The New Neurasthenia: How burnout became the buzzword of the moment
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
Be extremely skeptical of this claim by the super-rich of 70-hour work weeks. I can't find it now but a while back there was a graphic going around by an exec who charted out how he spends his work time. A huge proportion consisted of things like going to the gym and getting haircuts--activities that us common rabble have to call "time off."
In reality, it's exactly the opposite. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151720 Page 16, Figure 4. Average hours worked by income group. The poorer you are the more hours you work.
The difference of hours worked may be due to factors relevant to countries, not to job done or individual differences.
I cannot deduce your conclusion from that graph.
And be even more extremely of people who lump in upper-middle-class white-collar wage earners with the "super rich". It's just as inane as lumping in people living on welfare checks and people who work a blue collar job on a union salary.
Given the cost of living nowadays in major US metro areas where those professions are concentrated, only a rarefied tiny fraction of people in those professions can make enough money to be richer than "comfortably upper-middle-class" anyway. Things of course are different in areas where houses cost $300k and not $1.3m, but they make comparatively less in those areas anyway.
Finally, lawyers, doctors, and (some) financiers do absolutely work 50-80+ hour weeks. Maybe not every week, but certainly more than a few weeks out of the year. And rarely do they have a "down" week. And not all of those hours are "billable". These people are paid not just for their expertise but their ability to grind through hours and hours of tedious and tiring knowledge work.
Perhaps they are overpaid in relation to people who work with their hands, but that is a completely separate discussion.
The point is that it's insulting and fallacious to claim that people in these careers do not work long hours, and therefore it's insulting and fallacious to conclude that susceptibility to burnout in these careers is exaggerated.
This feeling perfectly illustrates two of the core issues raised in the article: that overwork is valorized, and that our jobs should be our identity. If we lived in a world without those values, skepticism over claims of hours worked wouldn't be a cause for insult--and there would be no incentive to even make the claims in the first place.
People like to think that "work" is always doing things you dislike but it doesn't have to be.
Those that think it's not work, I challenge you to close a multiyear, multi-billion deal with Boeing over a few dinners, and then tell us how it was just a walk in the park.
You can do it.
If you're closing a high stakes multi-billion dollar deal with Boeing then you should count that as work, definitely.
The problem in my view is not how we categorize work vs non-work but how people homogenize different types of work to create unrealistic expectations of what work is and how much of it we should be doing.
The 1% who claim such long hours... I know some people who live to work, and have done so for years, but they are amply rewarded and respected. Their entire social life is entwined with what they do and what they do is WHO they are.
When I have burned out it is because I have poured so much effort into specific activities while those people around me did nothing, where the credit for my effort was not offered or, even worse, offered but not followed through, and where I expected a result that never eventuated.
Reward for effort offsets the stress gained. When one feels disrespected, when one feels like they are being worked to death while others sit around, when one feels that they are the unacknowledged single-point-of-failure, this breeds burnout.
not that I think burnout isn't real; I think the test is if the person can easily move on to their next thing or not
I think this perspective is one that is a bit too privileged. Even in tech - many of us don’t have the ability to take 6+ month breaks between jobs, find ourselves again, and figure out a way to align the work/life balance. I spent a few months between my last job and my current.
You know what I did during that time almost completely? Interview. It’s why I left the other job - I didn’t have enough time to study and interview. 20+ interviews a week. Studying. Applying. Etc. Doing 3-4 onsites/week for a month at a time. Using my “off” days to study more. I took about a month off between accepting the final offer and starting the new job. It wasn’t enough but I had burned through a lot of my savings because of having to exercise options at my last company, pay AMT on exercising said options, and having to pay for another person who lived with me while living in one of the most expensive parts of the world cause all the jobs are here. (ex-wife who was in college and not working)
Again - feel like this is a very privileged attitude to take about being able to move onto the next thing. Most of us don’t really get an option. You just have to.
Getting to choose your job and when you move onto it seems like something only multi-millionaires I know do. The rest of us just slog through it because we have no other choice.
