The New Neurasthenia: How burnout became the buzzword of the moment

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-new-neurasthenia-tyson

by miobrien • 4 years ago

62 83 4 years ago

dade_• 4 years ago

That was long winded, but it seems to agree with the ideas: Since the pandemic, more perceived effort is needed to accomplish the same work which directly causes burnout (or whatever name you want to give it) Companies need to think about what employees do in a day to identify grind (tedious, annoying, useless work) and automate or eliminate it. (a little goes a long way)

lumost• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, I think people have to do a lot more to get an idea improved or deal with day to day bs of broken libraries etc.

With remote, employers also miss the in person social queues when someone has started going through the motions or everyone is simply tired.

In the office I could see when someone was working 12 hour days and intervene, with remote I just see someone sound a little tired on the video screen.

pydry• 4 years ago

Remote working highlighted for me how much I previously relied on subtle social cues, body language and informal communication (e.g. lunchtime/pub chats) that all but disappeared.

This in turn made me feel isolated which i instinctively reacted to by isolating myself even more and procrastinating.

That jacked up the amount of stress I felt coz I felt hugely uncertain about everything all the time as well as unproductive which in turn led to me burning out.

iamdbtoo• 4 years ago

Some employers would first have to admit they are part of the issue. The last place I was at just decided everyone else was the problem and kept cycling through people.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

I’m not kidding, my employer sent out a survey and scored low on career growth so they had managers ask “what do you want to work on to grow your career?” I said I wanted to learn Rust so my supervisor reached out to other departments to get an idea if anyone was using Rust and came back with an anecdote from a middle manager about how he tried using it but Python was faster. I can’t even.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

Since the pandemic, more perceived effort is needed to accomplish the same work which directly causes burnout

I don’t disagree, but I don’t think it makes sense to blame the work for this shift. If we’re talking about “the same work” then what makes it more difficult now?

I suspect that the people prone to burnout have shifted heavily toward consuming a lot of news media, podcasts, TV shows, and social media in lieu of a lot of the social interaction they previously got from more in-person activity. If someone is consuming 30 clickbait news headlines every day about how the world is ending, 100 social media posts about people complaining about things or fighting against injustices, a couple hours of sedentary TV watching, hours of listening to people debate overly politicized stuff on podcasts, and all of the other anger-as-entertainment outlets, they’re going to be emotionally exhausted before they even attempt to get any work done. When I work with young people it’s painfully common to hear them recite hyperbole about how the world is ending or how we’ve only got a few years left before everything collapses or nuclear war destroys us all. They’re consuming cynicism in unprecedented quantities from all angles.

Anecdotally, going to remote work seems to trigger burnout a lot faster in people who were doing okay in the office. It’s way too easy to fill the social void left by WFH with a lot of unhealthy and draining content.

zwkrt• 4 years ago

My 2c as someone who burned out during the pandemic is that wfh left only the work and no social interaction, as you mention. But I have always been solidly against social media/doom scrolling consumption. For me the burnout stemmed from realizing how much effort I was putting into work versus what I got out of it. My head was swimming with JavaScript typing quirks and database indexing schemes and potential bugs and business requirements. My creativity and intellectual capacity was almost completely consumed by meaningless minutiae and stress about a company that does not care about me, and all I got in return was the ability to sit alone in my house.

bradlys3• 4 years ago

It could be a lot simpler than that - ya know? The work always sucked but at least some of the people were okay. You take away the people and now nothing about your job is good.

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

The Sunny Taylor essay linked in this one is an incredible read itself. Highly recommend.

WSSP2• 4 years ago

I suspect many resignations due to burnout would be better attributed to the company's poor management, culture, lack of opportunities/compensation, etc.

not that I think burnout isn't real; I think the test is if the person can easily move on to their next thing or not

bradlys3• 4 years ago

I think the test is if the person can easily move on to their next thing or not

I think this perspective is one that is a bit too privileged. Even in tech - many of us don’t have the ability to take 6+ month breaks between jobs, find ourselves again, and figure out a way to align the work/life balance. I spent a few months between my last job and my current.

You know what I did during that time almost completely? Interview. It’s why I left the other job - I didn’t have enough time to study and interview. 20+ interviews a week. Studying. Applying. Etc. Doing 3-4 onsites/week for a month at a time. Using my “off” days to study more. I took about a month off between accepting the final offer and starting the new job. It wasn’t enough but I had burned through a lot of my savings because of having to exercise options at my last company, pay AMT on exercising said options, and having to pay for another person who lived with me while living in one of the most expensive parts of the world cause all the jobs are here. (ex-wife who was in college and not working)

Again - feel like this is a very privileged attitude to take about being able to move onto the next thing. Most of us don’t really get an option. You just have to.

