Burnout in the UK
Earlier this week, I got into a discussion on Slack about volunteering in the UK. A recent report by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) suggests a sharp decline in volunteering activities over recent years, with the numbers of people raising money, running activities and campaigning on behalf of charities all dropping by about 50% since 2018. That’s a huge change. And, of course, there’s one very obvious culprit at which to point the finger.
Analysis by the Guardian newspaper certainly blames the COVID-19 pandemic for the drop, quoting the CEO of NCVO as saying, “People who were lifelong volunteers broke their habit during the pandemic and haven’t yet got back to it. Millions more who would have committed to longer-term volunteering didn’t have the chance.”
While I don’t deny that COVID is at the root of this change, I don’t think “habit-breaking” is really the mechanism at play.
Here in the UK, life is ostensibly back to normal after the pandemic. COVID-related restrictions on everyday life have long since been lifted. Kids are back in the classroom, and workers are doing their best to resist being sucked back into the office. Pubs and restaurants are trying hard to rebuild. But everything feels rather fragile. Like it’s being held together with sticky tape.
It’s not just the eye-watering cost of living (annual inflation in food prices 19.2%; gas prices up 129.4% and electricity prices up 66.7% in the year to March 2023), or the fact that large swathes of public sector workers have been taking part in disruptive strike action (including nurses, junior doctors, ambulance workers, teachers, university staff, civil servants and rail workers). For a long time, it has felt as though the next crisis is only just around the corner (65-hour waits for an ambulance? Fresh food shortages? The mould epidemic? The social care crisis?). Add to that the ongoing war in Ukraine, which frequently fills the news, and growing unease over AI potentially automating away many jobs over the next few years, and you can perhaps see why Britain’s volunteers might be a little distracted right now.
And all of this has come straight after a pandemic that was – for many – a deeply traumatic experience that left both physical and mental scars. Since the start of the pandemic, there have been ~225,000 deaths with COVID-19 (as of 7th May 2023). During lockdown, rates of depression among adults almost doubled from their pre-pandemic levels, and an additional 4.5 million people became unpaid carers for the first time (myself included). As of March 2023, an estimated 1.9 million people in the UK were still living with long COVID. Humans are not machines. We don’t just take a week off and bounce back to normal from this kind of effort.
Life in the UK is tough right now, and every time we come up for air it seems as though something else pushes us back under the surface. Many are running on empty, their reserves long spent. And somehow, the heroic efforts we mustered to get through the pandemic have now become “baked-in”; the minimum required to keep the show on the road. But still the extra demands keep coming. Just ask NHS staff, many of whom seem to be on their knees right now.
I don’t know where the UK is heading. It’s a scary time. All I can really do is to try to be as kind and patient as possible with people whose paths cross mine. We all desperately need to recharge.