The problem with burnout discourse
Long time readers of this newsletter will remember my obsession with the monks of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, initially sparked by this article by Jonathan Malesic. In the before times, he visited their monastery in New Mexico and endeavored to understand the monks’ relationship to work in hopes of repairing his own dysfunctional one. Work at the monastery is tightly prescribed: The monks must do it daily, but for a limited amount of time. They always stop after three hours, and if their tasks are unfinished or they’re on a roll, they “get over it” and stop anyway. If work begins to interfere with or take over their spiritual lives, they stop doing that kind of work. Work is not their first priority or primary source of meaning, but it’s not empty or without value either.
In 2019, when the article was published, this seemed like an enchanting alternative to our culture of overwork, albeit one that wasn’t particularly accessible to those of us who don’t live in monasteries. Starting in March 2020 and continuing right up until today, however, the monk’s approach to work began to feel like our only option for retaining even a scrap of our humanity. So I was thrilled that Malesic has now incorporated his desert monks visit into a book, called The End of Burnout.
I was obviously going to read this book no matter what, just for more monk content, but I’ll admit the presence of “burnout” in the title gave me a little pause. I don’t like how the term has become a catchall for all “our” (read: white collar, non-essential workers) problems with our jobs, a trend that has only intensified during the pandemic. Thankfully, Malesic hasn’t liked this either, and the book presents both a clear definition of what burnout is and isn’t and a cogent critique of its cultural overuse.
Malesic defines burnout “as the experience of being pulled between expectation and reality at work.” When what you think work should be (these days, the source of your identity) drifts farther and farther from what you actually do at your job (data entry, or teaching bored students, or surgery, or really anything that happens in our messy, imperfect world), it eventually results in the burnout triad: cynicism, exhaustion, and ineffectiveness.
Burnout is a slippery term even in the psychological literature, but it’s different than just being overworked. Colloquially, however, we’ve reduced “burnout” to mean only “exhaustion.” The problem with that, Malesic writes, is, “Exhaustion is not really a negative in America’s work culture…If you say you’re exhausted from work, then you are saying you are a good worker, upholding the norms of the American work ethic. In fact, you’re so devoted to work, you sacrifice yourself to it.” The exhausted worker, in 2022, is the ideal worker—and so claiming this oversimplified version of burnout does not threaten or question the current ideology of work, but merely reinforces your superior status within it. As Malesic writes, “We have been over-diagnosing ourselves with burnout as a means of self-praise for the entire history of burnout culture.” When he describes his own experience with burnout, it’s clear that it’s not something to brag about. It’s more akin to what previous generations might have called a nervous breakdown than something that could eventually get you promoted.
The widespread flattening of burnout into exhaustion—i.e., overwork and, implicitly, exploitation—also locates its causes primarily or even exclusively in our working conditions, not our ideology. The imperative then becomes to improve working conditions as a way of bringing our ideals about work within reach. If we weren’t so exploited and abused, the logic goes, we could safely make work the center of our lives and our identities.
🚨 Danger danger danger! 🚨 Making work our only source of meaning is psychically dangerous no matter how good our working conditions are. The noble and necessary goal of increasing worker power should be about dismantling the ideology of the ideal worker, not making it easier for each of us, personally, to uphold it. If we want to cure our society-wide burnout, we need to do more than shorten hours or increase job security (though those goals are important for reasons that go beyond burnout). We need to change our entire framework for understanding work’s place in our lives.
The monks offer one alternative framework, and Malesic explores several others too. Many of them have their roots in religion, and particularly Catholicism and early Christianity; Malesic was a theology professor before burnout forced him to quit. YMMV on that, but I found his approach to be an interesting and effective way of decentering the values of industrialization by plugging into a philosophical tradition that extends back well before that. Burnout is, in essence, a crisis of meaning, which makes it a spiritual problem as well as a societal one.
What attracts me to the monks isn’t that they are immune from burnout or the siren song of work (which is really the siren song of ego). It’s that they realize they will never be free of those things, and as such they must figure out how to manage them. They have 1,500 years of tradition to help them. It’s time the rest of us started catching up.
p.s. For a look at how the Monastery of Christ in the Desert spent the pandemic, here’s a very charming article about their isolation and reemergence. They got a guard donkey!