Burnout Nation: On Mothering, Meaning, and the American Malaise.

Burnout Nation: On Mothering, Meaning, and the American Malaise

I’ve been pushing off my new least-favorite tasks: the relentless dinner planning, which is squeezed n between editing my ethnography and becoming a non-certified project manager for summer logistics. Late May to August in America is a fever dream of camps, childcare gaps, and $16 popsicles. We call it summer. There is no break.

In the early morning, when the house is quiet and the coffee is fresh and hot, I open the news. I tell myself I won’t read, but sometimes curiosity wins. One click, and the rage bubbles up. Sometimes the tears. Other days, it’s a flatline—my nervous system muting itself for survival. I scroll just enough to take the pulse. But the truth of how some of my fellow Americans are behaving in this time and place? It’s too much.

Gone are the days I read the newspaper cover to cover before work, nodding along in the early light. These days, minimal comprehension has to be enough. I don't need every detail—I need emotional fluency. I need to know what people are feeling so I can be in the room and offer the right resistance. Not performative outrage. Not easy agreement. Just presence. A kind of allyship that says: I see where this is coming from, and I’m not going to let it pass unchecked.

People are scared, and when people are scared, they become unreasonable. This isn’t news—it’s the cost of living in society.

We’re All in This Liminal Space (Some of Us Just Have Chore Charts)

There’s a term in anthropology: liminality. Victor Turner used it to describe the in-between stage of ritual—after the old identity has been stripped away, before the new one has solidified. It’s disorienting. It's uncomfortable. It's powerful. It’s where change begins and transition takes shape.

That’s where America is right now. Suspended. The rituals that once defined us—civic engagement, shared facts, neighborly discourse—they don’t work the same anymore. We're all stuck in this strange cultural puberty, shedding skin, yelling across aisles, unsure of who we’re becoming.

This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a human one.

Tiny Rituals, Massive Weight

There’s something profoundly anthropological about routine—about making meaning through the repetition of small acts. Even now, in all this disarray, I notice how we still do the things. We meal prep. We walk dogs. We take screenshots of tweets that say what we can’t yet name.

These aren’t trivial. They’re rituals of persistence. Cultural continuity in micro-form. They remind us we’re still here, still trying, still tethered to something resembling life.

Grief Is the New American Pastime

We tend to think of grief as belonging to the aftermath of death. But life teaches us grief has many forms. What we're witnessing is a kind of ambient, sustained grief: for broken systems, lost illusions, civic unraveling. It's not always loud, but it’s ever-present.

Talk to someone on the left, and you'll hear grief over rights lost, violence ignored, futures abandoned. Talk to someone on the right, and you'll hear grief over perceived freedoms, eroded values, institutions they no longer trust. The details differ, but the emotion? It's often the same.

Grief may be the most bipartisan thing we have left.

The Productivity Paradox Comes Home

In my research, I’ve been investigating the productivity paradox in healthcare—how systems that aim to optimize care often fail to measure the most meaningful work: emotional labor, decision-making, and relational nuance.

But this paradox isn’t confined to hospitals. It’s everywhere. It’s in the invisible work of caregiving, the planning of summer logistics, the psychological acrobatics of staying informed enough but not too much. It's the slow burn of being perpetually useful in a culture that treats wellness as indulgence and emotional presence as optional.

We’re optimizing ourselves into the ground.

What Now? Just This.

I don’t have a prescription. I’m not writing from the mountaintop. I’m writing from the eye of the storm, where the coffee is now lukewarm and the inbox is full of forms for soccer camp and insurance renewals and requests for “just a few hours” more of my time.

So here’s what I can offer: a kind of solidarity. A reminder that you’re not the only one feeling this mix of rage, fatigue, and hope all folded into one another like bad laundry.

And maybe this: even in this cultural molting phase, there is comfort in remembering that humans—despite our mess, despite the fear—have a deeply annoying habit of finding our way to better judgment. Eventually.

We improvise new norms. We resist old scripts. We rebuild worlds from scraps.

And that? That’s where the hope lives.

Shine brightly and ask lots of questions until we meet again.

-Antho Pop

AnthroPop is where cultural commentary meets emotional anthropology. If this piece resonates, share it. If it stings, sit with it. And if you have a meme about late-stage capitalism or summer break schedules, please send it my way. 🌀Nicole