The Weight of Impermanence: Sitting With Political and Professional Burnout
Lately, I’ve been thinking about impermanence. Not in the abstract, spiritual sense, but in the very real, lived experience of trying to build something—work, stability, change—while everything underneath keeps shifting. A conversation with a brilliant and insightful pal yesterday put words and new ways of thinking to the despair and uncertainty I've been feeling yesterday.
I look at my own career: the work I’ve done, the credibility I think I've built, the experience I’ve gained. And I catch myself wondering if alongside the work of social change, I’ve been trying to accrue personal security. As if a great CV, a strong LinkedIn profile, a medal from the Queen or a standout website could somehow create solid ground beneath me. As if expertise or recognition could provide some kind of anchor that protects me from being swept up by the waves.
And yet, here I am, in a moment where everything—politics, funding, institutions—feels fragile. The work continues, but the systems around it feel increasingly unstable.
The Tension Between Hope and Hopelessness
In therapy, I find hope all the time. People come into sessions feeling stuck, lost, overwhelmed, and within the safety of conversation, something shifts. Not necessarily in a grand, cinematic way, but in the quiet moments where someone sees themselves a little differently, where something painful is put down, where a new path forward—no matter how small—becomes visible.
In community, I find hope too. In the ways people show up for each other, in small acts of care, in the knowledge that while institutions may falter, people remain.
And then, I look at Parliament, and I feel exhaustion and apathy. I look at policy discussions, clipped videos of Committee meetings where the representative of an organisation answers the question they sent to the elected member the week before, at the same cycles of bad faith arguments, at how people who are already marginalised—trans people, refugees, disabled people—are treated as political battlegrounds. I see Reform UK gaining traction, and I wonder how much cruelty people are willing to vote for. I write funding applications to support counselling, something that helps people and communities thrive, and watch it fail to make it to the top of the priority list time and time again. The misalignment between what I think is needed and what I think is possible feels vast.
Understanding Moral Distress and Burnout
This isn’t only stress. Stress can be managed, mitigated, balanced. This is something deeper—what in healthcare is often called moral distress. It happens when you know what needs to be done, but the systems around you make it impossible to do. It’s what doctors, nurses, midwives experience when they don’t have enough resources to care for their patients the way they know they should. And it applies beyond healthcare—to charity leaders, public service workers, care home workers activists, anyone trying to create change or find dignity for people inside structures that are fundamentally resistant to it.
Over time, this kind of distress accumulates. Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North’s 12 stages of burnout describe a process that starts with overcommitment and a need to prove oneself, but gradually descends into cynicism, exhaustion, and detachment. Not everyone reaches the final stages, and not all of them happen in sequence, however the earlier ones—feeling emotionally drained, questioning whether anything actually changes, oscillating between outrage and numbness—are familiar to many of us. They are familiar to me right now. It's why I put a pause on political and lived experience work in my consultancy - I don't think it's ethical to point people towards our Government right now and say that I believe they can change things.
Sitting With It, Rather Than Fixing It
It would be easy to end this with some kind of forced optimism. A rallying cry to ‘keep going’ or ‘focus on what we can control.’ And maybe that’s useful for some people. But I think there’s value in simply acknowledging the weight of it all.
What if, instead of trying to push through, we sat with the discomfort? What if we made space—not for quick fixes, but for honest reflection? What does it mean to do this work when the institutions around us feel unaligned? What does it mean to lead when there’s no stable ground beneath us?
These aren’t easy questions. And I don’t have answers. But I think there’s something in the asking.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be putting together a space for people who feel this weight. A chance to sit with it, reflect on it, and think about what comes next—not in the name of relentless productivity, but in the name of clarity and care. If this speaks to you, keep an eye out.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear—how are you sitting with all of this?