Why Burnout Is A Broken Promise

It is telling how fed up people are with the conditions of work — that people are now rejecting this worldview, and doing so to such a degree that it’s become a movement. If the movement has a motto, it would be the word that’s been on everyone’s lips over the past 18 months: burnout.

According to an Insider survey of over 1,000 American workers, 61% said they were currently "at least somewhat burned out." An Indeed report from March found that the majority of respondents said their burnout had worsened during the pandemic, with 52% overall saying they were currently burned out.

Maybe a telltale sign of burnout is when you start thinking in such extreme terms, ruminating on life and death as it pertains to your work satisfaction.

If you’re wondering what would happen if you died tomorrow, and weighing how deeply your workplace would feel the loss of you, you’re not just tired. You're preoccupied with existential questions related to meaning and purpose. And they’re all related to your job.

There’s a lot of debate about what exactly burnout is: A medical condition? A philosophical matter? Is it just the cost of doing business? Of being alive? According to the World Health Organization, it's an "occupational phenomenon." But that seems to be an anodyne way of saying that the exact nature, cause, and solution to burnout aren't entirely clear.

For some, burnout is just another way to say their stamina has been used up, and they need a vacation. But for others, "burnout" is a term that encompasses a kind of melancholic meditation on the unrelentingness of work.

The reason medical students seem to suffer higher rates of burnout compared to other college students isn't because the work is intrinsically more difficult, but rather because the way they were being taught was often soul-crushing.

It was an educational environment that did little to nurture compassion — ironic, considering these were training to care about the wellbeing of others. Burnout is not, then, necessarily caused by stress and overwork, but the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice.

Thinking of burnout as a form of betrayal is illuminating, because it frames burnout not as a solitary experience — an agony you battle alone, something that's your sole responsibility to heal from — but a relationship in conflict.

For those medical students, the conflict comes from being let down by their professors and mentors, and their subsequent interrogation of whether this path would allow them to be the kind, empathetic doctors they wanted to be. Across sectors, the core problem remains the same: Workers feel betrayed by their employers.

In the depths of disillusionment and burnout, there can also sometimes be a strange sense of freedom in recognizing that work might never provide the purpose and emotional sustenance you once believed it would.

And that's okay. You'll survive. Collectively, we will simply need to come up with a new way of thinking about work. It turns out, work — like any relationship — isn't the be-all, end-all we’d thought it could be.

In order to survive without a passion for labour, work itself has to be less necessary for survival. A world where work doesn't take centre stage, where you don't mention your job within minutes of meeting someone new, seems impossible.

The concept of a post-work world has existed for a while now, but the idea that people should care less about their jobs, let alone work less, often causes deep moral outrage. This isn't all that surprising, considering how much of our identities are defined by work. It's as if, without work anchoring all of our lives, society itself will disintegrate.

However much it feels like "everyone" is quitting their jobs, we should be wary of thinking that all, or even most people have the ability to do so. It's also unclear yet that we're seeing a major shift in power between workers and employers.

The Great Resignation has likely been bolstered by stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. But most of us need jobs as a matter of financial necessity, and quitting on the spot remains only a pleasant fantasy for many, rather than a plausible reality.

The Great Resignation could be an inspiration toward implementing a long-term bulwark against burnout. Instead of encouraging vacations, discrete periods of rest, it’s time to enact labour protections that guarantee higher wages, that end at-will employment, that boost unemployment benefits permanently, that disentangle healthcare access from employment status.

Until that happens, burnout will continue to be endemic in our society, and individuals will continue to find their own solutions for how to cope.