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The term burnout was coined a half century ago to describe the exhaustion, cynicism, and feeling of ineffectiveness experienced by those in the caregiving and human-service professions: doctors, police officers, social workers, etc.<\/p>\n
Over the decades it has come to be applied to more and more professions and even unpaid work as well: professors are burned out; students are burned out; retail workers are burned out; activists are burned out; parents are burned out. People feel burned out on life, in general.<\/p>\n
Yet while the application and discussion of burnout has greatly expanded, what burnout is, exactly, and what causes it has remained stubbornly difficult to pin down.<\/p>\n
There is no clinical definition of burnout, no universally agreed upon yardstick for what constitutes it, no official diagnostic checklist as to its symptoms.<\/p>\n
In the absence of this consensus, surveys that are administered on the subject each use various kinds of criteria and frame their questions differently, making it hard to accurately assess just how many people are actually experiencing the condition.<\/p>\n
As Jonathan Malesic points out in The End of Burnout<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n One meta-analysis found that out of 156 studies that used the MBI [Maslach Burnout Inventory \u2014 a standard burnout assessment] to examine physician burnout, there were forty-seven different definitions of burnout and at least two dozen definitions each of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. It\u2019s no wonder these studies produced widely divergent results, from 0 percent of physicians experiencing burnout, up to 80 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n An absence of consensus around burnout also makes it difficult to disentangle it from other conditions that manifest in similar ways. Are you burned out or just bored<\/a>? When is burnout different from simple tiredness or stress? Is someone burned out, or are they actually depressed<\/a>?<\/p>\n This murkiness doesn’t mean burnout isn\u2019t real. There\u2019s a reason the term has become so popular: it perfectly describes a common, intuitively understood experience \u2014 a state that can feel akin to things like straightforward exhaustion, garden-variety boredom, or clinical depression, but also feels qualitatively distinct. Even if it\u2019s a varied, subjective thing, people often simply know it when they have it. Nonetheless, the murkiness around burnout should invite some epistemological humility into the discussion \u2014 a willingness to acknowledge that much about the condition remains a mystery.<\/p>\n That is equally true when dealing with what causes burnout. Because if we don\u2019t have a clear definition of what burnout is, we\u2019re equally confused about what drives it.<\/p>\n Burnout is most commonly associated with overwork. And yet there are folks working 80 hours a week who don\u2019t feel burned out, and people working 30 who do.<\/p>\n Another popular theory is that burnout is a peculiar product of our modern world \u2014 something to do with its go-go pace, its atomization, its overstimulation. And yet, even if they did not yet have the word burnout to describe it, people have been complaining of burnout-esque conditions throughout history, especially since the dawn of industrialization. In 19th century America, folks called it \u201cneurasthenia,\u201d<\/a> and thought it was caused by the rise of stultifying office work and the increasing speed of technological change. Add to this the fact that the strictest of monks, who lived a couldn\u2019t-be-more stripped-down lifestyle almost two thousand years ago, experienced something akin to burnout too, and the idea that burnout is driven by our brain-fragmenting devices begins to seem more tenuous still. (More on those monks in a bit.)<\/p>\n Related to the modernity hypothesis, is the idea that burnout has to do with the increasingly blurry line between our work lives and our personal lives. But that line was arguably even blurrier in past centuries; you woke up, milked the cows, chopped firewood, planted and harvested on your property, mended things around the house . . . farmers were WFH-ing long before we were, with essentially no separation between their \u201cwork\u201d lives and their \u201cpersonal\u201d lives (even explicitly dividing the two would have been a strange distinction to make).<\/p>\n Well, we then think, if burnout isn\u2019t caused by the encroaching reach of modern work, then it is a result of the essential meaninglessness of that work. Modern work isn’t as directly connected to our survival as it was in yesteryear, nor is it always fulfilling on a higher, more philosophical plane either. And yet we have here a problem similar to the overwork hypothesis, in that there are people in jobs that are very meaningful who still burn out, and folks in positions that are devoid of meaning who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n In his book, Malesic postulates that burnout is caused by the gap between our ideals of work and its reality; we expect work to fulfill us on every level, and then are disappointed when it does not. We place too much of our need for meaning on our jobs, and don\u2019t have enough intrinsically valuable pursuits outside of it.<\/p>\n But then we\u2019re back to the inconvenient counterexample of those monks again. They didn\u2019t work for pay, didn\u2019t receive the kind of status-elevating, identity-affirming rewards we seek from our jobs, and their work was entirely<\/em> pursued for its intrinsic value. So too, one can find plenty of ordinary people who do<\/em> have other sources of meaning outside the office, and yet still feel burned out nonetheless.