But then there is the issue with taking a break. Maybe this is more a problem that women experience, but I'd be interested if men feel like they experience it, too. However, when you have gaps in your employment, I have felt that people didn't respond very positively to that and wanted to know why you had a break and what you were doing it. Because god forbid you weren't doing something "productive" during that time.
The way our work style is makes it feel like burnout begets more burnout because the options to escape burnout might not actually be feasible for every individual.
but yes I agree anyone who can takes months off work without financial stress should consider themselves fortunate. I know (non-parent) people who did that who were far from multi-millionaires though
There was another piece recently (at The Atlantic?) that was talking about how many cases of burnout are really better thought of as moral injury.
This perspective seemed closer to home for me. It's not the work per se, not the hours (although I think it can be that) -- it's this increasing gap between what your job is on paper, and what it actually is, and no acknowledgment of it from institutions or society, no recognition of it being a problem in your career or workplace, or the dysfunction and pain it causes.
In my case, I think initially some saw it as burnout or needing a break. I had friends talk to me about their own resistance to it in terms of their work ethic or some nonsense like that. But they worked in places with functional departments, where nothing remotely similar would happen to them, where there were support structures in place for things that needed to happen, and so forth and so on. Every job has some stuff that you let slide, that's less than optimal or ideal from a moral or ethical perspective, that you do for practical reasons, or whatever, but there's a point where the gap just gets to be too much, and when your workplace or even field isn't acknowledging the stuff going on, or minimizing it, it starts to feel hopeless.
The Atlantic piece was talking about this all in terms of nursing and all the issues involved, how it wasn't the workload that caused people to resign, it was, to paraphrase, this moral crisis, or crisis of dignity or something. Stuff having to do with healthcare system collapse, the culture in healthcare and in the US and so forth.
I think from what I've seen with myself and colleagues, "moral dissonance" or something might be closer to the right word than "moral injury", although neither are quite right. I'm not sure there's a term I've heard that gets it right. It's like the train has run off the track, and you either stay on board because on paper it's still on the track and you get benefits from it (material and otherwise), or you jump off the train and hit the ground but at least don't let the train carry you away.
I do think in some cases it's about the hours. But in many cases it really isn't about the hours, it's that there's enormous problems that everyone is ignoring or minimizing one way or another.
I burned out almost 10 years ago now, and I'm still not sure what recovery/redemption looks like. I know I'm getting closer, but it's a long process, and every unexpected bump in the road slows me down a lot. My main direct insights have mostly been around letting go of ego while somehow still finding things I can reliably dig in and fight for. Redefinition of context is a primary theme.
Not accepting: you hate your job, you need a break, you need to recover from a disease, you hate your house, you need help, you need to stop cheating, your asking too much from your body, and so on.
This causes stress and when this goes on for too long your body burns out.
A lot of this comes from social pressure. You hate your job but you need it to pay the big house. You don't want to buy a smaller house because 'what will my family think of me when I do this'. Or: I need to go to this client while I am sick because else I might loose them.
Anyway, for those who are feeling burned out I would say: step on the brakes because a burnout can really be dangerous and life threatening.
What if you already have the house? Moving is itself an exhausting and expensive prospect, not to mention the effects of forcing your partner & kids to move with you. It's definitely a last resort.
I believe you should make choices that are good for your family and the people close to you. Don't let social pressure guide you.
And yes, maybe for some people it's best not to move but to start looking for another job.
With remote, employers also miss the in person social queues when someone has started going through the motions or everyone is simply tired.
In the office I could see when someone was working 12 hour days and intervene, with remote I just see someone sound a little tired on the video screen.
This in turn made me feel isolated which i instinctively reacted to by isolating myself even more and procrastinating.
That jacked up the amount of stress I felt coz I felt hugely uncertain about everything all the time as well as unproductive which in turn led to me burning out.
