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

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

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

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.

Burnout is an indicator that something has gone wrong in the way we organize our work. But as a concept it remains lodged in an old paradigm—a work ethic that was already dubious in America’s industrial period, and now, in a period of extreme inequality and increasing precarity across once-stable professions, is even harder to credit.

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.

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.

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.