Getting to choose your job and when you move onto it seems like something only multi-millionaires I know do. The rest of us just slog through it because we have no other choice.

emeraldunicorn9• 4 years ago

I agree that this is a problem that prevents people at all income levels from pursuing other options. Partly there is the real issue that you present, which is that you can't afford to take 6+ months off between jobs. But you clearly did a tremendous amount of work to find your next opportunity and that might have been virtually impossible to accomplish if you still had to perform your previous job.

But then there is the issue with taking a break. Maybe this is more a problem that women experience, but I'd be interested if men feel like they experience it, too. However, when you have gaps in your employment, I have felt that people didn't respond very positively to that and wanted to know why you had a break and what you were doing it. Because god forbid you weren't doing something "productive" during that time.

The way our work style is makes it feel like burnout begets more burnout because the options to escape burnout might not actually be feasible for every individual.

WSSP2• 4 years ago

to be clear I meant emotionally able to move on. burnout is often characterized as being unable to do that, even if the person wants/needs to

but yes I agree anyone who can takes months off work without financial stress should consider themselves fortunate. I know (non-parent) people who did that who were far from multi-millionaires though

derbOac• 4 years ago

This article really resonated with me for a lot of reasons and I think you're right, at least in many cases.

There was another piece recently (at The Atlantic?) that was talking about how many cases of burnout are really better thought of as moral injury.

This perspective seemed closer to home for me. It's not the work per se, not the hours (although I think it can be that) -- it's this increasing gap between what your job is on paper, and what it actually is, and no acknowledgment of it from institutions or society, no recognition of it being a problem in your career or workplace, or the dysfunction and pain it causes.

In my case, I think initially some saw it as burnout or needing a break. I had friends talk to me about their own resistance to it in terms of their work ethic or some nonsense like that. But they worked in places with functional departments, where nothing remotely similar would happen to them, where there were support structures in place for things that needed to happen, and so forth and so on. Every job has some stuff that you let slide, that's less than optimal or ideal from a moral or ethical perspective, that you do for practical reasons, or whatever, but there's a point where the gap just gets to be too much, and when your workplace or even field isn't acknowledging the stuff going on, or minimizing it, it starts to feel hopeless.

The Atlantic piece was talking about this all in terms of nursing and all the issues involved, how it wasn't the workload that caused people to resign, it was, to paraphrase, this moral crisis, or crisis of dignity or something. Stuff having to do with healthcare system collapse, the culture in healthcare and in the US and so forth.

I think from what I've seen with myself and colleagues, "moral dissonance" or something might be closer to the right word than "moral injury", although neither are quite right. I'm not sure there's a term I've heard that gets it right. It's like the train has run off the track, and you either stay on board because on paper it's still on the track and you get benefits from it (material and otherwise), or you jump off the train and hit the ground but at least don't let the train carry you away.

I do think in some cases it's about the hours. But in many cases it really isn't about the hours, it's that there's enormous problems that everyone is ignoring or minimizing one way or another.

kritiko• 4 years ago

Moral Mazes is an early 1980s ethnography of corporate managers and delves heavily into the situational morality of the workplace.

tonymet• 4 years ago

a friend of mine is a productivity researcher at a notable tech company. She studies all sorts of signals like hours worked , number of meetings , output artifacts like landed commits and docs created etc . overall productivity increased with lockdown , but work efficiency actually went down. basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down .

burnout is real

lalos• 4 years ago

That metric of "basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down" sounds like people doing busy-work to look busy and fill their calendars because its harder to signal that you are 'there' when working remotely. Useless meeting time increased dis-proportionally, and by useless I mean "this could have been a self-documenting email conversation".

Robotbeat2• 4 years ago

Even email is, for many thorny issues, much less efficient, potentially, than a phone call or a real face to face meeting. And phone calls have fallen out of style.

I can’t help but think of how many email chains stretching out over weeks could’ve been resolved in 5 minutes if everyone were in the same room (and not in a meeting context, but standing up near a computer) and were insistent on actually getting the problem solved.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

basically people worked longer hours and had more meetings, but the output per unit of time went down .

