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> Complaining Might Mitigate Burnout

Yes this literally happened yesterday.

The moment I complained and vented in a single line to an old friend, I can feel the pressure leaving immediately

And further more emotionally spacious made me think of another alternative despite me brooding for more than 3 months.

Who knew?

I think it was the interaction across multiple factors: this exact friend, how I think of him, the nature of the issue, our relationship that magically produce an emotional spaciousness.

Weird and most likely hard to reproduce for other issues with same friend or same issue but different friends

🤷🏻‍♂️

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This is great. And my main thought about "complaining = taking on the obligation to fix it" is that a culture like that is a really good way for a workplace culture to avoid the concerns of women and minorities, because very often the things that make it a bad workplace for us will be things it's not directly in our power to fix, or where appropriate behaviour and attitudes need to be modelled by people with more institutional power than us (showing good allyship, though there's more to it than that) to get the "soft" parts of the problem (i.e. those that aren't crisply described by rules or procedures or budgets which might be changed) to shift over time.

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Yes, absolutely! Thanks. I was aware of this problem, but hadn't quite made that connection with the issue of the culture of complaining more broadly.

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