Giving them the benefit of doubt, maybe OPs employer may think they're doing OP a favor by sharing informatiom that you can crank out some things more quickly in Python at higher levels of abstraction which fits their business needs and the needs of the person they spoke to, then they falsely projected those requirements onto the world like all businesses would operate under this model of technology adoption. Why would any sane business use Rust if Bob over here says you can make more stuff quicker with Python?
Giving them less benefit of doubt and what I suspect is the real case, they really don't actually care what you think. They send surveys around to appease whoever thought it was a good idea, then adjust the responses to fit their perceived reality by ignoring them or explaining them away, because if they really have to set time aside and waste resources on your career growth, they made their lives harder in their eyes because you'll be gone next month or whenever anyways.
I've been in corporate environments that send these surveys out and no matter how clear the results, the results are ignored or the lowest effort and lowest effect response is taken to correct them just to provide lip service and continue the charade that they care, changes will be made, and your work environment will improve for you. News flash, your work environment will only improve when you have leverage, otherwise you can assume it's going to be on a continuous decline driven by labor cost minimization.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t think it makes sense to blame the work for this shift. If we’re talking about “the same work” then what makes it more difficult now?
I suspect that the people prone to burnout have shifted heavily toward consuming a lot of news media, podcasts, TV shows, and social media in lieu of a lot of the social interaction they previously got from more in-person activity. If someone is consuming 30 clickbait news headlines every day about how the world is ending, 100 social media posts about people complaining about things or fighting against injustices, a couple hours of sedentary TV watching, hours of listening to people debate overly politicized stuff on podcasts, and all of the other anger-as-entertainment outlets, they’re going to be emotionally exhausted before they even attempt to get any work done. When I work with young people it’s painfully common to hear them recite hyperbole about how the world is ending or how we’ve only got a few years left before everything collapses or nuclear war destroys us all. They’re consuming cynicism in unprecedented quantities from all angles.
Anecdotally, going to remote work seems to trigger burnout a lot faster in people who were doing okay in the office. It’s way too easy to fill the social void left by WFH with a lot of unhealthy and draining content.
- work is a way, a tool, a means to an end:to make money. If work becomes more (a way to meet people, a way to have a higher status, a way to fill time) then it should be culled, cut off, put back in its proper corner.
- work should not be enjoyed too much. Lest you come into temptation to do more of it than necessary.
- work should also not be too boring. A little challenge now and again is fine.
- Do not take shit from colleagues. Talk to them about their behavior. No change? Talk to the manager. Still no change? Transfer or quit this job.
- Do not take shit from managers or your boss. Be open about this and direct: the buck stops here. Period.
- It helps to have F-you money. I suggest 2-3 years salary is a nice stash.
- work should not be done too much (working 2 to 4 days per week seems ideal. I've worked for 3 days a week for years and can highly recommend it).
- work should be done diligently (you should do the required tasks, and recommend improvements). Any time your suggestions for improvements are sworded down, you should NOT worry. After all, you only work for money, not for your ego.
- work should be done honestly (no lying, stealing or cheating).
- You do not work overtime, not even when paid, unless there is an emergency. If there are more than 1 emergencies per year, then the company's definition of an emergency is wrong. Look for a less toxic company.
- You do not do any unpaid overtime. Work is for money. No money means no working. It's really that simple. But would you really want to abandon your colleagues/coworkers? No, but it's the task of the shareholders or company owners to chip in, not yours.
- When fired, give yourself a year sabbatical.
- In case of being fired, do not take it personally. Were you really under-performing, or was your new manager just not able to appreciate your work? Hint: he was too short-sighted to see your work's true value. But what if he was right? Maybe you do suck at this. It is better to think about such soul-searching things after the sabbatical. When you still agree: look for a whole new kind of work. A different position with fresh perspectives.
It is also nice to have a pony and a room full of ice cream.
burnout is real
I can’t help but think of how many email chains stretching out over weeks could’ve been resolved in 5 minutes if everyone were in the same room (and not in a meeting context, but standing up near a computer) and were insistent on actually getting the problem solved.
You end up in more sessions where your presence probably isn't necessary, but it's hard to be sure ahead of time so there you are. Also a hilariously high percentage of these "problem solving sessions" ended with the need for someone to go off and attempt or research something individually and then bring the results back. Which... should have just been an email yeah.
I’ve managed remote teams for many years. This is basically the hallmark of a poor transition to remote work: Everyone is working more but getting less done.
Remote work is hard. Many people aren’t fit for remote work (employee or manager), even if they think they want it. Remote requires a lot more work overall to communicate and coordinate, but companies are tempted to treat it like it’s the same as in-office work. It’s not.
Are they too weak to withstand the temptations that come with so much freedom?
Are they incapable of self-motivation? Do they need an office-parent to kick them into gear?
Can this power be acquired?
I wish only to serve better. Please sir, you teach me.
It's the same kind of problem communist economies struggled with: why should a worker put out any significant effort at all if the results of their labor are being appropriated by someone else? You can work twice as hard, make a major contribution, but you get no reward - the rewards all go to some form of ruling class, be it the head honchos of the Central Committee (Soviet Union) or some small group of founders and their VC investors (Silicon Valley).
I suppose the alternative - living homeless in poverty without any access to medical or dental care - is the stick used to keep the no-contract wage-rate workers in line in the USA, while in the Soviet Union, the threat of deportation to the Siberian gulag served that purpose.
The solution is fairly obvious, create a system that rewards people fairly for their contributions. This of course means much less profits flowing to founders and investors, right, hence the organized political resistance to anything like that.
It seems to me that an excellent way to achieve that would be to actually use our anti-monopoly laws to properly regulate our market places. Over centralization, be it in a committee or in a cartel, has the same results.
The solution is not to rest and then resume consuming toxins but to eliminate the toxicity.
In order to do that, you must identify what is killing you.
Burnout is your body trying to save itself because your conscious brain is killing it.
However, there is such a thing as real physiological burnout, and it is very very nasty. It is not a "mental health condition," but rather a metabolic disorder that can be objectively physiologically diagnosed with the correct equipment. The brain is just another organ, and like every organ in the body it does its best to maintain homeostasis. Thinking, especially deep rigorous logical thinking, is highly metabolically stressful, as can be seen by how it burns thousands of extra calories[1]. The brain is a remarkable organ, but like any organ it can be stressed beyond its ability to adapt[2][3][4]. Spending too much time in exhaustion impairs the body's ability to restore homeostasis and adapt to similar stresses in the future. Continuing in that state for long periods can cause cumulative damage.
In short, real mental burnout is akin to real physical overtraining, which incidentally is another term that has become a buzzword. There can be mental health consequences from both burnout and overtraining though. An athlete or a programmer can both become depressed from no longer being able to perform at the level they are accustomed to, among other possibilities. For example, was Bobby Fischer's mental instability later in life an example of the possible mental health effects of physiological burnout? Who knows, but it sounds plausible at least.
[1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2038162/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(biology)#General_adapt...
[4] The top search results are absolute pop-sci garbage, read the above paper or the wiki summary.
nobody wants to be productive, because of the new wave of entitlement.
this is both objectively and subjectively true.
everyone wants the checks, nobody wants to run at 130% capacity afterwards to help pay those checks off.
this point is refuted by the "da globalist cabal stole the productivity", but the math shows otherwise.
the pandemic created debts that the average person must repay.
"Savings" are things that are produced but not consumed. During "lockdown", consumption exceeded production. That means, globally, years of savings were consumed.
When savings are reduced, prosperity is reduced. Savings will have to be rebuilt to return to prosperity.
I do know that one of the biggest single costs the average person faces is housing. And I know that housing can be built in large quantities in economies with a tenth the GDP/capita of the current G7 average.
I don’t by into the narrative that capitalism is pure evil (or anything even remotely close to that), nevertheless I think that unless effort is made to avoid them, undesirable Nash Equilibria can form within it, and that is why we don’t collectively have 10-20 hour work weeks with the standard of life from 1970: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
right, and because we do not have a fair market with price discover, and regulation has hindered progress, this has led to a basic living need to become a speculative asset, much to the loss of the average homebuyer.
if you expect your home to grow in value, you cannot also expect your son or daughter to be able to afford it in the same way.
