What Is Burnout?

After my past week of illness, I pulled out my iPad this morning, curled up in a chair, and started catching up on blogs. After reading a WSJ story that made me want to do odd things with my iPhone (but that's another story), I saw Preventing Anime Burn-Out on Ogiue Maniax. Much as I love that blog, the article left me disappointed, as it used 8 long paragraphs and 788 words to say "watch different anime." Let's go a little deeper, shall we?

We all recognize burnout: feeling fed up with a genre or medium. On one extreme, you merely lack the passion you once had; on another, it's like you can't even look at the genre any more.

A useful parallel is writer's block. I've found two kinds of writer's block: Existential Cramps and Laziness. The first is a genuine physiological inability to write: you sit down at a keyboard, your fingers lock, and mind completely blanks. It's actually fairly rare. The second, more common writer's block is the kind we'd often get in school when a paper's due, you haven't done any research, and you sit down to "bang something out." Nothing flows, because you're unprepared and exhausted. You can write gibberish or bad stuff, but nothing good.

Similarly, there are two kinds of burnout, which I'll call Full Burnout and Boredom. In the latter, which I think is being addressed in the Ogiue Maniax post above, you just don't care about the anime you're currently watching. In that case, sure, watch VOTOMS or Perfect Blue instead.

If you're suffering from Full Burnout, on the other hand, you're completely unable to even look at anime. You're sick of the clichés, the stereotypes, and even the art style.

There are several possible causes of Full Burnout:

It could be that you've legitimately exhausted your interest in the medium. We all have interests that come and go; we've all had hobbies that lasted for a few weeks or months or years, then faded away.

There's nothing wrong with being an otaku temporarily. A good friend of mine did this; he went from hardcore anime fan to hardcore movie fan.

It could also be that you need time to process. Our minds need some time to fully absorb ideas, beyond the time spend experiencing them for the first time. We can easily gorge on anime, then find ourselves nauseous.

In that case, my prescription is: Walk away from anime. That Saturday you would have spent watching anime? Take a book to a nearby park. Try meditation. Start working on a novel. Heck, even try some other aspect of fandom: fanfic, AMV creation, role-playing, etc.

We get so wrapped up in Being An Otaku that we forget we're more than otaku.