Halfway through writing her new book Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley had what her mum called a “midlife crisis”. “I realised that the stuff that I was doing, and the way that I was making sense of what I was doing, was having a really negative impact on me and my mental health,” she says. “Just everything ... feeling constantly on edge, not really being able to engage with people in honest and open ways. There was a point at which I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’”
Twenty-nine may sound a bit young to qualify for burnout, but as a radical socialist economist who has spent the last several years fighting her corner on TV and social media, Blakeley has been at the centre of a brutally intense new era of political engagement. She took herself off to Central America for nine months to recover and detach from the public sphere.
