When I was a child, I loved playing outside on the cold yet sunny winter days in the mountain west. Sometimes a strange experience would occur where the bitter cold air was contrasted against the subtle warmth of the sun’s rays. I later learned that this is called apricity—the feeling of the winter sun’s warmth.

Apricity was a good reminder that in the heart of winter, change was always present, that winter would not last forever. But apricity also taught me that if I didn’t go outside and experience those cold winter days, I could have never felt the warmth of the sun either.

We find ourselves in the bitter cold of what has become a winter era in our society. Building a sustainable hope in our times is like finding the warmth on a cold winter day.

It seems somewhat dangerous to speak of hope these days, mostly because hope has been tainted by misconceptions and ill applications. Hope is too often slapped onto misguided attempts toward magical thinking or clever denial. Or it has been incorporated into all manner of toxic positivity culture. An authentic hope, however, must survive our collective winter and not rely on distorting our present circumstances.

I know that hope is possible in a space where despair lives. As a therapist, I have helped people navigate these brumal realms — to understand that where there is despair, there is also hope.

To build a radical hope, one must first build a relationship with despair. And too often we try to deploy a faulty kind of hope in an effort to avoid despair rather than to transform it.

Hope is Not Optimism

At its core, hope is about our relationship with the future. We look out at the state of the world and wonder how things are going to go. It’s human nature to anticipate. Our capacity to forecast and plan for the future is perhaps one of our strongest survival strategies. But here lies the potential pitfall as it relates to hope.

People often think that to have hope, one must be optimistic about the future. Hope, then, becomes a sweet honey we mix into the bitter coffee of our current predicament.

But hope cannot be optimism.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the same issue. Those who are pessimistic will say with conviction that the future will not improve and thus is hopeless.

Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. In the face of our uncertain future, optimism and pessimism fill in the gaps with certainty. They pretend to have all the answers. In place of the anxiety of the unknown, optimism knows things will be better in the future, and pessimism knows that the future is bleak and beyond repair. Both presume to know something we humans cannot.

At their core, optimism and pessimism are psychological mechanisms of protection, serving as a salve against the anxieties of our unknown fate. Will the United States survive its current challenges? Optimists and pessimists have strong beliefs about this. This is the extent of optimism’s and pessimism’s usefulness — belief.

Hope, on the other hand, is a useful force in our lives because it is available to us specifically when our future is uncertain. As activist Rebecca Solnit notes, “hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.”

If the future were known, there would be no need for hope.

Worst yet, seeing hope as a form of optimism encourages a passive, disengaged relationship with the world and the changes that should be promoted. Because it is presumed that things will get better, I need not really do anything to usher said changes into this world. I only need to sit back and wait for that brighter future to arrive. But hope should encourage a responsibility for ushering in the possibility of a better future.

We need hope when the future is unknown.

Hope is Not Concerned with Happy Endings

Working toward desired outcomes is vital for everyone. When we set our minds to something, work hard, and achieve a positive result, there is a sense of accomplishment. But what if the things that we need to accomplish are large-scale, complex, multi-generational change?

When hope is conjured solely for short-term future attainment and achievement, people engage in meaningful behavior only to the degree to which they believe near-immediate change is possible. Hope is only given to those things that guarantee a payoff — a happy ending.

This manner of using hope is transactional, bordering on a type of hostage negotiation that says, “give me what I want or else.” This kind of idea of hope is dangerous because it readily stifles people’s efforts right out of the gate. If a tangible, immediate outcome is not known, then why engage? Secondly, if we engage in a meaningful movement and our efforts do not yield any explicit impact, why continue?

Now, this is not to say that orienting ourselves with goals and tangible outcomes is not a desirable capacity. It is. And we should have goals in mind when engaging in personal, professional, social, political, and ecological change. However, being solely preoccupied with short-term outcomes becomes a liability when trying to enact large-scale, complex change at the cultural, justice reform, or ecological restoration level.

Hope is not a negotiation, because radical hope is never for sale.

If our hope is built on an implicit need for a finish line, or a profitable outcome, and when issues are not easily solved or deemed too costly, we will disengage.

We need hope when the outcome is unclear.

Building a Relationship with Despair

In my work with clients, I began to understand how we construct these utopian-inspired forms of hope to avoid the troublesome realities we often face. Hope is treated like a shield, protecting us from inconvenient truths and even harsher realities.

In life, however, we must build relationships with emotions we might see as painful, and despair is one of them.

Hope is found in the valley of despair. Therefore, to know hope, we have to know despair.

When despair is present, it is trying to tell us there are things vitally missing in our lives that need to be tended to with intention and care. While despair is often accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling reminds us that we are all relationally dependent on the world. We need connection— and hope is found in our connection to ourselves, others, and our world.

Despair invites a feeling of futility — that nothing ultimately matters. This state of being reminds us that we ultimately do not control the outcomes of our existence. The future is unknown to us, and that is a deeply uncomfortable reality. Despair also reminds us that meaning is made in the world; it is not automatically given. We must act in the world, creating the meaning we hope to find in it. This will, as we will see later, provoke us to act rather than to passively wait for something good to happen in the world.

Despair and hope are twin siblings born out of the contexts of powerlessness and uncertainty. Each points us toward a particular way of handling such circumstances, but it is important to acknowledge them when they arrive.

If despair is nearby, be comforted to know that hope is not too far away since these siblings occupy the same house.

Building a relationship to despair is also important since hope is not an everlasting state of mind and can easily crumble back into despair. Rather than seeing this as catastrophic, it is a reminder to tend to our relationship with powerlessness and uncertainty in our lives.

We need a hope that can meet despair, rather than avoid it.

Cultivating a Radical Hope

The despair in our present circumstances needs a radical hope. The word radical is frequently used in modern contexts as a pejorative. But the word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root. This is fitting for the kind of hope our contemporary lives need. Like the roots of a tree, we need a hope that is deep, far-reaching, that sustains us, and keeps us grounded during difficult times.

Hope starts in the imagination. In the face of the unknown, we dare to imagine a world transformed. Unlike optimism, radical hope begins with a sober accounting of what we are facing and acknowledges the possibility that things may not improve. George Carlin is credited with saying that ‘behind every cynic is a disappointed idealist’. Idealism, having a phobia of despair, struggles to accept the conditions of the present and instead encourages escapism into a utopian future.

Radical hope recognizes that even if we achieve meaningful societal change, there will still be problems to solve in the future. All change brings about future challenges. Always. And challenges must be accepted and faced.

In other words, radical hope evaporates any delusion that we will fully arrive at a landing point where despair may never live.

This process of change may be painful, but radical hope encourages us to have integrity in the space of struggle. Toni Morrison was once interviewed by Juan Williams during the Connecticut Forum and was asked, “How do you survive whole in a world where we are all victims of something?” Morrison wisely answered, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole; sometimes you survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can against impossible circumstances.”

Radical hope encourages us to engage the world with integrity — knowing that we can make meaningful decisions, even when the odds seem impossible.

Radical Hope as Connection and Engagement

The feelings of despair would have us flee the present circumstances into places of isolation, disillusionment, and hopelessness. Radical hope lights open despair through connection with others. Sustainable change has always been facilitated through community.

Connecting to supportive communities is a critically important part of cultivating radical hope. We cannot go about engaging an unknown future alone. Oppressive forces weaponize despair as a method of creating isolation, division, and disempowerment. We must resist this through intentional spaces of validation, connection, and mutual collaboration.

When it comes to connections, we should pay attention to who and what captures our attention. Our connections to people and things are incredibly important for cultivating radical hope. We have to build a wise relationship to staying informed versus doomscrolling. We have to remain alert to the conditions of the world, but we should ward against the disengaging powers of cynicism and pessimism.

Radical hope is not about knowing that a better world is going to happen; it is about expressing that a better world is possible. However, this is only possible if we cultivate the necessary conditions for a better world to emerge.

Radical hope is about nurturing, in the space of an unknown, uncontrollable future, the conditions under which something beautiful may grow. It’s about resisting the entropy of the status quo while building strategies to encourage movement, bolster morale, and sustain ourselves against the oppressive onslaught of the present moment.

Cornell West once said,

West reminds us the hope we need is blood-drenched. In other words, it is a hope found in the center of the battlefield of despair and pain. It doesn’t try to avoid it or smooth it over, but instead responds from this tragic space—taking in the despair of the world, giving it validation, and acknowledging the unmet needs brought on by the times.

While in the center of this despairing place, radical hope plays at the fringes of our current circumstances, offering stories imagining worlds transformed and accountable. These visions manifest in actions, often small at first, that work from the edges of society toward the despairing center.

Radical hope seeks to meet its sibling, despair, with compassion. It cultivates a courage to walk into our collective unknown future with a commitment to work to build a better world. ∎

I recently watched Louis Theroux's Inside The Manosphere. The documentary explores the world of several top social media influencers who inhabit a cultural domain labeled the manosphere. The film investigated many dimensions of these influencers’ lives and their impact on young men.

The central premise of the manosphere is that contemporary men suffer because society has changed in ways that have left them behind. Men, in their view, must prove their value and worth to society by becoming economically successful. For these men, one must work hard to resist being chained to the economic machine as a lower-income earner.

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The men of the manosphere feel the societal strain, but erronously identify the wrong causal factors. They place the plight of contemporary men’s issues in the hands of gender equality. What they don’t see is that this trend toward alienation and isolation has a long history — one that stretches well before any of the influencers in the film were born.

The sociologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm noted in 1941 in his book Escape From Freedom that the social structures of the capitalist economic system were producing increased alienation and isolation among people. Watching the documentary, you don’t have to be a psychologist or a therapist to observe the fragility of these men. The insecurities seeped out of them. The isolation and alientation was palpiable. What has changed is that these psychological insecurities have been given a microphone and a vast audience.

A Dehumanized, Hollow Culture

Industrialization brought many advantages to developing countries over the last few centuries. Most notable among these was the capacity of a growing number of people, mostly white men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, to achieve greater economic stability. Men were incentivized to take on mostly high-labor jobs through economic benefits that built the middle class. But, as the saying goes, nothing is given without a cost.

As our culture transformed into a consumer-driven capitalist society, the psychological character of these men began to deteriorate. The existential psychologist Rollo May, in Man’s Search for Himself, showed that people were losing a sense of their center, that they were becoming "hollow men" at the turn of the last century. Without any real sense of purpose and meaning to guide their behavior and shape their character, people were increasingly adrift throughout their lives from their true potential to develop as fully human beings. They were mere automotons for the great machine of progress and tended to believe whatever the social order told them was right.

Erich Fromm called this the 'character of alienation,' a person who seems motivated by self-interest but, in reality, is an instrument of the very machine they claim to be independent of. We see this in the manosphere influencers. Each of them in the documentary tried to position themselves and their actions as a reaction to the unfair circumstances of society. And yet, their actions and lifestyles are mere extensions of this very machine. They posture as having broken out of the matrix, while demonstrating tragically that they are Mr. Smith guarding the gates.

The Dynamics of Selfishness

Watching these influencers interact with Theroux was fascinating because they were so uncomfortable in his presence. Despite Theroux's physical presence not being particularly intimidating, these men were, nonetheless, afraid of him. Perhaps because he forced them to see themselves.

The men in the documentary were incredibly selfish. Several of them had built asymmetrical, one-way monogamous relationships with their girlfriends and wives. Out of earshot from these women, they would blast on about how men need to dominate and provide while women need to serve. But when the women were part of the discussion, you could see these men hedge and defer in various ways. And we saw that, at best, the women tolerated this most uncomfortable agreement. And one left the relationship shortly after Theroux had interviewed them.

The manosphere's conception of masculinity is at its core a selfish ideology. It doesn't call men to be of service, to be just, wise, or respectful. It calls them to serve themselves in a narcissistic fashion. Fromm reminds us that selfishness is not self-love, and the same holds for the narcissistic character.

Selfishness is a kind of greediness characterized by a gross uneasiness perpetuated by an anxiety of not getting enough, being enough. Selfish people envy anyone who might have more or be more. As Fromm observes, "If we observe still closer, especially the unconscious dynamics, we find that this type of person is basically not fond of himself, but deeply dislikes himself."

You see a glimpse into this psychological dimension when Theroux asks the influencer Harrison Sullivan, who goes by HStikkytokky online, why he doesn't try to spread good to the world instead of divisive content. Theroux’s question struck a chord. The moment is revealed in Sullivan's face for a brief second. You can see the conflict of conscience surface for the briefest of seconds, only to be consumed by this pathological selfishness.

These men are hollow men— empty, lonely, and hurt. Most who were interviewed came from childhoods with trauma and abandonment. They had no real models of healthy masculinity. They were, instead, wide open for the societal machine to fill the gaps. And in a consumer-driven culture, this gap is filled by commodifying oneself.

They are the Matrix

The manosphere is sometimes referred to as the red-pill community, a reference to the movie The Matrix. In the matrix, the protagonist is given the choice to awaken to the realities of social conditioning and the illusions of the social order (the red pill) or to remain in the illusion, grossly unaware (the blue pill).

The manosphere is steeped in a number of ironies, the most notable being that they use a film written and directed by two trans women as the metaphorical framework for their ideology. Lilly and Lana Wachowski would later confirm that the story of the Matrix served as a metaphor for the transgender experience of making the difficult yet important journey of awakening and embracing one’s true self against the pressures of a wider society.

How strange would it be, then, years later, to have this metaphorical reference get co-opted by an alt-right gender ideology? But this is not as strange as it seems. The system that profits from keeping the masses largely uncritical of its design will utilize liberation language to infuse its dehumanizing agenda.

Again, Fromm helps understand this seeming contradiction. He shows that while people generally claim to want freedom, their behavior generally shows otherwise. The whole premise of his book was to show how a society that claims it is free and filled with individualist ideology, like Germany, could devolve into an authoritarian society like Nazism. He made it plain to see that a society like the US could easily drift in this direction should enough of its citizens hollow themselves out for it.

Fromm noted that people became increasingly fearful of the freedom brought about by societal progress through industrialization and democratization. As the old world order was giving way, people would have to exercise their freedom by developing their personhood amid significant ambiguity. Instead, people, espeically those in 'free countries' are more suseptable to curtailing their anxiety over freedom with three possible modes of escape: authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity. The manosphere shows signs of all three--given modern men who subscribe to this ideology sufficient resources to evade freedom at all costs.

The Manosphere’s Authoritarian Ideology

The manosphere is, first and foremost, an authoritarian ideology. This is why they so feverishly attack women and any gender ideology that promotes equality, equity, and acceptance. Fromm explains that the authoritarian character sees the world as "composed of people with power and those without it, of superior ones and inferior ones. On the basis of his sado-masochistic strivings, he experiences only domination or submission, but never solidarity." This is why their content is steeped in sexist, racist, xenophobic, and transphobic content. These are all seen as threats to their pursuit of dominance.

Those who subscribe to an authoritarian ideology are also those who submit themselves to those they perceive as more powerful. This is also why they all are, ironically, claiming to be 'alpha wolves' while trying to gain the attention of other, more notable men in their lives. They may dominate their small sphere, but they must submit themselves to even bigger wolves. This is why Theroux is so threatening to these guys — he clearly has a sense of personal self-empowerment that is not found in the authoritarian hierarchy they prostrate themselves before.

In a scene out on the street, one of the manosphere influencers points to a fan who encountered him and says, "he has no inherent value; he has to create value." He goes on to explain that women, specifically beautiful women, have inherent value because of their appearance. These are the dominance narratives of the authoritarian character, which are quite dangerous to women and children. As Fromm notes, for those with little in the way of property or social prestige, the family was one way a man could confront the anxieties of freedom through power and dominance. "He was obeyed by wife and children, he was the center of the stage, and he naively accepted his role as his natural right. He might be a nobody in his social relations, but he was a king at home."

Patriarchy is a social invention aimed at controlling the population. Creating contrasts of power and control within the population is a method of macro social control. Give men more power than women, give white indentured servants more power than enslaved black people, and so on. These methods of division quell the possibility of uprising against the owning class. In other words, give a little bit of power so that they subordinate themselves to the highest power of society. This is the authoritarian directive, and it still flourishes today.

