Burnout is the defining mental-health issue of our era. Nurses and doctors are burning out; so are teachers and office workers and elite athletes and, honestly, probably you and me.
Openly discussing burnout with your boss (as the Harvard Business Review now encourages workers to do) or sharing your experiences with burnout on Twitter or LinkedIn carries a lot less risk and stigma than saying that you’re depressed or anxious or having an existential crisis or experiencing any number of other mental and emotional issues. Maybe that’s because burnout is a problem at once induced and approved by capitalism: You’ve earned this mental-health collapse.
But if burnout has given us a culturally acceptable way to admit that we need help, it’s worth exploring what, and who, gets left out of the burnout discourse.
Many burnout experts today do try to call attention to the ways that people from marginalized identities can be particularly susceptible to the condition as they deal with racism, transphobia, ableism, and other prejudices on top of other workplace stressors. But overall, in popular media, burnout remains a term largely associated with the (largely white) middle- and upper-classes.
Meanwhile, the usual solutions to burnout—more time off, more flexible schedules, more reasonable workloads, better work-life boundaries—depend in large part on the cooperation of a willing employer. Addressing burnout for people across class stratifications would require not just an overhaul of workplace culture but policy interventions and a stronger social safety net, guaranteeing that all people have access to things like paid time off and affordable child care.
None of this is meant to deny the impact of burnout on people’s mental and physical health. Living and working through a global pandemic turns out to be stressful, on top of navigating a society that has long encouraged Americans to measure their self-worth by their productivity. But why do we need to overwork ourselves in order to learn to stop working so much?
An emerging genre of conversations about work, from Reddit’s anti-work forum to China’s “lying flat” and “touching fish” trends, urge people against buying into the cultural values that lead to burnout in the first place. On TikTok, Gen Z users declare proudly that they “don’t dream of labor.”
This more radical line of thinking isn’t about managing burnout, nor do its solutions rely upon employers finding it within their hearts to improve working conditions. It’s about being fed up with the premise that our jobs determine so much of our identity and perceived value, not to mention whether we have access to healthcare and retirement plans, in the first place.—Sarah Todd
Source: Quartz
