To be honest, after a month at Renée Materials, I am utterly exhausted.
I’ve tried to find joy in the work: collaborating with Yijia, a fellow DPS student, makes the days less lonely, and I’ve always found a sense of achievement in organizing messy fabrics into neat sets. But these small sparks are being drowned out by a massive wave of burnout.
The offline work is high-intensity manual labor. I spend all day in the Hub standing and sorting heavy yarn, or dragging massive parcels to the post office.
Beyond the physical strain, the repetitive tasks are numbing my brain. Whether it’s sitting outdoors for three hours cutting 200 small cards or spending seven hours adding image captions to the website, these tasks feel like they are draining my creativity dry.
We are asked to travel to distant events with no travel reimbursement. We have no breaks except for a one-hour lunch; as soon as one task ends, another is assigned immediately, as if we aren’t allowed to breathe. This is an unpaid internship. We are volunteers here because we identify with the mission of environmental protection, yet the management treats our labor as an entitlement and still implies we aren’t working hard enough.
I can’t help but compare this to my time at UCCA in Beijing. There, I worked eight hours a day, five days a week. was full of energy. This was because the supervisor there would actively notice my hard work; they would buy me coffee or take me out for meals. That heartfelt gratitude made me feel like a “human being” rather than an “asset.” At UCCA, I could rest or relax at any time, but it was precisely because of that trust that I became more proactive in wanting to take on more work.
I’ve realized that management is like a “Non-Newtonian Fluid”: the harder you squeeze and the more you micro-manage, the more resistance and stress you create. It makes the employees rigid and passive. But when you lead with trust and flexibility, the team flows smoothly and takes more initiative.
This experience, though exhausting, has taught me where to draw the line. I refuse to let my future career be defined by this kind of exploitation. True sustainability must start with respecting the human being.
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