Spectacular burnout to radical rest
A Detroit activist’s perspective on working less, connecting more, and reimagining what comes after capitalism
Hello, bonjour, marhaba, kia ora, boozhoo! If you’re new here, I encourage you to check out my “About” page to learn more about this blog.
I met Melina in 2022 at a Prayer Walk for the Water in Detroit that was led by a group of Anishinaabe (Great Lakes indigenous) folks. That was the first time I heard of DSA and the beginning of mine and Melina’s social media acquaintance-ship.
Earlier this year Melina responded to an IG story I posted about exploring anti-work concepts and talking to other people with this lifestyle. I’m so glad we were able to catch up as our values align on this type line up so well. Melina’s work-life-activism balance is something I really aspire to have in my life so it’s great to have someone to look to as a model for that.
Katy: Yeah, so can you start with just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your story? How you spend your time, that kind of stuff.
Melina: I’m Melina, I use she/her pronouns and I’m 37 years old. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and I’ve been in Detroit since October 2018. I work as a program coordinator at the Detroit Waldorf School. I was working 30 hours a week, but I recently got that down to 23 hours a week.
I have a good amount of free time. I do a lot of volunteer work, mostly with the Democratic Socialist of America, and lately I've been working on my house. My boyfriend and I bought a house and it needs a lot of work, so a lot of my free time has been going to that. I also spend a lot of my time resting. I have multiple chronic illnesses, so I do take a lot of rest.
Katy: How did working part-time come about? What has your journey to that been like?
Melina: Yeah, so I have experienced, I call it “spectacular burnout”. Just completely.
That was 2016, 2017, it really started in 2015 actually.
I was working for a nonprofit. I was working a lot, like 60 hours a week. On top of that, I started to become really active with the Democratic Socialists of America. I've been an activist for my whole life, but it was Bernie's first run. And then with Trump's first presidency, there was all the organizing that happened with that. All the political organizing plus working a bunch, it made me really sick.
I ended up getting a really severe case of bronchitis. I ripped a rib ligament from coughing a bunch and that took me out. That led down this like 2017, I just spent like the whole year really sick. To the point where I was on bed rest– I could barely get out of bed. And then, I ended up having, essentially, a mental breakdown. I was put on medication and I had an adverse reaction, making it even worse. It was really, really bad.
After that, I took a step back from everything, from life. I asked myself, “well what made me that sick to begin with?”. It was working too much and overdoing it on the organizing. I didn't really work in 2017 at all, and most of 2018, and then after that I was like, “Oh, I don't have to work all the time.” I'm going to make it a point to only get part-time jobs, do gigs, you know, take like little jobs here and there. Since 2018 I've been intentionally working part-time jobs, and working as little as possible.
I have had my current job since 2019, but it has always been part-time. I actually applied for the job because it was a super part-time position.
Katy: Was it hard to make that decision to work less?
Melina: Yes, I was in my early 30s and there was part of me that was like, “oh, you know, like, you're young, you should be able to work a full-time job”. I was like, “no, we're supposed to… you know, this is how much we're supposed to work.”
I recognize it now as a little bit of internalized ableism. I did come away from that experience with all these chronic illnesses. Until this day, I'm still recovering. I don't know if I'll never recover from the physical stuff.
Thinking through how sick I had gotten and feeling like, you know, I quit my nonprofit job… that helped me think rationally. I got a pretty good severance package, but I also lost my health insurance. So yeah, there was a little bit of internal back and forth. But I've got it to a point where, now that I'm on this side of it, I do feel like, “okay, I'm making it happen”, right? I feel pretty good about it.
You know how people talk about work-life balance? I like to say I have a good life-work balance. Where my job is not my life, like at all. I do quite enjoy that. Like I enjoy leaving my place of work and just living my life.
Katy: Can you describe some of the other benefits you've experienced from working less?
Melina: I feel like I have pretty strong community ties. I think it's because working less has enabled me to build my communities more. If I was working 40 or more hours a week, I don't think I would have the strong communities I have now.
I've been able to pick up more skills. I get more time to learn things that we don't learn in school. I learn from other people too. I know more about gardening now. Gardening for me is like a sustenance thing. And I've gotten to that point where I feel pretty skilled at plant medicine.
I've been able to travel a little bit more. I get to spend more time in nature, like by the water or whatever. I don’t have to wait for the weekend to do that, I just do that before work.
