I am Burntout. Statistically and anecdotally, you are too.
66% of Americans are Burnt out at work this year.[1] In Britain, around 600,000 reported world related mental health issues.[2] 91% have experienced high levels of stress in the last year.[3] In China, it’s reported that over half a million people die from overwork – Guolaosi – each year. The slogan often perpetuated by tech companies there is 996 – 9-9 6 days a week. Philosopher Pascal Chabot has said that ‘burnout gives expression to the anxieties of our age’.
I’ve been quite moved to hear from many of you, around the world, we’ll hear some of your stories, talk to some experts, do our history and a bit of philosophy, and find out if we’re burned out, how can we put the fire out? Is it capitalism? Inequality? Is it technology? Culture? Insecurity? Perfectionism? Is it snowflake Millennials like me who can’t handle the grind?
The term burnout was coined in 1974 in New York.
Psychiatrist Herbet Freudenberger was working in free drug addiction clinics. Something struck him – it wasn’t just the addicts that had a problem, it was the staff too. Freudenberg worked from 8am to 9pm at a hospital, then went to the drug clinic where we worked until 11pm and often later, getting home around 2am. He did this for months. People told him he needed to slow down. His response: “You think I should be doing less? I should be doing more. There are thousands of these kids, and they have no other place to turn.”[4]
Burnout in some ways had the same structure as the drug addiction – an idealistic goal and a do anything approach to achieving it. Freudenberger noticed that the clinic staff were in a worse state than some of the patients
Freudenberg wrote Staff Burnout in 1974. In it he said ‘As a practicing psychoanalyst, I have come to realize that people, as well as buildings, sometimes burn out. Under the strain of living in our complex world, their inner resources are consumed as if by fire, leaving a great emptiness inside, although their outer shells may be more or less unchanged.’[5]
We all have an intuitive sense of what burnout is. But let’s ask ourselves – what causes the burnout fire to rage in the first place and what happens when we get psychologically burned?
First there’s obviously emotional and physical exhaustion, a sense of overwhelm. But there’s also often an accompanying set of negative attitudes – cynicism, insecurity, depersonalisation – meaning a detachment, a retreatment, a reduction in sincerity or meaning in one’s work, a numbness, seeing others as objects, becoming mechanical. Those are the symptoms. I sat down with Mark Rowland the CEO of Mental Health Foundation to ask about the causes:
“There are the external drivers of burnout, job design, the demands of it, the autonomy and the fairness. If you, and broadly speaking, If you're in a job where you're treated unfairly, you have no control over that job and there are excessive demands being placed on you in terms of your time and resource, almost anyone is going to find that hugely stressful and that's going to lead to burnout. So I think there are some things that are baked into the human condition, which make being treated unfairly, not being able to deliver against unreasonable expectations and having low levels of control, Human beings are designed psychologically for community and protection and belonging. And when that is systematically undermined, you will find a big psychological toll. So the first set of external drivers is fairly consistent. We're all in that boat. None of us. It's quite interesting because with burnout, sometimes the most resilient, the people who believe that they can cope with that end up creating a bigger problem downstream than the people who are saying, this is not reasonable. I need to get help or get out. there is a fairly universal reaction to those external drivers. “
Ok so we can add excessive demands, lack of control, need for autonomy, fairness to our list of causes. It often but not exclusively happens in people facing work – nurses, psychiatrists, GPs, teachers, social workers – as I heard from you - In the US, Burnout is highest amongst teachers. Burnout is generally higher in the US than Europe.[6]
But there’s an interesting tension we’ll explore between overwork and the structure of work – the autonomy and control Mark pointed to. Compare Freudenberg’s overwork to British MP John Lubbock.
Lubbock was the British MP behind the Bank Holiday Act of 1871. Because of him, us Brits will enjoy 8 national holiday days this year. Lubbock was so popular he was known as Saint Lubbock. Cheers to Saint Lubbock.
He said ‘‘Work is a necessity of existence,’ he explained, but ‘Rest is not idleness’, because ‘to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time’.’
But Lubbock was no slouch. He was an MP, played county cricket, played in the 1875 FA Cup Final, ran a bank, was the president the Institute of Bankers, was chairman of London County Council, was councillor to the queen, was president of the Royal Statistical Society and the Anthropological Instutite,, vice of the Royal Society, and wrote several book, including a two volume ‘pleasures of life’ on the importance of rest.[7]
I bring Lubbock up at the beginning because work can be very meaningful – I love my work – and I think to understand burnout is not just about working less or having more time, although it often is, but it’s also about how to make work and life more meaningful – to get more out of ourselves – not more productivity, but more life.