The Manosphere’s Destructive Ideology

Another way these men escape freedom, according to Fromm, is through destructiveness. When people have a profound insecurity and deep existential loneliness, they may utilize destructiveness as a method to address these issues by projecting their insecurity out into the world.

The manosphere promotes a dangerous ideology that objectifies those who are seen as a threat to their supremacy. It is dismissive, in my opinion, to see these men merely as boys. Yes, they embody an immature psychological nature, resembling that of a child. But they have the faculties and social privileges of men in our society. As such, these men have great potential to be abusive toward others. In the film, we saw how a mob of them beat up a person they suspected of being queer. We also observed the way in which they were verbally degrading toward women.

The manosphere is a dangerous ideology because it encourages insecure men to channel their insecurity into destructiveness toward others, and, if that fails, toward themselves. There is no doubt that their rhetoric encourages abuse toward women, children, and anyone else seen as beneath them. And it also encourages self-destruction.

Fromm calls this thwarting your life. A person escapes the anxieties of life, the uncertainties we have to psychologically manage, by focusing on how the other is the object and the reason for these anxieties. It is a projection. The men in the documentary are scared of women, of men who express a wider spectrum of masculinity, and anyone who hasn't taken the manosphere’s toxic pill.

But we must be clear-eyed about this. Insecurity, if not dealt with appropriately, can become a problem for everyone around this person as they lay waste.

The Manosphere as Automoton Conformity

The last method Fromm identified that people use to evade the anxiety of our freedom to build a meaningful life is automoton conformity. Here we see an irony once again. The men in the documentary are influencers, public personas who are promoting a particular brand of success. Their image of success came with the tragic stereotypes of consumer capitalist trappings that have been all too common for decades.

The automaton conformity is easily apparent in the way they all portray success in near-exact terms. Expensive cars, beautiful women, and a wide fan base. There is nothing new here. Even the methods by which they enrich themselves are simply age-old pyramid schemes retrofitted with modern technologies of self-promotion.

These influencers prey on the insecurities of men, selling them all kinds of products around getting in shape, making money through investments, and relationship advice. They are all snake oil and poison pills. Theroux, in fact, invested $500 into one of the money investment schemes only to lose all that money in relative succession.

These influencers are leeching off of their own community. They sell themselves, or at least a certain version. It seemed apparent that there is a high degree of audience capture in their work. Audience capture occurs when a person on an online platform, for example, starts to adjust their behavior to whatever gets the most likes, views, and engagement.

The philosopher Sam Keen noted this as a trait of narcissism as well. “The narcissist sees himself through the eyes of another, changes his lifestyle to conform with what is admired by others, tailors his behavior and expression of feelings to what will please others.” From this analysis, we can see that the manosphere influencers and content consumers are merely cogs in a machine of mutual reinforcement and destruction. Consumers want an outlet, and influencers become increasingly exaggerated in their claims and personas to keep up.

Each of them is a hamster on the hedonistic, consumer driven, life style obsession of contemporary society.

Building an Integrated Masculinity

The manosphere points to something that has needed to be addressed for some time in our culture. We need to continue to build a broader, more richly defined conceptualization of masculinity in our society.

Many men are walking around with old, outdated software about what it means to be a man. The truth is, the old software was always terrible for guys as well as everyone else. If being a man is just being a protector or provider, then we are promoting a very narrow, one-dimensional man in society. Such a person will have little reason to introspect.

No, these gender ideologies were designed specifically to strip away our personal freedom. This is what the manosphere can't see. They think they are rejecting modern society and pursuing freedom. What they are doing instead is shackling themselves to a myopic vision of masculinity that squeezes their humanity into a tiny box. When they can't fit into the box, all that psychological anxiety and insecurity pour out into depression, rage, confusion, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide.

But contemporary men do not have to forge this path alone; others have been on the road of social deconstruction and liberation for millennia. Women and people in the queer and trans/non-binary community have been forging a path that helps all of us build a more accepting and valuable life.

When manosphere influencers say that men have no inherent value, they echo the sentiment placed on disenfranchised members of our society. This is a shame dynamic that is perpetuated by a society that uses shame as a weapon to create subservient citizens. To liberate ourselves, we have to take the actual red pill in The Matrix—we have to listen to women, queer, and trans people.

We need to learn how to construct a society that sees people as valuable as they are and not in what they do. We need to deconstruct traditional masculinity straight down to the foundation at this point. Men, no doubt, are alienated and suffering. But this makes them easy prey to snake oil salesmen on the internet who are selling a lifestyle that will hollow them out even more.

Theroux did us a great favor, especially for those who care for young boys. We must help steer youth away from these destructive ideologies while challenging the institutions that make something like the manosphere possible. ∎

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Every time I look at the Pyramids of Giza, I can’t help but think about the workers who built them. While most probably marvel at their construction, their mystery, and their sheer magnitude, I have found them to be a cautionary tale of human paradox.

The people who built the pyramids worked hard to build a physical bridge to their leader’s spiritual afterlife, knowing they would never get the same opportunity. They worked and died so that their leader could have eternal life.

Our modern world is not as morose, perhaps, and yet our life energies are sacrificed to a larger social structure for which a disproportionate amount of benefits are siphoned to the top. The working class may not be building pyramids for our pharaohs, but we find ourselves in the largest pyramid scheme in human history.

Building Modern Pyramids for New Age Pharaohs

As modern jobs increasingly rely on an extractive mentality—where workers are merely seen as a means to productivity rates—we see burnout rates climbing to alarming levels. In a country with a collapsing social support system, workers are increasingly having to contend with longer work hours and fewer benefits.

Burnout is an occupational hazard commonly associated with feeling tired of one’s job. But burnout is more than mere exhaustion. Burnout is an unrelenting exhaustion that cascades into a psychological cynicism about the value of one’s work, a depreciation of one’s belief that what they do matters, and a general despair that often goes on unrecognized.

The average worker will spend most of their life working, and now that work is an uphill battle the whole way. Increasingly, workers are asked to do more than last year, and with fewer resources. Wages stagnate, but productivity expectations never do—strange how that works!

Stretched on the torture rack of ‘economic progress,’ many are led to believe that they are easily replaced if they can’t carry the load. Build the pyramids, or we will find someone or something that can.

The conversations around AI are simply the most contemporary iterations of a millennia-long pursuit of free labor. The pyramids being made by our society may not necessarily be towering structures for a leader’s afterlife. Instead, we build for economic progress — a goal with no end, just like that pharaoh’s eternal afterlife.

If the workers, however, are unable to lift the stones for this social institution, then they will be replaced. The result is that we see people increasingly overworking in work environments with collapsing morale. It is quite concerning to observe a return to previous eras of gross exploitation of workers.

I say all of this as a warning of the real consequences to our society. People work to live, but increasingly they are working to death. People are working themselves to death building an economy that, in the end, has demonstrated no intention of serving them. We are building a pyramid that we will never rest in.

The result is that burnout rates are proliferating across our society. But burnout is not simply a symptom of psychological distress, but a condition that can lead to rising rates of health issues and mortality.

Burnout Kills

The conversations about stress have become so commonplace in our modern era that, unfortunately, there is a tendency to trivialize stress’s impact on our lives. Everyone is stressed to a certain degree, and it becomes normalized within the cultural milieu as simply an expected condition of modern living.

Because burnout is a specific stress condition, it tends to be quickly dismissed as something that can be and should be managed through self-care. I’ve written considerably on the idea that self-care is not the sole solution to burnout. When we see burnout as simply being an individual’s failure to manage stress, we trivialize the work conditions that make burnout possible.

And when we see burnout as simply normative work-related stress, we fail to acknowledge the real danger psychological stress can have to people’s overall health. Chronic, unmitigated stress can have destructive impacts on people’s physical and psychological health.

Work-related stress can lead to death. In Japan, this is called karoshi—death from overwork. In the late 1960s, Japan came face-to-face with the hazards of unbridled occupational stress. In their case, their post-war industrial and white-collar work demands led to unsustainable work hours where workers were literally collapsing to death in the workplace from overworking.

But it is not simply the number of hours a person works that increases their health risks. It is the conditions of work as well as the conditions of our society that also impact the rates and severity of burnout. People working today have to face all kinds of stressors and uncertainties that stretch their reliance on employment including: access to healthcare, housing issues, stagnating wages, difficulty taking time off away from work, not being able to retire, and affordability issues.

In other words, workers house within their bodies the stress caused by our society's failure to construct sufficient social structures to improve the wellbeing and flourishing of its citizens.

We All Die, But None of Us Wants to Die for Work

The extraction of wealth from the majority of workers will increasingly lead to adverse effects on work-related stress and health outcomes. This is why we all have to acknowledge that our self-care routine has limitations. There are not enough walks on the beach to correct for the way our economic wealth is being redistributed to the top.

The growing economic wealth inequities are creating dire existential conditions for the average worker, especially future generations hoping to retire someday.

The great paradox of affluent societies is that wealth inequalities are robbing us of the potential to create a society where people can truly flourish. Instead, people are increasingly wed to their jobs for access to healthcare and other resources for longer periods in their lives. We see, for example, an increase in elderly employees working to afford their cost-of-living challenges.

When we live in a society that has created so much unaffordability, we are essentially creating conditions where work becomes a coffin and burnout an increasing inevitability. We live in an advanced technological age, and yet have not escaped the tyranny of pharaohs.

We operate our lives largely not cognizant of the absurdity of this particular dynamic. We all get one life, and our society seems hell-bent on increasingly trivializing human life in the pursuit of macroeconomic success.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “And one day we must ask the question, ‘why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalist economy.”

We feed the machine and build the pyramid—with our work and with our lives. If we truly want to reduce workplace burnout, we need to start treating it like the existential threat that it is. ∎

The laptop feels cold against my hospital gown as I hastily type a work email. I had unexpectedly been hospitalized for a blood platelet disorder and was preparing for my second round of transfusion treatments to address the issue. While I had alerted a few of my colleagues about the emergency hospitalization, I felt the need to do some work while the nurses prepared my next treatment.

I was supposed to be at a meeting, and here I was, laptop in a hospital bed, making sure I wasn’t disappointing people instead of tending to a more important matter at hand. I sent out a batch of emails from my hospital room, thinking of all the inconveniences this unexpected thing might cause my co-workers.

Ten minutes later, I received a text from a colleague:

“Get off your work email while you’re in the hospital, FFS! (Also- I hope you’re seeing improvements!!!)

Reading those words, especially as a scholar who researches and writes about burnout and work life, was an eye-opening experience. I had realized in that moment that I was not practicing something that I preach — we have to establish and maintain proper work-life separation.

Work-Life Entanglement

Our contemporary workplaces have increasingly ushered in confusing and entangled relationships to the work we do. For many of us, the boundary lines between where our work begins and where our personal lives end are an opaque horizon. The entwined domains of work and personal life create the impression that we, as workers, should be ever-available and more productive.

The COVID pandemic contributed considerably to this entanglement process. Forced to find creative ways for workers to continue their work from home, workers and workplaces collaborated on methods that blended the work-personal life domains. Now, it is often expected that people be able to do some of their work away from the workplace, and increasingly, people have jobs that are fulfilled entirely from home.

The flexibility to attend to one’s work-related responsibilities has been a boon for most workers who get the chance. Those who can do at least some of their work from home tend to report higher job satisfaction and be just as, if not more, productive.

Problems arise, however, when there is a clear lack of separation between our personal lives and our work-related responsibilities. Technology has heralded the possibility of doing even more work from any location. We have broadened the spaces in which people can do their work, but we have not accounted for an equally important factor: when and how often should people work in this manner?

When workers feel they must constantly be available to do their work, work becomes a psychologically exhausting context, if for no other reason than there is no sense of escape from it. This is made worse by workplaces where the exemplar worker is the person who allows work to infiltrate most of their life without objection. So what can be done about this?

The Myth of Work-Life Balance

When I go around conducting trainings on resisting burnout in the workplace, I often get asked how one can find a work-life balance. My answer is usually simple but frustrating: You don’t.

The idea of work-life balance sounds good on paper. Our task, as workers, is to find a harmonious relationship between work and our personal lives. In effect, our task is to distribute our work and personal life equally. My personal responsibilities are balanced against my work responsibilities.

Work-life balance, however, would only be possible if my workplace were fully aware of all of my personal needs and my personal life were fully aware of my work obligations and burdens. In other words, a harmonious relationship between these two domains of my life would require that they interact in a way that makes them aware of each other.

Another glaring issue with work-life balance is that it presupposes a static, balanced relationship between work and our personal lives. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes, in my personal life, my needs take priority over my work. There have also been times when my work needs to temporarily take on a greater focus. This dynamic shifting means that, at certain times in my life, work-life is purposefully unbalanced. If someone in my life dies, my biggest concern is not how I’m going to balance this with my job. At least it shouldn’t be the primary concern, in my opinion.

Work-life balance, as often proposed by workplaces, is subtle language suggesting that our personal lives need to accommodate the weight of our work — that our personal lives need to rest against the expectations of our job, but rarely the reverse. Consequently, we are seeing the work domain bleed into our personal lives in problematic ways. It is for this reason that we do not need to aspire for work-life balance but need to establish work-life separation.

Work-Life Separation

As the boundaries between work and personal life continue to blur, largely due to work obligations, it is important for workers to advocate for work-life separation. The boundary lines need to be as clear as possible.

One starting point for this kind of negotiation is the distinction between access and availability. Let’s use email as an easy example, since many of us use email for work. It is vitally important that workers have ACCESS to email if this is a communication framework used in the workplace. But email (and communication/productivity tools like Slack or Discord) creates a problem relevant to work-life entanglement; you can send an email at any time and from any place. This gives the impression, if we are not careful, that communicating with the person in this manner means they are near-constantly available.

I’ve seen this in many workplaces where electronic communication is treated as ubiquitous availability— expecting people to respond to us as quickly as possible. We treat email, for example, as if we are walking into someone’s office at any time or day, expecting them to be available for us. And this is why these communication tools can be so exhausting.

This distinction between accessibility and availability is critically necessary in our technological world. The common practice of video conferencing, electronic systems for paperwork, communication apps, and collaboration programs has made work easier to access. But we need to stop assuming this makes people available.

We’ve made so many of these systems so friction-free that we tend to overuse them. When you have to go to someone’s office to ask a question, you are more judicious because the person is not always available. But with electronic versions of these behaviors, we often assume speed and efficiency are the most important elements of our electronic interactions.

Work-life separation recognizes that my availability has to be anchored to realistic standards (and hours). If I’m doing work constantly, all hours of the day, then the lack of separation is produced by overworking. Incidentally, this is often what workplaces expect. That, with additional access technology, they expect greater availability. But this needs negoiated for worker wellbeing.

Work-life balance also misses another important factor. Sometimes things need to be unbalanced — on purpose. If I have a family member in the hospital, I don’t want work-life balance; I want my personal life to take priority. Work-life separation also supports this notion. Sometimes our work responsibilities need to be strategically deprioritized.

Assessing Your Work-Life Separation

I recognize that work-life separation is not the norm in our society. Work in our society was historically founded on indentured servitude, slavery, and child labor. In other words, worker exploitation is our cultural heritage when it comes to the relationship between worker and workplace. But we can all make incremental changes to workplaces and work cultures by strategically challenging assumptions. And one of the assumptions many workplaces make is that access is the same as availability.

I encourage people to assess the degree to which they have work-life separation.

Here are some points to explore to get you started:

1. Do I feel like I have to be constantly available for coworkers, clients, customers, and administrators? If so, what contributes to that feeling? How does my job encourage this?

2. What kind of work-life relationship is being modeled by leadership and exemplar employees? Is it expected that one sacrifice their personal life in service of the work?

3. What are the anticipated reactions if appropriate boundaries are established in this workspace?

4. How might I contribute to work-life entanglement? Are there things I do the create or maintain this type of relationship to work?

