Due to a few scheduling issues (thanks to holidays, vacation time, and so on), I actually had a normal work week where I only did approximately eight hour work days. None of them were actually eight hours in total, since I wound up needing to stay late for a couple of those days, but that meant I got to leave early on the last day of the week, so I got to experience what it was like to be home by about five or six, have dinner eaten and cleaned up before seven, and then to have an entire evening to myself after work for the first time in longer than I can remember. Even before my shift to working fifty-hour weeks when I moved over the summer (to account for my change in rent), I was working forty-five to fourty-seven and a half hours every week. I occasionally did a forty-hour week in 2022, but the last time I did them reliably was at some point in 2021 when we were still dealing with pandemic strain on my employer’s finances and I couldn’t work extra hours. I don’t remember when that limitation got removed, but it has probably been around two and a half years, give or take a couple months.

It was amazing. I actually had energy to do things in the evening and over the weekend. I wasn’t staggering (metaphorically, to be clear) through the last hours of every day in the office, nor was I collapsing in exhaustion on my couch after work until I could muster the willpower to shuffle off to bed (often too late to get a proper amount of sleep because I desperately needed to spend some time having fun and enjoying myself). Every day, I’d get through what felt like my evening of gaming or reading or watching a show only to realize that it was barely nine and I still had hours before my usual bedtime. I finally understood how people could go to sleep at ten because, if I’d already done that much after work, I might as well have gone to sleep. I, of course, was going through a weird phase in my sleep cycle where I kept twitching awake when I tried to fall asleep, like my body was trying to keep me from falling over, so I didn’t get any more sleep than usual, but it was still a memorable experience. It’s something I want to get back. I want to have the energy to do things. I want to have time to myself again. I want to find a way to recapture that appreciation for how much time I had in a normal day.

It’s difficult to really explain just how monumental a different it was. After all, I only worked for two fewer hours than usual. Sure, I didn’t have to do a single eleven hour day to make up for a day when I could only work for nine, but even sticking around for almost nine hours twice that week barely registered as staying late. Part of that, I’m sure, is my sense of my average work day being warped by how long I’ve been working this many hours, but two hours is still quite a bit of time in a day. I spend that much time on my morning routine every day (an hour working out and stretching, then an hour fo showering, food/coffee, morning pet care, and then my commute) and that chunk of time sets the tone for my entire day. Two hours isn’t nothing, especially when those two hours cost more energy than any other two hours in my day since I have to spend a ton of energy to keep myself working and focused past the point where I’ve worn out my attention and begun to wear out my body. Each successive hour of work after the first three costs more than the one before it and the difference between eight and ten is a huge amount of energy. If I’m working eight hours a day, then I can fully get my energy back every week. If I’m doing ten, it slowly drains my reserves, depletes my ability to borrow from the future, and then begins to eat at my ability to recover over the weekends until I hit a holiday where I get more than two days off in a row.

I mean, hell, being away from work for twelve days over the holidays barely got me back to baseline and even then a lot of it got immediately burned up in my first full fifty hour week of work [and the rest got burned up in my second such week] because of the number of crises I was dealing with (my “something bad or incredibly stressful happens at work during my first week back from any vacation” curse is still going strong, though this iteration felt inevitable because my team has had to tackle a crisis of some kind literally every week since mid-October). At this point, I need a much longer break from work if I’m ever going to recover from this burnout. I probably need a new job (which is a point I keep returning to) so I can get out of this cycle of needing to work so much extra time to afford to live comfortably/because there’s so much damn stuff that needs doing every week. The problem I always run into, though, is that I’m too burned out and exhausted to spend time looking for jobs on my nights and weekends. That extra two hours of work and two fewer hours to myself each evening made a HUGE difference in this regard and its not like I can just take one night a week to work less since I’ll be too tired from the other four nights to do anything but continue my daily collapse from exhaustion.

I don’t really have a good idea for what to do about all this. I’m talking about it with my therapist, but there’s only so much I can do when I’m too tired to do much of anything on my week nights and too emotionally/mentally burned out from work every week to spend my weekends on anything I don’t absolutely need to do. Ideally, with fewer major expenses this year (since I won’t be moving, participating in a wedding across the country, or doing any international travel), I’ll be able to build up some financial padding and either take some time off, take some kind of medical/personal leave for this horrendous burnout, or just work a normal amount of hours long enough to recover from burnout so I can find a job that pays better and demands less of me (because, honestly, at this point, I’m pretty sure my fellow testers and I are doing an extra two employees worth of work on top of our own, maybe more). God, what a nice life that would be… Too bad I’m caught up in the Capitalist Hellscape of it all…