This is why understanding burnout is so crucial right now. It connects the personal to the political, the medical to the philosophical, plus it has a history, a then and a now – and it’s serious – it can be both a warning sign and it can kill.
Rowland said: “Yeah, I think its basic impact can be extremely serious in terms of degrading someone's ability to be resilient and be able to cope with life. And it's a gateway to then experiences of depression, anxiety, even the experiences of psychosis and other serious forms of mental illness that can have long and enduring impacts. So, you know, it's a bit like... It's a bit like asking how serious is being burnt by fire. And you can be burnt by fire by scolding yourself. You withdraw, you recover quite quickly. But you can also have lifelong scarring impacts if you're seriously at third degree burns, where you're not able to escape from that kind of exposure. And so the psychological risk and the psychological impact really depends. It shouldn't be underestimated.”
The History of Work and Play
Lubbock believed that rest was both good for the soul and for productivity. That idleness can be the well-spring of creativity. This was towards the end of the first industrial revolution, and workers had gone from dreadful, unsafe conditions and long hours to fighting for the eight hour work day and safety regulations.
As we talk about a lot on Then & Now, history isn’t linear – it’s complex. Sometimes what seems like progress results in regression elsewhere.
Anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers in general were well-nourished and only worked around fifteen hours a week. So much so that the Michael Sahlins called his study of hunter-gathers like the !Kung of the Kalahari ‘The Original Affluent Society.’
Some have pointed to pre-industrial artisan workers as having better lives prior to the industrial revolution. In 1833, for example, Manchester surgeon Peter Gaskell criticized the factory system, writing that before it ‘the average person ‘commonly lived to a good round age, worked when necessity demanded, ceased his labour when his wants were supplied, according to his character, and if disposed to spend time or money in drinking.’[8]
But we shouldn’t romanticise the past. There were trade-offs. What happened when famine struck? Disaster hit? When conflict or injury or illness broke out? Historians have also shown how people were grateful for the steady work in factories – farming was temperamental and backbreaking work too.[9]
There’s no simple story. But people certainly seem to have used to work less. As Anne Appleby points to in her history of capitalism, the number of public feast days declined as capitalism spread in the 17th-19th centuries. St Monday[10] was often comically pointed to as the saint of the Monday hangover – Monday was often referred to as holy Monday! Wedding days, fairs, wakes, big celebrations and days off were much more common and hours were not punched in. Over the 18th century, the average number of days worked increased from 250 days per year to 300.
Why? Productivity (could be good to have a very quick montage of Youtubers like Chris Williamson saying ‘productivity’ here).
Where I live – the midlands of the UK – was ground zero for the productivity movement. 18th century potter Josiah Wedgewood experimented with different clay over temperatures, and casts, and worker routines, using bells and clocks and records and building canals – all to get costs down and productivity up.
Wedgewood started a tradition of industrial productivity that led to Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management theories at the end of the 19th century.
Taylor was ‘father of the efficiency movement’ – a scientific approach to work. He’d stand with a stopwatch, which he carried with him everywhere, measuring every movement of workers – shaving off seconds here and there, breaking each movement, action, process into as small a unit as possible and redesigning from the bottom up the most efficient factory.
Early 19th century industrialist wanted longer inhumane hours because it’s easier and more profitable to have one worker, trained, onsite knowing the machine or the tool continuously. And this led to unionisation and strikes and the fight for the eight hour working day – hint, hint, organise. By 1870, hours worked declined from around eighty hours a week to sixty. Weekends were slowly becoming more common. People like Lubbock fought for holidays.
Ok so far so expected. It’s a classic tale of capitalism. But here’s a rub – often, when given the choice, people historically would choose to work more too, up to a point. Hard work can also be a cage of our own making.
When the Great Depression hit in 1930s, one well-intention philanthropic cornflake connoisseur - Will Kellog – believed in would be better to reduce everyone’s hours slightly rather than sack one set of workers. He instituted the 30 hour work week – a 6 hour day. To his surprise, it worked out great – injuries were less common, productivity even increased, it was so successful he kept it
But what happened next was even more surprising. It wasn’t Kellogg’s who changed his mind and asked the workers to return to their normal hours, but the workers themselves.