I’ve managed remote teams for many years. This is basically the hallmark of a poor transition to remote work: Everyone is working more but getting less done.

Remote work is hard. Many people aren’t fit for remote work (employee or manager), even if they think they want it. Remote requires a lot more work overall to communicate and coordinate, but companies are tempted to treat it like it’s the same as in-office work. It’s not.

swayvil• 4 years ago

Not fit?

Are they too weak to withstand the temptations that come with so much freedom?

Are they incapable of self-motivation? Do they need an office-parent to kick them into gear?

Can this power be acquired?

I wish only to serve better. Please sir, you teach me.

CipherThrowaway4• 4 years ago

I don't think this establishes the presence of burnout. It's an expected result of increasing workload at any level and is caused by the diminishing returns to labor as an input of production.

Jerrrry9• 4 years ago

People don't want to face the facts, that we have to make up for lost productivity.

nobody wants to be productive, because of the new wave of entitlement.

this is both objectively and subjectively true.

everyone wants the checks, nobody wants to run at 130% capacity afterwards to help pay those checks off.

this point is refuted by the "da globalist cabal stole the productivity", but the math shows otherwise.

the pandemic created debts that the average person must repay.

jnkxhrcixh• 4 years ago

This is correct.

"Savings" are things that are produced but not consumed. During "lockdown", consumption exceeded production. That means, globally, years of savings were consumed.

When savings are reduced, prosperity is reduced. Savings will have to be rebuilt to return to prosperity.

ben_w2• 4 years ago

I don’t know how normal people think, because I am not at all normal.

I do know that one of the biggest single costs the average person faces is housing. And I know that housing can be built in large quantities in economies with a tenth the GDP/capita of the current G7 average.

I don’t by into the narrative that capitalism is pure evil (or anything even remotely close to that), nevertheless I think that unless effort is made to avoid them, undesirable Nash Equilibria can form within it, and that is why we don’t collectively have 10-20 hour work weeks with the standard of life from 1970: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Jerrrry9• 4 years ago

biggest single costs the average person faces is housing

right, and because we do not have a fair market with price discover, and regulation has hindered progress, this has led to a basic living need to become a speculative asset, much to the loss of the average homebuyer.

if you expect your home to grow in value, you cannot also expect your son or daughter to be able to afford it in the same way.

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

Nope. Get the multibillionaires to repay all that stuff. Why would I want to be productive when the value of my local currency has inflated away to about 50% of it's 2019 value and the businesses I work with literally can't afford to raise my hourly rates?

Jerrrry9• 4 years ago

Because the opposite is furthering hyperinflation.

Do not raise your hourly rates, expect people to work harder. That is what productivity actually is, working harder for the same income.

axiomsEnd• 4 years ago

Can you show data that shows how much productivity has fallen? Also, how productivity and wages change in last 30-40 years. From what I know, although wages in low and middle jobs stagnate, the productivity now is extremly high. Also, in which countries it's objectively and subjectively true?

Jerrrry9• 4 years ago

Productivity has fallen, due to the pandemic.

people not working, less productivity

gerbilly4• 4 years ago

People don't want to face the facts, that we have to make up for lost productivity.

No. We don't.

I am unmoved by your attempt at argument from authority.

Jerrrry9• 4 years ago

Feel free to complain, starve, and rent forever.

There was no argument from authority. This is Modern Monetary Theory in action.

It is just the other side they didn't show you.

jodrellblank3• 4 years ago

"nobody wants to be productive, this is objectively true"

This is objectively false; many people want to be productive. Demonstrated by things like: people working for money, people changing jobs to get more money, people signing up for courses to learn new skills, people founding new companies. Let's see census.gov[1] big graph of new business applications: steady at 200k/month from 2005 through 2015, increased to 300k/month by 2020, then CLIMBED to 400-500k/month through 2020 and 2021 and into 2022.

"nobody wants to run at 130% capacity afterwards to help pay those checks off"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics[2] (which, incidentally, reports productivity improvements in latter half of 2021) says "Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked by all persons". Which rebukes your claim "That is what productivity actually is, working harder for the same income." More hours for more output is not an improvement in productivity.

Nobody wants to make well-reasoned arguments when they can lazily sneer at other people being "entitled" and then think that makes their point for them.

"the pandemic created debts that the average person must repay."
"this point is refuted by the "da globalist cabal stole the productivity", but the math shows otherwise."

