I have a confession to make.
On 11 December, you should have been able to pick up a copy of Observant 14, the last edition before the Christmas holidays. That wasn’t possible. We ended the year with number 13, on 4 December. You probably hadn’t even noticed.
At some point in November, we decided, somewhat impulsively, to only publish articles online for most of December. Anyone in the (newspaper) journalism industry knows that deadlines and ‘stress’ are just part of the job. In November, the pause button for Observant – available to us on 18 December, as that’s when our Christmas break began – seemed very far away. We were counting down, three papers, two papers... Surely that couldn’t be right? An exhausted team spending half their break feeling unwell (because as we all know, exhaustion only truly ‘manifests’ itself when you’re not at work)?
Just skipping that one physical newspaper would alleviate a lot of pressure. It’s not a decision we made out of convenience, we weren’t simply resting on our laurels. Rather, we worked ahead, writing articles for January, and we still needed articles to maintain an interesting website and for our weekly newsletter. President of the university Rianne Letschert was appointed to an important role in forming the government, and the MUMC published a scathing report on social safety in the workplace. News we obviously wanted to share.
We also realised that it’s alright to only include eight or nine articles in the newsletter, instead of ten.
For many organisations, always being available is a general, albeit unwritten, rule, diaries are chock-full of appointments, and performance is always on display and open to comparison. On the one hand, a top level performance is expected, while in the meantime, systems that consistently exhaust people are maintained, Joost van der Weide, Professor of social innovation and the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, wrote in an editorial in de Volkskrant on 22 December. I was fascinated by his words. Coincidentally, we are working on an interview – initiated by the Maastricht Young Academy – with two young researchers about their work-life balance, workload, and how they manage to keep their lives running smoothly. Or take this week’s article about students struggling with mental health issues such as stress, anxiety and fear of failure. People who don’t know how to keep their heads afloat in a world that is unrelenting in its forward march.
Although Van der Weide said it’s good for people to learn to cope with stress, there is no point if you don’t tackle the causes of that stress, he wrote. So that is what we did: tackled one cause of stress. I can’t promise it won’t happen again in 2026.
On behalf of the Observant team, I wish you a happy, healthy new year!
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office