In his book Work: A history of how we spend out time, anthropologist James Suzman writes ‘most [workers] were clear: they wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly upgraded consumer products coming on to the market during America’s affluent post-war era.’[11] By 1957 most had voted to move back to the 40-hour week.
This points to something fascinating we’ll return to – that in a world of productivity, we can internalise the demand to do more as a positive. But it’s not as simple as giving up and saying, well the workers voted for it like turkey’s voting for Christmas. There are wider cultural reasons that are interesting too. Economist Robert Whaples looked at the Kelloggs example and saw managers convincing workers of the importance of work. Shorter hours were denigrated and feminized.
Whaples writes ‘but most importantly many workers, especially male employees, seem to have changed their tastes. They became embarrassed by the short hours that they were working — shorter than the shifts worked by men at other local jobs. They changed their rhetoric, downplaying the freedom that leisure gave, and asserting that they were “unable to afford” a six-hour shift, that longer hours were needed to “‘keep the wolf from the door,’ ‘feed the family,’ and ‘put bread on the table.’[12]
What the history of work and productivity shows us is that it’s just about economics – it’s about how culture, politics, and economics intersect. And by the 70s, a new wave of neoliberals were realising that to change the economy, you had to change the culture.
In the 70s high inflation, unemployment, oil shocks, lower levels of profit and innovation. public debt challenged the postwar consensus. That consensus was built upon predictability – predictably job security, factory work, wage increases, predictable Fordist factory lines.
But neoliberals believed this structure was stifling productivity and innovation. They wanted a more flexible economy. Economist David Weil called it the ‘fissured’ workplace.
The trajectory was towards identifying a companies ‘core competencies’ and outsourcing the rest to contractors – from supply chains to cleaners to marketing, to pensions and training – the economy became fractured in pursuit of flexibility. In the 80s and 90s, entire departments disappeared over night.
In 1993, Apple published an article called ‘The Changed Nature of Workers and Work.’ IT said that “More and more companies are laying off permanent staff and relying on contract workers and outsourcing to carry out their business […] The emerging workplace has a head and no body. It centralizes free-floating talent resources as necessary to meet current needs, and changes size from moment to moment as the marketplace dictates.”’
Today, subcontractors make up between 40 to 50 percent of the workforce in tech. Apple only employs around 60,000 over the 750,000 million who work on its products.
Incredibly, one study found that almost all of new jobs added to the US economy between 2005 and 2015, were this kind of contingent work.[13]
In 1972, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst – Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – were predicting that the new information society, where everything was in flux – where there was a demand to constantly encode and recode information - was leading to a modern man’s sickness – that all of this flexibility was going to have consequences.
The Cult of Excess (Cultural link to global meritocracy and tech)
If, as Chabot claimed, ‘burnout gives expression to the anxieties of our age’, what happened to the age of stress? Why has our language shifted? In 1983, Time had this cover. In 2020, this one.[14] The changes are meaningful because stress has an object – a stressor – a boss, a deadline, a difficult client – we all face stressors on an almost daily basis.
It seems to me that the Fordist economy, while having many stressors, was much more predictable. The neoliberal economy – a word so overused to invite apathy, but let’s be clear – the economy is still neoliberal – is much less predictable.
Those causes we talked about – lack of control, lack of autonomy, lack of fairness – are sacrificed at the alter of competition and productivity. Contractors, gig economy workers, friends and even family – can often be jettisoned at the drop of the hat – it’s nothing personal - it’s just that there is so much choice – always the better option, the easier option, the more profitable option.
Let’s call it the flexible society. And in a flexible society meritocracy has been both supercharged and distorted. On the one hand, the best get the gig, you can be supremely successful in a global economy if you’re talented, privileged, or in the right place at the right time. But the flexible society supercharges downward mobility too.
In fact, whereas for decades – maybe even a century – upward mobility was not just the norm but expected – that you would do better than your parents, today download mobility is increasing more than upward mobility.
In the U.S., research shows that a child born in the 1940s had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in the 1980s, it dropped to about 50%.[15]
Since the 80s, we’ve seen a ‘Great Decoupling’ of GDP growth from real media earnings. GDP continues to rise, but the gains go to the top. Over the past forty years, CEOs have had an almost 1000% pay increase, while average workers have had just 10%.[16]
Again, you now have roughly the same chance as doing poorer than your parents than you are as doing better than them. Upward or downward mobility? Flip a coin.