5. Do the people in my personal life feel deprioritized because of my work?

6. What might be one small thing I can do or advocate for that could contribute towards greater work-life seperation at my job?

Keep in mind that work-life separation is a work culture issue. We all need to keep our expectations grounded in the realities of reasonable progress. Changing the work culture takes time and persistent effort.

Many of us unknowingly contribute to work-life entanglement, and it may take time to change this dynamic at your workplace. Fears of productivity costs, workplace conflict, and tarnished professional image are all natural obstacles that ought to be faced.

The more we are able to, little by little, establish clearer, more defined separations between our work and personal lives, the more we will be able to establish the psychological distance needed to recharge from the stressors of our job. Ironically, this will allow us to be more productive at work while also enjoying a more enriching life outside of the hustle and grind of work. ∎

For Percy Spencer, it was an accidental discovery that would change the modern kitchen forever. A leading researcher and engineer in radar, Spencer was employed by a defense contractor. One day, while standing in front of an active radar set, he noticed the candy bar that was tucked into his front pocket had melted.

Being scientifically minded, he quickly began experiments to replicate this peculiar accident. He placed popcorn kernels in front of the device, creating the first microwaved popcorn.

Subsequent experimentation examined liquids and solid foods, producing exploding eggs and boiling water. He had created the first electromagnetic field generator housed in an enclosed box. The machine emitted microwaves that could safely heat food, and in 1945, he filed the first patent for a microwave cooking oven.

The microwave would revolutionize the kitchen. Advertisements, most often targeting wives and homekeepers, promised efficiency and time costs.

The microwave did indeed reduce cooking times. But it didn’t save us time. That time was filled with other things that might be called ‘more productive’ tasks. Americans began a steady process of reducing not only the time to cook dinner but also many of the staple cultural practices of dinner time.

Over the decades, there has been a precipitous decrease in regular home-cooked meals and the practice of eating dinner around a table. The COVID pandemic offered a temporary boost, but rates have slowly returned to pre-pandemic levels. We are no longer in our kitchens, not because the microwave saved us time, but because we no longer have time for formal meals.

The microwave didn’t cause this shift; it is the result of our society’s ever-present push for productivity, as well as the change in a family’s work-life dynamic, with the average household having two income earners and children increasingly involved in a multitude of activities. Percy Spencer had no way of knowing that in the not-too-distant future, American households wouldn’t even have time to cook food in a microwave.

This trend is not unique to microwaves. There is a parade of inventions and devices that have promised, over the decades, to be time-saving, only to show that, in the end, time is merely shifted to more pressing, time-consuming tasks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making all the same claims as the bygone era‘s technologies. It is promising to save us time and to ease our lives. But history tells us that we will not, in the end, be saved from time; instead, we will find time accelerated and compressed.

AI will not save us time. Instead, the goal posts will move — stretching further toward an event horizon where our experience of time will eventually be a muddled frenzy of nothingness. But AI is assured to accomplish one thing: Workers will be expected to be more productive, but at what cost?

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Where Does Time Go?

To have a coherent understanding of what will occur as AI advances into our lives, we have to analyze our cultural relationship to time itself.

In the modern era, we experience a paradox in our relationship to time. We are surrounded by technologies that have reduced the time required for a variety of tasks that once took up a great deal of a person’s day. Most of us no longer haul pails of water from the river to our house to cook. The majority won’t find themselves out in the cold, chopping wood to heat their houses. And I think we can all appreciate the advancement of indoor plumbing. For those of us with even remedial access to modern level benefit from having the most basic of our needs met with little time inconvenience.

Computers and the internet have revolutionized work, productivity, and society in countless ways by speeding up our work. Communication technology has made planet-wide communication near instantaneous.

Despite all these technological advancements, why does time feel so precious and the pace of life so quick?

A paradox is observed with the advent of technology and time. Even though we end up with more time, freed up by a particular technology, we tend to feel like we don’t have enough time. This is primarily due to a process called acceleration — trimming time across a multitude of tasks leads us to do many more things in the same amount of time, speeding up the pace and creating a compressed sense of urgency.

What is particularly fascinating about acceleration is the psychological consequences. As acceleration proceeds, people generally do not feel they are getting more things done. Paradoxically, we feel like we never have enough time in a world that keeps delivering time-saving technologies.

Part of what drives this time paradox is that we do, in fact, save a great deal of time on the time-saving technology. But all time must be filled, and what ends up happening is we simply do more things in less time, creating a process of hyperactivity.

We are all completing hundreds of tasks, many of which are quite convenient, and because they are convenient, we tend not to see these activities as being very productive. I suspect that AI will, in many ways, lower the felt-sense of accomplishment for many workers as a result. If I spend a couple of hours chopping firewood, I will have a stack of wood and a sense of accomplishment. If I type a few key strokes, I might not get the same sense of accomplishment, esteem, and task completion as chopping that wood.

The Industrial Revolution was partially fueled by the drive to increase workforce productivity, but it didn’t account for how workers might feel less productive or derive less meaning from their jobs. But early inventors and engineers would have no idea of the magnitude of productivity that would occur over the centuries. Our economic systems became obsessed with productivity and, as a result, our society is built mostly on this premise.

A Future of Great Leisure That Never Happened

Industrialization brought about a wide variety of utopian visions, in which the dreariness of daily tasks gave way to a swell of leisure time. This is the vision often spoken of when a new technology hits the market. The new thingy will save us time, and in the space created, a new vision for the future will be born.

Early industrialists were quite concerned that citizens, with too much time on their hands, would devolve into a listless community. After all, if folks only need to touch a dial to heat their house, what will they do with themselves?

Consequently, they thought there would have to be high levels of investment in leisure education, where people are taught to pursue hobbies, communal activities, and skill development for personal enrichment and, quite frankly, to fill the time once devoted to work.

This is an interesting idea coming from a social viewpoint that was quite sick at the time. Industrialized labor meant that most people worked 50 to 60 hours a week. Making a more productive workforce, generally speaking, meant packing workers into factories, mines, and mills for most of the available time you could squeeze out of them. With machines replacing human labor, it was thought there would be less need for this level of intensity.

But an economic system built on exploitation and profit isn’t going to take kindly to the notion that people are going to have too much time on their hands.

Feeding the Hungry Machine

In Wall-E, the advent of technology effectively infantilizes humans, confining them to pods where they eat, sleep, and watch video content. But an economy couldn’t be supported by this idea. Instead, time-saving technology was ultimately used to increase the productivity of human laborers.

There is no free time in a techno-capitalist world, especially if billions of dollars are at stake. Space created can be filled…should be filled…by the hustle and grind of a consumer-driven society.

The personal computer, for example, has revolutionized our work. It is hard to imagine the modern office operating without one. But workers aren’t going home early because they can now accomplish in a single day what used to take weeks. Instead, these same workers are working later hours with ever-growing productivity margins and expectations.

The mere price of AI alone is telling of what is to come. There is no way that a technology worth billions in investment is here to make our lives easier. It is here to make someone rich, which means it must dramatically impact productivity to be worth investment. If AI pulls this off, workers’ lives will continue to get busier and faster for those who still have their jobs. Increases in production speed will require workers to do even more.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that AI won’t improve some work tasks. It will. It is already revolutionizing areas such as the administrative burden on healthcare providers, who often spend hours on documentation and insurance paperwork for the services they provide (documentation, mind you, that has increased with the advent of computerized healthcare recordkeeping). But hospitals and healthcare agencies will be quick to have those providers see even more patients to fill the gap left in AI’s wake. Therefore, productivity standards will rise.

AI’s Productivity Problems will Emerge

AI is currently being marketed and portrayed in the best possible light to secure investment. But AI will inevitably create problems (beyond the catastrophic ecological damage that makes AI simply absurd in terms of global long-term costs).

Another prior technological advancement gives us a good example. The advent of email revolutionized how communication was conducted worldwide. What a dream it must have been for ancient people to think about the kind of power I have access to from my computer. I can reply to an email from a professional I am conversing with in the UK and, if our time zones cooperate, get a response near immediately. Email changed the world of communication, but it also created a major problem: we became startlingly less productive due to the amount of time spent engaged in electronic communication with others.

When a communication tool can deliver information instantaneously, the world starts to expect instant communication. It didn’t happen all at once. At first, email was filled with spam that was later countered by the creation of sorting systems and spam folders. As email became increasingly popular, the sheer magnitude of communication increased. It became too convenient to communicate, so the cost of sending an email was nothing. The cost of receiving hundreds of emails, on the other hand, is entirely different. Prior to email communication, it was more cumbersome, which acted as a sifting, sorting, and screening function for the recipient. Messages were only sent when absolutely necessary. Now, the barriers are lifted like levees that once protected a peaceful town.

According to the McKinsey Institute, the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. This comes to 2.6 hours per day or 13 hours per week. Communication tools have undergone improvements to address the downsides of email. Slack and Discord channels organize this deluse a bit better. But for many professionals, their jobs have shifted to being mere communication brokers, and, ironically, this will probably be the jobs replaced by AI tools.

There is a real possibility that AI creates paradoxical productivity issues in the workforce. A few known issues are emerging: prompt generation inefficiencies, AI slop, internet search pruning, model collapse, and so on.

Most of the time, however, the worst parts of a technological advancement are not fully known until it becomes ubiquitous in the workforce. What does seem likely, however, is that we will experience greater time compression and acceleration — leading to a worsening relationship with time.

Assessing Time, Productivity, and Wellbeing in the Workplace

If your workplace is implementing AI tools into the workplace, there are some considerations that you might want to assess:

Why do we think AI is necessary for this task?

Sometimes we want to play with new toys because they are new. It is important to select the right tools for the right job.

What do we hope to gain from AI doing or assisting with this task?

It is important to be clear about what the workplace is hoping to gain from implementing AI. As with anything popular, sometimes we do things because ‘everyone else does it’ (yes — we are still in a high school mentality sometimes). It is important to be clear about goals and outcomes associated with AI implementation. It should be held to a high standard (just like workers).

What are the potential costs of AI doing or assisting this task for us?

Workplaces need to anticipate future problems that AI will create in the workplace. There is no free lunch, as they say. Besides the financial investment, it is vitally important to assess potential negative outcomes arising from AI implementation. For example, Amazon Web Services was catastrophically disrupted for 13 hours after its in-house AI coding tool mistakenly deleted and recreated the digital environment. It is important to consider the costs of overly relying on this technology to replace human labor.

One of the costs is the meaning of our work. Early creators of the assembly line discovered that while the assembly line workers were more productive, they found the work to be much less meaningful than traditional methods of production. That is because screwing in the same bolt day in and day out is soul-crushing work, despite it being the most productive method. Will AI reduce the meaningful parts of your job? Something to think about.

If AI saves time on the task, what will fill that time void instead, and is it worth it? Will AI increase the felt speed of the workday? In other words, will I feel like I need to accomplish more, faster than without it? If yes, how might this impact my psychological and physical well-being at work?

In a perfect world, time-saving technology would give us humans more time off from work. But we live in a world that is never satisfied with the level of productivity earned. AI will only raise workplace productivity standards, and this needs to be clearly anticipated and worked through. Workers need to be safeguarded against unreasonable productivity standards in the wake of AI tools. Simply demanding more will push an already overworked workforce into even more unstable conditions.

Uncertainty in the New Age

As we all navigate the frontier of this new iteration of the digital age, we can bet that things will change dramatically. The prospects and unknowns are enough to fuel both optimists and pessimists. What is clear is that AI will change our relationships with work. How those relationships will change and to what extent they may improve or erode work is still unclear. We all would do well to be vigilant and advocate for what we need in our workplaces moving forward. ∎

Our current age is stacked full of chaos, pain, and uncertainty. The social order is disrupted, and societies are in decline. It can be challenging to metabolize all of these changes.

The ‘attention economy’ is an apt term for a process that has us all attentionally broke. Glued to our phones, we accrue a daily debt of fatigue, overwhelm, and general malaise as we engage in the false sense of productive doom management.

Within this perturbation, we might find ourselves reeling from the chaos, engaging in unwise vices or outright retreating into self-destruction.

What choice do we have? Our productivity-obsessed society has poisoned the concept of self-care as a means to a productive end. Take care of yourself so you can do your job better. Take care of yourself so you can tend to your overwhelming obligations while the world burns.

Tending to Wellbeing as Radical Acts of Resistance

While engaging in self-care to sustain our efforts to help others has merit, there are problems with treating self-care merely as a means. It builds an association that suggests that you are only worthy of self-care to the degree to which it translates into tangible outcomes in your life.

According to this perspective, self-care is a tool to help you get stuff done. Given our current predicament, it is not always clear what we can do or whether the things we do will be ‘productive.’ Then why engage in meaningful self-care if, at the end of the day, the world is falling apart?

In a world obsessed by domination and hierarchical power, tending to our own wellbeing and wellness is a radical act. Our wellbeing is not subject to conditional worthiness. We do not have to prove anything to deserve wellness and wellbeing. Tending to ourselves and our communities in thoughtful and intentional ways against the backdrop of dystopia is radical.

This doesn’t suggest that we each fully control our wellbeing. Wellness is structurally influenced. With the decline in economic health of our country, those with less economic resources will experience greater threats to resources that can contribute toward greater wellbeing.

Instead, what I am addressing here is the all-too-common tendency to engage in self-destructive behaviors in the face of intolerable stress. I am referring to the inclination to engage in self-neglect in the face of adversity. Or over-aggressive pursuit of distraction. Or the overly obsessive consumption of the surrounding doom.

In other words, this is about how we can, if we are not careful, take a difficult situation and context and make it worse by making choices that deny our wellbeing.

Living organisms, in order to sustain their life force, must find a balancing point within their given environment. Our environment (physically and socially) has become less habitable, yet our needs have not disappeared. The deliberate intention to care for ourselves and our communities is a radical act of wellbeing. They become the sparks of light that warm the cold nights of our collective despair.

That slow, deep breath doesn’t change the world — but it can change this brief moment. That lingering hug from your child is an opportunity to experience gratitude in the face of despair. Enjoying the feeling of a full-bellied laugh at something entertaining is a gentle reminder that all the darkness of the world can’t enter into that space.

Prioritizing wellbeing in the context of a catastrophe might seem odd at first. But it has long been known among social justice advocates and change-makers, like Angela Davis, that sustainability is a key strategy of resistance to forces that would rather see us consume ourselves into cynicism and anguish.

The Dynamic Equilibrium of Wellbeing

The key is to be mindful of our wellbeing during these times. As I’ve said before, we have to establish a clear and precise distance from the darkness we are facing or be consumed by it.

Tending to our wellbeing during societal decline requires that we hold a steadfast intention about where we invest our attention. Focusing exclusively on the outward chaos will create panic. Focusing exclusively inward will dissociate us from the reality of this moment. Our task is to dance within these extremes as we navigate the storms of uncertainty.

Our neurobiology was not built to handle chronic stress very well. In the classic book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, biology professor Robert Sapolsky explains that most of our survival repertoires were built with acute stressors in mind. Humans, however, have built elaborate structures that produce chronic stress. As a result, we find ourselves trapped in the quagmire of threat activation in our modern circumstances.

Engaging in radical self-care is an act of resistance against a world that wants us constantly plugged in and spinning. We must, to the best of our ability, move from a grounded place. The psychologist Michael Mahoney noted that people have to establish a sense of what he called dynamic equilibrium — a constant balancing act within the continuous shifts of living conditions.

I see self-care as part of that dynamic balancing act — it helps me to gather myself, form an intentional strategy of action, and to reflect on changing events. It prevents me from growing too accustomed to mere reactivity.

Steps in the Right Direction

It is important not to feel guilty wanting to build meaningful habits, tending to one’s physical, emotional, and relational health during difficult times. The guilt would have us convinced that we need to burnout to prove our worth. But this is precisely what these systems want people to do — they want to engender a pervasive hopelessness, and what better way to do that than to have people broken down?

