.

However, I am not saying that such reading is all negative. In the process of reading for the sake of self-justification and to enrich the so-called weariness of youth, there is always a little something good left in the end, just like panning for gold in the sand, and there are many such cases. It's like reading a book, and in the end, you unexpectedly touch the core. This core will finally say "no" to the reader, and say "no" in the last moment, which is against the original intention of the reader to read for self-justification. The power of "no" overflows in the truly first-class readings. And this power threatens them, expels them from their previous state of peace of mind, and pushes them to take off. Therein lies the incredible effect of reading. The person who does not encounter such first-class reading can only say that it is his real misfortune.

I have already given an example of reading, but youth is so elusive that one might go to the movies in order to soothe the mood of not knowing how to spend it. The movie will cut off life for an hour and a half and let you indulge in all kinds of dreams and colorful fantasies. As a result, movies can sometimes give people the illusion that they are a reality. Of course, the movie will take advantage of this illusion. It helps people pass the time and makes them most relaxed and comfortable to spend time. I know a young man who went around watching ten movies in a week. They were just like patients lying in bed with their mouths open waiting for their medicine to be fed, literally accepting something at their own discretion. Then, even if this can pass the time, but in no way can dispatch their original said tiredness or loneliness. They feel more and more lonely, and in the end, what is left is some stale dregs that cannot be cleaned up.

As I said before, the true way of life, aspiring to honesty, has a certain cunning of youth lurking in this feeling. However, I think that the human animal, from childhood to old age, stubbornly has its own level of cunning in all ages. Children have the terrible cunning energy of children, and even madmen have the cunning of madmen. There are also old people and old people's smoothness, and middle-aged men have their notorious treachery. Forty-eight year olds have the cunning of forty-eight year olds. How can we ask only youth not to have their own cunning? In this way, the so-called cunning can also be said to be a method of self-protection that humans have to take in order to survive.

But what I want to say is that the cunning of at least those honest young men and women in their youth actually manifests itself in a rebellious form. That is, out of self-protection, they have to put on a mask to show that they are actually an honest person, absolutely honest. Thus, it is necessary to let what is nothing but fear of life have a shadow that seems to be a sincere exploration of life. Then true honesty is not such a thing. True honesty does not tolerate its own cunning. And one constantly doubts whether one is honest or not. But youth does not doubt its own cunning, and does not wish to be pure and honest all the time. Therefore, I would rather say that it is not the honesty of youth. It can also be said that it is a longing for the honesty of youth.

So, what does it have to do with the burnout mentioned earlier? What I want to say is that I want to show, by exploring life, that in their senseless arguments, in their random reading, and in their actions driven by madness, there lurks the blind action of trying to escape from loneliness and being helpless.

IV How to overcome burnout

In the past, Nietzsche discussed the ancient Greek misanthropy, which is an explanation of the so-called Attic sorrow that repeatedly appears in the lyrical poems of Attica. Nietzsche interpreted Attic sorrow as an anguish generated by the very fecundity of the Greek nation, which is still in the age of vigorous youth. Nietzsche illustrates it as a powerful pessimism, although it is a misanthropism, a pessimism. Nietzsche is saying that abundance and fecundity themselves produce a kind of anguish. This is what distinguishes it from the terrible weariness of the one who has everything that we have described earlier.

Here, in effect, a simple formula is established. That is, the imbalance here is the imbalance produced by the excess of physical energy, the imbalance between the spiritual unfinished and the physical finished. For this reason, balance can be achieved by deducting a little from the excess to make up for the increase in the less. This is the reason why sports and spiritual action are synonymous with youth. In short, it is the physiological requirements of youth that are best met by consuming the excess and wearing out the excess. If certain excesses are left untouched as they are, then the excess energy will in turn overwhelm the spirit, prompting it to become undeveloped. Just as a plum tree must be cut back in order to blossom, it is necessary for youth to expend its energy through sports or other activities in order to regulate itself and to enable its spirit to be fully developed. When one's physical body is used cruelly, one has the uncanny feeling that this cruelty makes will actually bring a certain refreshing joy and at the same time refreshes one's spirit. In short, people who like to think deeply about things need to go outside and walk around. However, it is an aberration to just walk around and do sports without using your spirit at all. The balance is achieved by consuming excess energy through sports and then thinking about the problem in a pleasantly tired way. Then, thinking can become normal, and the spirit itself can function with clarity without being bothered by excess. In addition, if the physical body wins and becomes excessive, it is necessary to exercise as much as possible to consume physical energy so that it can be converted to the spiritual.

In the final analysis, I think that all the problems of youth come from the imbalance between the spirit and the body. People gradually realize that people who seem to have a surprisingly developed intellectuality at first glance do not have a developed spirit per se. Why? Because it is impossible for the spirit to function fully during the period of oppression by the body. Even if one tries to explain, oppress, or perfectly analyze the flesh by the power of the spirit alone, it is impossible to do so in the age of youth. To say this is by no means an overstatement; by the time one is fully able to do this, one can be called an adult.

June 1957