On top of this, extreme inequality puts pressure on almost every resource except mass-producible consumables – housing, education, healthcare, politics – the richest outbid the poorer on any commodity that is slow to build or extract or produce, pushing up prices of assets, avoiding taxes, buying media and politics. Keeping up with the Jones’ is impossible when the Jones’ are flying a SpaceX Rocket.
This is not just a video about inequality – although it’s unignorably the star of almost every story right now – but it is about a lack of time, control, resources, autonomy, and fairness. What’s philosophically interesting is the inextricable link between a flexible society and an insecure one. If society is flexible you can be going up or down at any moment.
Technology, the internet, globalisation, consumerism, tourism, ease of travel, and cultural changes meant we are culturally, socially, professionally and personally flexible as well as economically flexible. We are postmodern, untethered, presented with numerous opportunities, places to go, jobs to take, hobbies to pick up, people to see. There is so much to do, so many choices, so many demands.
If Burnout is in some sense the fear of insecurity than comes with the flexible society – because remember, if you can be flexible with people, people can be flexible with you – then this applies to longevity of relationships, divorce rates, moving away from family, not looking after elders, not committing to one hobby or profession.
When there’s so much to do we are judged by how much we’ve done. Have you slouched on the couch or travelled the world? The demand of meritocracy in an unequal world is that you are expected to do more and more with less and less – than is the marker of productive, iron excellence, right?
As Anne Helen Peterson describes in her book Can’t Even – millennials were the first generation to experience this kind of pressure to do as much as possible - they had all sorts of calendar entries for extracurricular hobbies, games, practises, try-outs, leagues, lessons, dance, music, homework, summer camp, theatre school, swimming lessons - an endless exercise in producing a longer fuller CV.
In The Overachievers, Alexandra Robbins writes that “When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture, they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough.” It’s all about getting that good university spot, that great placement, to prove your worth in the meritocratic flexible society.
Even leisure now has to be maximised – more experiences. Need to find a new novel, find a new run route, read a new magazine, go on a new trip. To me Saturday feels like a half day and Sunday a day off but I’m still doing things.
Peterson points to something that resonates with me too. A generation of parenting that was hands off, entirely unsupervised, both parents working – for good reasons – but a lot of time spent alone and maybe generating anxieties and insecurities. She points to sociological reports in which children describe ‘endless hours of trying to entertain myself’. This is a strange combination – half the time entirely alone, disconnected, potentially anxious, and the other full of the demand to do as much as possible.
The great Enlightenment philosopher Georg Hegel realised that recognition was a central – if not the central – feature of how we understand ourselves self-consciously as social creatures.
We recognise and are recognised by others – and how that happens has consequences for who we are, how we think, and what we do. We are watched, judged, rejected or accepted, admonished, and to paraphrase the anarchist thinker Pierre Proudhon ‘inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.’
In a flexible society, the anxieties of recognition becomes hyperfocused. When we can be dropped at any moment, move anywhere, flick through dating apps, follow and unfollow anyone, contract and freelance, fire and rehire, review and be reviewed; how much we’ve achieved, what our CV shows, plus a decline in traditional cohesive communities, families, a lack of linear security, a lack of enough resources to do the job effectively – contributes to the race to achieve more and more, to not stop, to be both insecure, anxious and always be on.
Sartre agreed with Hegel on the importance of recognition when he said ‘hell is other people’ – he was talking about the effect of eternal judgement – what are you worth?– judgement which is accelerated by another feature of modern life – technology.
Always on (tech)
A quick Then & Now recap on the importance of historicising – how we talk about these things has changed over time and matters – our language, culture, and history – can have a direct effect on our health. As the historian Roger Cooter reminds us, even the body has a history. As Mark told me, mental health contributes to 23% of the disease burden. Should we be stoic? Buddhist? Cognitive psychiatrists? Our culture is like a reservoir we draw from – so it’s crucial that reservoir is well-filled.
Stress, for example, is a relatively new medical concept – first studied in the 1930s. Stress was an industrial metaphor – the stress placed on metal, for example. Before Stress, the American psychiatrist Charles Beard coined neurasthenia – a modern illness effecting Americans nervous and anxious about modernity – he blamed steam engines, the media, the telegraph, the speed of modern life – for putting too much pressure on people.