Really? Because here in the UK we have a company that was founded for £100 and then awarded a £110,000,000 contract to supply PPE to the NHS. A Government which has since written off £9Bn of PPE spending after it delivered nothing useful, £2.6Bn of that delivered PPE that wasn't good enough quality, and we have a court ruling that the Government's allocation of money for PPE during the pandemic was unlawful[3], and "Tansparency International UK said its analysis indicated "apparent systemic biases in the award of PPE contracts that favoured those with political connections to the party of government"".

"Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner called for an independent investigation to "get to the bottom of how £3.5bn of taxpayers' cash were handed out in crony contracts and ensure it can never happen again". Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Daisy Cooper described the ruling as a "damning judgement" and said: "Not only did the Conservatives give their mates privileged access to lucrative Covid contracts, they did it unlawfully.""

Barrister, Law school Professor and Director of the GoodLaw Project Tweeted[4] "Fortunes large enough to sustain generations are being made by those lucky or well connected enough to win them" -

"Test and Trace’s “staggering” £22bn annual cost has not been justified by any clear evidence of its impact on the Covid pandemic, parliament’s spending watchdog has declared.*" - [5]

But nooooo, this is just "da globalist cabal stole it" which you switch to mocking "da" language because the entitled lazy plebs are dumber than you XD XD XD right?

[1] https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html

[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/prod2_02032022.htm

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59968037

[4] https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1314114913850318848

[5] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/test-and-trace-treats...

slfnflctd• 4 years ago

As with most things in mental health, personal experiences will vary dramatically.

I burned out almost 10 years ago now, and I'm still not sure what recovery/redemption looks like. I know I'm getting closer, but it's a long process, and every unexpected bump in the road slows me down a lot. My main direct insights have mostly been around letting go of ego while somehow still finding things I can reliably dig in and fight for. Redefinition of context is a primary theme.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

Main point: > "Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise."

It's the same kind of problem communist economies struggled with: why should a worker put out any significant effort at all if the results of their labor are being appropriated by someone else? You can work twice as hard, make a major contribution, but you get no reward - the rewards all go to some form of ruling class, be it the head honchos of the Central Committee (Soviet Union) or some small group of founders and their VC investors (Silicon Valley).

I suppose the alternative - living homeless in poverty without any access to medical or dental care - is the stick used to keep the no-contract wage-rate workers in line in the USA, while in the Soviet Union, the threat of deportation to the Siberian gulag served that purpose.

The solution is fairly obvious, create a system that rewards people fairly for their contributions. This of course means much less profits flowing to founders and investors, right, hence the organized political resistance to anything like that.

akira2501• 4 years ago

The solution is fairly obvious, create a system that rewards people fairly for their contributions.

It seems to me that an excellent way to achieve that would be to actually use our anti-monopoly laws to properly regulate our market places. Over centralization, be it in a committee or in a cartel, has the same results.

_moof2• 4 years ago

The top 1 percent of the income distribution is composed largely of executives, financiers, consultants, lawyers, and specialist doctors who report extremely long work hours, sometimes more than seventy a week.

Be extremely skeptical of this claim by the super-rich of 70-hour work weeks. I can't find it now but a while back there was a graphic going around by an exec who charted out how he spends his work time. A huge proportion consisted of things like going to the gym and getting haircuts--activities that us common rabble have to call "time off."

light_hue_1• 4 years ago

This has always been part of the propaganda against the poor. If only you worked as hard as this CEO, you'd be rich too!

In reality, it's exactly the opposite. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151720 Page 16, Figure 4. Average hours worked by income group. The poorer you are the more hours you work.

thesz• 4 years ago

The graph shows difference between countries with different income, not groups of individuals with different income within same country.

The difference of hours worked may be due to factors relevant to countries, not to job done or individual differences.

I cannot deduce your conclusion from that graph.

dannyobrien• 4 years ago

The conclusion of the actual paper doesn’t quite support your argument: “ We document that, on average, adults in the developing world work about 50 percent more hours per week than adults in rich countries. Average hours worked are higher in developing countries both for men and for women, for all age and education groups, and along both the extensive and intensive margins. Within countries, hours are decreasing with income on average and particularly so in the poorest countries. In the richest countries, hours worked are flat or increasing in income. One implication of our findings is that aggregate labor productivity and TFP differences across countries are larger than previously thought. Moreover, ignoring hours worked also leads to misleading conclusions about the extent of welfare differences across countries. Put simply, residents of the poorest countries are not only consumption poor, but leisure poor as well.”

nerdponx4• 4 years ago

Also be extremely skeptical of people who lump together lawyers, financiers, doctors, and executives; they are all very different types of jobs with very different pay structures and hourly/daily/weekly schedules. It's just as inane as lumping in restaurant servers with longshoremen.