Here are a few prompts to help you get started with tending to your wellbeing:

1. What have I been neglecting recently that could serve my overall wellness?

2. What activities am I engaged in that may not be sustainable?

3. How might I engage in wellness activities as a form of resistance?

4. When I feel guilty for tending to my needs during these times, what is the guilt about?

5. What is my relationship with being informed about the things going on? What would an intentional relationship with things like consuming news or other similar activities look like?

One thing the COVID-19 pandemic revealed was that people really struggled with wellness against chronic stressors. Instead, people had a tendency to engage in short-term coping strategies that were neither sustainable nor beneficial in the long term. For this reason, it is essential not simply to look for things that make us ‘feel good.’

The focus is more on the sustainability — to look out at the distant future and wonder how we might meet that future with some intentional work today. We are not ignoring the short-term; instead, we are balancing short-term, often reactive behaviors with longer-term, intentional efforts in wellbeing. That means we nurture relationships that will support us in difficult times. We tend to our physical health to the best of our ability, resisting any tendency toward neglect or harm. We tend to our mental health — acknowledging the limits of our capacity to hold the world’s suffering.

I see this process as a dance in the chaos. Yes, we can build positive habits in hell. It might be the best time to do them. ■

It’s the fall of 1999, and the movie Fight Club is gaining popularity among teenage and young adult crowds. A film based on Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel, Fight Club explored many contemporary themes — most notable, for me, was the piercing criticism of consumer culture. In a now iconic statement, the rowdy and unpredictable Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, says the narrator, “We are consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me; what concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear, Rogaine, Viagra. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let’s evolve. Chips fall where they may.” And to add a firm punch to the face of consumer reality, he ends by saying, “the things you own end up owning you.”

We live in a society that has waged a full scale war on our contentment. Our age is one punctuated by the sheer access to what would have once been considered the height of luxury. Most of us have access to a cornucopia of consumer goods that promise us any manner of pleasure, status, accomplishment, relief, belonging, and pride.

Despite ready access to so many commercial goods promising us contentment, we find ourselves increasingly unhappy. In a society that offers so many goodies that tickle our dopamine fix, it is no wonder we have lost our bearings with what might be most important in a meaningful life.

In an ironic turn of events, we have found that shelter (and increasingly food) have increasingly become costly while luxury goods more within our purchasing power. It seems clear that society wants you to be a consumer of goods and services, not necessarily a person who has viable access to the basic foundations of survival like shelter, healthcare, and quality nutrition. Those come with premium prices.

There is good reason why our society has fortified itself as a consumer society — it ensures that economic power is secured by those who own the capital in society while encouraging all of us to increasingly seek out consumer goods to find fulfillment in a society that abhors contentment.

The War on Contentment

My grandparents were part of the generation that survived an economic depression, a world war, a war in Korea, and a cold war. My grandfather, who was a tank driver in World War II, never threw away anything he saw that had future value including any left over lumber, metal, parts, screws, and so on. Anything old was good. It helped that he was a skilled welder, carpenter, and general handyman. My grandmother-in-law, too, was an incredibly handy person skilled tailoring, quilting and other home crafts, gardening, and so on. What I noticed about their generation is that they tended to not waste things and tended to save nearly anything that might have future use. They were not ‘consumers’ by any stretch of the imagination.

Our culture has gone through a considerable transformation over the course of several generations, both in terms of purchasing power and desire, starting with the baby boomer generation and continuing into our youth today. This is all part of the grand vision of industrialization’s great promise. The late sociologist Erich Fromm, in his book To Have or To Be, keenly diagnoses in 1976 some of the key issues of modernity.

“The failure of the Great Promise [of unlimited progress], aside from industrialism’s essential economic contradictions, was built into the industrial system by its two main psychological premises: (1) that the aim of life is happiness, that is, maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (radical hedonism); (2) that egotism, selfishness, and greed, as the system needs to generate them in order to function, lead to harmony and peace.”

In order to understand this profound shift, we need to understand the psychological mechanisms that are partly responsible. According to the psychologist Paul Gilbert, humans evolved three separate but interrelated systems for regulating our emotions and directing our attention energy. In his book, The Compassionate Mind, he explains that we are motivated to ward against threats to our safety, to seek out resources, and to rest in contentment when safe and satiated.

From this formulation, we can see how our current economic systems ‘motivate’ us into excessive drive in the pursuit of consumption for the purposes of pleasure, status, or achievement. Consuming can also serve as a poor surrogate for contentment as well. We purchase things sometimes as a way to self-soothe against the stressors and threats of our daily lives (attempting to down regulate our threat system).

Marketing firms became increasingly successful in selling not only products but the inferred status for such items. While previous generations would criticize the degradation in the quality of purchasable goods, younger generations became more interested if it had the appropriate logo. This is masterful work on the part of corporations, especially the fashion industry, which can sell cheaply made shirts for $80 allowing for maximal profitability with a loyal customer base. Our consumer driven lifestyle was crafted and fueled by economic globalization that aimed to find newly exploitable workforces to drive down the costs of production while maintaining aggressive profit-margins, profits that would slide upward to the c-suite executives and investors.

The Double-Binds of Consumer Society

As we can see, the whole system is built upon greed, and with it comes the necessity of the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of consumers. And consumer spending is what drives the majority of the economy. According to the U.S. Bank, “In 2024’s fourth quarter, personal consumption expenditures represented nearly 68% of the nation’s GDP. Healthy consumer activity is the primary economic growth driver.”

Corporatists have to manufacture discontent in order to create mass appeal of consumer products that can drive profit. Keeping consumers on a hedonic treadmill constructed on a semi-regular release of the next consumer product ensures that all participants in this sick-cycle are locked in.

The system is built and driven to its apex by human greed. The greatest liability of this entire system is that consumers stop consuming. The COVID pandemic revealed how fragile our system has become under the assumption of endless consumption. Large corporations, in particular, seem to lack resilience in the face of consumer shifts.

It is clear to see, then, that consumer spending must not stop. I remember it clearly when President Bush was urging Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 to go out shopping. Fight club had only been out for a couple of years and here we were being asked by the Commander-in-Chief to do the patriotic thing by purchasing that new sectional sofa. For me, this would go down as one of the most dystopian reactions to national trauma I would witness.

The current Trump administration is utilizing an usual tactic to say the least. The delusional belief that tariffs will somehow magically lead to massive migration of American manufacturing has resulted in major disturbances to markets and consumer confident. The consumer is spooked on a number of fronts.

Our entire system from top to bottom has become consumed in our consumer system — Tyler Durdan was right. I find it interesting that movements toward increasing American manufacturing do not take into consideration the massive consequences to the consumer-drive nature of our current economy. If we move toward being more of a manufacturing powerhouse as we once were, we will also simultaneously become less consumer driven as we once were. We will, rightfully, demand that products be made with higher quality if they sport a more expensive price (given the cost of labor).

We would probably see the consumer market shift considerably. Corporatists also would run into issues demanding their usual high profitability ratio, which would drive the costs of products even higher, leading to a reduction in sales. There are major issues on all sides of this because the entire system has created economic stability on exploitation and consumer-driven greed. But this system took a solid forty years or more to get to where it is today.

As consumers, it seems we lose no matter which path we are currently offered. What is perhaps the most alarming to me, is the idea that if American’s were more contented in their life, they would most likely see a sharp depreciation in their drive to have the latest kitchen device (or whatever). This would, in turn, drive down the economy, which would then jeopardize their economic stability.

Our society has been consumed by consumerism. In our efforts to buy possessions that promise happiness, status, and pleasure — we have become, ironically, the possessed. And we have to spend money to ensure our society’s economic stability. We have become owned by a system of perpetual consumption. I’m not suggesting we become Tyler Durden and burn down the system, but I am alarmed by a world in which we are driven in this manner.

Our neolibral economic system has prioritized our consumption behavior above our overall wellbeing and contentedness. As Erich Fromm noted, we have treat almost everything in our life as possessions and property as a result of this acquisitive social directive. I believe this is what Fight Club was ultimately illuminating — our society has become totally divorced from meaning and community. The initial rejection of this woldview was to embrace anarchy, but eventually the protagenonist adopts a more mature position in the end.

High on Their Own Supply

Our consumer culture is largely propagated by owners of capital that benefit economically from the mass appeal of their products. Over the course of the last forty years we see the precipitous rise in the profits of the economically elite class, with the creation of the first billionaires on the planet.

The psychology of billionaires is an interesting one for our society. America has founded so much of its contemporary value system on getting and staying rich — and by this account billionaires have won this game. This should arise a contented feeling, you would think, amongst this class of individuals — most of whom were able to take the fortune of their inheritances and grow their wealth by extreme measures. But we don’t see billionaires being more happy.

Interesting research that looks at the relationship between wealth and happiness finds an interesting dynamic. It is true that money can improve your happiness but only to a certain point. Elevating a family out of poverty, for example, can have tremendous impact to happiness and wellbeing. But there is a ceiling effect to the relationship of money and happiness — in other words, once you have what we could consider a lower middle class access to income and resources, happiness does not dramatically increase as you become richer.

In fact, it seems that many highly rich people become addicted to the pursuit of more. Consumer culture wants people on a hedonic treadmill of more and it seems that many billionaires have gotten entranced into a similar situation. They have gotten high on their own supply. The pursuit of more power, more influence, and more admiration demonstrates the addictive power that the pursuit of these things have — the power of greed firmly locks into people’s lives within a wide range of incomes.

The Last Jacket You’ll Need Doesn’t Need Pockets

We have become possessed by consumer culture. The truth is our current time is illuminated in ancient stories that show that our endless pursuit of externalities ultimate leads to our hubris. Billionaires keep pursuing power in an effort to ‘be enough’ and we keep buying the next iphone to ‘feel enough.’ It is all socially constructed to ensure we do not operate from the center of our being — to localize our freedom, passion, and wellbeing from our existential realities.

“The desire to consume,” Lewis Hyde explains in his book The Gift, “is a kind of lust but consumer goods mere bait this lust, they do not satisfy it.” He goes on to say, “the consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”

Real satisfaction in life comes from our focus on being-in-the-world. This kind of being is about engaging with ourselves and with others in meaningful ways. This is the pathway of a meaningful life. The motivational speaker Dwayne Dyer once said that, “The last jacket you wear won’t need any pockets.” He means to say that when you are at the end of your life, your possessions ultimately won’t matter. Your property will not be the most meaningful thing in the last moments of your life.

You can’t take any of this stuff with you when you die and if the most interesting thing about you at your funeral is your wealth, then I’m afraid to say you lived an impoverished life. I’m not suggesting we all live as monks. We also don’t necessarily need to be rebellious minimalists either. Instead, we should be challenged to reflect on what truly matters in our lives.

Our consumer driven culture is a distraction from the existential reality that we have one life to live and precious choices to make in the time we have. This is also a call for us to re-evaluate what should be affordable in our society (e.g., housing, healthcare, quality food) and what should be considered a luxury. But most importantly, we need to reflect on how we are being-in-the-world and less on what we have. Our society should place great importance on lifting members of our community out of poverty and less concerned with spending our whole lives chasing increasing amounts of possessions. Our focus should be on being in the world, not having the world. ∎

It’s the summer of 2021, and Pam is starting to recognize that the distress she has been feeling at work might be burnout. It had been festering at her workplace. As an addiction counselor who works in residential treatment, she had worked throughout the pandemic under the “essential worker” classification.

Six months into the pandemic, several of her co-workers were toasty with burnout, beginning to slack off on work responsibilities and voicing a cynical dissent to most suggestions about how to address the ongoing challenge of providing quality addiction care while also tending to health and safety.

Pam initially felt a sense of camaraderie with her fellow co-workers, but as the morale of the team tumbled, she found herself infected by their negativity. A year later, she is struggling to get up to go to work — wondering if there is any real advantage to continuing down this career path.

In reflection, Pam realized that the constant negativity of the workplace brought on a great deal of her burnout. She enjoyed her work with clients, but having to fill in the gaps with colleagues who were no longer team players began to drag her down.

During the pandemic, Pam would catch more than COVID; she would also catch burnout.

Is Burnout Contagious?

Burnout has become a commonplace term liberally applied to many stressful contexts, disappointments, and pressures of modern living. As a burnout scholar, I am prone to view burnout as a workplace phenomenon where the interaction between a worker and the workplace results in negative consequences, manifesting in psychological distress, health issues, and disruptions to work productivity.

One of the leading burnout researchers of the last century, Christina Maslach categorized three dimensions of burnout that are relevant to understanding the contagion effect of burnout:

• exhaustion

• cynicism

• compromised productivity

As we will see, cynicism and compromised productivity, in particular, seem to have deleterious effects on our communal workplace.

In the early 2000s, organizational psychologist Arnold Bakker wondered if burnout could be transmitted from person to person in a given workplace. At this point, workplace research had observed that burnout often emerged in clusters within an organization. Dr. Bakker and his research team sought to determine whether a person’s susceptibility to emotion contagion — a conscious cognitive process of tuning into the emotions of others — could make them particularly vulnerable to ‘contracting’ burnout through interpersonal interactions with burned-out coworkers.

In 2001, they published a paper based on a study of physicians in the Netherlands, finding that doctors who were more susceptible to their colleagues’ negative emotions and cynical attitudes were more likely to experience burnout themselves. Since then, research studies have demonstrated burnout contagion in various workplaces, including schools and healthcare organizations.

The Effect of Cynicism on the Workplace

Several factors can contribute to burnout contagion. When members of our workplace are going through burnout, it is not uncommon for their overall conduct to shift and change. Burnout has a detrimental effect not only on our sense of well-being but also on our general attitudes about work. As burnout deepens, we can begin to adopt a cynical attitude toward work, the organization, and those with fellow coworkers.

Cynicism is a particularly draining emotional attitude to be around. It tends to produce a deflated and irritable mentality, which, if spread to others, can lead to a feeling of apathy and hopelessness.

Hopelessness is a difficult emotion for our empathy. Attempting to connect with someone’s hopelessness empathically can often feel like hitching yourself to the anchor of a ship — plunging yourself into the dark depths of someone else’s despair. The study of physicians in the Netherlands revealed this truth. Those who are particularly emotionally available to their coworkers may, in fact, be susceptible to burnout from others simply because cynicism has a deflating, sinking quality to it.

Cynical attitudes at work also tend to increase isolation — people start avoiding coworkers and the draining energy of cynicism. This isolation can lead to separate workplace issues.

Sometimes, however, people want to join in on cynically inspired vent sessions to ‘let loose’ their dissatisfaction with work. While venting can sometimes offer relief, if cynicism is at the heart of all the venting — it tends to backfire. Most of the time, there is little relief, and worse, the person is left with their stress and decreased morale.

The Burnout Domino Effect

Simply being emotionally or psychologically affected by our co-workers is not the only way burnout spreads in a workplace. Through my investigations into the lived experiences of individuals who have experienced burnout, I became aware of a common pattern expressed by many who navigate burnout among coworkers. This pattern, as it happens, is related to the last dimension of Maslach’s description of burnout: compromised productivity.

As a member of our work group burns out, their work productivity will eventually be affected. This can manifest in several ways, including increased absenteeism, dropping important work responsibilities, disregarding other’s demands at the workplace, and so on. This, in turn, can impact our own work tasks and responsibilities, placing more significant burdens and increasing stress.

As we try and compensate for our fellow colleague’s loss of productivity, we may find ourselves increasingly vulnerable to the pressures of burnout baring down on us. I call this the Burnout Domino Effect.

And so the dominoes begin to fall — creating a cascading effect in the workplace where burnout is spreading into an increasingly challenging context. Now, it is easy to want to place blame on the first person who burned out. It is essential to step back and recognize that the domino effect occurs because the system is susceptible to this outcome.

The burnout domino effect is particularly salient in overtaxed and under-resourced workplaces. In these spaces, there is little forgiveness for absences or reduced workloads. Inflexible workplaces are vulnerable to situations where employees are expected to be fully available and productive at all times. When coworkers have to manage someone else’s duties in addition to their already overburdened tasks, a disastrous situation is waiting to happen. Not only can this create further animosity in the workplace, the work overload can provoke burnout in those left to fill in the gaps.