He wrote, ‘the perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments. We are under constant strain, mostly unconscious, often times in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere or do something at some definite moment.’
Before neurasthenia there were the four humours that might have been disbalanced, melancholy or hysteria, there were religious maladies and ancient ones, culture-bound syndromes that only exist in certain cultures – the point is this – mental health is structural and historical – it does not just come from us but happens to us.
Here’s a brief list of apps I used every day: Google docs, sheets, drive, OneDrive, Microsoft word, excel, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, Slack, Youtube Analytics, about four email accounts for some reason, WhatsApp, Garmin connect, X, Facebook, Instagram (2 account), Reddit, different news apps – you get the point.
Add in your favourite – plus train timetables, your childcare hours, different schedules and calendars, alerts and notifications, your Duolingo reminder, meal planning notification, Garmin Connect – all of which circumvent personal boundaries by alerting you in your pocket – we are continually plugged into the world, ‘available’, contactable.
We are surrounded by auxiliary demands – the extra stuff we have to do at work – that was once siloed off, someone else responsibility – now we can all do everything. I get burnout keeping up with cameras, lighting, audio, algorithms, demonetisation, thumbnails – and I am fortunate – some of the messages you sent in sound unbearable, I would crumble.
I don’t’ want to get all Prometheus and Frankenstein on you – but what’s happened when we’ve become slaves to technology? IN the 1930s, the economist John Meynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour work week by 2030. We’re about 5 years off and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s not looking good.
Big Tech companies’ employee very few people historically speaking while being in control of huge flows of revenue. Take Uber – it’s worth about $200 billion – but employs just 31,000 people – high-earners. Sounds a lot, but around 8 million people drive for Uber.
There’s been a lot of discussion about burnout in the gig economy. Uber drivers being always on, plugged in, anxious about reviews and surge-pricing timings, and the ‘algorithm’.
The research is mixed, but this 2022 BMJ study concluded that ‘Gig workers reported mental health and life satisfaction worse than those employed full time and part time, but better than the unemployed. Mediation analyses showed that gig workers’ worse mental health and life satisfaction than other workers were explained by their higher levels of loneliness and financial precarity’[17]
Uber drivers told this BBC reporter that Uber increases commission and cannot see what the passengers actually paid. Uber took 20%, then up to 41% - arbitrarily, while drivers struggle to make ends meet.[18]
This is just one example of tech inequities exacerbating inequality and burnout. Tech in particular has a particular Hussle culture that trickles down the ladder. I talked to Tech Workers Union member Simone about this:
Uber is just the most obvious example. Microsoft managers can access employee chats, emails, calendars, measure productivity. Companies like Amazon are known for tracking toilet time and outsourcing as much to cheap foreign markets as possible.
The point here is that burnout is a technological phenomenon as much as medical one. And so any solution has to reckon with how we’re connected to each other – in which ways are we recognised. The Uberification of society risks taking over everything. It is the model of productivity and efficiency over humanism – everything becomes a hussle, a grind, from driving to being an artists.
The Artist Adam Jartz wrote “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”’
The End of the Candle
The owl of Minerva flies at the coming of dusk. When the candle is almost burnt out. Do we have to go through burnout to get out the side? Wilmar Schaufeli and Bram P Buunk write that ‘‘Occupational stress occurs when job demands do not match the persona’s adaptive resources.”
And in this book, Steven Hobfoll argues that ‘the cognitive focus on mental health has meant we’ve ignored the sociohistorical causes of mental health.’’ He says ‘I argue that resources are the primary unit of interest in the stress process.’[19]
But of course this is a resource problem. Of course, we all need more time, money, staff, energy, breaks, capacity, more resources. Saying it doesn’t make it so. The more interesting question is how does burnout help us get more of what’s needed.
Burnout is a radical, potentially revolutionary concept because unlike say anxiety, burnout makes the link between mental and the economic – between in here and workplaces and economy and political unignorably explicit.
It’s easy to say – we need to fix inequality – it’s more interesting to ask, how can we use burnout to contribute? The historian Carl Schlott -talked about thinking with history rather than about history. Lets think with burnout.
There are two ends of the analysis we can approach burnout out from – the individual and the societal.
One issue is that the ‘societal’ model feels insurmountable, out of our control, structural. Chabot says that ‘society is perceived as “a selfish and destructive giant.” We ascribe to it “a colossal amount of power, dwarfi ng that of our unconscious desires.” And that we are a “defenseless child, bereft of resources.”
