As a diagnosis, it’s too vague to be helpful—but its rise tells us a lot about the way we work.
Photo by Aiony Haust on Unsplash
To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure at three in four. A recent book claims that burnout afflicts an entire generation. In “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” the former BuzzFeed News reporter Anne Helen Petersen figures herself as a “pile of embers.” The earth itself suffers from burnout. “Burned out people are going to continue burning up the planet,” Arianna Huffington warned this spring. Burnout is widely reported to have grown worse during the pandemic, according to splashy stories that have appeared on television and radio, up and down the Internet, and in most major newspapers and magazines, including Forbes, the Guardian, Nature, and the New Scientist. The New York Times solicited testimonials from readers. “I used to be able to send perfect emails in a minute or less,” one wrote. “Now it takes me days just to get the motivation to think of a response.” When an assignment to write this essay appeared in my in-box, I thought, Oh, God, I can’t do that, I’ve got nothing left, and then I told myself to buck up. The burnout literature will tell you that this, too—the guilt, the self-scolding—is a feature of burnout. If you think you’re burned out, you’re burned out, and if you don’t think you’re burned out you’re burned out. Everyone sits under the shade of that juniper tree, weeping, and whispering, “Enough.”
But what, exactly, is burnout? The World Health Organization recognized burnout syndrome in 2019, in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, but only as an occupational phenomenon, not as a medical condition. In Sweden, you can go on sick leave for burnout. That’s probably harder to do in the United States because burnout is not recognized as a mental disorder by the DSM-5, published in 2013, and though there’s a chance it could one day be added, many psychologists object, citing the idea’s vagueness. A number of studies suggest that burnout can’t be distinguished from depression, which doesn’t make it less horrible but does make it, as a clinical term, imprecise, redundant, and unnecessary.
To question burnout isn’t to deny the scale of suffering, or the many ravages of the pandemic: despair, bitterness, fatigue, boredom, loneliness, alienation, and grief—especially grief. To question burnout is to wonder what meaning so baggy an idea can possibly hold, and whether it can really help anyone shoulder hardship. Burnout is a metaphor disguised as a diagnosis. It suffers from two confusions: the particular with the general, and the clinical with the vernacular. If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just . . . the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage—if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies—then it raises a historical question. What started it?
Herbert J. Freudenberger, the man who named burnout, was born in Frankfurt in 1926. By the time he was twelve, Nazis had torched the synagogue to which his family belonged. Using his father’s passport, Freudenberger fled Germany. Eventually, he made his way to New York; for a while, in his teens, he lived on the streets. He went to Brooklyn College, then trained as a psychoanalyst and completed a doctorate in psychology at N.Y.U. In the late nineteen-sixties, he became fascinated by the “free clinic” movement. The first free clinic in the country was founded in Haight-Ashbury, in 1967. “ ‘Free’ to the free clinic movement represents a philosophical concept rather than an economic term,” one of its founders wrote, and the community-based clinics served “alienated populations in the United States including hippies, commune dwellers, drug abusers, third world minorities, and other ‘outsiders’ who have been rejected by the more dominant culture.” Free clinics were free of judgment, and, for patients, free of the risk of legal action. Mostly staffed by volunteers, the clinics specialized in drug-abuse treatment, drug crisis intervention, and what they called “detoxification.” At the time, people in Haight-Ashbury talked about being “burnt out” by drug addiction: exhausted, emptied out, used up, with nothing left but despair and desperation. Freudenberger visited the Haight-Ashbury clinic in 1967 and 1968. In 1970, he started a free clinic at St. Marks Place, in New York. It was open in the evening from six to ten. Freudenberger worked all day in his own practice, as a therapist, for ten to twelve hours, and then went to the clinic, where he worked until midnight. “You start your second job when most people go home,” he wrote in 1973, “and you put a great deal of yourself in the work. . . . You feel a total sense of commitment . . . until you finally find yourself, as I did, in a state of exhaustion.”
Burnout, as the Brazilian psychologist Flávio Fontes has pointed out, began as a self-diagnosis, with Freudenberger borrowing the metaphor that drug users invented to describe their suffering to describe his own. In 1974, Freudenberger edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues dedicated to the free-clinic movement, and contributed an essay on “staff burn-out” (which, as Fontes noted, contains three footnotes, all to essays written by Freudenberger). Freudenberger describes something like the burnout that drug users experienced in his experience of treating them:
The first staff burnout victim, he explained, was often the clinic’s charismatic leader, who, like some drug addicts, was quick to anger, cried easily, and grew suspicious, then paranoid. “The burning out person may now believe that since he has been through it all, in the clinic,” Freudenberger wrote, “he can take chances that others can’t.” The person exhibits risk-taking that “sometimes borders on the lunatic.” He, too, uses drugs. “He may resort to an excessive use of tranquilizers and barbiturates. Or get into pot and hash quite heavily. He does this with the ‘self con’ that he needs the rest and is doing it to relax himself.”
