activist burnout

People who study or work in international development studies often tend to start from an action-oriented, activist and advocacy perspective. Yet later, they can appear to either become more bureaucratized, or disappear from the scene altogether. There are, in my view, 3 simple rules to trying to sustain an activist life:

1. keep your goals small and feasible, not large and impossible;
2. make sure that you have a life outside of your activism;
3. understand that while your choices matter, being an activist is not the same as denying yourself some of the elementary pleasures that this short life has to offer.

Keep activism grounded in the real world, and one's own real world needs, is how to avoid burnout.