www.theatreartlife.com: There seems to be a weirdly macho attitude towards exhaustion in the performing arts, we wear it as an odd badge of pride. “I just pulled three 10 out of 12s!” “Oh yeah, well I just got off 40 hours straight with no sleep!” “It’s been three months since I’ve had a day off!” Bragging about how overworked we are is a one-ups game—I can endure more, so I must be more hardcore than you.
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This sort of attitude is so prevalent in theatre and CMU’s school of drama is no exceptions. It is this weird badge of pride being the “most over worked” and not getting much sleep that is so toxic and unhealthy for the industry as a whole. Also I think there is this stigma around being impressive for being capable of putting yourself through such misery and honestly what is more impressive to me is doing your work well and still having a life balance that allows you to be healthy and content as a person. I do hope that in time this idea will shift and with the increasing awareness and value of mental health I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to do so and soon. Also this lying about being okay is also toxic to the environment we’re creating we need to stop lying and ask for help. If we believe we need to be super humans at a jobs and refuse to express our concerns and weaknesses we aren’t going to make anything better for the people around us. If they see you pretending to be okay they’ll think that is standard when in reality you’ve been going to your car every night after strike and crying or being unable to function outside of work. To make this issue better we need to first start with removing that stigma of independence and unflappable iciness is the only successful way to lead.
Stress culture is awful and it so present in this industry but also in our school. In my interp and argument class, Writing about Public Problems, I have to write a proposal to solve an issue in a community I am a part of. I chose to discuss stress culture within the school of drama. The stress culture olympics of having the least amount of sleep or having the most work is absolutely ridiculous. I have also noticed that the source of it is often the pressure of being at such a prestigious school, and it gets better over time as freshmen figure out that they don't need to over work themselves to do well. I noticed that in school of drama this is a really big trend. Once you get out of the DP world, you realize how little those assignments mattered. With my proposal I would love to get upperclassmen in our department to talk to freshmen about stress culture and about not overworking yourself over assignments that you won't even remember in 2 years.
This mentality is something I have been practicing for my entire life, and only within the last three weeks (through a series of Rube-related breakdowns) did I come to realize truly how unhealthy it is. Saying “I feel like I’m dying, but I’m fine” is definitely something I need to work on; it’s not fine, and I shouldn’t qualify my exhaustion with an excuse like that. Since I was little I’ve been in environments where anything less than working until exhaustion has been unacceptable, so in some ways I have been conditioned to think this was normal. This article is important to me, because I feel like I need to hear that other people are working through this issue too. I need to hear that there are people out there who are trying to fight the culture of overworking. It helps to normalize that needing a break is healthy and okay, and hopefully it will become more normalized in the workplace.
Wow this article is so right and I really wish there were way more people in the world openly questioning the attitudes surrounding work in the performing arts because I know there are so many people thinking it. I think Loar brings up so many good points about how people take pride in being the most overworked one in the room, which is clearly not healthy. I think as students it is really easy for us to say that we are overworked because we are still in school, but this is how the industry is. I would never want to work anywhere else because this is what I love and what I am passionate about and I do love working long hours in the theatre sometimes (I do think that is part of the fun) but it so hard for me to just accept that I will be tired the rest of my life. I don’t know if this is an issue that will ever be completely fixed because also this system seems to be working on paper and people don’t like messing with what works but I do agree with Loar that what we need right now are starting points to fix this.
I really connected with this article; I feel that it really applies to a lot of aspects of my life, and I wish it did not. There is definitely the kind of attitude that, in order to work in theater, you have to spend hours and hours working and that if you can’t deal with that, then you’re not cut out to work in this industry. While I do not see a problem with devoting much of your life to working in something that you love, the culture that has developed has become one that can be dangerous to people and becomes less and less productive. I have definitely felt that sometimes, in order to get work done, I’ve had to put my life and emotions on hold, which ends up hurting me in the long run; when I have a minute to pause, everything comes crashing back in, and I have ended up turning towards more self-destructive coping mechanisms, because the healthier options are too expensive or time-consuming. I see this culture has a huge problem in this industry and I really hope that more people notice and do something about it.
Stress culture is something that we have all fallen victim to. Being the person who was working the longest, the latest is now almost more valuable than being the person who was the most efficient, who came to the best quality of work. It is an incredibly frustrating thing to wrap your brain around. When I was in high school, my teachers told us that because of the way our high school pushed us, college would be easier and that as long as we could were working harder than the people next to us, we would be doing fine, so somehow that became a the measure of success for all of us. Since then, I have learned that knowing my own limits, setting my own boundaries, and being able to stop is actually how I should be checking in on my success. All of these things are much easier said than done. It is something that I struggle with daily. At this point, I worry so much as I see my peers, especially those younger than me, getting sucked into this awful system, and I hope that we as a community do better to support one another in setting boundaries.