I feel like I'm a more whole human, I guess. Like I'm more well-rounded in my knowledge and skill sets because I've had the time to build that up, now that I don't work all the time.
Katy: Yeah, I like that. When we’re working full time we're given like, “this is your one role and you don't get to do anything else.” You have to depend on everyone else to do those things. It's nice to depend on others, but also they don't even give us time to build those connections with others!
Melina: It just becomes like a money exchange, right? If you work 40 hours a week, then maybe you can pay other people to do the things. But when you are able to build a community of skilled people, it becomes more of … you know, “I'll watch your baby if you cut my hair”. There's been some fairly random trades I’ve done. I'll watch people's kids in exchange for whatever.
Katy: I actually need a haircut, so if you have connections…
Melina: I actually just did this last one myself, because I didn't want to wait. I don't have a bunch of extra money, and the last time I had my haircut it was like $160. So I just went and bought hair cutting scissors, and one of those razor things, and it cost me like 20 bucks.
Going back to like added benefits, I think a benefit has been, you're able to work more on yourself as a person. I've built up a confidence in my abilities.
Seven, eight years ago, I wouldn't have had the confidence to ask my supervisor – I had to ask a whole committee of people – for less time at work. I would have been afraid to even propose that I work less hours. I would have been scared to just get fired.
I got to this point where I'm like, and I think about this a lot is, you know, I've heard this saying, it's like, you know, “closed mouths don't get fed.”
It's like deep programming, you have to get over this idea of what we're supposed to be doing with our time. A capitalistic society wants us working all the time. And once you get over that, you start to get over things being impossible.
It’s like cutting your own hair. It does take a certain amount of confidence. There was a chance I could have fucked it up, but I've taken a lot of chances in the last seven years or however long it's been. I have fucked up, I make mistakes, everybody does, but I'm still here and I've learned a lot.
Katy: How would the world be different if more people could work less?
Melina: I like to discuss this a lot. I think people would be less cranky. I think it's because people work too much. I know way too many people who are working more than 40 hours a week. I think that that has become, not the norm anymore, a lot of people are working way more than that. And then, commuting is a whole other thing, right? A lot of people are spending way too much time commuting.
I feel like, you could kind of tell, people have had their souls crushed. I think that if people would recognize that it's because they’re working too much, that wouldn't be such a thing. So many people have to deprogram from that mentality of, like, “I have to work all the time”.
If people were working less, they would be able to enjoy spending time with their families and friends more. They would be able to spend time with themselves, build themselves up as humans, learn skills. And just rest, too. I love to rest. I love to lay down.
It makes me pretty sad how people overwork. One of the children I work with, we were waiting for their mom to pick them up, and then they were like, “I wish my mom worked less because I want to hang out with her more.” And I was like, dude, that's so sad. Parents are working as much as they do because they want to provide a better life for their kids, but, if you asked their kids, a better life for them would be spending more time with their parents.
Katy: Can you talk about some challenges that you've faced in transitioning to this lifestyle and what advice you would give to someone that's interested in doing it themselves?
Melina: Definitely, like, on a practical level, there’s the financial part of it. I get the question of how do you afford to live?
It's collective housing, number one. I don't need all this space to myself, and I'm okay living with other people. It's way cheaper. I participate in a lot of clothing swaps. I don't buy new clothes. My clothes are all gifts or clothing swaps. I organize pot-lucks quite a bit. It's all that community building stuff, that at the same time also enables us to take care of each other. Because I have spent so much time getting away from this mainstream mentality, I know how to have fun for free. I'm okay not consuming all the time.
I don't really consider myself anti-capitalist. I consider myself a post-capitalist. Or, if you want to get really nuanced, I consider myself a collectivist. Which is to mean, we can all take care of each other. We all have skills, we all are able to offer something.
I don't really have savings, but I do have multiple communities that care about me a lot. There have been times when I reach out and I post online. For example, when my cat got really sick. I started up a GoFundMe, and I had it funded within an afternoon. That's because I've had the time to build up relationships with people who will help me out when those times happen.
That's a piece of advice that I would give – you can't be afraid to ask for help. If you're not going to work all the time and not have typical ways of making money, you have to be okay asking for help. Asking for help could look like going to the community fridge and grabbing something. You have to be figuring out other ways, like trading a skill you have with somebody else who has a skill that you need in that moment.
