The New Neurasthenia

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

Is burnout, then, really a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress, as the World Health Organization has classified it? Is it a form of depression? Or is it a mark of disillusionment with the fictions propping up our world of work?

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

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.

The psychologist Christina Maslach, a foundational figure in burnout research—the Maslach Burnout Inventory is the standard burnout assessment—sees burnout as having three components: exhaustion; cynicism or depersonalization (detectable in doctors, for example, who see their patients as “problems” to be solved, rather than people to be treated); a... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.