But the societal model, of course, ignores the individual – their individual lives, neuroses, inner conflicts, traumas, position in the world. The only response is a ‘relational’ one. How are we connected to society?
The psychologist Cary Cherniss points to three stages of burnout.
The causes, as we’ve seen, are a lack of resources, demands that exceed our need for autonomy and some control, fairness, and insufficient rewards for the work.
The results according to Cherniss are:Stage one is stress – an imbalance between resources and demands.Stage two: ‘emotional tension, fatigue, and exhaustion (strain)Stage three: ‘Changes in attitude and behaviour’ (depersonalisation, cynicism, coping mechanisms, etc).’
Depersonalisation and cynicism result in a collapse of meaning in our work. Psychologist Christina Maslach writes that ‘People are becoming cynical, keeping their distance, trying not to let themselves get too involved.’
Cynicism is a loss of idealism. It’s important and useful to see how Burnout is most common in places that seem most humanly important – teaching children, caring for the sick, the addict, the maternity war – places so full of what’s called moral injury – where workers are called upon to do things and make difficult choices that strain their moral beliefs.
Psychiatrist Alexis Burger writes that ‘In a stress- inducing situation, the natural behavior exhibited by animals is a fight or flight response. But, in a care- based relationship, which, by definition, represents a concentration of difficult interactions, one can neither escape nor attack; one is obligated to stay, even if one finds it unbearable.’[20]
You have to stay, but you mentally check out. Depersonalization means becoming a robot, sometimes even becoming negative and cynical not just towards the system but towards the receiver of your service or care.
The most influential philosopher of what’s happening to us in a burnt out world is the South Korean thinker Byun-Chul Han.
Han frames burnout as happening a permissive society – where everything is possible, everything is allowed, everything is achievable – the flip side of this world of ‘positivity’ is that it demands an ‘excess’ from us.
We used to live in a disciplinary society. We now live in an achievement society. Should is replaced by can. Everything is possible.
The major psychological difference is that in a disciplinary society we are exploited by an ‘other’, in an achievement society we ‘auto-exploit’ ourselves voluntarily.
Han writes ‘Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation. This is more efficient than allo-exploitation, for the feeling of freedom attends it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited.’
He talks of our egos bursting, ‘standing utterly alone’ – everything is on us, our successes and our failures.
Han’s Burnout Society is a rich and often complicated book. But there was a section I found particularly different. He says in an achievement society we must be self-starting. But, he says, ‘It is impossible to reward oneself’
The achievement society appears as meritocratic – everything is on us as individuals to perform, to do, to be, to choose, to dream – it is the society of freedom and individuation – that sounds great! But what if its precisely what’s wrong. What if, as Hegel said, we our psychologically, maybe even evolutionarily, entirely bound up with notions of recognition from others. What if we cannot avoid recognition but are so free that we only recognise the goals, achievements, ambitions, performance that we set ourselves. We live in a society where we ‘only have ourselves to blame’ – we auto-exploit.
We are expected to be achieving, doing, performing, choosing, dreaming – based on our desires. WE are free. But Richard Sennet says ‘Self-absorption does not produce gratification; it produces injury to the self’. Han calls it the ‘violence of positivity.’
He points out that in this kind of society, we actually avoid achieving our goals by always moving on to the next goal. We cannot celebrate, cannot stop, cannot be for or second, because the next achievement always beckons us forth. A society of the individual self ironically becomes a society of self-sacrifice.
The sociologist Emile Durkheim, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, saw what he called a ‘malady of infinite aspiration’ that was the result of those who ‘no longer know what is possible and what is not, what is just and what is unjust, which claims and expectations are legitimate and which are immoderate’.
This is Han’s point. We auto-exploit because we cannot learn these things ourselves, alone, we get them in some way from the interaction and pressures with the wider group. Is it the flexible society that leads to auto-exploitation? Is it freedom itself? Do we need to seek the cure unintuitively in unfreedom? In exploitation? Is it possible that autonomy, control, comes from structure?
Linear Security
We’ve prioritised freedom and flexibility over community and security. We’ve done so for some good reasons – innovation, freedom, individual choice, that flexible society. But we’ve tipped the balance too far.
