Episode 136 - Burnout

Transcript

Ellie: 0:17

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:20

The podcast where two philosophers burn the candle at both ends, bringing big ideas into dialogue with everyday life.

Ellie: 0:28

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:29

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:32

There's a very popular self-test for burnout known as the Maslach Burnout inventory. It comes from Christina Maslach who popularized the term burnout, and it's based on her research with mental health workers and other helping professionals in the 1970s, the full Maslach burnout self-test is something that you have to purchase. But I found a bootleg pseudo version online. So I'm gonna read you a few of these things, David, and you tell me how they resonate with you.

David: 1:01

Oh, are you gonna test me live on Overthink.

Ellie: 1:04

I'm not gonna test you live'cause there's too many questions but, there's a few sections.

David: 1:09

Okay, so let's do a mini test.

Ellie: 1:11

Well, we'll do a mini test. Yeah, we'll do a mini bootleg test. Okay.

David: 1:15

Spoiler alert, I'm at the end of my rope.

Ellie: 1:19

Well, so also, I mean, a key part of it is how frequently you feel this. So that already tells you a bit about what we are testing here, right? It's gonna have to do with the frequency, right? Because the total will count up your score and every day receives a score of six and never receives a score of zero. So burnout has to do more with the pervasiveness of the experiences that it's testing rather than with the sheer presence of them, right? So, number one, I feel emotionally drained by my work.

David: 1:50

Okay. I would say

Ellie: 1:51

How frequently?

David: 1:52

Like once per month.

Ellie: 1:56

So you got a score of two for that one. Working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort.

David: 2:05

That's tricky because we, as an academic, I don't work with groups of people that often accept in the classroom, so no, I would say very rarely.

Ellie: 2:13

Okay. Some of these yeah, do have to do with different kinds of jobs than the ones that we have. Oh, but, ooh, here's an interesting one. I feel ideal with my team slash colleagues impersonally as if they're objects.

David: 2:26

Oh gosh, no. I do not feel that, my colleagues I think are real people.

Ellie: 2:31

So that's a never, wow. Aren't you saintly? Okay. I feel like my work is breaking me down.

David: 2:40

I feel that also roughly like once a month, once every two months.

Ellie: 2:45

Okay, so you get another two.

David: 2:48

Yeah. Breaking down is a strong term though, so maybe less frequently than that. Once per semester, I would say.

Ellie: 2:54

Okay. In my work, I handle emotional problems very calmly.

David: 2:59

Mm. Yes.

Ellie: 3:01

This one's interesting to me because it seems like the higher you score, if you deal with emotional problems very calmly every day, then you score really high. But if you never deal with emotional problems calmly, you score zero. Okay.

David: 3:19

That is weird also because it means that if you like explode all the time, you're not experiencing burnout.

Ellie: 3:26

Yeah, no, I know, but I guess like the point would be, okay, so this is in the category of depersonalization, so, oh, I'm gonna skip ahead. So David, based on this, the test so far, the results are inconclusive because we only gave you a few things. Doesn't seem like you're really having much burnout, but there are three categories here or three sections. The first is burnout. Okay, cool. We're, the self test for burnout includes a burnout section and that defines burnout as depressive anxiety syndrome, which testifies to fatigue at the very idea of work. So you have fatigue when you even think about your work, let alone like when you actually work, and then the problems disappear outside of work. So it's a specific kind of depressive anxiety that you experience in relation to your work. Section B, that was the one where this like emotional calmness question came out. And that makes sense when you realize that Section B is depersonalization or loss of empathy. So dehumanization is one feature of this you, that's like you treat your colleagues as objects and you have like sort of a weird calmness when it comes to intense emotional things, like you're just detached. And then section C is personal achievement. I actually didn't ask you any questions from personal achievement, but one of them, Hey, why not do that now? I accomplish many worthwhile things in this job.

David: 4:52

Oh no. Well, a few times a year,

Ellie: 4:56

Yeah, actually. Okay. That sounds about right.

David: 4:58

And so my results are still inconclusive. Although, I have to say, I think a lot of academics occupy an interesting position relative to burnout. This is something that I talk about in the book that I just published with our friend Rebekah Spera, about academic philosophy.

Ellie: 5:12

Remind us the name.

David: 5:13

It's called Professional Philosophy, and It's Myths where we talk about the politics of professional philosophy, and that includes labor politics.

Ellie: 5:21

Get your library to buy it because it's priced for libraries, not for individuals.

David: 5:25

Yes, I feel very comfortable telling people to only get their library copies rather than purchasing it as individuals.

Ellie: 5:32

How do you feel about the bootleg copies? Like my bootleg copy of Maslach

David: 5:36

Oh, get it, download it illegally. It's about the ideas and not the what, 6 cents I'm gonna get in my pocket if you buy it from the publisher. We also talk about the politics of publishing, but one of the things that we talk about is how a lot of academics suffer from burnout, but also because we relate to our job as if it's this special spiritual vocation. We wouldn't answer the questions that you were asking Ellie in a way that would reveal burnout because we would say, oh, we're super happy in this job.

Ellie: 6:11

Hmm.

David: 6:12

We get to teach. We don't have to teach. And so the ideology of being committed to a mission and something larger than yourself, it doesn't prevent burnout, but it prevents people from recognizing their burnout. And so who knows? Maybe that's the case with us. Ellie, you and I are maybe literally at the end of our robe, but we think that we are thriving and happy with a high sense of achievement.

