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Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

So many comments are speaking about burnout as a result of lack of managing emotional investment in work. This blows my mind because I’ve never seen or heard of burnout manifesting this way in real life, not a single time.

Burnout happens to you and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive burns employees out not employees “letting themselves” become burned out.

Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression for not “managing their emotions.”

I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive behavior.

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There's more than one way to burn out. Some employees will push themselves to burn out. I know first hand.

Who is victim blaming? We talk about emotional investment because it’s something that is actually under your control to change, unlike your manager or “wider sociological issues”

Exactly. Trying to turn it around like the issue is due to the agency (hence blaming) the victim, when really it’s not down to that person’s agency at all, rather something they are subjected to through no choice of their own.

Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should not be made to be about that or justified as such.

I am not blaming anyone, I don’t care whose fault it is. I am focusing on what an individual can do because focusing on anything else is a waste of time.

Focusing on what the individual can do _is_ a tacit form of victim-blaming in many situations. For many types of victims, drawing attention to remedies that rely on that person’s agency, rather than wider remedies predicated on greater social responsibility to fix the underlying problem, is a tacit way of putting the onus on a class of victims to “deal with it” and to view whatever type of abuse was inflicted on them as if it is their own private burden, instead of being _everyone’s_ burden to fix.

In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do” tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”).

You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.

If “drawing attention to remedies that rely on [one’s] agency” is victim blaming, then I’m all for it.

Since when was societal change a waste of time? Was the civil rights movement a waste of time? Fighting for worker's rights? Independence?

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