【外刊英语精读】“过劳假”能拯救打工人吗 | burnout breaks

Burnout breaks: is extra holiday time the answer for tired, traumatised workers?“过劳假”：额外假期能拯救疲累不堪的打工人吗？All employees at dating app Bumble are being given a paid week off work at the same time – and other companies are following suit交友软件Bumble公司要求其所有员工同时带薪休假一周，其他公司也纷纷效仿The dating app Bumble has given all its staff a paid week off in its battle against burnout.交友软件Bumble要求其所有员工同时带薪休假一周，以对抗过度疲劳。According to Rahaf Harfoush, a digital anthropologist based in Paris, and the author of Hustle and Float, this is really the only way to do it.位于巴黎的数字人类学家，《未来、工作、你？》一书的作者拉哈夫·哈福什表示，上述做法的确是唯一的出路。“A couple of years ago, the thing was unlimited paid vacation. It was huge in the UK corporate wellness market, until it was discovered that a lot of people do not take their vacation days, and when they do, they’re still connected to the office by email.“几年前，无限期的带薪休假比较流行，该做法在英国企业健康市场中比较流行，而且后来发现很多人不会主动休假，即使是休假也通过电邮的方式工作。The only way that we can get a decent break is when we’re forced into it: when the company says: ‘Guess what, everything’s shutting down, nobody’s allowed to work.’”大家唯一能好好休息的方式就是被强迫休假，也就是说，公司宣布：‘公司暂停营业，大家都不准工作’。”But what exactly is burnout, and are businesses right to be worried? The psychotherapist Hilda Burke says it isn’t recognised as a condition but reels off the symptoms that she associates with overwork: “Extreme exhaustion, insomnia, crippling self-doubt, extreme despondency and feeling ‘what’s the point?’”但是到底什么是“过劳”，公司有必要担心吗？心理治疗师希尔达·伯克表示“过劳”并不被认为是一种疾病，但是她却脱口而出一些与之相关的症状：“极度疲惫、失眠、病态自我怀疑、过度消沉以及感觉毫无意义。”At work, that is often the giveaway for colleagues: that you’re finding it uncharacteristically hard to make decisions, as well as displaying confusion and irritability.工作中，你的“过劳”症状常常在同事面前出卖你：一反常态得难以做决定，时常困惑而且易怒。Harfoush is pretty clear on what causes it: “Chronic overwork; being consistently sleep-deprived and hyper-stressed over a period of weeks or months.” Rebecca Seal, a writer , after suffering burnout herself, adds something else to the mix: precariousness.哈福什明确表示了背后的原因：“长期的超负荷工作、长期睡眠不足以及长达数周或者数月的精神紧绷。” 作家丽贝卡·希尔在经历了过劳之后，又补充了一个：“不稳定感”。The experience is on a spectrum – some people describe long periods of being basically incapacitated, unable to see a way back to functioning normally, and Harfoush even lost her hair through stress – but to Seal, “the most overwhelming feeling was loneliness, a really profound sense that I had let work take over everything in my life.”这种该症状有强有弱，有人感觉到长期的无力感，无法回归正常状态，哈福什甚至由于压力过大而脱发，但是对希尔来说“最可怕的感觉是孤独感，那种让工作占据了生活中一切的根深蒂固的感觉。”Allied to that precariousness, of course, is what drives so many of us to overwork in the first place: the sense that our worth comes from our work, the “productivity propaganda cult”, Harfoush calls it.与上述“不稳定感”相伴随的，就是一开始驱使我们很多人过度工作的因素，也就是对“价值源自工作”的认同，以及“效率至上”的宣传，哈福什认为。She also talks about the “commodification of wellness”, so we think we can buy our way out of stress with a massage or a holiday, but “there’s so much that pushes us in the direction of being burnt out, a massage isn’t going to cut it”.她也谈到了“健康的商业化”，我们认为自己可以通过花钱按摩或者度假来摆脱压力，但是“让我们过劳的因素太多了，一次按摩是治标不治本的。”前往小宇宙评论区与主播互动