Ellie: 6:37

I wouldn't go that far. But I mean, I guess to some extent, such as life under capitalism,

David: 6:42

Today we're talking about burnout.

Ellie: 6:45

How is burnout different from exhaustion or fatigue?

David: 6:48

What does the history of the term reveal about burnout's connection to social justice?

Ellie: 6:54

And does achievement culture necessarily result in burnout?

David: 7:06

Nowadays we think of burnout as a particular form of fatigue associated with capitalist productivity culture. What is unique about this modern psychiatric or psychological, depending on how you read it, ailment, is that it is specific to work as opposed to being fatigue or exhaustion or depression more generally. In fact, the World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome that results from workplace stress and notes specifically that it does not apply to other forms of fatigue or other forms of exhaustion.

Ellie: 7:42

So you can't be burnt out because you are having relationship troubles or even because like your housing situation is stressful to you, right?

David: 7:52

Or family or anything else. Your hobbies are not a source of burnout.

Ellie: 7:56

Yeah, and we saw that the Malsach inventory defined it as a depressive anxiety, but it's one that you feel specifically in relation to work, either when you're at work or when you're thinking about work. And that's really what actually distinguishes it from depression'cause depression is this more generalized mood disorder. So one thing I read in prep for this episode, and I know you did David as well, is Hanna Proctor's book Burnout, specifically the chapter of the book on burnout called burnout. This is a theme here, the Maslach inventory about for burnout has a section on burnout and the Hanna Proctor book called Burnout has a chapter on burnout. This book was just one of those books I love to read on my own time. I had actually purchased it well before we decided to do this episode. I just hadn't read it yet.'cause it's like, I love reading mix of sort of social criticism and theory and history and this really, scratched that itch. And she notes that burnout has not always had this particular meaning a specifically an association with capitalist productivity culture, or with workplace stress generally. The term was first introduced by Herbert J Freudenberger, who was a psychoanalyst, who as a young person, age 12, escaped Nazi Germany. And then he moved to New York and he became a psychoanalyst. He worked in private practice with wealthy clients in Manhattan, but then in the evenings he would go downtown and volunteer at a free clinic. And this experience working at a free clinic led to what he then came to term burnout, and he discovered that he needed to take time off as a result. In coining the term burnout, he was trying to describe cases of physical or mental collapse as the result of overwork. So I think that tracks with our usual conception of burnout today. But it was more specific than that. And so here's how it's described in the Proctor book. Burnout is explicitly addressed to the phenomenon of fatigue and encroaching cynicism among people who devoted their spare time to projects that sought to transform society. So it's not just like workplace stress generally, it's specifically workplace stress and a sense of cynicism among those who were trying to achieve social justice aims. So it involves a mismatch between the values that you hold, specifically values of the transformation of society into like a more just place to live and the work that you're actually engaged in. And one thing I found really interesting is that Freudenberger in coining this term, borrowed it from hippie drug users, which were some of the people that he was seeing in this free clinic where he was working downtown. It captured the sense of guilt and disappointment that he had with respect to being part of a project with broader social justice aims.

David: 10:41

Oh, I didn't know that the term was originally taken from hippies doing drugs, but I really like that idea. I mean, I would have to know more about how that term is used in that cultural context.

Ellie: 10:52

You like the idea of hippies doing drugs?

David: 10:55

Of them being the origin of conceptual innovation in psychology, psychiatry, and the mind sciences. Yes. But one thing that I take to be absolutely essential from what you said about how Proctor describes burnout based on her reading of Freudenberger is the reference to cynicism. The fact that it's this very weird condition that culminates in something that I don't know really of many other conditions that culminate in cynicism, where you just look at the world sort of with squinty eyes. And I think that actually speaks to the social nature of the problem. That there's something about burnout that we know is not about us, it's about our working conditions. And I think that explains why we become cynical about our very work.

Ellie: 11:45

Yeah, it's not, I feel not up to the task. It involves a recognition that the conditions are not enabling me to actually achieve what I wanna achieve.

David: 11:55

Yeah, and if you think about what cynicism is, it's a disposition characterized by distrust of other people and also associated with pessimism, right? The idea that things are not going to be better, not because of me, but because of the motives and actions of other people. So cynicism does have a critical edge to it where it reveals a problem in the social field.

Ellie: 12:20

Yeah. And even though you mentioned earlier that you have thoughts on like academia and burnout, I think it's really important to foreground the fact that burnout is first and foremost associated with the medical profession and with what are known as the helping profession. So it was originally coined, you know, to designate the work of psychiatrists, doctors, social workers, and I had a couple of perspectives that I wanted to bring in here from talking to loved ones who work in those professions. One is my sister who is a therapist, and before she did her master's in social work, which is her background, she worked at a home for victims of sex trafficking, teen victims of sex trafficking in LA. And I think a lot of us, she was fresh outta college, really young, and a lot of us were like, wow, this is such like an amazing kind of work to be doing. And also like, how are you doing mental health wise? Because this seems like something that could really lead to burnout. And indeed, that's precisely what happened, but it was for very different reasons than those of us on the outside would've thought. We thought my sister was gonna get burned out because she was working with people who had had such adverse life experiences, people who had so much trauma that it was just very challenging to be confronted with that on a day-to-day basis. Instead, what she found is she was like, hey, it wasn't working with the girls that led to burnout, rather, it was the bureaucratic aspects of the job that were really hard for her because what she saw from the inside was that this space that was meant to be just like so directly helping people had all kinds of internal problems with it that were preventing the employees from actually being able to be effective in the way that they wanted to be. And there was so much about like the donations and kind of ties to donors that they had to deal with ineffective management. And it was really that that led to the burnout. So that's one story of burnout. I wanna share one from a doctor too, but if you wanna respond to that, David.