Most workplaces that produce burnout are also stretched or, at the very least, are stretching their resources. Workplaces are often so packed that the absence of a co-worker is enough to send the system into a spiral. In other words, the workplace lacks sufficient resiliency.

The Burnout Domino effect can radically change a workplace. As burnout spreads, work responsibilities are piled onto the most well-adjusted workers, much like a game of hot potato. Workgroups struggling in this manner sometimes create a cyclical pattern where burned-out workers withdraw and disengage from work. This space can sometimes be beneficial in a person’s recovery from burnout. That disengagement, however, can lead to other colleagues becoming over-engaged in work and thus vulnerable to burnout.

As the disengaged worker feels better and steps more into the work, they find that their colleagues are now where they were previously — disengaged and burned out. They step in to cover and round and round we go. I suppose we could call this process the burnout merry-go-round.

Shared Burnout Causing Events

The last form of burnout to be investigated is shared burnout. Sometimes, burnout spreads quickly among work groups because they all collectively have experienced contexts that have contributed to group burnout. Critical events that are mismanaged, such as major funding being pulled, mass layoffs, and other similar contexts, can produce a shockwave of despair, exhaustion, and cynicism.

These events alone are usually not enough to produce large-scale, lasting burnout if workplace leaders know how to appropriately address the issues and support their workers. If these events are linked to poor management and toxic workplace culture, then burnout may be a natural consequence of these larger-scale issues.

Workgroups often find themselves collectively experiencing burnout, which can sometimes prompt the need for community care. However, left unaddressed, collective burnout can be a particularly grueling workplace event, as entire teams of people can spiral into burnout with limited resources available for those with whom we are working.

What Can We Do?

It can be demoralizing to read the ways in which burnout can blaze through our workplaces with catastrophic consequences. It is also natural to wonder what we can do to address burnout contagion in our workplace. Here are a few considerations:

(1) Self-Care is Self-Defense.
I have written about the need to adapt our self-care practices not just as a tool of rejuvenation but as a strategy of protection from the toxic elements found in the workplace. For example, it’s essential to recognize that our relationship with work requires intentional boundary setting. It is also important to reserve enough of yourself so that you are not completely ‘giving it all’ to the job.

(2) Community Care is Critically Important.
We must cultivate positive, compassion-focused working relationships with those we work with, even if we don’t like some of them. Mainstream American culture has become overly individualistic, leaving us vulnerable to workplace exploitation and neglect. Collaborative work relationships will not only help prevent burnout contagion but also enable your team to address burnout when it arises.

(3) Advocate and Educate.
It is important that managers and supervisors know the systemic elements of burnout. Burnout spreads in workplaces that fail to address the conditions that promote it. It is also the responsibility of managers and supervisors to identify the factors that are leading to the burning. I’m reminded of an episode of Dwight from The Office, who was jumping in to help (perhaps aggressively) when there was a fire in the building. Leaders need to jump in and find where the fire is burning and assist in putting it out.

(4) Monitor your Energy and Your Heart.
Be mindful of your exposure to cynicism in the workplace. Creating emotional boundaries with co-workers helps us clarify what our issue is versus what is theirs. As the saying goes, ‘misery loves company’, and it is important to address burnout as promptly as possible in the workplace. We can still be attentive to the person burning out — giving them our support. However, we must be clear that their experience does not have to be our own. For those who are burning out, it is vitally important to take responsibility for the energy you bring to a workgroup.

(5) Protect Against Overwork.
While this is simple, this is probably one of the most difficult for most people to do. Our culture glorifies overworking. We even go so far as to moralize our work, making self-sacrificing an esteemed ideal. Most workplaces do not shape work obligations based on the science of productivity or even the limits of human capacities at times. Instead, workplaces will often assign duties in an abstract manner that targets larger organizational goals. Assessing your workload and projecting the time and resource commitment for said goals is an important first step.

A Community Orientation to Work

Like Pam, we can all be vulnerable to burnout that spreads within our workplace. During the COVID pandemic, we hopefully learned how to be more communally aware of the systemic impacts that affect our society and our work. Using this frame of mind, we can encourage a more community-orientated approach to our work. Part of this approach includes tending to the relational contexts of our work to prevent the spread of burnout. If we recognize that burnout originates in the workplace and can spread among workers, we can develop strategies to prevent and mitigate burnout. ∎

People love a good transformation story. The rags to riches tale. That nerd-to-hero movie. The sports team who started behind and made it all the way to the top. An underdog country in World War II that became a world superpower through grit and bravery.

Change and transformation can feel good, and they certainly can make for a compelling story. But change is not a simple process of mere improvement, as we are often told to believe. Most contemporary notions of change espouse the myths of endless, linear, unimpeded growth.

Worse yet, we pursue these kinds of changes, believing they will make us happier and more successful. We apply these myths of change to our personal lives, our businesses, our education, our technology, and our economy.

Consequently, these attitudes toward change and well-being generally lead to discontent and are linked to many of the issues attributed to consumer culture. These models of change that we have are all wrong. Sure they can demonstrate results in the short term. In fact, from our economic models to our personal models of change — the focus seems fixated on the short term.

We want to change our lives, and we want that change now! But we pay a high price for this kind of thinking — a debt paid into our troubled future.

Real, meaningful change is not about short-term quick fixes to our complicated lives. The kind of changes people need are often those that come with the most perturbation, uncertainty, and cost. James Baldwin wrote, “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.”

If we are to create sustainable change in our lives, then we have to approach change in a realistic way. What do I mean by realistic?

Making a change in our lives means that something has to die!

Change and Death

Contemplating the relationship between our choices and death can be a troubling way to start this exploration. However, it is vitally important to consider the role death has on how we engage in meaningful change. Our life choices are made as our life is lived — a life that is moving in one direction. Forward. We only have so much forward before the end.

There is a close relationship between change and death. Think about it this way: all change involves loss, things given up, something exchanged. Always. Big life decisions or small, life is not simply a parade of additional things we are gaining. If we are gaining things then it also comes with things we may be letting go, things we are deciding not to pursue, things we are leaving alone.

It is no mistake that many ancient cultures and religions believed that the gods of creation were also the gods of entropy and destruction. Similarly, many shamans and witches understand that the world operates in a delicate balance. No magic can merely create something without something being given up in return. Nothing is gained without a price.

This has relevance in our contemporary world because, from this perspective, all change occurs within a closed ecosystem. There is an important symbiotic relationship going on here.

In contrast, most modern concepts of change simply see change as growth. Our stock markets, and the economies they represent, are built on the idea of endless growth. Many of our psychological models of personal change have this idea as well. They relish in the before and after photo that doesn’t consider a wider context.

As a result, we have constructed a consumer culture that often disregards any real cost to a given choice or behavior. We’ve grown addicted to progress, often for its own sake. Our innovative mantras in businesses often shout ‘can we’ but rarely ask ‘what will we lose by gaining this?’

As a result, the changes that are often made are superficial, transient, or down right dangerous. A company lays off a percentage of its workforce to make their Q4 look more profitable than it was. These are mere illusions of change we tend to create when we have little respect for the realities of lasting meaningful change processes.

The reality is change involves three equally important considerations:

• exchange

• limitedness

• integration

As they say, nothing is free, and if a change is to be sustainable, it must consider (and respect) these forces within the interdependent world.

Vampiric Change

When our vision of change does not consider exchange, limitedness, and integration, we end up with unsustainable, monstrous versions of change. The first one I want to talk about is what I refer to as vampiric change.

The vampire mythos is centered on the undead — beings that are not alive but are not entirely dead. In other words, vampires violate the natural order — a creature out of the exchange with nature since all natural things die as part of the interconnected flow of life. Something outside of this cycle would disrupt the dynamic balance that nature provides.

While vampires do not exist, vampiric models of change do. Like vampires, this model of change does not consider exchange as a natural part of the change process.

What do I mean by exchange? Let me give you an example. If I want to hike more, then I will do at least one thing less. This exchange just makes sense. I can’t gain something without giving some other things up or at least doing something less. So maybe I have to give up some Netflix time in service of my goal of hiking more. These exchange processes help keep my newly found change balanced within the larger structures of my life. Quite simply — I can be on my couch watching Netflix and hiking at the same time.

This points to an important reason why sometimes we do not change — sometimes we don’t change because the price is too high. What we have to give up is an important consideration.

A common thing we have to give up in the service of change is our sense of certainty. We don’t know what is going to happen next. Anything we do that is truly novel means we have to let certainty die at that moment.

Let’s look at an example. In order to write more, perhaps, I have to let go of some of the fear of failure. Maybe I have to let die the narrative that “You aren’t good enough to write.”

Now it might seem silly to think I have to let go of the fear of failure. But by letting the fear of failure die, I invite a greater uncertainty into my life. And this can be uncomfortable. It can be challenging to let a known discomfort pass away and an unknown discomfort take its place.

In vampiric change, however, the emphasis is on feeding change without considering an exchange, the cost. It’s all consumed with gaining things without consideration to what things need to be let go, given up, or allowed to end. The costs of change are not considered. As a result, a great debt, so to speak, is accrued in the process.

We see this kind of change in forms of modern business and politics when leaders act in ways that suggest that they do not appreciate the interdependence of all beings or the inequities their greed induces. It is a method of change that grabs as much as you can and gives nothing in return.

And there is a great deal of temptation in this kind of change because it suggests that the change you want in your life is out there waiting for you to take it without any real cost.

Life-full Change Not Lifeless Change

Vampires are monsters because they have lost their humanity. For us humans, the beauty of life lies precisely in our eventual exchange of life with death.

Our life choices are meaningful because we can’t do it all; we can’t have it all. Our choices have consequences for ourselves and for others. We have to be responsible for our choices as a result. Therefore, we have to make committed choices toward what really matters in our lives!

And the costs of those choices are worth it if it aligns with our values. It produces meaningful change. If we approach change in a consumptive orientation, however, we will often experience a hollowed-out, lifeless change. These changes don’t feel worthwhile and often lead a person hungry for more.

Don’t be a Vampire: Our ever-evolving change process has to be connected to the world we live in. Exchange and interdependence are important considerations. Some questions to ask yourself:

• What might I lose to gain what I want?

• What kinds of exchanges might have to happen in order for this change to take place?

• The changes I engage with will have impacts on those around me. Who will that be and how might it affect them?

• Is the change I’m wanting bringing more meaning/vitality to my life or is it a lifeless pursuit?

Cancerous Growth

Exchange is one part of the change process we need to consider. Limitedness and integration are other important parts. Limitedness helps create boundaries to growth, whereas integration helps us stabilize changes happening over time.

Without limitedness and integration, we could change too quickly or inconsistently. Or the changes we have made might not settle into the larger ecology. And there is an unfortunate model of this in nature.

Growth without limits and integration is cancer.

Think about it. Cancer is growth. But it’s catastrophic growth because it is cellular growth that has evaded cellular death (limitedness) and extends itself without consideration of its own organism (integration) leading to damage over time. It has compromised its own organic system by extending and replicating its cellular structure too far. In other words, it has grown too much, too fast.

Unfortunately, the cancerous growth model extends well outside medical health. We see cancerous growth modeled everywhere in our economy. A person working in sales has a good quarter. We celebrate the win and then a stark realization — that a win for today is now the expectation for the future.

Businesses have to grow or, at the very least, appear like they are growing. The constant marching drum of ‘progress’ in this context leads some companies to behave poorly in the service of short-term profits. Corporations that have grown too large and lack proper integration within our economic ecology are considered ‘too big to fail,’ meaning that they are to be considered everlasting or limitless. This is cancerous growth at the economic level.

We see this modeled in our own personal lives too. I see all these articles about ‘biohacking’ and human ‘optimization.’ We are frantically trying to succeed through the ‘hustle’. You are either winning or you are losing. There seems to be sheer panic at the possibility that we will experience any form of decline as we age and so must vigorously deny such inevitability through consumer products that promise the miracle of anti-aging.

I’ve seen this in counseling contexts as well. A person is making some important changes to their life, and then they start to level off. Plateauing is a natural and expected part of the change process. Countless times when this happens, however, clients are bereft of the process, “why is this happening to me?”

Our psychological health requires time for rest and integration. We need time to stabilize new insights, habituate new behaviors, and practice new skills. But if our internal working model of change emphasizes growth as a linear, unending process — then we will suffer.

Allow for Integration and Stabilization: Change necessitates rest and reset. It also requires us to know our boundaries and limits. Pushing beyond what we can tolerate is the surest way toward injury. Ask yourself:

• How am I supporting my growth?

• Am I expecting too much, too quickly of myself or others?

• Am I fueling these change processes with renewable resources?

• How when I know I need to rest versus engage?

• When will I know I have gone far enough or am I on an endless pursuit of more?

Building Sustainable Futures

Our expectations for growth and change must be mapped onto human life’s existential realities. From our economic policies to our personal growth goals, we need to appreciate the higher wisdom of nature.

Our expectations of change need to find a home in the soil of human existence. They have to make a relationship with the real boundaries of life. We certainly don’t want to be vampires or cancers to the world!

Nature demonstrates that sustainable growth is about exchange, limits, and integration within an interdependent environment. Our whole human life is one big production of these forces. If we seek a sustainable future, we are wise to respect and incorporate these forces into our plans for change. ∎

It is 1607 in the Italian city of Mantua. The city is situated between and slightly to the south of Milan and Venice. It’s early summer and the composer Claudio Monteverdi assembled a huge ensemble of musicians.

Up until this point in history, most composers prioritized the specific musical melodies for an ensemble not necessarily specific parts to particular instruments. Monteverdi had something else in mind. He had written parts for specific instruments. He also intended to do this with a much larger ensemble than was usually the case.

He led the ensemble through a musical experience that would set in motion much of what we recognize in modern orchestras and was one of the pioneers in the development of opera.

Modern orchestras now boast some one hundred musicians. It takes quite the coordination to find a cohesion we recognize as music.

Our workplaces are like orchestras and our culture is obsessed with maestros. Workplace culture is fixated on leaders. Magazines proclaim them as ‘Person of the Year’. Documentaires and Hollywood films obsess about the faces of well-known corporate leaders.

This is the equivalent of thinking that the most important person in that orchestra is the person on the box waving a stick. But orchestra music, like so many vocational outcomes of our modern world, cannot be produced by a single person. Orchestras demonstrate beautifully the power of the human collective engaged in a group process.

We can gain something valuable by turning away from a preoccupation with leaders and toward the systems they serve. Leaders, too, could benefit from this systems perspective. Leadership, then, becomes a group process.

A Focus on Systems

In ancient Greece, thinkers knew that there were important reasons to appreciate the interconnected web of things. Aristotle, for example, claimed that “the whole is of necessity prior to the part.”

Since that time, systems and holistic theories have been utilized in business, education, healthcare, and technology. Good leaders need to be good at systemic thinking. They need to understand and appreciate the system as a whole, not just its component parts.

Good leaders need to have the capacity to snap onto different perspectives within the system they are leading. And perhaps most importantly, leaders need to share a deep appreciation that they are part of a larger system.

All of this requires that we drop the notion that leaders are special and above the systems they serve.

Now I know what you are thinking, don’t leaders matter? Yes, of course. But our culture puts too much emphasis on the person who is the leader and not enough attention on leadership as a facilitated process — a group dynamic.

The device you are reading this on is a great example of systems theory and the leadership necessary to produce it. This device is the amalgamation of thousands of people’s efforts, both historically and presently. Ideas developed, elevated, elaborated, and improved. People who know about materials, labor, manufacturing, technology, psychology, business. It is the product of human relationships that took glimmers of ideas and turned them into industries. A single human being would never be able to accomplish such miracles! And yet often a single human (or some small few) gets all the credit. This device exists because of the workplace ecology that supported it.

Leaders Don’t “Deserve” Their Position

We have to start this journey into leadership processes by de-throning our leader preoccupation.