<\/p>\n Indeed, perhaps the most peculiar cases of burnout are in those who want to be in the jobs they occupy, who generally like their work, who may be doing meaningful and\/or creative things, who aren\u2019t overly-reliant on their jobs to define them, who have a decent level of autonomy, and may even be their own bosses . . . but still experience periods of burnout. There\u2019s no clear, immediate cause of their affliction, no clear answer as to why burnout rears its head when it does \u2014 their work hours have not increased, their not-too-onerous workload is about the same, the amount of stress in their job is fairly stable \u2014 but they feel burned out all the same. They suddenly feel tired of doing what they\u2019re doing. They hit a wall. They feel like they\u2019ve got to get out. They don\u2019t want to go on with it.<\/p>\n All of this is not to say that overwork, overstimulation, and meaning-bereft jobs aren\u2019t real problems with real, deleterious effects. On both an individual and societal level we should be striving to make work more fulfilling and humane.<\/p>\n It\u2019s just to say that even if we solved all these problems, we would not entirely solve the issue of burnout. Though these issues can make burnout worse, even in their absence, burnout can still occur.<\/p>\n So, if we hope to understand burnout better, we\u2019ll have to look elsewhere for an underlying cause.<\/p>\n No matter your vocation (to include parenting as well), our schedules and tasks are fairly routine and homogeneous. We do the same things, day after day. Even in jobs that involve a high degree of creativity, there is still a sense of doing line work; you\u2019re just spitting out art and media and design instead of widgets. Write an article. Write another one. Write another one. Rinse, wash, repeat. Rinse, wash, repeat. Whether for a 9-5 employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer, the conveyor belt of work just keeps on moving.<\/p>\n This problem of sameness has been with us since the dawn of settled, urban civilization. Prior to it, life for hunter-gatherers and farmers followed a rhythmic and cyclical pattern; there were different tasks to accomplish in winter and summer, busier periods and fallow lulls, a time to plant, and a time to reap. There was a seasonality to life, in diet, rituals, work, and otherwise.<\/p>\n Today, we eat the same things, do the same tasks, listen to the same music, and follow the same routines 7 days a week, 365 days a year.<\/p>\n And it may be this sameness that is actually behind our burnout.<\/p>\n It seems to be the case that human beings can only take so much sameness. Our cells get saturated with it and we hit a wall. We don\u2019t want to do the thing we\u2019ve been doing anymore.<\/p>\n If it\u2019s true that burnout is worse than ever in the modern age, it\u2019s because contemporary factors have only exacerbated this trend. Work, the exact same work you do in every season of the year, has seeped into the weekend; few any longer keep what remained one of the last vestiges of our more cyclical lives \u2014 the weekly Sabbath. But even if work was corralled back into a Monday-Friday, 9-5 schedule, the sameness problem, though diminished, would still persist.<\/p>\n Indeed, while we can solve the problems of overwork and under-meaning, the problem of sameness has no real solution.<\/p>\n You can, and should, try to reintroduce a little cyclicality into your life<\/a> \u2014 deliberately implementing a bit of seasonality into the foods you eat, the music you listen to<\/a>, and the events you participate in. Availing oneself of rest and recreation helps too. But even after a long vacation, you\u2019re right back into the relentless loop of regular life. You can mitigate the problem, yes, but you\u2019re then simply at 85% sameness rather than 95%. It\u2019s a balm, but also a drop in the bucket.<\/p>\n The state of life and work in the modern world is what it is. The vast majority of jobs will require us to do pretty much the same things throughout the year, year after year. We can no more introduce a cyclical calendar into our work, than it would have made sense for the farmer to remove the idea of seasons from his.<\/p>\n You can escape from sameness by changing jobs, of course, but it\u2019s impossible to change jobs often enough to both beat burnout and advance in a career: if you stay in a position long enough to accrue professional skill and mastery, you\u2019ll inevitably hit a patch of burnout; if you don\u2019t stay on long enough for burnout to catch you, you\u2019ll never acquire that skill and mastery.<\/p>\n And what if you actively do want to stay in some job, maybe indefinitely? It\u2019s what you want to do, maybe even something you feel called to do?<\/p>\n Is there anywhere we can turn to find an answer for how to deal with sameness-induced burnout?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s get back to those aforementioned monks.<\/p>\n In the 3rd century AD, dedicated Christians from all walks of life withdrew to the Egyptian desert to become hermits and focus their thoughts and energies entirely on God. Known as the \u201cDesert Fathers,\u201d these monks renounced all the creature comforts of civilization to inhabit a tiny, barren, sand-strewn cell and adopt a life of silence, solitude, prayer, study, fasting, meditation, and manual labor.<\/p>\n While monks followed the cycles of liturgy, for the most part their lives were very regimented and routinized; in a way, they were the first to experience the kind of Groundhog Day<\/em>-esque sameness that would come to characterize the modern age (on a much more austere, ascetic level, of course). So it\u2019s perhaps not surprising that among the challenges they faced, was one that mirrors our modern concept of burnout. The monks called this affliction acedia<\/em>.<\/p>\n Acedia comes from the Greek for \u201clack of care,\u201d in the sense of indifference. There is no single English word that serves as a direct equivalent to acedia; the term encompasses a variety of connotations, including exhaustion, languor, listlessness, boredom, disgust, and despair. The condition was marked by a lack of desire to work, and it could affect a monk in both body and mind, creating mental distress and real or imagined physical ailments.<\/p>\nBurnout = An Oversaturation of Sameness<\/h2>\n
The Monastic Solution to Sameness-Induced Burnout: The Hair of the Dog<\/h2>\n
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