David: 14:12

Well, yeah, I do wanna respond because it seems like this is a good opportunity for us to disassociate two terms that maybe can get confused. One of them is burnout, and I think you're right to associate that with maybe the administrative bureaucratic dimensions of work to all those pressures that are tied to our advancement in our career, to how we are evaluated, to how we are treated on a day-to-day basis, rather than the nature of the work itself. And so it allows us to differentiate burnout from what I also think would be a risk in the case of this line of work, which is compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue, where sometimes in some helping professions. You experience compassion and empathy for others so much that at some point you've run out of empathy to give. And I think in those cases that can be tied to the population itself that you work with. But it's a good way of differentiating the two where burnout is not a problem due to the people that you're trying to help, but rather to the structural conditions that limit you and prevent you from feeling as if you are actually meeting the goals, the ideal goals that you've set for yourself in pursuing this line of work.

Ellie: 15:27

Yes, and I'm so glad that you bring this up, David. I think this is really important to distinguish burnout from compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue, because that not only coheres with the origins of the term burnout, but it also reflects what I was hearing, not only from my sister, but from other friends as well. And in particular, it's like practically like you set me up for my second story. So thanks for accidentally doing that. I talked to my friend Michelle, who is an emergency room doctor. And what she told me, she texted me this like amazing stuff 'cause I asked her about burnout, you know, in her workplace. But she said that her main frustration is people who overuse the term burnout, especially in medical context because she said that like, there was even some article, she couldn't find it, but there was some article somewhere where people were saying that the cats are burnt out. And she was just like, this word has become meaningless because we're using it as an, as a catchall term that doesn't have any specificity when we divorce the term burnout from its origins and just use it as that, like sexy catchall term, the potential solutions to it become clouded. So she said in particular, she's frustrated by like the idea that a wellness happy hour is a solution to burnout. And when the wellness happy hour doesn't work, people are like, oh, there's no solution to burnout. But she says, no, the actual solution is to address the root cause of being powerless and a system that prioritizes profit over patients in the first place. And so it's not about like social time with puppies, it's about genuinely overhauling the very system.

David: 17:01

Well, and you know, I talked also about this just like you talked to your sister. I talked to my partner who is an MD and he said, you know, the really weird thing about burnout is that we don't treat any other condition like it. And he gave the following analogy, which you will appreciate, Ellie, since this, I think it was inspired by your run in with an eye infection in a pool in the south of France.

Ellie: 17:22

Yeah. I feel like we've talked about this multiple times. Eye infections had a lot of run on the podcast. Huh?

David: 17:27

Yes. But he used the analogy without mentioning you, and he said, imagine that we took somebody who had an eye infection from going in a pool. We took them out, gave them time off, and then waited for their eye to get better, and then tossed them back in the same pool. That's what we do with workers who experience burnout. We assume that giving them some kind of distance from their working conditions for a limited period of time is to solve the problem because we medicalize it, we individualize it, and we psychologize it rather than recognizing it as a property of the water in which they're asked to swim, which is the workplace. And so this also coheres with that. You know, in all the research that I did, I kept seeing that Freudenberger is the origin of this term from this 1974 article. And so after reading that in like four or five articles, I was like, I've had enough. I need to go and read the actual text directly. So I, I went to read the original article from 1974, which appeared in the Journal of Social Issues. And what I wanted to see was how FreudenBerger's understanding of this concept at that time fits or doesn't fit with our modern understanding of it now. And I think his account is quite prescient in its description of the phenomenon. For starters, he recognizes that burnout is disappointment with work specifically. So it's not as if in the beginning he just described it as like a general condition that we later realized this specific to work. That specificity is already built into his account in 1974, which, you know, it's like half a century ago. So he's recognizing that there is an issue here about workplace culture. Now he's not super clear about the causes of burnout, but he does allude to the fact that a lot of lines of work, especially those that have this connection to social justice aims are being subjected to increasing routinization and monotonization where like work is becoming repetitive. There is a lot of forms, as you said, you know, like we need to get donors, we need to do self-evaluations, we need to apply for grants.

Ellie: 19:46

Not the self-evaluation.

David: 19:48

In that original article, he also says something quite interesting, which is that we are more prone to burnout when our sense of self-worth is tied up too much with our line of work. And he differentiates between people who have a mature relationship to work where it's like, Hey, this is my job. I wanna do it well. But then I separate myself from work. My work doesn't consume me, and it certainly does not define me. And on the other hand, people who maybe, because of their political commitments, do everything they can in their work to be liked by others, to not alienate anybody. And so they see their work as an extension of their personality. And the people who do that, he says, are way more likely to experience burnout because they will feel much more intensely. That split or gap between idealism and reality.

Ellie: 20:49

And I think that is where we get this idea that we need to have better work boundaries, which is very often touted as a solution to burnout. And I think obviously that does have value. I personally think it's really important to detach from work in my off hours, and I really make a lot of effort to do that. And so I'm definitely not against boundaries, but I think also a lot of people have come to be a bit critical of the language, the kind of therapizing language of boundaries, especially because it's an individual solution to a social and political problem, which takes us back to what my friend Michelle said. One of the things that Proctor highlights is that over the course of Freudenberger's own career, especially once Christina Maslach popularizes the term, it does come to have a more general meaning, and Proctor states that burnout shifted its meaning from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it, even though Maslach's research was also on mental health workers and other helping professionals. She framed the solution to burnout a bit more in terms of like that boundary stuff, but Maslach presents burnout as something to be guarded against through guarding against emotionally demanding clients and Proctor worries that this emphasizes the importance of expertise and a sort of hierarchical relationship between patient and healthcare worker. And so the idea is that like, oh, they just need to sort of exert their boundaries more. And even though that's still happening within the context of healthcare professionals, then it really gets broadened out even further as like you have burnout because you're too convinced by hustle culture, the grind set culture, and you need to set more boundaries. You need to like take a two week vacation, not answer emails after work and so on.

David: 22:39

Well, and that also implicitly posits the client, especially the difficult client, as the source of your burnout, which then makes you look to the clients as the source of your problems, rather than seeing you and the clients as both victims of a larger system of endless exploitation that reduces both of your egos. Now, the Maslach work, I think, is really interesting because, you know, we mentioned this already, but she's the one that conceptualizes burnout along these three axes of the tests that you used on me at the beginning. Exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal achievement. And I read an article that pointed out something that I hadn't thought about before, which is that those three axes should be understood sequentially. So it's not just like three variables that are floating around in the space of burnout, but rather there are phase that we move through on our way to burnout. So first, you are in a toxic work environment, you are feeling depleted and overworked, and you get the sense that it's not gonna change anytime soon, that's emotional exhaustion or burnout. Then as a way of protecting yourself against this hostile work environment, you start disconnecting from other people and from work colleagues and clients alike, and you start becoming cynical. That's a coping mechanism, so that's where you get the depersonalization, that's where you get the sarcasm, even the aggression, the resistance to change, and then finally you get crushed by the feeling that because you haven't quit your job because you're in there, but because you're completely disconnected, you are insufficient and you are not achieving anything in your line of work. And I think that sequential interpretation of these variables gives it a better narrative arc. 'cause at the very least in my case, it allowed me to visualize the average workers path to burnout.

Ellie: 25:00

David, when you and I were thinking about doing an episode on burnout, there was something that we both immediately messaged each other on Slack, probably simultaneously, if my memory serves me well, which it very well may not, that we wanted to talk about, which is the contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han's very short, very pithy little book, the Burnout Society. We've talked about Han before. We did a YouTube video on his text in the Swarm a while back, and we sort of teased him for writing really short books. Supposedly Han only writes three sentences a day, but, you know, one of the benefits of that is that it's short and pithy. So I often teach this text when I teach continental philosophy, and I mean, it's so fascinating. I think people really connect to it. And in fact, I did a short YouTube lecture years ago on this text, and it's one of our more popular YouTube videos. Now we're talking about how people use burnout today in relation to capitalist productivity culture, or what Han Calls Achievement Society. So let's get into the picture of burnout that Han offers.

David: 26:02

Yeah. So I think the best place to begin is by thinking about precisely this concept of the achievement society, which means exactly what you think it means, that we live in a culture that because of the rise and spread of capitalism, has come to see achievement understood as endless productivity for the sake of generating profit as the highest value that we can pursue and achieve. So under capitalism, there is no greater batch of honor than to be looked down by your superior and to be told that you are a productive little bee, right? That you've produced more of your share of honey for the hive. And according to Han, one of the essential features of the Achievement Society is that it has completely reconfigured the nature of power, such that we can no longer understood the Achievement society by invoking something like a top down form of power, like what we might see in a repressive society or in a society of control, where we say that we are oppressed because society tells us you must not or cannot do X, Y, or Z. Rather, in the Achievement Society, we are oppressed by a, you can by this constant encouragement that we do, that we produce, that we achieve, especially because the Achievement Society has convinced us that the things it wants us to do are also the things that we want to do because that's how we establish our own sense of self-worth.

Ellie: 27:45

So let's break down some of the features of this achievement society. For one, Han thinks that we become achievement subjects. We are characterized by a compulsive freedom. And he says that what happens when we have this compulsive freedom is that we have what he describes as the free constraint of maximizing achievement. It's like we're free to do anything, therefore we are constrained. We are forced to try and maximize that freedom, that achievement.

David: 28:12

Yeah. To do everything.

Ellie: 28:14

Exactly to do. That's a, maybe a nicer, more pithy way of putting it. And he describes this as auto exploitation. And so we come to exploit ourselves. And you might think at first if you know anything about Foucault, that there are some similarities here because Foucault also thinks that a disciplinary society encourages us to subject ourselves to become like obedient subjects. But Han thinks this is actually the opposite of what Foucault was writing about because he thinks  Foucault's analysis of disciplinary society where we're subjecting ourselves and becoming obedient, that's a society that's governed by the no, like you cannot do this. What we have instead is the I can. And so Han finds  Foucault's analysis to be ineffective for helping us understand achievement society. Foucault was describing an excess of negativity on his view, whereas Han thinks that achievement society involves an excess of positivity.

