Quietly Quitting Tall Tales of Compassion Fatigue
Nicholas Rickards, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Brock University
University Lecturer & Middle School Teacher
In the fall of 2020, on yet another day on the seemingly infinite journey of P.D. (professional development), the phrase “compassion fatigue” was being thrown about as if it were the paragon of the era. Spliced between weeks of haphazard lessons on Teams and calls for attendance to blank screens, our session included Orwellian messages of the dangers of too much talk at the water cooler, the importance of self-care, and the difficulties of continuing to care which echoed off the walls of my hollow, baren classroom while the world was free falling through the first phase of the novel coronavirus.
Since then, the term has lost its buzz in the zeitgeist. It’s not trendy anymore, nor does it retain its pedantic sophistication. It’s become a banal platitude embedded within our speech. It has no zing. Nevertheless, it continues to ring. Maybe because, on one hand, there is a certain mystique about it. Semiologist Roland Barthes (2012) might refer to this process of meaning-making as a “myth” (p. 255).
. . . compassion fatigue. . .
Is it a verb, a process? A noun, a thing?
Like straining my biceps to concentric failure, am I fatiguing to the end of my compassion? Or, to continue the analogy, have I already passed the point of concentric compassion failure? Like the process of muscular hypertrophy, will my compassion grow if I continue with progressive overload, always fatiguing my compassion? Maybe my compassion can be to my humanity what Chris Hemsworth’s body is to Thor?
Do the perils of compassion fatigue outway the effects of racism a man of colour experiences at work? Being spoken to as if he is a child, like a visitor in the community in which he lives? Is he tired of caring or is he tired of disrespect?
Is compassion fatigue a synonym? Feels a bit like quietly-quitting, smells like burnout. No, that’s a misnomer. They’re all different, right?
Is it measurable? If so, how? To what degree?
Yet, on the other hand, like Oxford’s 2022 neologism of the epoch, “goblin mode”, perhaps compassion fatigue endures in its banality because there is a certain pitch to it that resonates despite its undefinable axiom; we all know very well what it means to live like a goblin (centuries of eldritch lore have certainly made that an easy picture to access in our collective imagination) and we all know what it means to be tired of caring.
There is a feeling here that has yet to be adequately translated and defined within the codification of compassion fatigue. After all, most of us are accessing its meaning based on a hunch and a feeling. Perhaps because it operates in the murky, ephemeral space of what Sarah Ahmed (2004) refers to as “affective economies”, the place where economic circulation and affect (or feelings) are synonymous.
I am curious, though, as to why it continues to resonate so profoundly within my milieu. We, the “salaried bourgeoisie” (Zizek, 2012), with guaranteed jobs whose greatest fear is the erosion of the political, economic, and class privilege our positions provide, seem to be very fond of it.
It does in retrospect read like a twisted carnival, that it was the frontline workers at grocery stores, not teachers, that facilitated the final exchange of capital needed to lube the machinations of modernity during the lockdowns — we all need to eat. As we performed what Hardt and Negri (2005) refer to as “immaterial labour” from our empty classrooms (remember, we don’t produce or sell a thing. Rather, we produce and facilitate the exchange of feeling, relationship, emotion, knowledge, etc.), buying houses and puppies at a rate never before seen in Canadian history, clerks at grocery stores had to perform their labour simply by putting their bodies at risk. Were they fatigued because of their inability to continue to be compassionate? At least I wasn’t in danger of getting sick from exposure to students.
It seems, to me at least, too coincidental and convenient that just as we approached the limits of the lexicon of labour during the initial Covid shutdowns, just while labour seemed to be winning during the Great Resignation, we began to brush under the rug the necessary basis for understanding what compassion fatigue requires to exist in the first place: working conditions and class privilege.
Why is it that compassion fatigue rolls off the tongue so much easier than a discussion of labour like adequate compensation, working conditions, managerial oversight and abuse, exploitation, alienation, drudgery? Why is it that it seems to be such a favourable means of talking about work by the managerial class, white collars so crisp? There is a sleight of hand here obscuring an agitprop for neoliberal capital. The Invisible Hand, however, is no longer pointing at our bodies and our actions — “just work harder and don’t buy avocado toast”- it’s pointing at the very depth of our souls.
To be clear, I am not here to argue against the existence of compassion fatigue. I understand that activists, for example, are tired of seeing the fruits of their labour unfulfilled. I am not a doctor or a psychologist and I have no doubt an adequate explanation can be derived from their manuals of diagnosis — maybe compassion fatigue can take the spot in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistic Manual) previously reserved for women’s hysteria and homosexuality. What I am, however, is a social scientist and an educator. It is my duty to see the horizon of intelligibility, identify the discursive signposts, and encourage critical engagement with them. In all honesty, I would like to understand compassion fatigue more. For now, however, I remain unconvinced.
How have we been led to believe there is a limit to our compassion? To our ability to care? Maybe to care about our jobs, sure. That place “where making a living often feels like dying” (Newitz, 2006, p. 2), where the alchemical process of transubstantiation magically turns our time into money, sure. But not our ability to care full stop. Our ability to be compassionate is like our ability to create knowledge: it’s an infinite, renewable resource that we can access at will and that ability is in part what makes us human. Not all is so bleak. We cannot lose hope.
Quietly quit the tall tale or at least ponder the question: Are you tired of being compassionate or are you tired of your job?
References
Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(2), p. 117–139.
Barthes, R. (2012). Mythologies. Hill and Wang
Hard, M., & Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and democracy in an age of empire. Penguin Books.
Newitz, A. (2006). Pretend we’re dead: Capitalist monsters in American pop culture. Duke University Press.
Zizek, S. (2012). The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie
