An Intellectual History of Burnout

Like many readers, I was very moved by Anne Helen Petersen’s widely-shared Buzzfeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” Its precision in describing the common sensation of struggling to complete an all-too-surmountable task and its lucid and cogent diagnosis of both why that sensation exists at all and why it is so common were revelations to me, as they were—judging by the responses of my friends—to many other people.

I don’t intend to recapitulate Petersen’s ideas here, but I thought it might be useful to think about how we might historicize her essay’s central term. She defines it as “the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.” In other words, it is not so much a malady as it is an occupational hazard for people who began their working lives under a specific set of conditions—i.e., for people of a certain age.

Immediately, a U.S. historian might link burnout to neurasthenia—the brain sickness or nervous ailment that was invented and became an common diagnosis in the Gilded Age—and, before she wrote the essay, Petersen might have agreed with the parallel. She used to think (she says) that “burnout was something aid workers, or high-powered lawyers, or investigative journalists dealt with… workers in acutely high-stress environments.” But later she came to realize that, just as it was not well conceived as an illness or a breakdown, it was also not accurate to imagine that it was only experienced by a particular category of workers. Burnout certainly was connected to overwork, but not to a particular class of overworkers. “Burnout differs [from neurasthenia in its intensity and its prevalence,” she writes. “It isn’t an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.

Burnout should instead be defined broadly, inclusively. It can be most usefully compared to (mere) exhaustion: “Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.” She quotes a psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen: “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”

If this is a good definition, then perhaps the better parallel is not neurasthenia but alienation, a term that is historically more diffuse but that has had a number of chapters which seem to me to compare quite well with Petersen’s conceptualization of burnout. If we think particularly about mid-twentieth-century uses of the term, some interesting points of contrast emerge.

One thing that I think alienation and burnout have in common is that both are responses to a problem of irresolution, of lacking a satisfactory ending. Alienation (of the midcentury, existential variety) was famously a reaction to the possibility that life, once ended, will have no further meaning; it simply stops. The shadow of nuclear annihilation magnified this absurdity: a world that ended in nuclear war would not even have a conclusion. If life persisted after this apocalypse, it would presumably do so in a wholly mutated form—whatever came after would look nothing like the life that came before.

Burnout shares with alienation this problem with endings. As Petersen (again borrowing from Cohen) characterizes it, burnout is the feeling that comes from the permanent mismatch between activity and accomplishment: one is working constantly, is even “productive,” but is never closer to the end of the to-do list. The keyword she returns to repeatedly as the Millennial’s mantra is optimization—the Millennial approach to “getting things done” is not so much a treadmill or an Escher print as a version of Zeno’s Paradox: we find a way to write more or send more emails or grade papers more efficiently, only to find that our habits still aren’t optimal. A half-hour has escaped us down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole; we could have been reading a novel or vacuuming the living room! We make great strides to find that we have crossed only half the distance.

Burnout therefore differs from alienation in that the latter presumes the existence of an ending, but fears that it is meaningless. Burnout, on the other hand, presumes that an ending—to a project, a to-do list, a pile of papers to grade—is meaningful; it only doubts that it exists.

One of the ways we can see this difference manifested is in cultural products that have been described as “post-apocalyptic.” As I noted above, classic Nuclear Age fiction and film generally imagined the post-apocalypse as a wholly new world: nuclear war would reset and transform society, it would be an age of new beginnings. (If, that is, anyone survived.) Even dystopias generally imagined worlds that either leaped ahead or backward in terms of human development: post-apocalyptic society either became much more “civilized” or much more “primitive.”

The age of burnout has much less confidence that the world that wakes up after the apocalypse will be very different. The zombie is such a common motif of these fictions in part because it expresses so well that sense of prolongation—of continuing beyond the point of exhaustion—that is at the core of burnout, but it is also inescapable because a zombie apocalypse generally is imagined less like a slate wiped clean and more like a kind of intensification of the problems of everyday life.

What distinguishes the zombie apocalypse from the nuclear variety is that most of our “stuff” continues to exist after the world ends. Buildings and cars, the contents of department stores and homes in the suburbs—it’s all still standing. Even human bodies continue to exist. And all of this “stuff” has to be managed in some way, has to be collected and organized or contained and walled off. But there is so much left, so much there—even in fictions where zombies are passive and not threats to the survivors, the sheer logistical challenge of daily life is, well, exhausting.[1]

There is not a very clean chronological divide between nuclear fictions and zombie fictions—most obviously, the classics of the zombie genre were themselves products of the Cold War, and apocalypses in which billions of people die and disappear in a snap can still be found today. Yet I think we are entitled to see these as two distinct paradigms belonging to separate moments. Perhaps another contrast will help clarify things a bit.

Under the midcentury alienation paradigm, the threat that consumerism posed was primarily to the self: obsessions with commodities eroded qualities like independence of mind and supplanted a proper concern with things of the spirit. Burnout is partly expressed as a similar loss of the self, but it is also—and I think more commonly—expressed as an inability to find time to connect with others, especially with one’s family and friends. And again, commodities—devices—are at the center of this problem: consumerism doesn’t threaten the self as much as it isolates the individual. It is not the things themselves but the ways they are delivered which defines the adverse aspects of consumption—the constant and instantaneous availability of our stuff. We don’t fear things, we fear “platforms”—the services that bring us our things. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook: they wall us off in a prison of immediate accessibility. And they—like zombies—never feel exhaustion.