David: 29:11

And the way he thinks about this excess of positivity is by invoking the concept of immunology. Basically, he says, in the past, we have understood all of our psychological ailments on the model of immunology, where there is a logic of foreignness that explains whatever it is that we're suffering from, right? Something external to you is the source of the problem. Maybe it's a virus, if we're talking about literal immunology, but maybe it's something external like the state or the man or other people that are the source of a particular ailment. But in the burnout society, we live in a post immunological world in the sense that what is oppressing us is simply an excess of positivity such as overproduction, overachievement over communication, and of course, production, achievement communication are good things, right? In many ways, they are the very things that make us humans and according to some accounts even differentiate us from other animals. But it's almost as if we've put those things that are natural and perfectly reasonable on overdrive. And now we don't just produce, achieve or communicate. We feel this compulsion to overproduce overachieve and over communicate. And that, I think that really crystallizes this tension between the emphasis on negativity that you get out of  Foucault, but also Deleuze with his notion of societies of control and the critical emphasis on this excess of positivity that we get from Han.

Ellie: 30:53

And I'll be honest, I think Han isn't totally fair to  Foucault on this point. I actually don't think his view is quite as different from Foucault and Deleuze as it seems. But hey, if you're writing in contemporary European philosophy, like one of the hallmarks of that is to as strongly distinguish your view from existing ones as possible.

David: 31:09

Yeah. Anxiety of influence baby.

Ellie: 31:11

Yeah, like I think that Han associates this drive toward productivity with hyperactivity, a mode of consciousness where we experience a kind of lack of interruptions or between times. And I think in the years since Han wrote this, this has even become more salient because of the nature of scrolling. How like there's really no between times for those of us who have smartphones anymore. And the kind of distinction between a, between time and like the time that we're actually spending doing an activity is perhaps non-existent, right? Because are you doing an activity or not when you're scrolling your phone? But yeah, his analysis of hyperactivity suggests that we're so oriented towards like doing something at all times without interruption that we paradoxically become really passive.

David: 31:54

Yes. I really like that and I found it quite compelling because he notes that the pressure to achieve ultimately changes our experience of time and the distribution of subjective attention. And in a world where you're always multitasking, where you always have multiple balls in the air and you're doing everything you can, not only to not let them fall, but to still add more balls to your juggling act, what you end up with is an experience of infinitely divided attention, and therefore no time left over to really dedicate to anything with a sense of focus. There is a chapter in the book, chapter three, called Profound Boredom where he says, we don't have time to be bored, because now we're trying to fill every cranny and every nook of our routine with productive activity by multitasking. And when you multitask, you might think that you're doing something that really highlights your intelligence and your ability to cope with complexity, but in fact, what you are doing is you are regressing to a more fundamental non-human animality because the multitasking state is the state of the wild animal who is just like looking anxiously in every direction, facing many threats to its survival in this unable to pause, to contemplate and to think about something in an immersive manner.

Ellie: 33:29

Yeah, but I think at the same time, even as he thinks this is kind of like reducing us to wild animals, there's also this way that this inability to be bored because we are so constantly doing things actually is the most boring thing of all. He describes us not only as hyperactive, but also as hyper attentitive. And he says that hyper attention is this broad but really flat mode of awareness as opposed to the contemplative immersion that you were just alluding to. And I think I certainly experience that quite a bit. Sometimes I'll pick up my phone and I'm just like, not really sure, like what am I doing here? Or all vaguely remember I wanted something or I've been looking into a bunch of decor lately.'Cause you know, I'm in the midst of moving and I feel like I'm always looking to scratch some itch for like, oh, exactly the decor that I want. And so I'm just like looking, I'm Googling more and more things, looking up more things on Reddit and Instagram and it's never quite hitting. And I think the other reason it's never quite hitting is 'cause I'm not gonna actually get like the true inspiration that I want from looking at a phone at all.

David: 34:34

Yeah, and I mean, we've been focusing on our analysis of burnout, but I think what you're describing, this sense of divided attention of hyperactivity, that even though it's hyperactive, it's also extremely passive and regressive. It's important to note that in this book, Han is talking about modern ailments like burnout, but not only burnout. He also talks about depression as fitting this general pattern in some cases, and in the case of attention, specifically ADHD. And he sees these three conditions as kind of similar and similarly symptomatic of a larger problem associated with capitalism. And to go back to the point that we made about freedom in the past, so much of this really hinges on our dilution that we do all these things because we personally want to, because they make us happy. And Han points out that this just misunderstands the nature of freedom. The absence of external domination does not equal the presence of personal freedom. And that's because freedom, and I mean, he's following Marx and Hegel here, is a dialectic. Freedom is this dialectical movement between liberation and constraint. You need the two. And the movement back and forth between them is what gives you the subjective experience of freedom. And that's what we cannot get in a world where we're distracted and you know, turning from one thing to another, never actually committing to any one course of action.

Ellie: 36:07

Yeah, and a lot of these themes are reminiscent of things that we love to thematize on, overthink, but I guess I'm curious, David, if we're bringing it back to burnout. I think we understand that language changes and just because the way that somebody uses a term is different from how it was originally meant when it was coined, that doesn't mean that it's like an invalid use of the term. In fact, we even saw that Freudenberger's idea of burnout develops over time. But I guess I'm curious what you think, based on what we've said so far, is Han really describing burnout?