Another challenge is building structure outside of work. Once I'm at work, I have a pretty strict schedule. If I run a few minutes late at work, it kind of throws everything else off. Outside of work, I'll get caught up with something. If nobody is expecting me to be somewhere, if I'm not expected at a job or an organizing meeting, I've definitely found myself doom-scrolling. I've had to build more structure in my life. I have a lot of alarms on my phone to kind of remind me to move on to the next thing.
Katy: I've been trying to figure that out myself. I'm like, “there's too much structure, and then… there's no structure!” What do I need? Having structure makes me anxious, and not having structure makes me anxious!
Melina: There has to be a balance, right. I keep this sticker on my notebook, and it's “you are worth so much more than your productivity”. That's something I have to remind myself a lot.
Recently, I was packing sentimental things and I found myself spending a lot of time with each thing. A part of me was, like, “oh, you're taking too long to pack, because you're spending all this time looking at every single picture.” And then, me to me, I'm like, “well, what else am I supposed to be doing with my time?” Sure, I can pack faster and just get it with. But it's nice to also take that time to reminisce.
A lot of the times CEOs talk about somebody being productive, it's about producing more profit. It's what the capitalist mindset is. When you don't have a regular job, and you're not producing profit for anybody, I then have to think through, “What does it mean to be productive?”.
If I spend a morning putting seeds in soil… is it productive? If I read an article about a political thing… it's different forms of being productive. And then at the same time if I just lay down for an hour, because I have the free-time, that's enabling me to rest up so that I can be there for my communities, be there for my partner, be there for my family.
Katy: Nice. Yeah, I'm very much trying to fight the productivity mindset, or maybe it's like you're saying, redefining what is productivity.
Melina: This whole thing is very much about redefining our worth as humans. It is something mainstream society kind of only sees where we're supposed to work 40 plus hours a week and then, like, live for the weekend. For a lot of people, that's what your worth as a human is – how much can work. And, I mean, it's fucked up, right?
We're worth so much more than that, we're so much more than how much we could produce for another person.
Katy: I noticed you said you don't consider yourself anti-capitalist. I was wondering if you could explain that.
Melina: It's an idea that I've been thinking through a lot, because I want to be for something rather than against something. And so I’ve kind of come away from the idea of being an anti-capitalist. It feels really, like, to be anti-something you kind of have to be in this rage mentality, I guess?
And part of my burnout in 2017 was this, like, I was so full of rage. I was mad, I hated everything, and I hated everyone.
We are very much in late-stage capitalism. This is the natural goal of capitalism, to get to this point. Everybody is working way too much and it's all for the profit of, what is it? A few dozen billionaires, right? They are all racing towards being the first trillionaire. And the rest of us, we're just pawns in that game.
For me, it's about being a post capitalist. It's about, one, acknowledging and accepting that capitalism has failed. And two, asking, “what does the world after capitalism look like?”
It looks like less work. It looks like spending more time with your family. It looks like taking care of your community. It looks like growing our own food. It looks like not using a private automobile to get around. It’s being able to ride your bike places, being able to walk places.
I spent a lot of time being mad at capitalism, which felt a little bit abstract in a way. I needed something to look forward to. Because otherwise I’m going to burn out again. I've accepted that we're not going to fix capitalism. So what comes next? That's post capitalism. I like that a lot better.
Katy: I like that a lot. We can't necessarily prescribe a definite solution, but we can start working towards it and at least set some frameworks and structures for how we want it to happen democratically.
Melina: In some ways, I like to think that I'm setting an example. We don't really have a lot of regular, working class people doing this thing, right? This is kind of me, like, walking the talk, right?
When I talk about being a post-capitalist, and when I talk about deprogramming ourselves and all that stuff… I am an example of somebody who grew up in poverty.
I am a poor person – which has been another mental shift – being poor isn't anything to be ashamed of, right? It is what it is, and I'm fine with it.
I do think that we need more examples of people doing this, so that people can be less afraid to do this. And my hope is that people will start to recognize that there are other ways to do life.
This interview was conducted in January 2025. Since then, Melina had to resign from her job as her employer was unwilling to provide further accommodations to help her avoid burnout. Through the support of her partner, she has been able to focus more of her time on renovating her new home and organizing with Metro Detroit DSA. Regarding her next plans, she said, “I hope to someday serve my community with my own childcare collective but for now I'm focusing on my health, my home and doing my part to protect democracy and human rights”.