When Your Profession is On Fire

These passion job organizations are burnout factories. Every year, a new crop of eager recruits comes in, grateful to have landed a job doing work “they love” — and every year, a significant percentage of the existing workforce churns out. Some have been there that single year, others for five. They leave not because they’re not good “fits” for the... See more

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.

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

For knowledge workers, the biggest sign that the status quo is broken is the rise in self-reported burnout. This past summer, McKinsey and Lean In collaborated on a survey of more than sixty-five thousand North American employees, primarily from knowledge-sector jobs. They found a significant increase in those describing themselves as feeling burnt

... See more

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work an

... See more