David: 36:38

I think he is describing burnout as an expression of a larger problem in capitalism that is also revealed by these other conditions like modern day depression, modern day ADHD. But also it's important to note that he begins from the observation. This is the opening of the book, that each historical period has its own mental ailments, and so there is something deeply historical and historicist about the categories that we use for thinking about the mind and especially mental suffering such that, it's not as if we will ever have a definitive account of what causes us to suffer psychically. And so it always has to be updated because society itself changes. And so this idea that we have to stick to an original term doesn't make sense in a world where you recognize that the very categories, not just the terms, but the conceptual categories for understanding what people suffer from change in a very radical manner over time.

Ellie: 37:40

Okay. But, so that gives us a sense of why he thinks burnout might be a new phenomenon, but it doesn't actually define burnout for us. And so I mentioned you before the start of the episode, but our listeners know I'm in the midst of moving. So I mentioned you before the episode, David, that I accidentally packed my burnout book. So I'm working off of my lecture notes on it here. I actually don't have the book in front of me with my annotations, so I'm forgetting how and whether Han actually defines burnout. I don't have that in my notes, which makes me think that he probably doesn't give a straightforward definition.

David: 38:13

I didn't notice it. It must not be there.

Ellie: 38:15

Well, no. I mean, usually when I take lecture notes, like I'm writing down the definitions, it's possible I just missed it. But I actually don't have much at all on burnout itself in my lecture notes.

David: 38:26

So you are right. And that's because I think he is adopting this more critical political orientation in the book, but he does say in the final chapter that the root of burnout is the inability to say no.

Ellie: 38:44

That's the root, that's not the phenomenon.

David: 38:46

I know, but that's the root. And I think it captures something about the experience too, right? That in burnout there's a new project at work. Yes, I want to do it because I want to advance, I want to climb the corporate ladder. It also captures the essential burnouty element of FOMO, where FOMO, it's also the inability to say no to things, right? Because you want to maximize experience, you want to not miss any opportunity. And it also brings into focus the difference, which I do kind of agree with, between the being told no by others that maybe is characteristic of disciplinary societies and societies of control and the inability to oneself say no to the things that oneself thinks oneself wants. And that, I do think that that does capture something fundamental about burnout.

Ellie: 39:39

Okay. And all of that indicates to me that Han is pretty much the apotheosis of this current way that we usually describe burnout, which really has its origin in Christina Maslach and sort of a later Freudenberger. And so just to recall, the way that Proctor had put it, I mentioned this earlier, is that burnout shifts, meaning goes from, you know, being the symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to this new thing, which is something experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it. That is exactly the view of burnout that we get in Han.

David: 40:16

Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance at fair wage. Despite my results to the Maslach test being inconclusive, the American journalist Anne Helen Peterson wrote a book about burnout called Can't Even, how Millennials became the Burnout Generation, where she argues that burnout really is a millennial problem. It's people like you and I, Ellie, who primarily experience burnout, and that has to do with the recent history of economics. According to Peterson, millennials went into the workforce immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, and that really determined our experience of being at work. And it led to us being mired in debt to us feeling this pressure to succeed to some extent because of the pressures that our parental generation put on us about the meaning and value of work ultimately resulting in all these feelings of anxiety and hopelessness that we've been talking about, and also cynicism that are characteristic of burnout. So if you wanna visualize the quote unquote average burnout victim, it would look very much like you or me.

Ellie: 42:00

I don't think so, David. I mean, just because we're millennials, like that's not us. Like I think the average burnout victim, I think this was Michelle's point, is that like we need to be careful about what we mean by burnout here, because I think, at least in my case, like you and I work extremely hard, David, we work in alienated capitalist conditions that are nonetheless still far, far, far better working conditions. I would say my working conditions are also substantially better than yours given the kinds of resources that I have at the college where I teach relative to you working at a state school. So I just think like academics, I'm not saying that we aren't and can't be burnt out, but I think a millennial academic is maybe less of this average burnout victim than like a millennial ER doctor. Right. And part of the reason I think it's important to make some of those distinctions is that the idea that burnout is just a product of hustle culture is not sufficiently nuanced. Like here's a example for you. The girl boss, the classic millennial girl boss of 2018 is not burnt out. That person's working her ass off. But I would say like, there's not that particular kind of, there's definitely no cynicism there. Right. And maybe part of the point is that we've become cynical because we realize that the girlbossification of the world like wasn't working. You know, not that everybody thought that it was to begin with, but I don't know. Do you see where I'm going here?

David: 43:22

I do. I just don't know that. I agree. That's the problem here because I mean, I actually disagree with your claim that because we're academics, we are less likely to be burnt out. Because even in the original work by Freudenberger, his target originally was people in service professions. But over time he came to expand the meaning of the term to include also teachers and academics who do suffer from significant rates of burnout, and that continued with later Maslach and other people who work on burnout. And it continues in my book, we talk about the fact that there is something particularly pernicious about academia insofar as it not only produces very high rates of burnout among faculty member, but it also creates the very conditions that make that burnout invisible to the very people suffering from it. And, you know, just like. Knowing how many people in academia dream about leaving academia fantasize about doing something else. That's the kind of cynicism that reeks of burnout.