And be even more extremely of people who lump in upper-middle-class white-collar wage earners with the "super rich". It's just as inane as lumping in people living on welfare checks and people who work a blue collar job on a union salary.

Given the cost of living nowadays in major US metro areas where those professions are concentrated, only a rarefied tiny fraction of people in those professions can make enough money to be richer than "comfortably upper-middle-class" anyway. Things of course are different in areas where houses cost $300k and not $1.3m, but they make comparatively less in those areas anyway.

Finally, lawyers, doctors, and (some) financiers do absolutely work 50-80+ hour weeks. Maybe not every week, but certainly more than a few weeks out of the year. And rarely do they have a "down" week. And not all of those hours are "billable". These people are paid not just for their expertise but their ability to grind through hours and hours of tedious and tiring knowledge work.

Perhaps they are overpaid in relation to people who work with their hands, but that is a completely separate discussion.

The point is that it's insulting and fallacious to claim that people in these careers do not work long hours, and therefore it's insulting and fallacious to conclude that susceptibility to burnout in these careers is exaggerated.

_moof2• 4 years ago

The point is that it's insulting and fallacious to claim that people in these careers do not work long hours

This feeling perfectly illustrates two of the core issues raised in the article: that overwork is valorized, and that our jobs should be our identity. If we lived in a world without those values, skepticism over claims of hours worked wouldn't be a cause for insult--and there would be no incentive to even make the claims in the first place.

CipherThrowaway4• 4 years ago

There is a certain breed of exec who is extremely generous with what they consider work. They will read a few articles after dinner and consider it "working all evening." Staying up late idly scrolling through LinkedIn is "working past midnight." Their accounts don't differentiate between operational work and social activities that relate to work. For example, wining and dining a stakeholder is always considered several hours of pure work. Once I worked with a CEO whose "80 hour" weeks included regular binge drinking and 2am kebabs with his buddies on the board.

nerdponx4• 4 years ago

Not to detract from the very good point you are making, but wining and dining stakeholders sounds exhausting. I would definitely consider myself "on the clock" for such an activity.

monkeydreams• 4 years ago

Burnout is not overwork. Burnout is a cycle of missed expectations, perceived unfairness, etc, etc. When one is at risk of burning out, one is often at their least productive.

The 1% who claim such long hours... I know some people who live to work, and have done so for years, but they are amply rewarded and respected. Their entire social life is entwined with what they do and what they do is WHO they are.

When I have burned out it is because I have poured so much effort into specific activities while those people around me did nothing, where the credit for my effort was not offered or, even worse, offered but not followed through, and where I expected a result that never eventuated.

Reward for effort offsets the stress gained. When one feels disrespected, when one feels like they are being worked to death while others sit around, when one feels that they are the unacknowledged single-point-of-failure, this breeds burnout.

User23• 4 years ago

Burnout has become a buzzword that can mean basically anything that excuses poor performance. Like most buzzwords, and excuses for that matter, it's not very interesting to talk about.

However, there is such a thing as real physiological burnout, and it is very very nasty. It is not a "mental health condition," but rather a metabolic disorder that can be objectively physiologically diagnosed with the correct equipment. The brain is just another organ, and like every organ in the body it does its best to maintain homeostasis. Thinking, especially deep rigorous logical thinking, is highly metabolically stressful, as can be seen by how it burns thousands of extra calories[1]. The brain is a remarkable organ, but like any organ it can be stressed beyond its ability to adapt[2][3][4]. Spending too much time in exhaustion impairs the body's ability to restore homeostasis and adapt to similar stresses in the future. Continuing in that state for long periods can cause cumulative damage.

In short, real mental burnout is akin to real physical overtraining, which incidentally is another term that has become a buzzword. There can be mental health consequences from both burnout and overtraining though. An athlete or a programmer can both become depressed from no longer being able to perform at the level they are accustomed to, among other possibilities. For example, was Bobby Fischer's mental instability later in life an example of the possible mental health effects of physiological burnout? Who knows, but it sounds plausible at least.

[1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2038162/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(biology)#General_adapt...

[4] The top search results are absolute pop-sci garbage, read the above paper or the wiki summary.

