Are We Living in a Burnout Society?

In an earlier age, writes Byung-Chul Han in his short book The Burnout Society, we lived in a world of "hospitals, madhouses, prisons." What has replaced these? "Fitness studios."

There is a touch of exaggeration to this arresting opening—we still have many prisons—but also a measure of truth. On my walk the other day, I passed no less than three yoga studios, not to mention a gym, a pilates studio, and a space devoted to "barre" workouts (like those done by ballet dancers). On Han's view, this is no accident. If in an earlier age people were disciplined by external authorities, today we are called on—at least if we live in the relatively privileged world of yoga and barre studios—to discipline ourselves.

Source: Vlada Karpovich / Pexels

For Han, this aspect of the contemporary predicament is the source of its distinctive psychologies, which for him are depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and "burnout syndrome." If one is living in a society in which all is purportedly possible, and one disciplines oneself to strive after one's goals, and one nonetheless fails to measure up—this is the kind of predicament, in Han's view, that inevitably leads to depression. The paradox at the heart of much work on the economics of mental health—that societies experiencing unprecedented levels of plenty nonetheless continue to experience high levels of depression—is not a paradox at all in Han's view, but an expected result.

Han's book is written in the language of contemporary European philosophy, and its points of reference are figures such as Heidegger and Baudrillard, but his message resonates with recent discourse about mental health in the United States. "Burnout" is something of a buzzword in recruitment and management, especially in health care. "Burnout" is held to be a crisis, and many see their task as reducing or managing "burnout." But Han's timely intervention asks us to spend some time with an unabashedly philosophical question: What precisely is "burnout"?

Engines and Circuits

"Burnout" is, first of all, a metaphor. In its primary usage, it seems to have been applied to engines that use up all their fuel, or to circuits that are overloaded with charge. So to even think of people or employees as the kind of entities that can "burn out" is to think that they can be useful analogized, in this way, to engines or to electrical circuits.

The person who brought this metaphor into general usage is Herbert Freudenberger, who in a now-widely cited article addresses what he calls the "burnout" among himself and his colleagues.

Interestingly, Freudenberger does not see burnout as an aspect of work generally, or even as an aspect of work in the "helping professions" such as medicine and social work. Rather, he sees it as a symptom of the particular kind of work that he and his colleagues are engaged in: work in the "free clinic" movement, a movement that sought to provide services to those in need, somewhat outside the ambit of the traditional medical system. He hypothesizes that burnout is a symptom of this kind of idealistically motivated work, perhaps arising also in "alternative self-help or crisis intervention institutions."

The idea that someone could be burnt out by one's work as, say, a product manager at a technology company, does not seem to be on Freudenberger's radar. For him, burnout is the flipside of a distinctive kind of overtaxing, and often underpaid, committed labor. His solutions can accordingly feel a touch quaint to someone experiencing 21st-century burnout. He advocates taking time off, reducing hours, and, where appropriate, mourning the loss of one's ideals. These recommendations, directed at volunteers as much as they are to employees, are sensible ones, but they do not always seem realistic to many of those experiencing burnout today.

Contemporary Notion of Burnout

Our contemporary notion of burnout—roughly, stress and exhaustion due to overwork or related causes—therefore stands at least two removes from more basic notions of burnout. We begin with the literal application of burnout to engines and circuits, which are burned out in the course of energy creation or transmission. We then move to Freudenberger's extended notion, in which people can be burned out in their pursuit of higher ideals. We move finally to our contemporary notion, which is simply a notion of stress and exhaustion, with no claim about what all that stress and exhaustion is even for.

For many, the sources of burnout will be clear: Burnout is often a consequence of needing to work a full-time job at the same time as raising a family, for example. And, as Freudenberger emphasizes, it is also clear enough what leads someone to work 80-hour weeks for little pay in a free clinic—namely, their ideals. But sometimes the origins of our burnout may be more obscure. So, if we are feeling burned out, it can occasionally be worth asking what ideals we ourselves are pursuing. If this question does not have a ready answer, that itself is an important symptom. People are not engines or circuits, and there is no particular task that they are designed to do and no particular fuel that they need to do it. So, when people feel they have burned themselves out, it is occasionally worth asking: to what end?