The Limit of Work and the End of Burnout - Part I

This is a two-parts post about two books I recently read on work and burnout. The second part is available here , but please make sure to read this first part before continuing.

Introduction

Last night my kids asked me to watch a cartoon they used to enjoy when they were small and we used to put them to bed. Most times we’d read a book, but at times I would use one of a few YouTube cartoons in Spanish to get them familiar with other language sources than just me. One of their all time favorites was that old Walt Disney’s “Three Little Pigs”¹, and that’s the one they asked for last night. I would have not mentioned this personal story here if I had not just finished reading two books on work, and I probably would not have watched the short movie from the same place I did last night if that was not the case. Beyond the morale of the original Three Little Pigs fable², this particular cartoon representation is explicit about the priority of work over play. The Practical pig can’t stop working because he’s aware of the imminent danger represented by the wolf, and he is explicit about it when the other two pigs come singing and end with “All he does is work all day”:

You can play and laugh and fiddle
Don’t think you can make me sore
I’ll be safe and you’ll be sorry
When the Wolf comes to your door!

What makes the Practical pig “work all day”? Is it fear of the wolf? Would he have worked as hard had there been no wolf? Would we have?

The books I recently finished³ were “The End of Burnout”⁴, and “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”⁵. I enjoyed both very much, and though they were born from very different experiences and focused on different dimensions of work (and even written at different times, with a four year distance in between), they appear to share similar perspectives on what makes “work” crazy and thus the cause of burnout. Actually, I read “The End of Burnout” intro and first chapter a few weeks back, then jumped to “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” this week, and finishing “The End…” right after. In a sense, it felt as a conversation, both moving in the same direction, one (“The End of Burnout”) providing a theoretical framework along a root cause analysis of burnout and showing how it is the result of the tension or gap between our ideals of work (personal and cultural) and the reality of our jobs; the other (“It Doesn’t Have…”), providing ideas and examples that reduce that gap by both, showing what can be done to improve the actual conditions of work, while also “curbing the ambition” of work and its context (companies), bringing down the ideals closer to the mundane realities of everyday human economic activities. I’ll try to provide some examples below that illustrate these connections, but I also hope to point to the unique aspects of each and the reasons I believe we need to pay attention to these books “today”.

The End of Burnout

There are at least 2 aspects of “The End of Burnout” that I found particularly original. The first is the notion of a gap as the origin of burnout, the tension between our ideals of work and the reality of our jobs that is at its source. In particular I found the attention to the “ideal” side, with its cultural and ethical implications, to be revealing, though also problematic from the argumentative point of view. Likewise, on the “reality” side, the fact that it is not just overwork that is mainly responsible for burnout is eyeopening. The second aspect I found original and helpful was the author’s definition of burnout not as a state, but as a spectrum.

The Gap

That gap between our ideals for work and the reality of our job is burnout’s origin point. We burn out when what we actually do at work falls short of what we hoped to do. Those ideals and expectations are not only personal, but cultural. In the cultures of wealthy nations, we want more than just a salary from our jobs. We want dignity. We want to grow as persons. We might even want some transcendent purpose. And we don’t get these things, in part because work has become emotionally more demanding and materially less rewarding over the past several decades.⁶

The above is the book’s thesis, that what causes burnout is a gap, a tension. It “identifies burnout as a cultural problem, not an individual one.” (p. 11) The author argues that we have made work our highest human endeavor, a condition he calls, following the mid-twentieth century work of the German philosopher Josef Pieper, “total work”. The issue with total work is that it diminishes our dignity, character, and spiritual aspiration: “total work occupies not only our time but our psyches”.⁷

But how did we get to make work, total? “We work because we hope it will help us flourish in every sense.” (p. 115) This is what the author calls, following Plato, the “noble lie”⁸: that work is the source of dignity, character, and purpose. He traces the ideal back to Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, perhaps a contentious move. From this perspective, Calvin’s doctrine of election along the notion of calling would have provided the mindset for our work ethics today because, though “it’s impossible to do anything to deserve God’s favor”, good works “can be signs of election” (p. 127) and the anxiety to confirm one’s salvation along the notion to have been called to serve God via our service of men⁹, aka work, would have been enough motivation to keep men working. This initial attitude became embedded in our culture (and not just capitalist I’d argue). We and our contemporaries might not care much about Calvinism, election or calling, but “we’re still trapped in the Calvinist cage. We are anxious to demonstrate to potential employers, and to ourselves, that we are talented, are autotelic personalities, are work saints.” (p. 128) Whether the Protestant Ethics played such role or not, if we agree that our culture of work is based on the notion that “dignity [is] earned through labor” (p. 137), we’ll probably also see how, “[f]or the sake of that hollow promise, we enter the gap, and we keep stretching ourselves across it.” We could of course ask if this is the main reason why we do work. The author agrees many work for a living, but his point is that even then, that’s not the only or even main reason for their work: “Even workers who aren’t rich, who really do need every cent of their paycheck, often say there’s more than money at stake.” (p. 114) I would expect the author would agree that this probably needs more research and additional considerations, and he does mention the limitations when considering how burnout affects minorities and how that condition might influence the overall burnout experience. In any case, in my context and culture I could not disagree with the description of “our” ideals of work, even if my anecdotal evidence at least raises the question of whether this is a common pattern across all of Europe and North America, or limited to groups, even if large ones.