Ellie: 44:29

Yeah. Yeah. I just wanna be careful around it because I think I am in a very different position than say a dean. I think like a lot of faculty members who go into administrative roles in academia get super burnt out in sort of the classical sense of the term. I also think that adjuncts get burnt out in a different way from people on the tenure track. And so I'm not saying that academics don't experience burnout, it's just I think we, yeah. Maybe need to be a little bit more nuanced. And I think, I'm trying to think about whether I would say that I experienced burnout when I was. A non-tenure track faculty member, like when I was doing adjunct and visiting professor work, and I would definitely say I was a lot closer to it than I am now. Another piece of research I came across associated burnout, particularly with women. The popular book Burnout, the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. It's written by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, and one of the points that they make in their book, which I actually have some pretty serious questions about, is the idea that burnout is not just like exclusive to women, but sort of like a common phenomenon that women experience. The reason I have questions about that is because I'm actually not so sure this is like as gender to phenomenon as we might say. I mean, our listeners know, like I am very concerned with gendered inequities and sort of the effects that they have on our psychological and emotional lives, but I guess I don't necessarily see burnout as one of those features, in part because I do think we should be careful to limit burnout discussions to the workplace in order to maintain the specificity of the term.

David: 45:59

Oh, I see. Yeah. And you know about the limiting of the term to the workplace. I don't know how I feel about that either, because I think there are ways of experiencing burnout that happened outside of work in the technical sense of the term. And so the debate then becomes definitional, right? Like, are we just defining it as work or talking about something that can happen in various places. But for instance, now people are using the term burnout to talk about athletic burnout, which is not physical fatigue, right? It's not like, oh, I'm really sore in my muscles from a workout. It's people who feel a pressure because of our health and wellness culture to constantly go to the gym, to have a perfect body and who at some point become cynical about that very project and lose the will to go to the gym, but then feel bad about not going to the gym and not working out, not exercising. And so structurally it's very similar. So I want to use it potentially for that case.

Ellie: 46:59

Yeah, actually David, maybe you're convincing me slightly otherwise because I do think it's fair to say that because of our culture's focus on body image and expectation of certain like thinness and or muscular norms for different people of different bodies and genders, that that is a kind of work.

David: 47:16

The question is, what is work?

Ellie: 47:18

Yeah, exactly. And I do think like a lot of the emotional and hermeneutic labor that women do. In relationships with men is work too, so maybe, yeah, I think it's probably not gonna hold my like obsession, withholding it to the workplace context, because I think the workplace context is a bit in question in the society, and that's part of what Han's work gets at in a really interesting way. I think the way that I would articulate my worry about the Nagoski point is that they claim that patriarchy causes burnout. And I maybe that's just where I'm like, hmm, no, I mean in as much as patriarchy and capitalism are intertwined systems. Okay. But I also think like really we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that capitalism is the culprit of burnout. And like even if it's working in sort of complimentary ways with patriarchy, I don't think it's quite right to say that patriarchy causes burnout.

David: 48:09

Well, no, and I think you're right to note that maybe part of the issue here is the boundaries of the concept of work. Because if we start having discussions about, well, what counts as work in terms of like domestic labor, reproductive labor, you know, like then like this other kind of work, like working out, another example takes us back to the origin point again, the 1974 article by Freudenberger, which is activism. So he was working in these free clinics, thinking about healthcare professionals who were technically working, but also volunteering. So it's kind of like somewhere between work and network. Obviously it's effortful activity, but they were doing it without getting paid.

Ellie: 48:50

Yeah. Dang. Good point. Good point. I'm so ashamed of myself of seven minutes ago.

David: 48:55

No, no, no. It's, it's all good. But I'm also thinking about the way in which activists can get burnt out by the work they do in their free time. And I hear, when I consider following the Proctor book, because Proctor talks about this quite a bit, the many ways in which revolutionary movements create the conditions for burnout by, for example, encouraging the effacement of the individuals in the movement, right? Like, if you wanna be a good activist, it can't be about you. You have to give up your personal dreams and ambitions. Also, the day-to-day work, if you're an activist, can be grueling, it can be thankless, and it can disconnect you from the larger goals and values and missions of the movement at large, leading to cynicism. I mean, burning out is a real phenomenon in activist circles. And you know, finally, I would add another point from the Proctor book, which is that social justice movements often place these implicit prohibitions against the expression of negative emotions. In activist circles like, oh, I feel defeated, I feel hopeless, I feel like I'm despairing. And so preventing individuals from expressing those negative emotions can also push them to the precipice of burnout.

Ellie: 50:15

I loved this part of the Proctor book because one of her worries is that because a lot of social justice movements, by emphasizing the collective, rather than the individual end up not acknowledging the significant impacts that this work can have on the individual. And so I think if we connect this to our earlier point about the solution to burnout really being a complete overhaul of the system, we at the same time shouldn't lose sight of the fact that burnout is experienced by individuals, right? It has this kind of isolating and individual quality, and Proctor wants to suggest we're not doing ourselves any favors by thinking that the individual and their emotional wellbeing just doesn't matter in activist circles.

David: 50:57

And I mean this raises the all important question of how do you prevent burnout from arising in the first place? And then how do you combat it once it's already there? And unfortunately that's a really difficult question for which there is no agreement, right? Yeah. Surely you can take people out of the pool, but insofar as people have to work and pay their bills, they have to be tossed back in the pool to get yet another eye infection. You know, I keep going back to the original article, and that's because I really enjoyed it. But this is a place where I saw the limits of Freudenberger's thinking, and that's where his account really proved, very dated and of limited appeal to me. Because the solutions that he proposes, and there are a lot of them in that article, are quite futile and uncritical. So he does all the things that you might imagine like the corporate HR person to. Sending the pamphlet over email, right?

Ellie: 51:58

Not Freudenberger who escaped from Nazi Germany and then volunteered at the free clinics downtown.

