Burnout is everywhere. Almost everyone will experience it in their career if it isn’t going on right now. Following COVID, burnout became a buzzword that appeared everywhere as the workplace tried to reboot. A significant percentage of workers got a chance to experience working from home, and now it’s being taken away. Now they have to get dressed, commute, deal with coworkers and customers face-to-face, rework their schedules around child care, and try to fit in chores after hours that they had become accustomed to doing midday during inevitable workday lulls.
As a majority of workers who experienced working from home report more productivity while working from home, many employers still insist on a return to offices, and workers begrudgingly do so under duress, driving the reports of burnout higher. The content around burnout poured in, stating what they saw as the causes and effects.
So, What is Burnout
Burnout can be most easily defined as a state of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion. A state that can last an unspecified amount of time.
Burnout is often caused by prolonged or unmanaged stress, leading to emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion
Most commonly Stated Causes of Burnout
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of role clarity and expectations
- Lack of management and social support
- Financial burden
- Excess hours and poor work-life balance
- Feeling overlooked and/or undervalued
- Job insecurity
Most Common Side Effects of Burnout
- Emotional exhaustion
- Physical fatigue
- Lack of focus
- Irritability
- Depression
- Loss of sleep
- Social withdrawal
All the side effects can directly feed the causes, creating a cycle that feels impossible to escape. Add to the cycle the introduction of AI and previous over-hiring leading to high levels of layoffs, a job market that is harder to get hired in, and the rapidly increasing prices of everything, and it seems burnout is inescapable.
Nuances of Burnout — What the definitions don’t always capture
The first thing, I believe, that is left out is where burnout is attributed to. Most people, when they talk about burnout, attribute it to work, whatever that work may be. It could be a career, school, or parenting, but what all those have in common is that they all take up large amounts of our time and attention. The amount of attention they require takes up time for most everything else. They can leave little room for rest, chores, or even fun.
The truth is that burnout is evidence of a holistic misalignment between what we want to do, should do, and must do, where the “must” takes over. It isn’t illogical or irrational that we put our work first so often. After all, that is what gives us money to buy the things that we have to have, like food and housing. It also dictates what non-work life looks like. From your entertainment budget to the amount and quality of sleep you get are easily dictated by your relationship to your work.
The second thing is purpose. We all try to deny in our own ways that we need to do something. We derive meaning from what we can offer, and the easiest way to satisfy that is work. The more we produce, the more we feel like we can earn. The more we earn, the more we can spend. The more we spend, the more we can be seen as valuable to others. It is not the only way, but the simplest for our primal brains to grasp in the current civilization.
The issue with this is that we are now being constantly told that we could and should do more. We are constantly shown that there is another level to what we can accomplish and attain. We push to get to the next level and then the next. As we continue on, the goalposts move. Things get more expensive, or there is a new must-have thing or subscription, and our pay doesn’t rise, so, relatively, our level up may be a net step back. How could we not be exhausted and hopeless on this treadmill?
The Cadence of Endless Progression
I have a hard time not blaming private equity for almost all that is going wrong in capitalism. As private investors have become prevalent in every industry, there has been a shift in the very way we think about business. With these investors come the installation of boards to ensure that profit goals are being met on schedule. The key phrase there is “on schedule.”
Most businesses of any size have very short scopes of focus when it comes to growth targets. Mainly quarterly and annually at most. Why? Investors run on quarterly and annual reports as standard gauges for share profitability in line with reporting standards. This creates very short-term decision-making priorities at the highest level. This is why a company can lay off large percentages of its workforce and be praised by the boards and stock markets. It isn’t because the product or company will actually be better for the cut, no. Profits this quarter will be higher because customers haven’t had time to feel and react to the decrease in quality, and the organization hasn’t had time to react and rehire the necessary staff they arbitrarily cut. Furthermore, they can justify price increases later to maintain profit levels as customers shed the degrading product for alternatives.
This kind of behavior is breaking a previously held social contract between a company, its employees, and its customers. Customers expect a reasonable ratio of cost to quality, and employees expect a reasonable ratio of security to productivity. For employees, specifically that is to say that if they are doing a good job at adding value or revenue, they can expect reasonable pay and working conditions in return. These contracts are what ensured loyalty, innovation, and healthy competition in the markets. It decreased incentives to cut corners and act dishonestly. Was it perfect? No, but the incentive structures were there.
Business was a game of longevity. Stay in business as long as you can and turn a profit. We all hate when the owner’s kid takes over the family business, but this was also proof that the motivations were at least in line with the contract of good, sustained business. Now, business is a game of rapid returns. Buy a company, cook the books, cut the costs, sell it again until there is nothing left of the service, and the last investor is left holding the bag.
Employees are aware of this, even if not explicitly. They feel it. Most importantly, they feel it’s pointless. Employees increasingly are unable to identify with their work, making no difference. Even if it did, they are waiting to be replaced by a computer program because they heard it can do their job better. Why try? Well, they have to stay on the progress wheel to make more money while they can. They have to try to secure the promotion, because they still have to play the old game of staying in it as long as they can.
Where Does This Leave Us?
The average worker is now being forced into something their parents and grandparents never had to struggle with: being more than our jobs. Gen Z will statistically have more jobs than any other generation. They will have more career changes, more uncertainty, and more volatility. For the sake of their sanity, they cannot afford to tie their identity to their careers as Boomers and even Gen X could.
Someone in the workforce now, who plans to remain in it for decades to come, must become a person void of a work identity and more of a person who just so happens to work. No more “just a doctor, accountant, chef, or customer support rep” who commutes in and out, the weekend warrior type, but someone with passions, personality, and specialties, while being a generalist who can interact with other humans. The kind of person whose entire industry can be eliminated, and they can be easily slotted into another industry. This isn’t about hard skills; it is about soft skills, confidence, and perseverance.
That is the cure for burnout: perseverance with purpose and options. Having the ability to say no and mean it. Knowing that if your job becomes unbearable, you can make a change and try something new. This means suiting your life to this mentality. Live a life that can shrink when it needs to, maintain savings that can float you through tough times, and don’t carry an ego that doesn’t allow you to take a step back.
Burnout is the sense of hopelessness that you can’t escape your misery and you use all your energy to keep going. That feeling of exhaustion with no end in sight. If you are looking for the end, maybe you should set the terms. If you can’t see the end, maybe you should determine where that is. Take back control of your balance, knowing that it may be work and lots of it for a while. Hopelessness, though, is accepting the current state and hating it.
Recapture your hope by redesigning what your goals are in this new reality. Redefine what a good life is, because I assure you, it isn’t working a job you hate, to get more stuff you don’t need, to impress people you don’t like.
We can’t plan on it ever going back to the way things were, even if we wanted them to, but we have the opportunity to live fuller lives, not focused on our work, but just including it. The economy has told us that “it’s just a job and it isn’t that important,” but the issue is, we didn’t believe them. Now we know, and two can play at that game.
Reid Pierpoint