The Burnout Society

In my own life at least, burnout was not about trying to give too much, it was about trying to give things that I didn’t really have to give. It involved what I came to think of as a ‘high artificial ethic’ about what I ought to be doing in the world rather than an ethic that grew up from my natural giftedness and my place in the ecosystem of my ow... See more

But the strange work ethic the rich have devised seems highly relevant for our understanding of burnout as a cultural phenomenon, especially as it spreads beyond its traditional victims—doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, anti-poverty lawyers—and courses through the ranks of knowledge workers more generally.

The legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills proposed that the “sociological imagination”—an understanding of how our own experiences reflect broader social and historical forces—could help us link our seemingly private troubles to public issues. Burnout, a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system, is a prime candidate for such reimagining.