But I certainly agree with you about the second point, it’s frustratingly hard to getting the relevant people to accept that allowing homes to become investments also makes them unaffordable.
Do not raise your hourly rates, expect people to work harder. That is what productivity actually is, working harder for the same income.
:pikachu face:
You need to build 15 things in 10 hours for more productivity, but if you do that you get the income of 15 things, which is more income which you can use to pay that $1200 debt you're talking about.
Build 15 things in 10 hours and get paid the same, means the employer pockets the extra 5 things of income. People who don't want to prop up businesses with more work for the same income is not the same as people not wanting to work.
people not working, less productivity
No. We don't.
I am unmoved by your attempt at argument from authority.
There was no argument from authority. This is Modern Monetary Theory in action.
It is just the other side they didn't show you.
To whom shall we make out the check sir?
Sounds like you're the one who's complaining.
[Stopping here because the only thing I really owe you at this point would break the posting guidelines.]
True wages must go down for the surplus. If wages went up, productivity/gdp wouldn't increase, and we would make no progress on our nation deficit, and continue to see inflation.
I am not complaining, just stating the inconvenient, economic, hard truths; shooting the messenger is the laziest (apt) way of dismissing the argument, which is all you are mentally prepared to do.
you don't owe me anything, since you cannot combat my argument with logic; everyone owes everyone a productivity increase to make up for the free $1200 checks, and the printing of money.
your entitlement is showing. my point, again, demonstrated within.
complain to get free money, then complain the money isn't worth as much. you cant have both.
all my points, QED, with your responses so far.
anyone else wanna disprove anything I have stated?
read up MMT. then come back with some facts.
ill wait.
Sure you are. Your comment is a classic example of what I call 'sore winner' literature.
It's characterized by: a superior pontificating tone, a sense of entitlement tell others what to do, a certain intellectual rigidity, a tendency to assign readings, but most important of all, a tone of having been cheated out of something by random strangers on the internet.
Calculate your share, if you really must have it so badly, and I'll cut a penny down and mail it to you then.
how am I simultaneously a winner, but feel cheated?
again, you literally quoted three words, strawmanned it up, and ignore the rest.
no substance to be found.
the "superior" tone is your perception, but if the issue being discussed (peoples not wanting to work), no discourse can be had without hints of condescension.
the labor shortage in the market cannot be discussed, because you think it is condescending... what a fantastic exchange of ideas, i am sure you are littered with nuanced views. /s (you are not.)
ironically, coincidentally, and incidentally, I am statistically probably the most "impoverished" here; allowing me actual insight into the markets you claim to have a moral aptitude towards.
people do not want to work. the left think the billionaires should make robots do it (see the above poster), the right are just tired of low-paying jobs that prevent them from being on welfare.
i know you didn't get this far, but if you have any substinant rebuttal to any or all of my arguments, im sure you would had presented at least one by now, instead of again, ad hominem and strawmans.
calling you a "fucktwit", deservingly, but also so @dang can read this, and maybe put thought into comment rankings, if he has some brain cells left from staring at walls of shallow dialogue all day.
There's nothing to refute because you can't refute tone. Plus it's not my job to be your debate partner for free.
Basically, either don't tell people what to do, or set conditions on how they should debate you, or you will get voted down.
But really, I suspect you are getting just what you want, really, pissing people off and making a stink.
> "your entitlement is showing."
> "complain to get free money, then complain the money isn't worth as much. you cant have both."
> "anyone else wanna disprove anything I have stated?"
1) your strawman of me complaining to get free money is something which didn't happen.
2) your strawman of me complaining that the money isn't worth as much didn't happen.
3) your repeated comments about "entitlement" is trolling ad-hominem, not something for disproving.
4) if I borrow $1200 from the bank, I don't "owe the bank a productivity increase", I owe the bank $1200. Whether that comes from me being more productive, or working more time into the future, is up to me.
