Read: 2025-08-21
Recommend: 3/10
The book is kind of disappointing. I had a very high hope of learning something new about burnout, but I learned very little.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
I define burnout as the experience of being pulled between expectation and reality at work. And I argue that burnout is a cultural phenomenon that expanded in the past five decades but that has deep historical roots in our belief that work will be a means not just to a paycheck but to dignity, character, and a sense of purpose.
I hope this book will help our culture recognize that work doesn’t dignify us or form our character or give our lives purpose. We dignify work, we shape its character, and we give it purpose within our lives. Once we realize this, we can devote less of ourselves to our jobs, improve our labor conditions, and value those of us who do not work for pay. Together, we can end burnout culture and flourish in ways that do not depend on work.
The End of Burnout appears in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended work around the world. In the United States, the mass unemployment caused by society-wide quarantine demonstrated once and for all that our ideals for work were a lie. People’s dignity, their worth as humans, had nothing to do with their employment status.
I was on the treadmill of the to-do list: one damn thing after another.
the term ‘burnout’ has become extremely popular—perhaps too popular; it has been so loosely used that it has become almost meaningless.” They caution that burnout “is not synonymous with job stress, fatigue, alienation, or depression. To use the term loosely is to diminish its usefulness.
And in 1974, he published a paper titled “Staff Burn-Out” in an academic journal. In the paper, Freudenberger asks, “Who is Prone to Burn-Out?” His answer is unambiguous: “The dedicated and the committed.”
I now recognize in that one sentence all three of the classic symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a feeling of ineffectiveness.
We have been over-diagnosing ourselves with burnout as a means of self-praise for the entire history of burnout culture.
Months later, when I was ranting on the phone to my wife about a scholar who I thought snubbed me at a conference reception—that was cynicism. Ignoring the papers I needed to grade and lumbering through class unprepared—that was ineffectiveness. Having to take a nap two hours after getting up most mornings—that was exhaustion.
I was blinded by my trust in the American promise: if I got the right kind of job, then success and happiness would surely follow. This promise, however, is mostly false. It’s what the philosopher Plato called a “noble lie,” a myth that justifies the fundamental arrangement of society. Plato taught that if people don’t believe the lie, then society will fall into chaos. Our particular noble lie gets us to believe in the value of hard work. We labor for our bosses’ profit but convince ourselves we’re attaining the highest good. If burnout is the experience of stretching between two stilts that are falling away from each other—our ideals for work and the reality of our jobs—then we come into our jobs already holding one of them: our ideals. We hope the job will deliver on its promise, but that very hope gets us into the conditions that will eventually burn us out. Hope gets us to put in the extra hours, take on the extra project, and live with the lack of a raise or the recognition we need. Ironically, believing in the ideal of a good life earned through hard work is the biggest obstacle to attaining what it promises.
In a state of flow, you cannot tell the surgeon from the surgery. Although games are meant to induce flow, Csikszentmihalyi thinks it occurs most readily at work, which has “built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.” Exemplary workers he studied—among them a farmer, a welder, and a cook—became “lost in the interaction so that their selves could emerge stronger afterward. Thus transformed, work becomes enjoyable, and as the result of a personal investment of psychic energy, it feels as if it were freely chosen, as well.”
With every aspect of life transformed into work, we who live in the total work society are suspicious of anything that comes easily. We believe we have to earn everything through toil—not just money, but insight and pleasure. Even, in the case of Steve Jobs, death. In Pieper’s words, the person who values only work “refuses to have anything as a gift.” Unproductive time is a waste. We justify time off as “self-care,” which sounds like resistance to total work but which we often frame as a way to stay strong enough to carry a heavy workload.
Personal finance blogger Sarah Berger speculates that millennial-generation workers leave most of their vacation time unused because they “feel like they have something to prove and want to dispel these negative stereotypes that have labeled them as entitled or lazy.” It’s worth asking to whom they are trying to prove this invisible characteristic: their bosses, or themselves? Whether workers’ sense of indispensability stems from ego or job insecurity, though, the person trapped in this iron cage is actually afraid the school, store, or company can function without them. Walking away is the truest test of whether the firm can get by in their absence. If they never take vacation, they never have to find out.
I believed the ideals, the noble lies about work as a site of meaning and purpose. So I identified with my role and kept anxiously trying to prove I was indispensable to the college’s mission. I believed I gave the college more—better teaching, more research, superior leadership—for the same salary as my colleagues. The pride I felt in being such a productive, engaged employee turned into anger at the unfairness of the situation: I’m giving the college so much more than that guy is, but we’re getting paid the same amount! Then I kept working to prove that the college and its students underestimated me, until I could barely work at all. My ideal image of a good professor both motivated my work and fostered my burnout, because it was at odds with the reality of the job. I wanted to be a work saint and became a work martyr, though a resentful one. In short, I was a typical worker in our burnout culture. The very thing our culture says will make us flourish—our work—keeps us from doing so.