Being promoted to a leadership position is an exciting and thrilling feeling. Don’t let any leader convince you that they weren’t content with the status they obtained by being a leader. And, quite frankly, we shouldn’t take that away from people.

The problem is not the status of leadership. The problem is an entitlement that can follow the status.

Being promoted, hired, or elected toward leadership is not a position of entitlement. It is a temporary privilege. Even if you created the company. Even if people have erected statues in your honor.

For some, they will be leaders in that position for a long time and others may be less. But for all leaders, there is no right to leadership. Leaders who lay claim to this supposed right ensure certain and eventual destruction.

While most leaders would be quick to agree that it is improper to act entitled, the truth is that entitlement is not necessarily a fully conscious attitude. Instead, it may very well present itself in the implicit attitudes leaders have in their position.

Dutch psychologists David de Cremer and Eric van Dijk were able to demonstrate that simply identifying or being labeled as a leader can lead to potentially unhelpful entitlements to resources. Their experiments showed that those who were simply told they showed an above-average aptitude for leadership were more likely to take more resources from the group irrespective of their actual contributions.

This social-psychological process is sometimes referred to as entitlement bias. What this research on entitlement bias demonstrates is that leaders need to be vigilant of the tendency to engage in egocentric motivations and behaviors.

In other words, we need to make sure our leadership position is not getting to our head. And what I generally recommend to leaders is to remove the word ‘deserve’ from their vocabulary.

Leaders do not deserve — leaders serve. Stephen Covey states it clearly in another way, “leadership is a choice, not a position.”

You are an entrusted steward of an ecology. And you have already learned this lesson from the Lion King. When Scar takes over leadership, he is selfish and greedy. He is entitled, which actually motivated him to take the throne. The results speak for themselves. His actions lead to degradation to the ecology and all suffered for it — including him! He believed himself superior to others, was resistant to feedback, and did not trust the team. He did not understand his role.

An effective leader must embrace authentic humility. Leaders have to actively resist the potential corruption that the role of leader can provoke.

If we allow the role of leader to get to our heads, then we very well might justify behaviors that are unproductive, even harmful. We will forget we are a part of a system not above it.

Leadership without Ego

We’ve heard the business adage: ‘It’s not personal; it’s business.’ My experience, however, is that leaders have a poor habit of taking way too many things personally.

And it’s not entirely leaders’ fault. This is the side effect of our work culture being obsessed with individual leaders. There is the misplaced myth that the leader is what makes a workplace.

Think of a highly successful business. Now give me the names of 20 people that led to the success of that business. If you are struggling you are not alone. Okay, now think of a single person who you think represents a successful leader. Done, see much easier. We attribute success and failure almost singlehandedly to leaders and yet we know, for a fact, that it is more complicated than that.

Systems thinking provides a more comprehensive answer. The relationships and interactions of various subsystems of a workplace ecology have the greatest impact on long-term success. The task of an effective leader is to find the dynamic balance between the relationships of subsystems and the organization as a whole’s values and goals. It is the synergy and trust of the components of a system that ultimately determines success or failure.

In order to be successful, leaders are best to check their egos at the door. When we lead from our ego, we will have the tendency to act in a manner that prioritizes accolades (e.g., “winning”), being right, demanding compliance, being less sensitivity toward subordinates, avoiding contexts of failure or ridicule, and prioritizing ourselves above subordinates and organizational needs.

The ultimate costs, in this context, are transferred to workers and organizational outcomes. And there is a spectrum of specific destructive leadership behaviors that are worth mentioning. Social psychologist Merethe Schanke Aasland and colleagues identified four categories of destructive leadership behaviors. The researchers categorized these as tyrannical leadership behavior, derailed leadership behavior, laissez-faire leadership behaviors, and supportive-disloyal leadership.

All of these destructive leadership behaviors have something in common. They are expressions of a leader who has become too entangled in the role and misappropriates their power.

Leaders who do not pay attention to the larger system and the people in it will cross these kinds of issues. Without this larger systemic awareness, a leader might become too narrowly focused on themselves, narrowing their perception of problems and solutions. They might become too emotionally entangled in the situation and less receptive to feedback from others. They may prioritize their needs at the expense of others or the organization. They might isolate themselves in problematic ways.

When we understand that leadership is a process, not an outcome, we have a greater capacity to pay attention to the wider context that gives rise to problems and solutions. We can monitor the possibility of destructive leadership behaviors. And when we recognize that leadership is something facilitated, leaders can find a healthy distance to take on the challenges.

With this healthy distance, leaders reduce the risk of becoming entangled in proving their worth or asserting their power and more energy can be freed up to address the needs of the organization.

And those we work with, no longer feel as though part of their unwritten job description is to tend to your ego in service of making their workplace more habitable. This frees everyone to be more constructive in their work.

A Pathway to Successful Workplace Ecologies

Systems-oriented leadership promotes sensitivity and responsiveness to workplace ecology. When leadership is engaged in this manner, leaders can identify workplace issues that exist at various levels of the system, from individual workers to groups.

Leaders need to understand that productivity is not a mechanical concept but a deeply humanistic one. A systems-oriented leader has to be able to snap their perception to different levels of the organization while recognizing the human element at all levels of the system.

This is multi-modal thinking — a skill that leaders need to develop proficiency in. Work on solving an issue, then step back and approach it from different systemic perspectives. Then zoom to some individual workers. Then zoom back. This capacity to fluctuate our perceptions allows for a more comprehensive analysis of the consequences of our decisions.

This can be a challenging and dizzying endeavor. Some of you might be confused already. That’s okay.

Let’s start at a simple place. Communication. A common strategy of leader communication is to simply communicate from a top-down manner.

A school district’s administration comes up with a decision and then broadcasts it to teachers to follow. Without context, teachers begin to feel like they are at the mercy of orders from on high. This is a disempowering systemic context that produces poor outcomes, including burnout.

Our work environments are terribly burnt out. As I’ve written about prior, leaders and organizations need to identify how they contribute to burnout — since it is often organizational factors that often have the strongest contributions toward burnout.

A human systems perspective recognizes that workers don’t just need information but insight into how decisions came about. Leaders, then, need to be more than merely information delivery people.

Instead, leaders ought to give workers access to the information they have and how they are thinking. Trust workers with what you know and how you are organizing what you know. I’m not saying groups need to know every detail. But if your team is left too much in the dark, then problems will usually follow.

It can be helpful for a leader to be transparent with the group about how they came up with a decision, the factors that were involved, and the limitations of the decision. People are more likely to follow a leader if they can see the process by which a leader is coming to decisions. Too often the case is quite the opposite.

A common pitfall I see with some leaders is they think their power comes from having information their subordinates do not. In fact, I’ve worked for some toxic leaders who would purposefully withhold information from the rest of the team. They withheld information believing this makes them irreplaceable and makes their authority legitimate. This came at the cost of organizational harmony and productive outcomes.

Workplace trust is built not in the spaces of withholding but with transparency. Leaders who can communicate their decision-making process and the information they are making those decisions on are more likely to have trusting workplaces.

The beauty of a systems orientation to leadership and organization is that you can apply it to many organizations’ needs, values, and challenges. It simply requires a shift of perspective.

The modern workplace is fraught with many challenges and leaders have a significant charge in addressing these. A human systemic orientation can aid in the creation of a richer, more sustainable workplace ecology. It encourages all of us to focus on the whole organization, not just its leaders or individual workers. ∎

Dr. Justin D. Henderson is a psychologist, an educator, and organizational consultant. Dr. Henderson’s scholarship focuses on improving individual and community well-being and advancing social justice. He’s a Medium Top Writer in Leadership and Business.

“The world is on fire — so it is no wonder you are burning up.” This is my struggling attempt to validate the person in front of me who is stressed out and wondering what to do.

It wasn’t a time or place most conducive for these kinds of conversations. We were in the middle of a large convention room, and I had just finished a presentation about burnout to a group of addiction counselors. She was a seasoned counselor and attended my talk about community care in the face of burnout.

I could tell she was distressed. Her posture alone revealed a person who has been carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her facial expression was a combination of tension on the edge of tearfulness. Yet, her question was simple and, unfortunately, common:

“I hear a lot about caring for ourselves so we don’t burn out. But I’m past that point now — what do I do when I AM burned out?”

There was a quiet mixture of desperation and cynicism to her inquiry. It made sense to me. She was correct to be skeptical about anyone proposing quick fixes to burnout. She needed answers, and her exhaustion removed the need for a polite preamble. She’s not alone.

I have engaged in conversations with an international array of workers encompassing many professions, including educators, mental health practitioners, medical staff, human resources staff, advocates, social services, and business professionals on the topic of burnout. One thing has been clear — burnout is impacting all these workspaces.

The world is on fire, and we need more than breathing exercises to put out the flames.

What is burnout?

Burnout is chronic workplace stress. It’s a state of distressing emotions, stress, physical exhaustion, cynicism, psychological overwhelm, and a decline in professional efficacy in the presence of workplace stressors.

Burnout hurts. It comes loaded with consequences for our personal and work-related lives. It can be a harrowing experience — compounded by a general lack of information about addressing burnout when it occurs.

Decades of research have revealed that burnout can happen in virtually any job.

The path out of burnout is usually not simple. Instead, it’s a process of recovery, renewal, and sometimes difficult choices. As a psychologist with fifteen years of clinical and administrative experience, I can attest to just how difficult burnout can be for people and workplaces.

Below are eight guiding principles to help you on your path out of burnout. Each principle is supported by research, experience, and practical wisdom. There are no promises of quick fixes and nothing to sell. Instead, these are some resources to aid the healing of burnout.

1. Gentle Acceptance

Burnout is a pervasive problem that has dramatically increased over the last few years. However, despite being more common, many people who experience burnout feel alone with the issue.

One of the central issues with burnout is burnout stigma. Burnout stigma is a prevalent belief that burnout happens because, as a worker, you are not strong enough to handle all the demands of your work and personal life. This stigma is the natural consequence of a larger culture that produces burnout environments and blames workers for catching on fire.

You are not burning out because you are weak.

The path out of burnout is more complicated than a handful of essential oils or a good vacation.

The first step is openly acknowledging that what you are experiencing is burnout and it is not your fault. No need to blame yourself or a specific person.

Your burnout is not the result of insufficient bubble baths, a lack of hard work, or insufficient grit.

Burnout is the result of problematic interactions between individual workers and work culture. Burnout can happen to anyone. It is a clear indication things need to change in our work environments. Offer yourself compassion and kindness during this challenging situation.

2. Find Support Where You Can

Research has consistently found that social support — both at work and in our personal life — can help reduce burnout.

What does this mean for you? First, don’t resort to isolation while burned out because it will make things worse.

Instead, find support where you can. You want to find meaningful support in your life. This can be co-workers, friends, spouses, or even a good pet. Humans heal in the spaces of connection — and you need connections to heal the pains of burnout.

Some questions to guide this process:

• Are there people that I can feel connected to at work? Can I ask them for help when I’m feeling overwhelmed? Can they help support work changes to help?

• Is it safe to inform my supervisor, manager, or boss about my experience of burnout? If not, is there a way to let them in on some particularly stressful work environment elements?

• Are there people outside of work who I can inform that I am burned out? Are there people who can support me in recovering from burnout?

3. Monitor Your Energy

One of the things we can do when we are burned out is to monitor our energy carefully.

When our cynicism is high, we are vulnerable to the forces of hopelessness. Worst yet, we might start connecting only with others who are also burned out, creating a tragic feedback loop of hopeless emotional energy.

It may feel good to vent your frustration with coworkers, but this can often backfire in reducing meaningful efforts to find solutions within reach.

Research on the experience of catharsis — the release of emotional energy — has demonstrated that simply discharging our negative emotional energy only offers a brief, temporary relief at the cost of more distressing emotions to follow.

I am not suggesting you shouldn’t connect with coworkers about your discontent. Instead, the focus is on monitoring the outcome of these conversations.

• Do I feel better afterward, or am I further demoralized by it?

• Do I feel connected and cared for by my coworkers, or is this simply feeding a sense of hopelessness about the future?

Demoralization is contagious and can threaten our ability to find meaningful and pragmatic solutions to the problems we face.

When cynicism leads to full-blown hopelessness, we have a significant hill to climb to combat our burnout. By monitoring our energy, however, we can stop the spread of fire in our lives and the lives of others.

4. Go Easy on the Self-Care

What have you been told to do if you are burned out?

Most likely, you’ve been told — self-care!

And I bet you feel, at least at times, too tired even to do self-care. And that probably feels terrible. You are not alone.

A recent study looked at this very issue and found some interesting findings. They showed that when people experience moderate to severe burnout, engaging in self-care actually backfires. Instead, it drains people of energy, and they still feel burned out!

Why? It takes resources to engage in self-care, and we can be too drained to follow up with self-care.

So go gently with self-care.

Follow the practical wisdom of less is more. Narrow down your self-care practices to a few effective practices or activities:

• Uncomplicated things.

• Things that do not require truckloads of motivation or cash.

• Easy things.

• Simple things.

We want to engage in the kind of self-care that is most accessible. Then, once you start to feel better, you can expand your self-care activities.

Once again, monitor the outcomes of your self-care.

• Does it make me feel better afterward?

• Do I have some sense of renewal or passion reignited?

If not — give those activities a bit of a break.

5. Inventory the Sources of the Burning

When we are burned out, we need to identify the factors that are causing the problem. To do this accurately, we need to suspend self-judgment for a bit.

Burnout can manifest because of many small things, a few significant issues, or a combination of these.

1. Take some time and jot down some of the reasons why you think you are burned out.

2. Think about the things that exhaust you, frustrate you, and generally turn you off from your work.

3. Go through your list and edit any overly self-judgmental items like “I’m just too stupid to figure out the procedures of this.” Find those little unnecessary jabs, and get rid of those from the list.

4. Now go through your list and circle the ones that you have some control over. These are the ones to focus on.

Inventorying our sources of burnout helps us sort out various causes and potential solutions. If you listed many items that are outside of your control, then this gives you a different plan to address burnout (see below) than if it was just getting more sleep.

Tend to the things you can control with self-compassion and self-respect.

6. Advocate for Self (and Others)

Our workplaces have increasingly become unhealthy environments. The problem has become notable to the point the U.S. Surgeon General released a report that outlines a framework for organizations and workplaces to address the health and well-being of workers.

Advocacy can help alert the work environment of issues and help workers feel empowered to address these within their workplace. Sometimes it is important to raise issues at work to prompt for healthy change.

Here are some tips:

1. Keep things professional: You want to be firm but fair in talking with supervisors, bosses, and managers.

2. Be persuasive: Think ahead of time about what message will be the most convincing for your workplace. What values does your workplace espouse that you could leverage for healthy change? Are they motivated by positive customer experience? Then message the issues with the workplace that threaten those prospects.

3. Know your worth: Go into conversations knowing that you are worthy of a workplace that respects your dignity and worth.

4. Plan multiple lines of attack: I recommend thinking of advocacy as a longer-term strategy than a single conversation. Rarely have I seen managers change in one conversation. Instead, build a strategy of long-term improvements.

5. Help problem solve: Put yourself into your boss’s position and think creatively about how to solve the issues from their vantage point. This will help guide how to approach some of the things you think might need to be addressed and reduce defensive reactions from your boss.

Advocacy is a vital part of addressing burnout in workplaces. It isn’t a clean process; sometimes, it leads to fewer changes than we want. However, the advocacy process can help workers evaluate how much their work environment is willing to collaborate with workers to resolve the unhealthy situation.

7. Celebrate the Good

When we are burned out, we can walk around our place of work with a filter that only attends to the problems of our workplace. Finding and celebrating the good in our workplaces wherever we can is essential.

One way we can do this is to engage in gratitude practices. If you work with others, purposefully try and find the good in your workers and let them know. Explicitly show them gratitude.

Gratitude practices can improve our overall mental health. It also builds a sense of contribution even if the workplace is stressful.

There may be people doing work who also feel stressed. Are there ways in which you can contribute positively to their experience? Even if it’s small things.

