The New Neurasthenia

It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity.

Covid brought in its train a parallel epidemic of worker exhaustion. The stress and social dislocation resulting from a poorly managed, seemingly interminable public health emergency put limits on what workers could tolerate. Yet burnout’s ubiquity cannot be attributed to Covid alone.

communities that subordinate work to higher ends can survive economically while promoting their members’ flourishing.

Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout’s clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The r... See more

Meanwhile, as if to compensate for an increasingly precarious economy, our fantasies about work have grown, if anything, more intense. Hard work is likely the most universally cherished American value. One recent Pew survey found that 80 percent of Americans describe themselves as “hardworking”—outstripping all other traits. Work has gotten worse, ... See more

It seems unlikely that the mainstreaming of burnout will lead to a more robust public conversation about the positive goods of idleness, or the pursuit of less alienated forms of work. The term has achieved cultural prominence precisely because it resonates with affluent professionals who fetishize overwork.

Malesic hopes to restrict “burnout” to official clinical criteria. But the broadness of the term is the source of its appeal; self-declared burnout cases can congratulate themselves on their diligence while dodging the stigma of depression or another weightier diagnosis.

Nor is burnout solely an American phenomenon. From the “lying flat” movement in China to outcries against deaths from overwork in Japan and South Korea, there is a growing sense of indignation in wealthy countries about inhumane work ideals that turn prosperity into a curse.

As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise.

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.