The street term spread. To be a burnout in the nineteen-seventies, as anyone who went to high school in those years remembers, was to be the kind of kid who skipped class to smoke pot behind the parking lot. Meanwhile, Freudenberger extended the notion of “staff burnout” to staffs of all sorts. His papers, at the University of Akron, include a folder each on burnout among attorneys, child-care workers, dentists, librarians, medical professionals, ministers, middle-class women, nurses, parents, pharmacists, police and the military, secretaries, social workers, athletes, teachers, veterinarians. Everywhere he looked, Freudenberger found burnouts. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Neil Young sang, in 1978, at a time when Freudenberger was popularizing the idea in interviews and preparing the first of his co-written self-help books. In “Burn-out: The High Cost of High Achievement,” in 1980, he extended the metaphor to the entire United States. “WHY, AS A NATION, DO WE SEEM, BOTH COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY, TO BE IN THE THROES OF A FAST-SPREADING PHENOMENON—BURN-OUT?”
Somehow, suddenly, burning out wasn’t any longer what happened to you when you had nothing, bent low, on skid row; it was what happened to you when you wanted everything. This made it an American problem, a yuppie problem, a badge of success. The press lapped up this story, filling the pages of newspapers and magazines with each new category of burned-out workers (“It used to be that just about every time we heard or read the word ‘burnout’ it was preceded by ‘teacher,’ ” read a 1981 story that warned about “homemakers burnout”), anecdotes (“Pat rolls over, hits the sleep button on her alarm clock and ignores the fact that it’s morning. . . . Pat is suffering from ‘burnout’ ”), lists of symptoms (“the farther down the list you go, the closer you are to burnout!”), rules (“Stop nurturing”), and quizzes:
You could mark questions with “X”s, cut out the quiz, and stick it on the fridge, or on the wall of your “Dilbert”-era cubicle. See? See? This says I need a break, goddammit.
Sure, there were skeptics. “The new IN thing is ‘burnout,’ ” a Times-Picayune columnist wrote. “And if you don’t come down with it, possibly you’re a bum.” Even Freudenberger said he was burned out on burnout. Still, in 1985 he published a new book, “Women’s Burnout: How to Spot It, How to Reverse It, and How to Prevent It.” In the era of anti-feminist backlash chronicled by Susan Faludi, the press loved quoting Freudenberger saying things like “You can’t have it all.”
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Freudenberger died in 1999 at the age of seventy-three. His obituary in the Times noted, “He worked 14 or 15 hours a day, six days a week, until three weeks before his death.” He had run himself ragged.
Lost in the misty history of burnout is a truth about the patients treated at free clinics in the early seventies: many of them were Vietnam War veterans, addicted to heroin. The Haight-Ashbury clinic managed to stay open partly because it treated so many veterans that it received funding from the federal government. Those veterans were burned out on heroin. But they also suffered from what, for decades, had been called “combat fatigue” or “battle fatigue.” In 1980, when Freudenberger first reached a popular audience with his claims about “burnout syndrome,” the battle fatigue of Vietnam veterans was recognized by the DSM-III as post-traumatic stress disorder. Meanwhile, some groups, particularly feminists and other advocates for battered women and sexually abused children, were extending this understanding to people who had never seen combat.
Burnout, like P.T.S.D., moved from military to civilian life, as if everyone were, suddenly, suffering from battle fatigue. Since the late nineteen-seventies, the empirical study of burnout has been led by Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, she developed the field’s principal diagnostic tool, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the following year published “Burnout: The Cost of Caring,” which brought her research to a popular readership. “Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind,” Maslach wrote then. She emphasized burnout in the “helping professions”: teaching, nursing, and social work—professions dominated by women who are almost always very poorly paid (people who, extending the military metaphor, are lately classed as frontline workers, alongside police, firefighters, and E.M.T.s). Taking care of vulnerable people and witnessing their anguish exacts an enormous toll and produces its own suffering. Naming that pain was meant to be a step toward alleviating it. But it hasn’t worked out that way, because the conditions of doing care work—the emotional drain, the hours, the thanklessness—have not gotten better.