David: 52:05

Yeah, yeah. He's the one that says like, oh, give people more breaks. Tell your employees to exercise. Tell the people in charge of hiring to only hire people with high energy. He also has this weird point about filtering out candidates who are prone to being sick. So like ask them if they're like sickly individuals and disqualify them from the job, which was just like horrifying and ableist at once.

Ellie: 52:34

Oh my God.

David: 52:35

And so he ends on this both really high note of like, there are all these solutions, but for me it was actually quite a low note because none of those solutions are structural and none of them recognize the root of the problem. And at the very end of the article, I think he kind of shows his cards a little bit where he recognizes that at the end of the day, you cannot prevent burnout. You can only manage it. And I thought, well, yeah, if you're leaving the workplace culture in place and only thinking about individual solutions like go to pet puppies or go to the happy hour cocktail, then surely you will never be able to prevent it.

Ellie: 53:22

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think really the solution to burnout is a complete overhaul of the system, right? This is like definitely a negative feeling and or emotion and or phenomenon depending on how, I guess we didn't explain how we're defining it specifically that way, right? That emerges within a social and economic, economic above all right? Economic system that we live under and will continue to persist. I wanna offer some individual solutions that came up in a book that came out a few years ago called the Burnout Survival Kit. And David, I was prepared to like be really down for this book. And what I found, I mean, I just read bits and pieces of it, but what I found, it's kind of similar to that Matt Hague, the comfort book that we like ribbed in our comfort episode. It's yeah, it's just like so corny.

David: 54:13

I mean, it's called a survival kit.

Ellie: 54:15

I know, I know. And it started as a zine and then it was developed into a book. But I wanna give you a few of the suggestions that the author gives. So one is, and, and I actually like this, so one is double check your gut reaction. If you're saying, if you can't switch off, this is one of the solutions that author recommends. Double check your gut reaction. Are you even letting yourself consider saying no? Think about your reason for turning something down. It's probably completely acceptable. All you need to do is think of a comfortable way to phrase it, right? And so she's inviting you to sort of think about like if your immediate reaction is to say yes, maybe take a pause and think about whether you might say, no. I also really value this one, which is outsource the boring bits. Don't get worked up about things that aren't going to play a huge role in your career. Outsource as many non-work related tasks as you can, whether through services or help from family and friends. I'll explain why I like this and then I'll explain why I also think it's like a kind of problematic bandaid. I like this because I've found it immensely helpful in my own life, especially in our work with Overthink. And so one thing we've done is outsource the boring bits to like a scheduling app. Early in the podcast, it was a total nightmare to try and figure out our schedules and have like a workflow. I didn't even really know that workflow apps were a thing because I'm not in the corporate sector. And then a friend was like, why don't you get a workflow app? So now we pay a workflow app to do our workflow for us, and it takes hours out, you know, out of the job that we do. The problematic side of this, of course, is that when we're thinking about outsourcing class distinctions come into play, especially if we're thinking about certain things like domestic labor and all of that. And so like, who gets to outsource the boring bits? The people who have relative power, right? We can outsource some of the activities that we'd rather not do to our employees and or to apps because we have the revenue to do so, which is, you know, something we've really worked hard to do and also gives us some power. So it's not that the solution is bad, it's just that I think this book in general, even though now that I'm rereading some of the bits of advice, I actually think they're helpful. I think this is why it's like, yikes. It's a little scary to me. It's sort of this corny, illustrated set of tips that actually are never really gonna solve the problem.

David: 56:36

Yeah. But I think even within the space of unideal solutions, there are better and worse ones. I think happy hour is horrendous. think encouraging workers to learn how and when to say no is quite useful because it does work against what Byung Chul Han says is the root of burnout, which is our inability to say no even to ourselves, right? To things that we think we want. And so learning the art of negation is potentially one of the better ones on an individual scale, right? So it's not gonna solve the structural side of the issue and the outsourcing, I mean, I like automating things that can be automated, like the scheduling in our case. But when we're talking about outsourcing from one individual to another, it raises deeper questions, right, about who's doing the work that others want outsourced and who can't outsource the work that they're stuck with. But in general, I think any maybe mid-level solution to the problem must include things like moving away from routinized, monotonous forms of work to the extent that that's possible, and also resisting the increasing bureaucratization of labor. And that is something that is much more feasible and that can be done within the scope of an institution, a corporation, a company.

Ellie: 58:04

And that's actually already what's happened with transcriptions. Like my partner used to do transcriptions for, there weren't podcasts back when we were in college. I forget what he was doing them for, but he would have to write transcripts by hand based on hearing audio. And what Kristen has is an auto-generated transcript of our podcast episode that then she has to correct. Right? And so that severely cuts down on her labor time, which means then that we can give her more hours to do parts of the overthink job that are actually more gratifying. And so I think that speaks to what you're talking about too. Like I wouldn't be sad if the transcripts got good enough that she didn't need to do those at all, and then we could just, you know, allot her other hours for some of the more rewarding aspects of the job. Even though there are then concerns about, well, who owns the transcripts and you know, that type of thing. So I don't know.

David: 58:51

At our next meeting, we just have to give all overthink assistance, the Maslach burnout inventory self test to see how they're doing.

Ellie: 59:02

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our overthink community on Patreon for bonus content zoom meetings and more. And thanks to those of you who already do.

David: 59:11

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Please check out our website, overthink podcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel as well as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts @Overthink_Pod.

Ellie: 59:26

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat- Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.