‘The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress. […] Such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.’ – Han
Or Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that we’ve become schizophrenic. This is a complaint I often hear from my own mouth – it’s too much. I open my e-reader and have hundreds of books. I get overwhelmed by choice. It sounds like this from a lot of you – that at work you have too many things to do.
Let’s contrast the flexible society with linear security.
Institutions like guilds, unions, families, clubs, even monarchies or tribes and businesses, haves some kind of what I’ll call linear security baked into them. They are structured to endure linearly through time. Linearity aims to predict, control, and somewhat secure the future for the members of the group.
Linear security is somewhat formulaic – going to see family on a Sunday, regulating workplaces, having a standard wage, going to the same church – these are all forms of linear security.
In many cases linearity is the death of creativity, innovation, and freedom. Guilds controlled and heavily regulated their profession – up to the point that you couldn’t legally do the thing – woodworking, say - without being a member of the guild. This, of course, stifles the other pole – creativity, innovation, freedom.
The security model is linear and predictable. It is in many ways safe. The flexible model is unpredictable and chaotic. It is similar to the distinction Nietzsche drew between the Dionysian spirit and the Apollonian. In Nietzsche’s time, he believed they needed more of the Dionysian – but he believed that a healthy culture integrates both.
Are we too flexible? This may go counter to how many of you feel burnout. How are we too flexible when it feels like you have no flexibility? No freedom? As we saw, burnout often comes from a lack of autonomy, of having too many demands placed on you. That doesn’t seem flexible?
But that overwhelm is from having too much to do – which is a sense of too much flexibility, too much multitasking. Plus, it’s a result of too much flexibility up the chain, that is exerting pressure on your down the chain. The flexibility of the economy and contract, the flexibility of tech, of always on, of having to achieve many different things, of the race to the bottom of – they all hover above, pushing down on us.
Burnout is often referred to a a mirror disorder – it is society reflected back in us – society reflected in us, on us, moulding and shaping us.
When I read Nietzsche’s descriptions of the Dionysian, it feels to me very much like the frantic, disregulated, overwhelm that accompanies burnout. Which seems very much at odds with the nineteenth century Nietzsche was writing in.
An interesting finding, for example, that that role ambiguity is moderately to highly correlated with burnout.[21] This happens when there’s not enough information to do a job well – nurses report it. Lacking supervisor support also has been found to have positive correlation, lack of feedback too.
Again, my burnout is nowhere near as bad as many of you, but this resonates with Youtube work too. Social media platforms have moved away from the regulated, linear subscriber model – where I have some level of confidence that I can publish a video and you will all see it. And has now moved to the flexible model where the videos served are the best performing, most clickable, most viral videos, regardless of whether you’ve subbed or not.
As Patreon founder Jack Conte recently talked about, this is terrible for creators, for stability, for quality over the long term. Which is also why it really helps me if you click that bell and join us on Patreon and other socials – it’s more of a grind for me to make sure we get seen – it takes up way more time.
We need mechanisms for linear security. The point of linear security is to regulate the components that are working together in some way – so each part can work with the whole. It’s a bit like car – you could say, ok, each part can do whatever it wants to perform as well as possible – and so one overachieving wheel says ok and shoots off, an engine part spins faster, the exhaust overheats, and the car bursts apart.
There has to be some agreement between components – and in this case the components are us.
The incredibly frustrating thing about burnout is that, like car wheels shooting off and burning out, it seems so obviously pointless. No-one – most employers included – wants a burnout workforce. Mark told me that 23% of the disease burden later on comes from mental health issues – stress, burnout, adaptive behaviours like drinking, eating, addiction. If that’s the case, prevention isn’t just an ideal of a compassionate humane society, it’s entirely consistent with doing better work, becoming more efficient, being more rational. It’s a win-win. So Why not focus on this?
Balancing the Scales
Freudenberg wrote that ‘In every fire, even a burnt-out one, there are glowing embers. You can use them to rekindle the spark.’
The causes of burnout, as we’ve heard, aren’t straightforward. They can be individual, social, company specific, economy political, psychological – my own often comes from an anxiety about the future that drives me to work anxiously. For others, the causes are technological, political, economic.
This makes it difficult to generalise about burnout, but, the fact that it’s become so general, necessitates some general answer – the very generality of it suggests a broken system.
Take Han’s achievement subject. He writes ‘the exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.’
This is much more complex than ‘boss needs more work done.’ As Kelloggs showed us, we are all often complicit in the rat race.
