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March 27, 2022 11:34 am

Is Burnout Just a Sign of a Broken Labor System?

A new essay from The Baffler suggests burnout is "a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system," rather than a trendy term that "resonates with affluent professionals who fetishize overwork." And then the essay turns to Jonathan Malesic's new book The End of Burnout:He casts a critical eye on burnout discourse, in which the term is used loosely and self-flatteringly. Journalistic treatments of burnout — such as Anne Helen Petersen's widely read 2019 essay — tend to emphasize the heroic exertions of the burned-out worker, who presses on and gets her work done, no matter what. Such accounts have significantly raised burnout's prestige, Malesic argues, by aligning the disorder with "the American ideal of constant work." But they give, at best, a partial view of what burnout is. The psychologist Christina Maslach, a foundational figure in burnout research — the Maslach Burnout Inventory is the standard burnout assessment — sees burnout as having three components: exhaustion; cynicism or depersonalization (detectable in doctors, for example, who see their patients as "problems" to be solved, rather than people to be treated); and a sense of ineffectiveness or futility.... Accounts of the desperate worker as labor-hero ignore the important fact that burnout impairs your ability to do your job. A "precise diagnostic checklist" for burnout, Malesic writes, would curtail loose claims of fashionable exhaustion, while helping people who suffer from burnout seek medical treatment. Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout's clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise.... [The book] is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don't work — the old, the disabled — lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another's humanity.... William Morris, in his famous essay "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil," dreamed of a political transformation in which all work would be made pleasurable. Malesic thinks, instead, that work should not be the center of our lives at all.... Burnout is an indicator that something has gone wrong in the way we organize our work. But as a concept it remains lodged in an old paradigm — a work ethic that was already dubious in America's industrial period, and now, in a period of extreme inequality and increasing precarity across once-stable professions, is even harder to credit.... The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week.... But the strange work ethic the rich have devised seems highly relevant for our understanding of burnout as a cultural phenomenon, especially as it spreads beyond its traditional victims — doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, anti-poverty lawyers — and courses through the ranks of knowledge workers more generally."

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