Think creatively about how you can express gratitude in your personal life. Who in your life could benefit from intentional acts of kindness? These can be small acts.

The purpose is to shift our focus, even temporarily, toward others and to feel we can make a difference in our work environment.

8. Is Dramatic Change Warranted?

It would be irresponsible of me to suggest that the only way to improve your situation is to find ways to adjust to a work environment.

Sometimes burnout signals that we need a drastic change in our lives. Here are some contexts that might warrant dramatic change:

• The work environment is toxic and unwilling to change.

• The work environment is a poor fit for what you want or need in your life.

• You have outgrown this type of work and need a new challenge.

There are a million more possibilities that could go here.

It is important to be honest with yourself and the situation. Sometimes burnout is the outcome of a delayed inevitability — we must make a dramatic, yet uncomfortable, change in our lives.

Perhaps burnout is the result of our avoidance of what needs to happen. In this case, to heal is to move away from the fire that burns.

It’s a Mess of a Process

In my personal and professional experience, the path out of burnout is messy and complex in most cases. It requires reflection, soul searching, and some hard decisions. It requires us to find social support and to be kind to ourselves in the process. But, through our community support and personal efforts, we can emerge from the flames of burnout like a phoenix ready to take on life. I wish you well in this endeavor and remember you are not alone. ∎

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Justin D. Henderson, PhD is an assistant professor of counseling, a counseling psychologist, and a workplace consultant. Dr. Henderson’s writing and scholarship focuses on improving individual and community well-being and advancing social justice.

My family and I were returning from a weekend away at a cabin. One of my children is known to suffer from the occasional car sickness, and that trip home turned out to be another struggle for her stomach. Wracked with the pain of nausea and the all-too-common anxiety about potentially vomiting, my wife could see my daughter’s mental catastrophe unfolding before her. Our kiddo was stuck on the fear of throwing up and was making herself more sick in the process.

In a masterclass of parenting genius, my wife began making a game to see who had the strongest grip as they clutched hands together. Before you know it, both of them were laughing and joking. The nausea did eventually come back into focus, but this time, it was met with a lighter touch of consciousness because a space was created from suffering.

We all have to find a way to get a little bit of space from our current predicament. There is no point in drowning in our doom, despair, fear, and panic. We also need this space so that other seeds of life can grow, including humor, playfulness, joy, and hope. Sometimes, the most radical thing we can do in the face of all this absurdity is to create moments of joy. It can loosen the grip of enveloped pain and shake loose despair that has grown too comfortable in our space.

It’s okay to laugh at this. It’s actually kind of silly. Human beings are a silly species. And we’ve have done a great deal of harm to our future. There is plenty of time to be drab and withdrawn from this reality, but sometimes, we just need a good laugh in the face of danger.

Buckling Under the Weight of Absurdity

Our society seems to be in trouble. Unless you have been living under a rock, the headlines are enough to spook even the most well-adjusted optimist. Against the backdrop of the many challenges our society is currently facing, it would not be unusual to wonder ‘why this is happening?’

We want the world to be rational and orderly. But it isn’t and it can’t be. Consequently, we live in a culture that has embraced self-destruction. The comedian Pat Burtscher says in one of his bits, “isn’t it weird how we made almost everything up, and it still sucks.” He goes on to talk about how everything from the stock market to currency to debt are all made-up concepts and seem to always be broken.

The imaginary world that we created is buckling under the weight of its own absurdity. We created all these rules of society to then slowly be tortured by the discovery that systems built for inequity don’t serve the common good.

But we do not have the luxury to engage only to the degree we can control the outcome. We cannot wait and see what happens. Life moves forward almost absurdly—indifferent to our opinions and feelings.

Finding the Right Distance to the Darkness

The ancient Greeks knew how to tell compelling stories. Part of the secret was building a strong story that provided moments of comedy and drama. This is true even today in modern cinema. Dramatic movies with those bits of comedic relief help the observer emotionally metabolize the drama better.

We cannot expect ourselves to tirelessly tolerate the endless drama of our current moment. It’s called doom scrolling for a reason—all this activity will do is find more ruin. Long before we all became entranced by social media, humans had to find ways to keep moving forward despite overwhelming odds.

RuPaul gives us a wise directive, “It’s okay to look into the darkness, but don’t stare.” Some of us have a hard time not staring into the darkness. I’m certainly one of those people. We’ve built some kind of narrative that suggests that only the weak look away. Or, we somehow claim that we are ‘more informed’ because we refuse to ever look away.

But getting too close to darkness doesn’t offer any strategic advantage. Instead, it might very well lead to more problems.

In martial arts, a practitioner is trained not only in technique but also in intimately understanding how to manage the space of a combat situation, a concept referred to in Japanese as maai (間合い). A warrior with a strong awareness of maai knows the optimal distance to keep one’s opponent for safety and defense purposes. Our current predicament requires each of us to be steadfast in knowing what distance we should be keeping doom at bay. We need to be ever so vigilant about the maai of us and the doom we see.

Becoming Stronger than the Rock

Sisyphus, you may recall, was cursed to carry a boulder up a mountain, to arrive at the summit, only to have the rock tumble down toward the foothills. Sisyphus was bound to this rock, venturing down the mountain, reuniting with the boulder, and carrying it up the summit once more.

The philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus examined humanity’s relationship with life using the myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor. Camus explored this as a metaphor regarding the absurdity of living, that each of us is figuratively Sisyphus carrying rocks up hills.

“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. [...] I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than the rock.” (The Myth of Sisyphus)

The story of Sisyphus is often interpreted as a cautionary tale about attempting to escape the realities of death or, since industrialization, points to the soul-crushing monotony of modern living. But Camus encourages us not to see Sisyphus as a tragic character. He, like all of us, is bound to a context out of our control. We are all trapped in loops—bound by a life that has ascension and decline built into it. The work is never fully completed—we never really arrive.

Camus encourages us to find liberation in this cyclical struggle by finding the ‘breathing spaces’ within our current hardship. Our happiness is not fused to the ability to get the rock up and keep it up. We break free from a life that is bound to permeant outcomes—instead, we become superior to our fate and stronger than our burdens.

We can all be stronger than the endless burden of living in our trapped contexts. But this requires us to suspend the attachments that thread us into despair. We have to keep moving because, quite frankly, we have no choice.

Our collective rock is rolling down that hill, and our job is to follow it. While we slide down to the foothills of the current predicament, we get to choose how we will meet this moment. Not perfectly, of course. But we get to choose whether our mind is captured by despair and doom. We get to choose how we understand our current situation and our place in all of it. We can carve out spaces of reprieve, humor, and joy along the way. In that way, we become superior to our fate. ∎

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Justin D. Henderson, PhD is an assistant professor of counseling, a counseling psychologist, and a workplace consultant. Dr. Henderson’s writing and scholarship focuses on improving individual and community well-being and advancing social justice.

If we were to time travel prior to the invention of the mechanical clock, we would experience a radical shift in people’s relationship with time. Most people worked in agricultural labor, and their sense of time was more fluid than today. Their work corresponded to available sunlight and season. Their leisure time would be intimately tied to season and harvest. Their concept of time was less linear and more cyclical.

As generations pressed on and technological innovations developed, a new orientation to time emerged. During industrialization, time became a metric to compress as much labor into the day as humanly possible. Crushed by the often brutal working conditions, the gruelingly long work days and weeks began to be challenged by labor movements looking to liberate workers from harsh working conditions.

At the turn of the last century, there were visions of a future where technological advancements would relieve workers of excessive overwork. Liberated from the daily grind, workers would need to transition their lives in such a manner as to carefully attend to goals of their leisure rather than the stress of overwork.

The realities of our modern world ended up being less romantic than predicted. Instead, every innovation that supposedly promised savings in time or work has generally produced more work, accelerated the pace of work, and expanded our work responsibilities in the end.

Innovation did make us more productive. We ended up being the most productive workforce ever recorded. And there is no end in sight for productivity goals in the future. Instead of more time, however, our lives continue to accelerate at a near-terminal velocity.

Despite this, we continue fantasizing about how technology will eventually reduce our overall workloads. Recent commentary about artificial intelligence’s place in our work and leisure is another golden goose we are convinced will save us from ourselves. But history tells us that the time we think we will save will be filled without mercy or pause.

Our problem is not the need for more technology to give us more time. It’s not better time management skills or life hacks. More time cannot be found at the end of a social media influencer’s video.

Our problem with time begins with our culture’s orientation to time itself.

Feeding the Hungry Productivity Beast

Our culture’s orientation to time is grafted onto the bones of our capitalist economic system’s values and assumptions. Our economy — and the nature of work it engenders — is built upon a delusion of limitless growth. The economy is expected to grow continuously, and we, the people, are the vessels that make that economy grow.

Our economic delusion of limitless growth is fueled by the compulsion of scarcity, an ever-present anxiety that we must constantly strive to meet the next achievement, next quarter’s profits, the next promotion, the next big deal. We must get ahead, or we will fall behind. A delusion of limitless growth compelled by scarcity fears keeps us all running on a treadmill of never-ending pressure of more.

But how does one outrun a treadmill? This is the catch! Our work, consequently, has become a place where we attempt to squeeze in as much productivity as can be mustered — hoping someday we will have enough time to rest. But the treadmill never stops.

We are all attempting to feed this insatiable beast, incurring what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called the ‘malady of infinite aspiration.’ No amount of technological, medical, or social advancement has seemed to reduce the burdens and demands of the average person. Instead, we see the complete opposite. We are pushed to do more in the name of efficiency. “Do more with less” is the mantra of the twenty-first century. And research shows that no matter how much economic prosperity is gained, people will feel pressured to do more.

The modern era of work has become so perverse in the pursuit of endless bottom lines that we work more now than our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors did. Anthropologist James Suzman suggests, in his book Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, that humanity’s workload increased precipitously as industrialization occurred. Since then, modest efforts have been made to curtail overworking despite Americans working the most compared to similar countries.

We come to this tendency to overwork naturally through our socialization.

Socializing Hustle and Bust

We have been socialized to hustle and grind our way into some future where we can relax. We comfort ourselves by calling this a good work ethic. And there is no doubt that many of us have been rewarded in our culture if we have been able to overwork, overachieve, and sacrifice our time.

And technology does not save us from this world we live in. We’ve met the innovative present not with an abundance of time and space. Instead, we’ve created what I like to call synthetic urgency — a sense that everything needs to get done all at once all of the time. And thanks to the very technology that should have been our salvation, we can now dilute the boundaries of when we work. Overwhelmed and flooded with stimuli, we search for ways to manage our bustling lives without losing our minds.

Vacations from work are a clear opportunity for us to be able to reclaim our time. However, the blended boundaries between work and our personal lives have increasingly made the separation of work from the rest of our time a disharmonious proposition. When on vacation, people rush their time as well. Visiting new places have become races to see how many sites one can capture on their phone to prove they did things away from work.

Even if successful at vacating from work, productivity rates these days mean returning to a workplace overwhelmed in your absence. All of this breeds a contemporary version of burnout. It all feels like too much, and we are not enough.

To make matters worse, we have transferred this rushed relationship onto our children as well. Millions of children are conditioned to think their time must be filled to the brim. Children’s school days are over-extended with activities to the point that they are afforded, on average, twenty minutes or less to eat lunch. Recess and play are momentary disruptions to an intense curriculum with questionable educational outcomes for most.

Children are then carted off to after-school activities and then homework — all of which can directly intrude on getting sufficient sleep requirements. Parents hold some badge of honor for their insane schedules where they have effectively become chauffeurs for their children’s extracurricular activities. And despite all this quality time in the car, only about 30–40% of families regularly eat dinner together. The message is clear for children and parents — there is no rest, only more to do.

All of these jam-packed schedules filled with too much work, over commitments, and obligations lead to an experience sometimes termed time famine. The most common thing people do to manage time famine is to attempt to better control their time.

Controlling Time

Overwhelmed and stressed, we are left on our own to find ways to “maximize our day.” Enter onto the scene an era of hacks and hustles promising a contented life. We see a proliferation of social media posts and mobile apps about optimizing our morning routines, hacking our bodies and calendars, and techniques to slide in extra work where possible.

Despite the panacea of resources, it begs the question: To what end are we seeking all this managed time? What will we do with all this supposed saved time?

Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, notes that part of our problematic relationship with time is due to our desire to control it. More specifically, he calls into question our assumption that we can control our time.

We treat time as a resource to be owned and thus managed. There are strong historical roots to this conceptualization of time. As societies emerged into the industrial era, time became money to the systems of profit governing labor. The faster and more efficient a factory was at manufacturing — the more profits were made. Time, then, became seen as a monetary resource.

As a result, our language about time began to change. We no longer “passed the time”; we “spent time.”

Time was understood as something we owned and used accordingly. Before long, managerial models began to search for the maximum efficient use of worker’s time and eliminate ‘wasted’ time.

But this relationship with time as money or as a possession conflicts with a simple reality: we can’t save up time. Time cannot be stored in a bank or a shoe box under your bed. Paradoxically, the more we try to control time, the more we lose any sense of having it.

When we treat time as money, we measure everything we do according to our economic and cultural values of endless productivity. This, in turn, wears us out and exhausts us leading to the search for some blissful place where time stops and we can enjoy our life.

We busily organize and plan out a schedule, hoping to eventually get to a place of contentment. The philosopher Alan Watts speaks to this tendency to lean forward into some fantasy future that we never quite enjoy. In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, he states plainly, “What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become now.”

Behind all of these strategies to maximize, compress, and dominate our time is a powerful social misconception. It is built on the idea that you can (and should) control time. Okay, maybe not right now — but eventually. Eventually, you are going to be able to find more time, have the perfect schedule, find a way to never have to meal plan again.

Google Calendars and Death

What if I told you that rather than having time, you are time.

Our lives are time itself.

This concept of time has ancient origins. For example, Zen Master Dōgen in the thirteenth century noted, “time is not a storm moving across the sky from East to West, time is being itself.”

We treat time as a resource to be owned and thus managed.

The hard truth is there will always be too much to do. Everyone dies with unfinished business. And our limited time alive means we have to make important choices and creating more time isn’t one available to us.

Rushing to the end of the day, the end of the week, end of the month, and end of the year — we lose sight of the larger movement in our lives. Captivated by being productive, we rush with no clarity as to where we think we are going.

There is a lizard in South America called the green basilisk, which is affectionally referred to as the ‘Jesus Lizard’ for its capacity to run across a water’s surface. Evolved as an escape behavior, the lizard can busily jog across the water’s surface with dexterity, evading danger. Our busy lives seem like this lizard, rushing across our rivers of daily tasks, except where exactly are we trying to get “on the other side” of in our rushed lives?

What are we so busy running away from? Where do we think we are running toward?

If we slow down for a second, we sink into the waters of our life, and they reflect perhaps deeper core insecurities avoided in the rush of our daily grind.

One of those possible insecurities is our own mortality.

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, noted that we generally have a hard time confronting our death and limitedness. This, in turn, causes us to behave in a delusional state in which we act as if an endless parade of tomorrows is available for us to cram life into. Much like our economy, we treat our lives as an endlessly advancing stock market of profits. It seems that our hustle-and-grind culture has also helped distract us from the existential realities we face.

Our economy’s delusion of limitedness has rubbed off on us. Hustling our way to future happiness, we deny the limited nature of our very lives.

At this point, a little fear might creep in, saying something like, “I shouldn’t waste my time then!” And before you know it, we are back to square one—rushing to cram in as many things as possible in the name of busyness.

Instead, consider that time is, in fact, worth wasting.

Wasting Time

Because we are time and our time is limited, it begs the question ‘how do we want to spend our time?’ The Stoic philosopher Seneca was captivated by this inquiry — wondering by what metric we measure a good life.

Our modern world feeds us ideas of a good life filled with endless consumable purchases, promotions, and compressed schedules. But your limited time alive need not be bundled up and quantified for an economic system that dehumanizes and commodifies our human experience.

The hard truth is there will always be too much to do. Everyone dies with unfinished business.

