Burnout Is Our Life
Burnout has become our era’s disease. Anne Helen Peterson ascribed it to an entire generation, while pandemic burnout has generalized the pathology across most of the species.
An interesting development in our understanding of burnout, a development of which I have mixed feelings, is an attempt to rescope burnout to be a problem specifically tied to work. The WHO has deemed burnout an occupational phenomenon. The Atlantic published an article whose headline summarizes this analysis well, Only Your Boss Can Cure Your Burnout.
As someone critical of our modern relationship to work, as someone who cares for the worker’s plight, one might think that I would favor this new specification of burnout. I do agree that we should emphasize our relationship to work in our treatment of burnout, but I believe this analysis mistakes work for a necessary cause when it is merely sufficient.
I would argue that burnout is a psychological disease that arises when our duties and responsibilities outstrip our mental capacity. For many of us, duties and responsibilities stem primarily from work, but it is no one’s soul source thereof.
A few non-work examples of burnout highlights this: Many of my activist friends talk about being burnt out on activism. Activism is not their job; there is no regional manager of antifa that could send them a formal warning if they don’t milkshake so many congressmen. But, an activist’s desire for change generates a number of duties such as remaining up-to-date on politics, posting GoFundMes for the downtrodden, organizing and then attending protests, calling politicians. Keeping up with these duties can cause burnout. These duties are, at some level, self-imposed, as all activism comes out of love rather than need for a salary. But activism as a calling requires duties; these duties can still produce burnout. The Atlantic’s article provides a prime example in line with the travails of activist burnout: psychoanalyst Herbert J. Freudenberger coined the term “burnout syndrome” to describe how he felt working at a free clinic that he had founded to assist poor workers. It was his innate love of his fellow man that instilled within him a duty to provide free care to the poor. An activist feels a duty to volunteer, and Freudenberger felt this same duty. This should dispel the idea that burnout is related solely to occupation, when it just as well relates to vocation and obligation. A final example is parenting. Parents do not make a salary, but the ever compounding duties of enriching a child’s life can outstrip one’s mental capacity. There is a website dedicated to parental burnout that includes multiple scientific journal entries and self-help guides on the topic.
Understanding burnout as a product of duties rather than work also helps us understand pandemic burnout. In this last year, we have all had panoply new responsibilities thrust upon us. We need to mask. We need to remain six feet apart at all times. We need to learn how to work from home. Parents now face the logistical challenge of homeschooling their children.
Yes, for many, work provides the lions share of our duties. But our family, our social circles, crises, our bodily needs, all of these generate responsibilities.
My push back against redefining burnout as a workplace phenomenon is not merely that I hold truth at high esteem. No one spills ink out of desire for truth; they spill ink for desire of action. Here are a few negative consequences of this redefinition.
It sets too high a bar for the possible outcomes of labor reform: If we deem work the sole cause of burnout, then any union or labor activism that cannot cure all burnout will be deemed a failure. Since burnout comes from multiple sources, this sets workplace activism up to fail. Even if we secure a socialist utopia, duties will still exist: kids will still need rearing, friendships will still need attention. While such a utopia could ameliorate many duties by providing excellent childcare, more leisure hours to pursue friendships, and less workplace stress, it is folly to say reform could cure all of them. To promise what we could not deliver is irresponsible.
It mistakes critique of workplace culture for critique of capitalism: Critique of workplaces and critiques of capitalism are not, as one may expect, synonymous. The comic strip Dilbert, for example, is an excellent satire of what office life feels like, but its creator is a staunch Trump supporter and capitalist. Aggretsuko, a popular anime, works similarly: the crushingness of work life is on full display, but the third season suggests the cure may be to hustle and to take on side jobs that one finds more fulfilling. Capitalism gives us our modern, bullshit jobs, which give us the majority of our duties, but capitalism also gives us other duties: the duty to identify our optimal tax write-off, the duty to find a subletter when we need to leave an apartment, the duty to work on our CV and apply to jobs, the duty to build a personal brand on LinkedIn, the duty to learn lucrative skills that might secure us our next contract, the duty to contest parking tickets. Only changing our society’s material reality and cultural values with remedy these. The desire of an individual boss or workplace to prevent burnout will never be enough.
It prevents us from solving individual burnout cases: While the causes of psychological problems are often sociological, disease is still a personal thing, and so are its solutions. An individual suffering from burnout needs to survey the duties in their life, and limiting their survey to the occupational will not always suffice. Focusing on material and cultural conditions is key to help solve burnout at a societal level, but individual mental illness is fickle, and a sociological turn that may disadvantage individual cases of burnout seems to me ill-conceived.
Certainly, I respect that this analysis moves the locus of our conversation on burnout from the personal to something more structural, that is, work. But work is but one product of a material reality where we must sell our labor to the wealthy. To end burnout, we must, and can, remedy other responsibilities thrust upon the poor and middle class.