When I saw this article I immediately thought about my relationship with work and how I’m constantly overworking myself. It’s really not healthy the amount of stress me and many others in this program put ourselves through. For pretty much most of my life I’ve always tried to be the hardest worker and run myself into the ground, often opting to forego sleep, food, breaks, or friends just to get something done. I couldn’t, and still somewhat today can’t, feel accomplished unless I’ve sacrificed too much of myself. Take even this weekend for example where I didn’t do anything for Carnival besides see a few booths and spent all the rest of the hours working. Only recently have I started slowly telling myself that breaks here and there are okay; and that it’s not weak to take care of your health sometimes. My coping mechanism for stress is often working even more because 'if I stop working, I start thinking' which I know needs to be fixed as well. I really hope the culture around this kind of stress in the industry starts improving so we have less technicians breaking down and feeling hopeless.
I know most of us probably relate to this article in one way or another, personally I feel like I don’t have an unhealthy relationship to my work in terms of stress or anxiety, but I do often prioritize work to the extent of not sleeping, skipping meals, bailing on plans, and all that jazz. Fortunately, however, I don’t often get anxious or stressed about the work that I am doing, regardless of whether or not I’m doing it in a healthy way. Which I suppose is a bit of a silver lining, but it’s not an excuse to treat myself poorly in service of whatever project I am working on that week.
I find it fascinating that this is such a common occurrence in the performing arts. And not only professionally. I know that I have been performing this way since high school. The pace has not changed from high school, to regional, to college, but the level of expectation has. Part of me loves that challenge seeking, hard working attitude, but at the same time, knowingly running yourself into the ground is unhealthy and impractical, and often makes you perform worse than you would had you just taken that dang nap.
I would say I agree and disagree with this article. I think many people try to cling onto their work which makes it difficult to give up necessarily. I have been a victim of this a million and one times. It’s not easy to just settle with what you have when you know its potential, and you;re so close to it. But there comes point where it’s time to let whatever you created be what it is and understand that instead of trying to change it for the “better”. I think that, yes, people in the industry are tired and overworking themselves, but it’s all about balance and knowing your limits as a person. If you know you could handle something, then do it and do it with confidence. Pursuing something with doubt in mind is always self destructive and unsuccessful. You have to believe that you know exactly what you’re doing and no one can tell you otherwise.
This problem is pretty much the one that has been there for a long time and that everyone knows about, but that nobody really has a good solution for and therefore never gets solved. I think most of us are guilty of it; I know that I am. I didn’t get to sleep last night because I scheduled myself almost entirely around the clock. Arguably more importantly, when I’ve mentioned that to people, it’s felt less like complaining and more like bragging. The plus side of the crazy workload and culture of exhaustion is that in most cases, it does eventually force us to learn how to take care of ourselves. The downside is that it teaches us that by showing us the consequences of not taking care of ourselves, and that works out better for some people than others. When we work ourselves into the ground it brings up a whole host of issues and can dredge up problems that we thought we had dealt with, and I think the industry as a whole would be happier, healthier, and probably more productive if the culture changed to better take care of people.
This article begs the question where does change come from. I see and experience this level of exhaustion in students even at the highschool level but I also see change, from my high school deciding to mandate a few days off after each show to the wellness advocates promoting good health and taking time for yourself. Though change is slow these steps are making a difference. I can see from the article, the industry as a whole may not be seeing that well needed change, but I’m super encouraged by this article. At schools change starts from people being vocal that they are not okay with this, and here this guy is taking that first step. Personally I hope that we as a generation can be that much needed change because of how much we experience this, but also then sit down and talk about it and how we can do better.
As a lot of people have said, this is something we all can relate to. The stress culture in the performing arts is something I have always been accustomed to since I was in 4th grade because I saw it all around me. It happens everywhere, and like Lenora said, CMU Drama isn’t an exception to this. The competition of who worked the most hours and is the most tired from a project, show, or event, is ridiculous. It promotes the utmost of unhealthy environments artists can be in. At a school like CMU, it so easy to fall into the “I have to be working 100% of the time” because that is all you see around you. I think it’s important to promote hard work, but your health shouldn’t be sacrificed for a degree. I hope we can start this change in high school, since that is where this awful mindset is bred.
Stress culture is an issue that gets brought up in college a lot, and the intense nature of both our current schedules and our future jobs definitely heightens that. I remember at the start of the year comparing my schedule to others’, comparing unit totals and class hardness as a sort of competition to prove who was doing more work. It’s easy to see how this translates to the professional world as well. An issue I’ve run into recently, which I think the article kind of addresses, is that the excess time we spend on work isn’t necessarily a choice or to be able to brag about it, but it’s because the work has to get done and we don’t have enough time to do it in a healthy way. This is definitely an attitude that should change, but I think the responsibility is on the theater companies to schedule their people in a realistic way to minimize burnout and maybe even allow people to *gasp* have a family.
This article addresses a very concept that, as college students, is a something we need to consciously make an effort towards: ensuring our mental health.
We live in a time and age where hard work is almost always used in a sense of working all the time without taking of our ourselves. It seems like working extra or later than others is the only way to prove that we worked hard. But this mindset presents a lot of problems.
For one, over working does not help anyone. The person over working is doing so at the cost of his or her mental health and the receiver of this work might get something as an end result which has not been utilized to its complete scope. Because working all the time does not necessarily ensure the best work.
I feel like that this article has tapped well in the sense where it is able to clearly articulate what happens in today's educational and work environment.
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