For me, the most interesting general psychological reference point that has come up frequently, is the point of recognition. If Han is right, the ego continues burning itself out because it’s impossible to self-recognise – we always need external reference points.
Of course, the profit-motive under capitalism, the race to the bottom, the need to outperform competitors absolutely undermines this.
But other things do too – the anxious subject is always seeking some kind of recognition that is unavailable, potentially within – remember, we’re not talking about simple ‘well-done’ recognition – recognition is non-simple – we embody it, there are different types – we can be recognised negatively and positively.
As Hegel knew – recognition is conflict – both good and bad – it’s the point where our inner subject meets the subject of the ‘Other’ -that regulates how we become social.
The French Sociologist Alain Ehrenberg said ‘With the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality and can no longer be counted on to guide us.’
If we cannot exist by recognising ourselves, if we cannot be recognised by the system of work we exist in, or the technology we use – if we are under resourced, over laboured, if we lack autonomy, and control – the only thing left is to seek that recognition elsewhere – in a union, pressure group, protest group, political group. If burnout leads to cynicism it could also be that cynicism – a breakdown in societal recognition - leads to burnout. Maybe we need to accept that accept that recognition is lacking or hidden or transferred in certain places – that the only place to seek that recognition is one which seeks to fix a broken system, workplace, or person. If cynicism is a lack of meaning, if linear security is its cure, then positive conflict is the route to change.
Han writes ‘he late-modern achievement-subject is subject to no one.’ Maybe this is the great irony of freedom under modernity – that it’s a mirage – that we are never really free, and we need to seek out, accept, and make plain the points of conflict – to lead into them, to let yourself be recognised in the point of conflict. That ironically giving up freedom is the route to more freedom. In other words, make yourself subject – slave - to a higher value – positive change.
We must learn from Kelloggs that we are in a fight together, to justify that four hour week, to make the case for it, to follow the evidence which shows quite conclusively that four hour weeks are more productive not less.[22]
We are in a prisoner’s dilemma because we’re all scared of being the one that stops, that checks out, the demands change. We must become slaves to freedom. To be captive to a group that recognises the need for a different structure.
It might mean organising, joining a union, or pressure group. It might mean putting the case to your boss. It might mean It might mean quitting. It might mean therapy. It might mean radical political change.
IN 2014, Zeynep Ton wrote a bestseller on the ‘good jobs strategy’ arguing – showing – that companies that prioritise good pay, benefits, schedules, employee meaning, and dignity, often outperform the companies that don’t. She points to companies were employees report high job-satisfaction – Costco, QuickTrip, Trader Joe’s
She writes ‘QuikTrip offers affordable healthcare, a stable schedule, and significant training, and promotes managers exclusively from within—with corresponding pay increases. And the results are staggering: its lines are fast, its customers incredibly loyal. Its sales per square foot are 50 percent higher than the industry average. And employee turnover is just 13 percent, compared to 59 percent amongst the top quarter of the convenience store industry.’[23]
Burnout is the realisation of the tortoise and the hare fable. We all think we have to sprint to win – and sprinting might mean overwork, it might mean squeezing employees, it might mean not raising the minimum wage out of fear of being outcompeted by China – all the while the tortoise – relaxed and happy – overtakes.
We are blind to this. We focus on the immediate instead of the mediate. We want the quick solution and are terrified of patience. We need to turn the world upside down to reveal new ways of doing things. We need to become slaves to another way of doing things. We need to give up being endless achievement subjects, avoid cynicism by seeking meaning in resolute change.
Mark had a great line – he said we too often get ‘sucked into the tyranny of the urgent over the important’. The news cycle moves on, we spend money on cancer but not stress on, we fear taking a break.
SOURCESJames Suzman, Work, A History of How we Spend Our TimeAnne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout GenerationPascal Chabot, Global BurnoutByung-Chul Han, The Burnout SocietyMark Jackson, the Age of StressCharles Beard, American NervousnessJoyce Appleby, the Relentless RevolutionAlan Hortwitz, Anxiety: A Short HistoryWilmar Schaufeli and Bram Buunk, Burnout: An Overview of 25 Years of Research and TheorizingStevan E. Hobfoll, Stress, Culture, and Community: The Psychology and Philosophy of Stress
https://mronline.org/2010/04/02/kelloggs-six-hour-day/?utm_source=chatgpt.com