The reviews are in! According to The Baffler, my “intelligent and careful study, The End of Burnout, brings clarity to a muddled discussion.” Meanwhile, a one-word review on Amazon claims the book “sucks.” So opinion is polarized. Who’s to say what the truth really is? The only way to know for sure is to purchase a copy wherever you like to buy books and read it for yourself. If you decide to buy it from the publisher, you’ll get 30% off by entering the code 21W2240 at checkout.
You sometimes hear that academic research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is irrelevant outside the ivory tower. But a shift that took place a few decades ago in that research — the shift toward analyzing society and culture via the lenses of race, gender, class, and (more recently) sexuality — has profoundly affected our ordinary way of looking at the world. Elections are now contested over these lenses. To mix a metaphor, the lenses are often the field of battle in our culture war.
So it’s no surprise to see race, class, and gender (though usually not sexuality) brought into the burnout discussion. Burnout matters to us, and we show how much it matters by arguing about it in terms of these lenses. But that argument plays out in a strange way, highlighting our very mixed feelings about burnout’s place in our lives.
One of the first responses to Anne Helen Petersen’s viral, conversation-changing 2019 essay on millenial-generation burnout focused on race. The poet Tiana Clark wrote in her essay, “This is What Black Burnout Feels Like,” that black burnout was different:
My therapist explains that burnout reminds us of our humanity; exhaustion lets the body know we are not machines — we need to slow down. Yet, for millennials of color, not only do we have to combat endless emails and Slack notifications, but we also get strapped with having to prove our humanity inside and outside of the workplace and classroom... It’s doubly (triply?) exhausting. But in all the hullabaloo about burnout, who is really allowed to take a break?
Sometimes, the battle over burnout is generational. Petersen highlighted the experience of millennials. I wrote at the time that burnout crossed generational lines, affecting Gen Xers like myself. That’s true, but as I later learned, younger workers often are more susceptible to burnout. Burnout, after all, is the experience of being stretched between your ideals for work and the reality of your job, and early-career workers often have very high ideals and fairly poor conditions: low pay and little recognition. If you burn out in one career, you might find another one, and another, until at some later age, you find a place you can work sustainably.
When it comes to gender, researchers have remarked that burnout can seem like a primarily-female phenomenon. Many studies show that women have higher risk of burnout, but the difference between them and men is not huge. I argued a couple months ago that we need to pay attention to male-pattern burnout, not because men have it so bad, but because the way masculinity is constructed around work makes it hard to see the real problem of burnout in male workers.
And as I’ve brought up before, the most common criticism I see of writing on burnout and calls for less work is that they’re all well and good for salaried workers with cushy office jobs that don’t really do anything, but the working class “can’t afford to burn out.”
Critiques like this aren’t as smart as they at first seem. Sure, if your answers to burnout are individualized — take paid time off, go for a walk on your lunch hour, sneak in a ten-minute nap under your desk — then, indeed, people who don’t work at desks or are on a time clock can’t put those answers into practice.
But the answer to burnout isn’t individualized! It has to be more collective and ought to involve shorter hours, higher wages, maybe universal basic income, etc. You know, stuff that would benefit every worker.
(By the way, it’s interesting that both the center-right Bulwark and the left-wing Baffler published generally positive reviews that nevertheless criticized The End of Burnout for paying insufficient attention to class. Sure, maybe that’s a shortcoming of the book — though I would counter that (1) the reviewers may have a too-narrow understanding of “working class” that leads them to overlook some types of work I address in the book and (2) I’m trying to offer a more universal vision that will benefit any and all workers — but maybe also the center-right is stealing the left’s moves. If so, why might that be?)
Paying attention to race/gender/class/sexuality differences can reveal aspects of society we would not otherwise recognize. For instance, my friend Anne Gray Fischer’s new book, The Streets Belong to Us looks at the history of policing in the U.S. via women being profiled and arrested on suspicion of “vice” crimes like prostitution. She finds that policing of women’s presence in public played a key role in the expansion of police power across U.S. society in the 20th century. Such analysis is crucial to forging a more just society.
But burnout poses a different issue. Burnout is not like arrest or incarceration, which everyone agrees are bad to experience. Rather, in a society that values constant work as a sign of merit, claiming burnout is often a brag. To say that some group is more susceptible to burnout is to elevate that group’s status. It’s to say that they are more meritorious than other people. This fact distorts our whole burnout conversation. It makes it hard to see who needs the most help, because everyone is competing to claim the title of most burned out.
I argue in the book that, as a society, we’ll never get past burnout unless we can identify the 5-10% of people who are classically burned out, with high levels of exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffecacy. And we’ll never be able to identify them if we don’t insist on that narrow, scientifically-validated definition. Once we have that in place, and once burnout ceases to be a status symbol, the race/gender/class conversation about burnout can move from the cultural battlefield to a more helpful venue.
If you’ll be in North Central Indiana next week, please consider hearing me speak at Saint Mary’s College on the evening of March 31! My talk is titled “Thomas Aquinas and the Demons of Work.” It’s going to be great. More info is here.
If you will be anywhere else, you can still hear my talk! It will be livestreamed. More info is here.