5) The idea that people being more productive ==> paying down the national debt doesn't seem to match what happens. USA GDP has increased from 1Tn in 1970 to 23TN today. Or $5k per person to $65k per person(!)[1] National debt has risen consistently since 1970, not been paid down by this increase. And your statement that paying down the national debt == "progress". Progress to what goal? Nobody in power appears to care about the national deficit. It's only a talking point for Republicans to criticise Democrats. It's a fiction number that is expected to grow forever, there's no plan, attempt or incentive to ever pay it off. It's not a household debt, no President, politician, senator, will be held personally accountable for it.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...
4) if I borrow $1200 from the bank, I don't "owe the bank a productivity increase", I owe the bank $1200. Whether that comes from me being more productive, or working more time into the future, is up to me
bad analogy, since printing money is not a loan in traditional sense - government debt doesn't really make sense - it is a tax on future users of the currency, by means of productivity per dollar is decreased.
more like, if everyone got a loan, and the bank said "trust me bro"...because the dollars were literally invented, not loaned - which increases the total M1 money supply.
the hope was the velocity of the money would also increase, which inflation helps with - stagnating cash loses value constantly.
one way to measure this "tax" (the damage done by inflation) is by measuring the value of the dollar per common good (the BigMac index) and is by debt/GDP/person. Of course it is a political bartering chip; everything is, but is also a useful measure of this change in buying power relative to the dollar.
Business are going to be the first to reap the rewards of the increase in productivity. As they should. Taxes imply the government will be the secondary beneficiary.
A well-executed MMT would then use the excess capital for common-good reinvest, a la the Build Back better plan.
It's a dream, but that is how they hoped it worked.
This is objectively false; many people want to be productive. Demonstrated by things like: people working for money, people changing jobs to get more money, people signing up for courses to learn new skills, people founding new companies. Let's see census.gov[1] big graph of new business applications: steady at 200k/month from 2005 through 2015, increased to 300k/month by 2020, then CLIMBED to 400-500k/month through 2020 and 2021 and into 2022.
> "nobody wants to run at 130% capacity afterwards to help pay those checks off"
The Bureau of Labor Statistics[2] (which, incidentally, reports productivity improvements in latter half of 2021) says "Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked by all persons". Which rebukes your claim "That is what productivity actually is, working harder for the same income." More hours for more output is not an improvement in productivity.
Nobody wants to make well-reasoned arguments when they can lazily sneer at other people being "entitled" and then think that makes their point for them.
> "the pandemic created debts that the average person must repay."
> "this point is refuted by the "da globalist cabal stole the productivity", but the math shows otherwise."
Really? Because here in the UK we have a company that was founded for £100 and then awarded a £110,000,000 contract to supply PPE to the NHS. A Government which has since written off £9Bn of PPE spending after it delivered nothing useful, £2.6Bn of that delivered PPE that wasn't good enough quality, and we have a court ruling that the Government's allocation of money for PPE during the pandemic was unlawful[3], and "Tansparency International UK said its analysis indicated "apparent systemic biases in the award of PPE contracts that favoured those with political connections to the party of government"".
"Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner called for an independent investigation to "get to the bottom of how £3.5bn of taxpayers' cash were handed out in crony contracts and ensure it can never happen again". Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper described the ruling as a "damning judgement" and said: "Not only did the Conservatives give their mates privileged access to lucrative Covid contracts, they did it unlawfully.""
Barrister, Law school Professor and Director of the GoodLaw Project Tweeted[4] "Fortunes large enough to sustain generations are being made by those lucky or well connected enough to win them" -
"Test and Trace’s “staggering” £22bn annual cost has not been justified by any clear evidence of its impact on the Covid pandemic, parliament’s spending watchdog has declared.*" - [5]
But nooooo, this is just "da globalist cabal stole it" which you switch to mocking "da" language because the entitled lazy plebs are dumber than you XD XD XD right?
[1] https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/prod2_02032022.htm
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59968037
[4] https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1314114913850318848
[5] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/test-and-trace-treats...