The Rise of Burnout: Why We're Exhausted and What to Do About It

Burnout stems from meaningless work, demanding excessive positivity, and hindering idleness.

### The Burnout Epidemic: Understanding its Roots and Finding Solutions
* 📈 **77%** of respondents in a survey reported experiencing burnout at work, highlighting a widespread issue of exhaustion, stress, and disillusionment.
* 🗣️ The term "burnout" gained prominence in the **1980s**, following Freudenberger's work, which described it as a response to stress, frustration, and self-imposed demands for perfection.
* 💔 Psychologist Lori Santos defines burnout through three key aspects: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (cynicism and detachment), and a sense of personal ineffectiveness.
* 🤔 David Graeber's concept of "bullshit jobs"—pointless, unnecessary work—resonates with many who feel their work lacks meaning, contributing to burnout.  A UK poll revealed **37%** of people felt their jobs were meaningless.
* 😫  Burnout stems from a sense of futility, amplified by spending significant time on work perceived as unproductive, leading to a broader feeling of life's meaninglessness.
* 🔄 While some criticize Graeber's examples, research suggests that monotonous jobs, like those in transportation or shipping, often contribute to this sense of futility and burnout.
* 🧘‍♂️ Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues we live in a "burnout society," driven by excessive positivity and the constant pressure to achieve more, echoing Freudenberger's observations about perfectionism.  "We never let ourselves stop being productive," he notes.
* ⏳  To combat burnout, Han and Russell advocate for embracing idleness and contemplation, suggesting that engaging in activities for their own sake, rather than solely for external validation, can foster a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

Burnout is on the rise. In one survey, 77% of respondents said that they had felt burned out at work. People are quietly quitting, or they're just quitting their jobs, or they wish they could just drop out of it all, stop working, and do

something that mattered instead. We're stressed, we're anxious, and we feel like we just can't do this anymore. So what is

burnout, and why is it increasing? Well, if we want to answer that question, we should go and actually look at the

history of the word. [Music] Take a look at this chart. The word "burnout" doesn't really start appearing

in books until the 1950s, and it doesn't really take off in popularity until the 1980s. That's when the psychologist

Freudenberger published his book, *Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement*. Freudenberger actually came up with this

concept by analyzing himself. He was so overcome with stress and anxiety that he wasn't even able to get out of bed or

move at times. He said that he couldn't even feel joy. In one interview, Freudenberger described burnout like

this: Burnout really is a response to stress; it's a response to frustration; it's a response to a demand that an

individual may make upon themselves in terms of a requirement for perfectionism or drive. Now, after Freudenberger's work,

psychologists started to get a bit more rigorous in how they described burnout. The Yale psychologist Lori Santos breaks

it down into three parts: You're burned out when you feel emotionally exhausted, so you can't handle any more burdens. The

metaphor that Santos uses is a house of cards. If there's even one more burden or one more piece of stress added

to your life, the whole thing is going to collapse. The second sign is depersonalization. This is when you start

to feel detached or cynical towards your work and the people you work with.

To be cynical, you start to question people's intentions, and depersonalization also gets in the way of forming authentic human connections.

And the third sign of burnout, Santos says, is a sense of personal ineffectiveness; no matter what you do, it

isn't going to matter. You can't change anything. That last part, I think, is really at the heart of the issue. There's

a reason so many of us feel burned out, especially about work, and it's because we think we're working jobs that don't

matter. That's an idea that was popularized by the anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber came up with a term for

these sorts of jobs, which he calls "bullshit jobs," and he defines a bullshit job as a form of paid employment that is

so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the

employee feels obliged to pretend this is not the case. And this idea of Graeber's really resonated with people. Graeber

put this idea out there in a really small online magazine called *Strike*, and when it was released, it went viral. I

think something like a million people read the article, and actually the magazine's website couldn't keep up and

ended up crashing. When Graeber was describing these pointless jobs, well, people thought that reflected their experiences. In one UK poll, 37% of

people said that their jobs were meaningless, or specifically, they said their jobs weren't contributing meaning—meaningful—to society. So we don't lose sight

of the plot here; let me break out how a bullshit job might be related to burnout. Burnout seems to partly stem from a

sense of futility—like nothing that you do matters or can change anything. Well, if you spend eight hours a day, which is a

huge part of your waking hours, working a job that you think doesn't accomplish anything, then it's not hard to see how

You would think that, in general, your life is futile, no matter what you do; nothing's going to change, and nothing's

going to get better. Graeber is often criticized for some of the examples that he gives for jobs, like

actuaries.  Turns out, actually, an actuary is kind of a useful job, and it might even be the case that actuaries think

that their jobs are quite useful, so they don't really meet the conditions of being a job like Graeber would

say. But some sociologists have tried to find empirical support for Graeber's thesis, and they found something: a lot of

people do think their jobs are...it's just not the jobs that Graeber expected. It's people often who work in

things like transportation or shipping. These are jobs that are characterized by monotony; no matter what you do, you're

going to basically do the same thing tomorrow. You do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and

over. I actually once had a seasonal job working at UPS; uh, my whole job was to grab packages as they were coming down a

conveyor belt and then put them onto trucks. And there's something really strange about the fact that you'll do

this for a few hours and you'll still see this endless flow of packages coming. It's like as if you barely put a dent in

it, despite the fact that you're tired and you feel sore. And later on, when I went to work at some tech companies, I

actually often felt the same, because it felt like we were always bouncing from project to project, or we all had to

pretend that we were excited about some big new corporate initiative, even though, like, we all knew it wasn't going to make

a difference. Oh great, they've come up with like some brand new metric in order to measure our performance, but it turns