The other side of the gap is the deteriorating working conditions. The book’s chapter 4 goes into multiple trends and details. I would simply like to mention that the trend in burnout is not simply an increase in people’s workload. Following Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter’s “The Truth About Burnout”, Malesic identifies the six areas where the gap is most prominent: “workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. […] A key point is that burnout does not result only from overwork.” (p. 98) This is contrary to most popular accounts (and my own prior to reading this book) on what often causes burnout. Among the many reasons contributing to the creation of poorer conditions at work are bureaucracy¹⁰, outsourcing and the gig economy. The six (reality) areas mentioned are ethical in nature: “Justice, autonomy, community, values: these are the basic components of ethics.”¹¹ Burnout is a moral problem, both from the material conditions that originate it, as well as from the effects it has on people and communities.

The Spectrum

We don’t know where the line is, on the Maslach Burnout Inventory or some other measure, between “burned out” and “not burned out,” because there isn’t one.¹²

If Burnout is not simply the result of overwork, neither can it simply be identified as exhaustion. Exhaustion, cynicism, and a feeling of ineffectiveness are the three classic symptoms of burnout, but they’re all experienced with various degrees of intensity and in different combinations, and depending on the effects they have and their duration, they might make it more difficult to be traditionally identified as burnout. This is why the author argues we need to talk about burnout as a “spectrum of conditions, not an all-or-nothing disorder”. This allows us to accept that burnout can manifest as exhaustion without depersonalization or ineffectiveness, or as ineffectiveness, the most common experience of burnout often associated with disappointment or detachment, yet not represent an extreme or full experience of burnout. In order to better identify the spectrum, the author follows (p. 74) Leiter and Maslach and adapts their work on “burnout profiles”, the most common ways people experience burnout by looking at the patterns in people’s responses to the Maslach Burnout Inventory ¹³. The profiles map to the classic symptoms of burnout, though the author presents them as the different types of reactions to the gap above between the realities of our jobs and our ideals of work: we may overextend to try to keep the distance between reality and ideal as small as possible (overworked); we may become cynical when giving up on the ideal completely (cynicism); or we may become frustrated when holding on to the ideal (ineffectiveness). When we give up (or get torn apart) on both reality and ideal, we become burnout. The initial profile is not burnout (the author argues against Leiter and Maslach engaged because he’s convinced that “employee engagement” as a work ideal itself contributes to burnout.)¹⁴.

Why is this important? Because by expanding the criteria for burnout we can make the distinction between extreme burnout cases and other incipient forms such as overwork, thus providing better help to those who are already on a trajectory for more extreme forms of burnout, particularly as some of the profiles are more likely to be openly confessed (overextending) while others may be cause for shame (frustration, linked to ineffectiveness), yet each requires additional measures to prevent things from getting worse.

Chapter 3 includes numbers that help clarify the state of burnout in North America, and might be representative of other places too. The most important figure is that more than half of workers are on the burnout spectrum, while “only” 5 to 10 percent fit the burn-out profile: “the percentage of workers who fit the burned-out profile is similar to the percentage of adults who have clinical depression, 8.1 percent in the United States, and we rightly see depression as a serious problem.” (p. 76)

The Rest

The second part of book is focused on countering the cultural premise that “dignity [is] earned through labor”, and presents its inverse. Sustained by religious voices (most notably Catholic popes) but also by secular philosophers and economists, the idea that humans have dignity, either because they are God’s creation or not means, but ends in themselves, is what allows us to affirm that “work only has dignity because human beings do.” (p. 149)

Through literature, religious communities and other “fringes of culture”, the author dedicates the second part of the book to explore ideas to “place a limit on work” and its claim to the totality of life. He may not have succeeded in showing very compelling practical ways to do so¹⁵, but that may be due to how embedded our ideals of work are and how limited any “practical” solution to the burnout problem may be, requiring first a “conversion”, a change of mind, a new perspective¹⁶.

But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. Not only should we continue to “work” for better jobs, but we should also continue to challenge the idea of “total work”. These are two of the things that “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” does in its own terms, and I believe that it can help us to move in the “The End of Burnout” direction while we, or the people in the fringes of culture, imagine and try out how can we flourish in the post-work era¹⁷. To read about that, continue to part II of this post .

I will conclude this first post with the author’s own words, which I believe are a good summary of the book’s “Counterculture” block:

The Protestant ethic that we carried into the postindustrial era helped create the vast wealth of the countries that are today most concerned about burnout. But it also valorized a destructive ideal of working to the point of martyrdom. To overcome burnout, we have to get rid of that ideal and create a new shared vision of how work fits into a life well lived. That vision will replace the work ethic’s old, discredited promise. It will make dignity universal, not contingent on paid labor. It will put compassion for self and others ahead of productivity. And it will affirm that we find our highest purpose in leisure, not work. We will realize this vision in community and preserve it through common disciplines that keep work in its place. The vision, assembled from new and old ideas alike, will be the basis of a new culture, one that leaves burnout behind.