Burnout continued to climb the occupational ladder. “Burnout cuts across executive and managerial levels,” Harvard Business Review reported in 1981, in an article that told the tale of a knackered executive: “Not only did the long hours and the unremitting pressure of walking a tightrope among conflicting interests exhaust him; they also made it impossible for him to get at the control problems that needed attention. . . . In short, he had ‘burned out.’ ” Burnout kept spreading. “College Presidents, Coaches, Working Mothers Say They’re Exhausted,” according to a Newsweek cover in 1995. With the emergence of the Web, people started talking about “digital burnout.” “Is the Internet Killing Us?” Elle asked in 2014, in an article on “how to deal with burnout.” (“Don’t answer/write emails in the middle of the night. . . . Watch your breath come in and out of your nostrils or your stomach contracting and expanding as you breathe.”) “Work hard and go home” is the motto at Slack, a company whose product, launched in 2014, made it even harder to stop working. Slack burns you out. Social media burns you out. Gig work burns you out. In “Can’t Even,” a book that started out as a viral BuzzFeed piece, Petersen argues, “Increasingly—and increasingly among millennials—burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.” And it’s a condition of the pandemic.
In March, Maslach and a colleague published a careful article in Harvard Business Review, in which they warned against using burnout as an umbrella term and expressed regret that its measurement has been put to uses for which it was never intended. “We never designed the MBI as a tool to diagnose an individual health problem,” they explained; instead, assessing burnout was meant to encourage employers to “establish healthier workplaces.”
The louder the talk about burnout, it appears, the greater the number of people who say they’re burned out: harried, depleted, and disconsolate. What can explain the astonishing rise and spread of this affliction? Declining church membership comes to mind. In 1985, seventy-one per cent of Americans belonged to a house of worship, which is about what that percentage had been since the nineteen-forties; in 2020, only forty-seven per cent of Americans belonged to an institution of faith. Many of the recommended ways to address burnout—wellness, mindfulness, and meditation (“Take time each day, even five minutes, to sit still,” Elle advised)—are secularized versions of prayer, Sabbath-keeping, and worship. If burnout has been around since the Trojan War, prayer, worship, and the Sabbath are what humans invented to alleviate it. But this explanation goes only so far, not least because the emergence of the prosperity gospel made American Christianity a religion of achievement. Much the same appears to apply to other faiths. A Web site called productivemuslim.com offers advice on “How to Counter Workplace Burnout” (“There is barakah in earning a halal income”). Also, actually praying, honoring the Sabbath, and attending worship services don’t seem to prevent people who are religious from burning out, since religious Web sites and magazines, too, are full of warnings about burnout, including for the clergy. (“The life of a church leader involves a high level of contact with other people. Often when the church leader is suffering high stress or burnout he or she will withdraw from relationships and fear public appearances.”)
You can suffer from marriage burnout and parent burnout and pandemic burnout partly because, although burnout is supposed to be mainly about working too much, people now talk about all sorts of things that aren’t work as if they were: you have to work on your marriage, work in your garden, work out, work harder on raising your kids, work on your relationship with God. (“Are You at Risk for Christian Burnout?” one Web site asks. You’ll know you are if you’re driving yourself too hard to become “an excellent Christian.”) Even getting a massage is “bodywork.”
Burnout may be our contemporary condition, but it has very particular historical origins. In the nineteen-seventies, when Freudenberger first started looking for burnout across occupations, real wages stagnated and union membership declined. Manufacturing jobs disappeared; service jobs grew. Some of these trends have lately begun to reverse, but all the talk about burnout, beginning in the past few decades, did nothing to solve these problems; instead, it turned responsibility for enormous economic and social upheaval and changes in the labor market back onto the individual worker. Petersen argues that this burden falls especially heavily on millennials, and she offers support for this claim, but a lesson of the history of burnout is that every generation of Americans who have come of age since the nineteen-seventies have made the same claim, and they were right, too, because overwork keeps getting worse. It’s this giant mess that Joe Biden is trying to fix. In earlier eras, when companies demanded long hours for low wages, workers engaged in collective bargaining and got better contracts. Starting in the nineteen-eighties, when companies demanded long hours for low wages, workers put newspaper clippings on the doors of their fridges, burnout checklists. Do you suffer from burnout? Here’s how to tell!
Burnout is a combat metaphor. In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including politics and life online, like yet more slaughter. People across all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old, caretakers and the cared for, the faithful and the faithless—really are worn down, wiped out, threadbare, on edge, battered, and battle-scarred. Lockdowns, too, are features of war, as if each one of us, amid not only the pandemic but also acts of terrorism and mass shootings and armed insurrections, were now engaged in a Hobbesian battle for existence, civil life having become a war zone. May there one day come again more peaceful metaphors for anguish, bone-aching weariness, bitter regret, and haunting loss. “You will tear your heart out, desperate, raging,” Achilles warned Agamemnon. Meanwhile, a wellness site tells me that there are “11 ways to alleviate burnout and the ‘Pandemic Wall.’ ” First, “Make a list of coping strategies.” Yeah, no. ♦
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