Oh, everything's exactly the same; it's just that the format of my quarterly evaluation has changed slightly, and we

all have to pretend like it matters. Everyone that I knew and talked to about this was very cynical, even if management

sort of wanted us to pretend otherwise. We were all like Sisyphus, but instead of pushing boulders up a hill, we were

sitting behind laptops and going to meetings and kind of just getting by. And at least a lot of people that I knew,

they felt burned out, and they felt burned out because we felt like we weren't ever accomplishing something of

course. Burnout's not just limited to our jobs; it can actually impact all of our lives. And that's because, as

one philosopher puts it, we live in a burnout society. That's the title of this book by

the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Despite this being a really short book, Han's ideas are quite dense, and so I just feel

compelled to pause the video and say, 'Hey, you should go and read this book.' You could probably read it in an afternoon

and get a sense of it, and it'll do more for you than watching this YouTube video. At the core of Han's analysis is this

idea that we live in an achievement society. In this society, we are constantly striving to do more; we want

to achieve more; we want to produce more; and on top of that, we always feel like we have to think positively about it. So,

Han says that the root of our problem isn't negativity; it's actually excess positivity. Now, if you take a quick look

at some management websites, when they talk about burnout, they always tell you to just change your mindset and try to

be more optimistic about the future. But if Han is right, that is exactly wrong; it's actually that kind of forced

positivity that makes us feel more burned out in the long run, and that's really similar to what Freudenberger

said at the top of the video: it's that drive towards perfectionism, achievement, and productivity. We never let ourselves

stop being productive; we always want to do more. In fact, even when we do things for fun, we often rationalize it or

justify it because we say it's going to recharge our batteries so that then we can go back and do even better work. The

philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it this way: the modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake

of something else and never for its own sake.  Han and Russell, following in a long line of philosophers, would say that

if we want to counteract burnout and this sense of futility in the world, we have to learn how to be idle again. We

like to use idleness as an insult; we say things like, "Idle hands are the devil's workshop." But in the ancient world, like

say, in the world of Aristotle and Plato, idleness was actually seen as important to a good life because when you're idle,

that's when you have time to contemplate, and contemplation is the best kind of life, at least according to Aristotle. Now,

for someone like Aristotle, contemplation basically meant being like a philosopher or scientist. For many people, that's not

their idea of the best sort of life, but Bertrand Russell has a slightly broader view of what one could do in their idle

time. It's when you're free from the necessity of work, where you don't have to work in order to meet your needs or

to live a decent life, and you also don't feel driven to do anything except for its own sake. You just end up doing

things that matter because they matter. Some people would just use all of their idle time, their leisure time, to have fun.

more to relax, but Russell thought that for a lot of people, they would use it to explore the universe or to produce great

art, or to perfect their craft. Because they cared about it, they'd be able to look at what they were doing and they

could see that it was good, and thus they wouldn't really feel burnout; it just wouldn't apply. Doesn't mean they

couldn't get frustrated; it's just that burnout wouldn't really apply. But in our world, that's hard to do, you know? B. Johan

says that we need to learn to be bored, and it turns out just sitting around and being bored is really hard when we're so

used to a world of constant stimulation and a world of constant productivity. But maybe learning how to be bored is that

first step towards learning how to be idle and actually using our time well for things that matter. Now, this video

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We're burned out. Here's why.

Jared Henderson

High percentage of respondents (77%) reported experiencing workplace burnout.

People are quitting jobs or considering leaving due to stress and anxiety.

The video explores the reasons behind the increasing prevalence of burnout.

Historical context and definition of burnout

The term "burnout" gained prominence in the 1980s.

Freudenberger's book, *Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement*, contributed to the understanding of burnout.

Freudenberger's personal experience with stress and anxiety shaped his concept of burnout.

Lori Santos' three components of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal ineffectiveness.

Many feel burned out due to working in jobs they perceive as meaningless.

David Graeber's concept of "bullshit jobs" resonates with many people's experiences.

A UK poll showed 37% of people felt their jobs were meaningless or did not contribute to society.

The connection between bullshit jobs and a sense of futility contributing to burnout.

Empirical support for Graeber's thesis found in jobs characterized by monotony and repetition.

Burnout is not limited to work and impacts all aspects of life.

Byung-Chul Han's concept of a "burnout society" is discussed.

Han's analysis focuses on the negative effects of an achievement-oriented society.

Forced positivity and the drive for perfectionism contribute to burnout.

Combating burnout through idleness and contemplation

The importance of idleness and contemplation in countering burnout.

Reframing the concept of idleness from a negative to a positive perspective.

Aristotle's view of contemplation as the best kind of life.

Bertrand Russell's broader view of how idle time can be used for meaningful activities.

The challenge of learning to be bored in a constantly stimulating world.