Our perpetual busyness — rushing around with no clear sense of direction — is often a fog that sets in and obscures what is truly important to us. Your life is not measured in billable hours, the number of chores achieved today, emails answered, or the number of likes on a recent social media post.

Unlike the delusion of endless growth espoused by our economy, your life is valuable precisely because it is limited. Life does not increase in value simply by doing more things with it. When we stop treating our time as a commodity to be spent as we hastily rush through our days, we start showing up to our life — to be present to our limitedness and engage our lives with purpose and intention.

This doesn’t suggest that we naively give up on our daily responsibilities or essential tasks that ought to be completed. It means that we need to intentionally and presently understand that we are time.

We become intentional and discerning about how we show up to our lives. Merely packing things into our schedules is, in fact, the opposite of maximizing our time. Spread too thin, your life becomes frail and chaotic.

Instead, we resist being baited to engage time in a manner that compromises our wellbeing. We actively resist a cultural worldview that celebrates time famine, convincing us to be that green basilisk running aimlessly across waters you are told to avoid while constantly running toward a more productive tomorrow.

We find ways to enrich our experience of time. These can be small moments — grateful moments, joyful moments, or simply a moment to catch our breath. It’s about genuinely enjoying that meal (and the people you are sharing it with, hopefully), as Alan Watts was talking about. It’s about lingering over that last bite. It’s about noticing a person you love and giving them your full attention. It’s about pausing in a space of immeasurable gratitude for the time you have to live.

In larger ways, we make meaningful life decisions based on a fundamental understanding of our lives’ true value. Claiming our life and our time in this manner is not without consequence. Insatiably hungry systems will view your actions, most likely, as ‘wasteful’ and ‘unproductive’. Even lazy, perhaps.

But we understand time to be much more profound than a resource to be managed. Our time alive is not simply to move a line on a profit spreadsheet to the green. Time is our limited life. We are no longer primarily moved by the appearances of ‘progress’ at the cost of our wellbeing.

To the outside world, it may appear that you are wasting your time, but instead, you truly appreciate what time means. ∎

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Originally published on Medium here.

Justin D. Henderson, PhD is an assistant professor of counseling, a counseling psychologist, and a workplace consultant. Dr. Henderson’s scholarship focuses on improving individual and community well-being and advancing social justice.

We've all been exposed to quotes from successful and famous people who have told us that good things come to those who work hard. My favorite comes from the American businesswoman Estée Lauder, who once said, "I never dreamt of success. I worked for it." Simple enough?

There is a problem; an unfortunate error of attribution is going on. Our successes and failures at work are not entirely ours. Our work is part of a larger ecology of which we are a part. These broader contextual forces shape our successes and our failures.

This is a crucial thing to consider when talking about burnout, because people who experience burnout tend to think it happened to them because they were not strong enough, resilient enough, or successful enough. This is often referred to as burnout stigma, which is shaped by this highly individualistic worldview.

Burnout stigma flourishes in a culture that believes 'you get what you deserve.' It is fertilized by unhelpful cultural motifs about what one should do with their bootstraps. It is sustained in a workplace that suggests that burnout is not the responsibility of a workplace to manage.

However, burnout is not an individual psychological experience; it results from an interaction between workers and workplaces. One way to reduce burnout stigma is to abstain from notions that burnout is caused by, maintained by, or solved by only individual factors.

To help reduce burnout stigma, consider the following:

1. Target systems, not people. Burnout comes from workplace ecology. Think about the forest, not the trees. What is going on in the workplace that might be significant promoters of burnout reactions? How is leadership responding to worker burnout? Systemic solutions to burnout are challenging, but they are the only sustainable way to address the burnout problem. Those who say otherwise are probably selling snake oil for a complex systemic issue.

2. Burnout is not about weakness, incompetence, or insufficient self-care! I've written extensively about how self-care is not the solution to burnout. Yes, for the individual, it is essential to engage in self-care for the purpose of protecting yourself from burnout forces. But there are more (or better) solutions for workplace burnout in the long term. Suppose you are experiencing burnout; it's important not to blame yourself. There are things you can do to improve your circumstances, but there are no quick fixes.

3. Resilience comes from community, not just grit. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the concept of resiliency. But humans have been resilient as a species specifically for our communal capacities. When our workplaces are isolating, indifferent, cold, hostile, or inhumane, no amount of grit will overcome the psychological erosion produced by these kinds of workplaces. We have to work deliberately to improve workplace wellbeing.

Our workplaces and workers are under immense strain and pressure. Burnout is an alarming and growing concern in many workplace sectors. Burnout stigma will only insulate the pain and suffering of workers. It is essential to consider how the workplace affects the mental health and wellbeing of workers. From a community orientation, we can reduce the stigma and find sustainable solutions for our future.

It was the autumn season and the large counseling center that I worked for was teeming with prospective clients seeking help. As the clinical director, my job was to ensure we were adequately addressing both providers’ and clients’ needs. This was a tall order to fulfill: counselors’ caseloads were full, our waitlist had swollen to well over a hundred, and team morale was at an all-time low.

The executive director of the center convened a meeting to address the growing demand for services and to discuss various options. Members of the center expressed their overwhelm and disappointment that they can’t seem to meet the demands of their caseloads, felt their weekly schedules swollen with action items, expressed discontent over the lack of schedule flexibility, and generally felt disconnected from the altruistic values that got them into the helping profession.

Like many team leaders, the director’s knee-jerk reaction was to tell everyone to employ self-care to make it through this rough period. The providers and staff reacted as expected. You could feel what little energy people had left simply deflate like a month-old birthday balloon that finally gave its last breath. One coworker hid the few tears that started spilling onto her cheeks. Another rolled their eyes in irritation. It was evident to me that this type of leadership in moments of intense stress was harmful and I wanted to learn more about alternatives.

In the years since that overwhelming autumn, I have been a part of countless discussions of burnout and self-care in workplaces. All of these conversations have had a predictable framework that placed the problem (burnout) and the solution (self-care) as being something that is within the individual person’s purview to address.

But is burnout simply the result of insufficient self-care?

My years of experience as a mental health provider, academic, and healthcare administrator have shown me that burnout is much more complex than worker behaviors. We have to widen our perspective to truly understand the contributory factors of burnout. Only then can we attempt to prevent burnout or address it when it's consuming us.

What is Burnout?

Burnout is a hot topic nowadays (pun intended). Many articles, news bits, and books have been written on the subject in recent years. It seems that many people have the language to describe the symptoms associated with workplace overwhelm and stress. This is important because once we build a common language around something, then it enters into the consciousness of our culture.

In the 1970’s in the United States, psychologists like professor Christina Maslach and professor Herbert Freudenberger began to independently identify some of the occupational psychological hazards endured by people working in human services and caregiving professions. While it would be many years until this phenomenon was called burnout by name, there was a growing interest in this kind of workplace stress that extended beyond just day-to-day hassles.

Today, burnout is often described as a state of distressing emotions, stress, physical exhaustion, cynicism, psychological overwhelm, and a decline in professional efficacy that a person exhibits in the presence of workplace stressors.

According to Dr. Maslach, burnout has three critical dimensions, each containing various symptoms and negative experiences:

1. Exhaustion Dimension: wearing out, loss of energy, depletion, debilitation, and fatigue

2. Cynicism Dimension: negative attitudes toward clients, irritability, loss of idealism, and withdrawal from professional obligations

3. Inefficiency Dimension: reduced productivity, low morale, and inability to cope

Since those early studies of workplace burnout in the 1970’s, there has been an explosion of research on burnout. The results have been definitive — burnout has become far too normative in many workplaces.

In 2019, Harvard released a report urging governments, organizations, and stakeholders to address the alarming rates of burnout in physicians. This report was issued before the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, reports have alerted the public to just how overwhelmed healthcare workers have been during the pandemic.

The Misguided Attention on Individuals who Burnout

While there have been important explorations into the experiences of burnout including individual’s symptoms and experiences, it has often led to solutions that also solely focus on said individuals. This creates the impression that burnout originates within individual people.

If we think that burnout happens because of weaknesses or vulnerabilities of an individual worker, then we are less likely to assess work environments and work cultures that cultivate burnout as a logical outcome to poor working environments, hostile work cultures for those with marginalized identities, unreasonable work expectations, ineffective leadership, and problematic work values. We are less likely to investigate the ways workplace policies and economic resources may contribute toward burnout environments.

This is similar to how we can put effort and energy to put out isolated forest fires but if we are not addressing the climate crisis that is increasing both the frequency and intensity of said fires, then we are not addressing the problem directly.

A great deal of the public focus on burnout has zeroed in on the skills and deficits of individual workers all the while three decades of research has demonstrated that work environments, not individual workers, have the greatest impact on the possibility of burnout and worker turnover.

Work environments!

Very early into the research into burnout, it was understood by researchers that both work environment characteristics and individual characteristics were responsible for burnout outcomes. Burnout, then, is an outcome of an interaction between burnout producing environmental factors and individually susceptible workers.

Burnout is the shared responsibility of both the individual, the organization, and our work culture. We have increasingly become a burnout culture, and it is salt on the wounds of so many people who are struggling to suggest that the problem is that they are not doing enough yoga.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a great deal of how burnt out our work cultures were prior to the pandemic and how little systemic care has been done to prevent burnout in people.

Burnout Systems, Cultures, & Contexts

If work environment factors are a major reason why people experience burnout, then why aren’t we seeing more work-related interventions? Why instead do we see a plethora of self-help resources and books that center the topic of burnout on individual people? Why do places of employment host self-care outreach programming but not work environment audits? Why are we told to simply do more cardio, eat healthily, and learn to meditate to manage symptoms of burnout?

I believe there are cultural and strategic reasons for this.

One reason we may see the onus of responsibility for burnout placed on individual workers is because of our overly individualistic culture. Peruse the self-help section of any bookstore and you see a cornucopia of exaggerated self-destiny and magical thinking. There seems to be a real desire for folks to improve themselves. And I love that! But, there is a real danger here.

Too often we may think that work environments are simply spaces we need to adapt to in order to ‘get along’. If we fail to do that, then there must be something we are doing wrong. And here is a fatal problem in this logic — it produces a sense of shame for folks when they feel like they are not handling all the pressures of work and personal life well. But if burnout is normative, then how can that be?

Another reason we don’t see work environments scrutinized over burnout is that the United States, in particular, has tended to have a long history of worker exploitation. It is no mystery why a country, whose historical workforce included both slave labor and indentured servitude, would have a hard time taking a sober look at working environments and worker wellbeing. Better to blame the workers for their suffering than to look at the culture of work.

American workers have a long history of being left to manage a host of work environment issues including abject abuse and exploitation. For example, you can read Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath and see unfortunate parallels of abuses of power and problematic work environments that continue today. From this perspective, burnout becomes a method to remove responsibility from exploitative business practices.

Even if work environments are not deliberately exploitative, the truth is we know that work environments can contribute to burnout outcomes. During a presentation on burnout, Dr. Maslach outlined some of the factors that research has found leads to burnout:

• Excessive workloads

• Lack of flexibility in schedule

• Lack of worker autonomy

• Destructive competition among co-workers

• Getting shut out of opportunities

• Loss of shared common meaning and purpose at work

• Workers feeling they are not meaningful change agents

• Fear as the primary experience of work

• Self-sacrifice promoted as the model of work

• Inefficiencies in the workplace

• Burnout is simply business as usual

As you can see from this list, many of the items on this list can’t be resolved solely by individual workers. So what good is self-care then?

Is there any value to self-care?

Self-care should certainly be an individual’s priority but not to solely address burnout. When we constrain our self-care practices to avoid something bad from happening, we deprive self-care of its fundamental value in our lives. It turns self-care into an obligation, a purely defensive maneuver, or a method of somehow recovering a lost sense of motivation, morale, and hope for the future.

Instead, self-care practices should be engaged for the purposes of health enhancement and self potentiation. Self-care, if it is to have continuous value in our lives, should be anchored into moving toward what we value. When self-care is framed in this manner, we can see the value of engaging in self-care practices regardless of our work environments.

What often happens, however, is that individuals will engage in self-care after they begin to experience stress, overwhelm, and burnout. Why? Well, for all the reasons discussed earlier — being told to do self-care to compensate for burnout, to adjust to work environments, etc.

Self-care, then, becomes situated as a solution to a particular kind of pain and suffering rather than seen as a continuous process of honoring our integrated wellbeing.

Certainly when we experience burnout we need to find ways to address our compromised wellbeing. But the larger issue of burnout work culture needs to place a wider responsibility on the systems that produce them. No amount of essential oil baths or stretching exercises are going to fix your toxic work environment or provide compassion-centered leadership skills to your boss.

No, what is needed is a larger systemic change that promotes workplace resilience.

Compassion Centered Workplaces

Our work environments must change. As our economy and society have often been insensitive to the natural order — taken her for granted and assumed an infinite supply of materials to consume. Our work has followed this basic assumption as well — that people will continue to give endlessly of themselves for those productivity margins. But just as our ecological environment burns from the lack of appropriate boundaries and respect for mother earth, our workers are scorched under the lack of boundaries of endless bottom lines.

We can change this. We can start by creating compassion-centered workplaces. This framework can guide leaders and work communities to enhance wellbeing, prevent burnout, and address burnout when it emerges.

Enhance Wellbeing

If workplaces are to be successful for the whole community, then workplace norms should emphasize wellbeing. Wellbeing, however, should be understood as a community-oriented goal, not just an individual worker’s outcome goal.

• Are we promoting wellbeing in this work environment?

• Do we understand the wellbeing elements of our workers?

• What values do we as workers share? In what ways do our values differ? How does that affect our workplace?

• What does a ‘successful’ team look like here?

This becomes a collaborative exploration and endeavor. Leaders and managers should pay close attention to workers’ values, cultures, and how they find meaning in their work.

Burnout Prevention

All too common, workplaces will fail to sufficiently prevent worker burnout from happening in the first place. A compassion-centered approach to burnout emphasizes the need to assess the environment for future threats to burnout in the community. Rather than being merely reactive to workplace concerns, are there ways in which workplace leadership and community members can identify potential threats to burnout prior to it happening?

Some general things that research has shown to prevent burnout in workers include things such as:

• Clear expectations to workers

• Identify worker values and autonomy needs

• Encourage teamwork and team orientation

• Design ideal work environments

• Provide strength-oriented feedback

Responding to Burnout

Compassion-centered workplaces also respond effectively to burnout when it happens. Worker burnout can be seen as the canary in the mine — it is the result of an interaction between work environment and worker experiences. This will produce two near-immediate changes.

First, work culture will be able to shift the focus from individuals to systems of operation. Managers and employees start asking questions like, “what is going on in this work environment that is promoting burnout?” “This policy seems to place a great deal more stress on employees with these identities or job descriptions — I wonder how I can address this to prevent burnout in my work community?”

Second, we can reduce burnout stigma. Because burnout is often characterized as an individual’s lack of resiliency, poor constitution, or mental instability, there can be a great deal of stigma for people when they are experiencing burnout. Burnout stigma has been shown to both exacerbate existing burnout symptoms as well as contribute toward more general negative mental health issues.

Creating Resilient Workplaces, Not Just Resilient Workers

From this compassion-centered framework, we are creating resilient workplaces not just resilient workers. Wellbeing becomes a focus of work environments.

The workplace community becomes the starting point of addressing worker wellbeing and burnout prevention. We start paying attention to the workplace ecology which produces rich information on the health of individuals. Rather than focusing all our attention on putting out individual fires, we start paying attention to larger factors contributing to these flare-ups.

Let’s bring back the example from the beginning: had the executive director of the counseling center been attuned to the needs of the community, there would have been much less burnout and employee turnover. Based on the research on burnout, assessing and responding to workplace contributions to burnout is the most effective way to reduce and eliminate burnout in individual workers.

Shifting out of an individualistic interpretation of burnout and self-care will produce a more community-oriented and compassion-centered approach to what has become a growing concern in work environments. The results will more likely produce resilient workplaces and happier workers. ∎

This article was originally published on Medium.