SubiculumCode• 4 years ago

Mental health conditions are real and they are powerful. Moreover, mental health conditions have a basis in biology.

eldude2• 4 years ago

Burnout is your body trying to save itself because your conscious brain is killing it.

The solution is not to rest and then resume consuming toxins but to eliminate the toxicity.

In order to do that, you must identify what is killing you.

blenderdt3• 4 years ago

No, a burnout is physical. All the stress burned out your body causing all kinds of issues. The first step to recover is 100% rest.

eldude2• 4 years ago

You’re agreeing with me. The solution is not rest and then go right back to a toxic environment but to eliminate the source of toxicity.

Burnout is your body trying to save itself because your conscious brain is killing it.

blenderdt3• 4 years ago

After being burned out and reading a lot into it I think the main reason for a burnout is 'not accepting'.

Not accepting: you hate your job, you need a break, you need to recover from a disease, you hate your house, you need help, you need to stop cheating, your asking too much from your body, and so on.

This causes stress and when this goes on for too long your body burns out.

A lot of this comes from social pressure. You hate your job but you need it to pay the big house. You don't want to buy a smaller house because 'what will my family think of me when I do this'. Or: I need to go to this client while I am sick because else I might loose them.

Anyway, for those who are feeling burned out I would say: step on the brakes because a burnout can really be dangerous and life threatening.

nerdponx4• 4 years ago

You hate your job but you need it to pay the big house.

What if you already have the house? Moving is itself an exhausting and expensive prospect, not to mention the effects of forcing your partner & kids to move with you. It's definitely a last resort.

blenderdt3• 4 years ago

It was just an example.

I believe you should make choices that are good for your family and the people close to you. Don't let social pressure guide you.

And yes, maybe for some people it's best not to move but to start looking for another job.

asdff• 4 years ago

Civilization is a recent concept especially in light of evolution. Is it really surprising that people suffer so much stress and anguish trying to live in this civilized manner, whose rules are just whatever bullshit constructs we put on ourselves of the age? Maybe we are so stressed out because we evolved to be out foraging during daylight hours, and instead we toil in caves with drop ceilings and put all kinds of strange expectations on ourselves.

janandonly2• 4 years ago

I've long suspected that my work ethics shield me from getting a burn-out. These ethics are:

- work is a way, a tool, a means to an end:to make money. If work becomes more (a way to meet people, a way to have a higher status, a way to fill time) then it should be culled, cut off, put back in its proper corner.

- work should not be enjoyed too much. Lest you come into temptation to do more of it than necessary.

- work should also not be too boring. A little challenge now and again is fine.

- Do not take shit from colleagues. Talk to them about their behavior. No change? Talk to the manager. Still no change? Transfer or quit this job.

- Do not take shit from managers or your boss. Be open about this and direct: the buck stops here. Period.

- It helps to have F-you money. I suggest 2-3 years salary is a nice stash.

- work should not be done too much (working 2 to 4 days per week seems ideal. I've worked for 3 days a week for years and can highly recommend it).

- work should be done diligently (you should do the required tasks, and recommend improvements). Any time your suggestions for improvements are sworded down, you should NOT worry. After all, you only work for money, not for your ego.

- work should be done honestly (no lying, stealing or cheating).

- You do not work overtime, not even when paid, unless there is an emergency. If there are more than 1 emergencies per year, then the company's definition of an emergency is wrong. Look for a less toxic company.

- You do not do any unpaid overtime. Work is for money. No money means no working. It's really that simple. But would you really want to abandon your colleagues/coworkers? No, but it's the task of the shareholders or company owners to chip in, not yours.

- When fired, give yourself a year sabbatical.

- In case of being fired, do not take it personally. Were you really under-performing, or was your new manager just not able to appreciate your work? Hint: he was too short-sighted to see your work's true value. But what if he was right? Maybe you do suck at this. It is better to think about such soul-searching things after the sabbatical. When you still agree: look for a whole new kind of work. A different position with fresh perspectives.

marssaxman2• 4 years ago

It helps to have F-you money. I suggest 2-3 years salary is a nice stash.

It is also nice to have a pony and a room full of ice cream.

lukas0992• 4 years ago

Incidentally, all three of those are achievable for most people reading the comment.

hondo77• 4 years ago

"Introvert" seems to be another. The number of outgoing co-workers I meet who describe themselves as introverts has been increasing in the past few years.

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