It’s early in the morning. School’s bell rang across our street and all the noise children make subsided. A few people talk as they walk.
I’ve been wondering about the meaning of burnout. I don’t think we have burnouts at my employer of about 450 people, mostly developers. My wife, on the other hand, knows countless examples in public administration.
My current hypothesis is that burnout needs to be understood on multiple levels. The easiest level is the individual level, at least superficially: it’s a medical emergency and I leave it up to the professionals to help victims recover. Sick leave, mandatory holidays, whatever it takes to break out of the hamster wheel of work and realign yourself with our humanity. I guess I am an existentialists at heart: all we know is that we are going to die eventually and every thing worth happening needs to happen before that.
Burnout as a social phenomenon is interesting. It seems like a kind of excuse we use to explain our troubles to ourselves. As such, the use of the word to describe our situation is like a contagious meme. We are unable to handle the conflicting requirements of work and family, of work and rest, of the drudgery of money and the meaning of life, the constant demands and then we see burnout around us and realize, it’s OK to be unable to handle the world they have made for us.
There have been endless occupations and situations super stressful for humans, including slavery. Terrible, terrible situations to be in. These people didn’t need to know a word like burnout to describe their condition because the hardship and pain was not something endured voluntarily. With the might of empire these people are crushed. I am not talking about those kinds of situations. I think burnout applies to a lighter, modern problem: there’s no direct coercion involved. The victims think there is, of course, but nobody is actually going to beat you up if you don’t show up for work. It’s the fear of poverty, the fear of failure, the fear of being shamed in front of your peers, the well meant concern for the company and your peers that need you, but in the great scheme of things, it’s not true: the company is not going to tank if you fail, your friends are not going to desert you if you take a few days off, the projects are not going to fail if you are sick and can’t come to work, or if they do, it’s not your fault. That’s mismanagement by other people.
Burnout appears to be something that requires the kind of soft power setup that our modern office world introduced because some managers realised that this is how you extract the most value from knowledge workers and the lower rungs of management: guilt, shame, angst, pay rises promised or recently received, potential career options and promotions just out of reach or to be thankful for, and so on. And upper management has built on these tools for their own gain: reorganisation to lift up their supporters and to overthrow their internal competitors, reorganisation to distract the revolutionaries, overwork here, sugar coating there, fermenting rivalries in the departments below you to prevent challengers from arising. They add as much uncertainty to the mix as possible, for their own gains. I think this is why burnout is a modern phenomenon. It doesn’t arise in slaves, in farmers, in miners, in construction workers, and so on. They have other problems, and more severe ones. Burnout is hard, but you can always quit, in theory. It’s indirect coercion and soft power that keeps us in our place.
I don’t know much about burnout treatment but I imagine you start by cutting all the strings attached: like a drug addict, you need to stay away from work, and you need to distance yourself from the toxic mindset that is drawing you into this spiral of work, lack of time, self-exploitation, martyrdom.
Another perspective I’d like to consider is the economic perspective. From a distance, all those people with burnout are participating in a wild, decentralised, unorganised strike. The overworked knowledge worker and lower management class doesn’t want to call it a strike, so they just continue until they can’t take it any more, on a personal level. Instead of quitting, or a career change, or retiring, or taking up household chores, they hear about burnout and their bodies join the movement, even if their brains, superficially, want to continue the hamster wheel race.
I think this why burnout needs two approaches. On the individual level, you need to find ways to not join the hamster wheel, to be impervious to the sticks and carrots of office life. More importantly, on the societal level, we need to find ways to encourage people to step off the hamster wheel. We can make the stick smaller by offering universal basic income. Perhaps this should be part of how the state establishes a fair market for jobs. We think a job market is one where we can pick the jobs freely, as much as possible given our experience and remuneration expectations, in any case, but how free are we really, if we are immediately beset by fears of losing our house, of being unable to pay for the tuition of our children, of being unable to afford medical treatments, of having to work until we die because we cannot retire? The society I want to live in helps me bear these burdens. The richer nations introduced universal healthcare, universal education, universal insurances for the old and the infirm, the sick and the disabled, the richer nations have implemented safety nets that prevent us from falling into homelessness.
I hear you: of course, not all of the nations that think of themselves as rich have implemented these safety nets. We all know some shameful examples! All I’m saying is that universal basic income would help people step off the hamster wheel to hell.
Also, I’m really enjoying my four month summer break every year. 😅
#Life
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– Nick Thomas 2022-08-23 23:25 UTC
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Ouch, that was a good one!
– Alex 2022-08-24 05:48 UTC