I agree though that for many people their situation could be improved by the assistance of a mental health professional. But that doesn't mean that their problems are all caused internally and aren't to some degree a product of their work environment.
This point also makes me wonder if habitual burnouts are poor at evaluating potential managers during the interview process and as a result end up burning out repeatedly.
If you need mental health treatment (that you otherwise wouldn't need) to do your job and not despair? There's a good chance there's something wrong with your job.
What I'd totally expect to find is that, even moreso than old people retiring and feeling a sense of meaninglessness, people who stop working while they're still in their prime working years will grow listless because we're meant to do more, we're meant to take on challenge, maybe even a sacrifice. That the same inner and outer factors that make us depressed at our jobs are actually just also making us depressed generally and reflect an inner pathology where we view ourselves as hopeless, inferior, lost or stuck.
But the info really isn't coming to me at a glance, I don't have time to really do that research, and I don't think I'd be any happier if I did. Unless someone else with the free time and scientific literacy to peruse to a week-old post comes by and contributes the data with a decisive percent chance to this discussion, you either trust my intuition that there's a substantial but hard-to-nail down effect where we're miserable on account of more than our jobs and an unspecified "many" could have all our needs met but still be miserable because you feel what I'm talking about too, or you have your own intuition about the nature of our sense of well-being and work and want to question it. Given a quick glance at your post history you seem like a well-intentioned firebrand of a libertarian who gets downvoted a lot, and I can respect you for that.
I 100% sincerely hope you and everyone else on here reading this has an absolutely fantastic day.
Quite the opposite for me. I was miserable in my first job. Not a single day where I wanted to go to work. After 4 years I quit and everyone told me that I need to change my attitude, and that all jobs are like this.
They. Were. Completely. Wrong.
I was very happy with my next job.
My 3rd job sucked (for different reasons). I wasn't anywhere near burnout, but my first two jobs taught me one thing: Life is too short to stay at a job that sucked. I moved on to the 4th job which ended up being awesome.
If you're miserable at your job, it may not be you - even if everyone around you thinks it is.
This XKCD is very relevant: