The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives
Jonathan Malesic, 2022
A professor with a job he can never lose realises one day that every morning he dreads going to his dream job. Jonathan Malesic quits, then works out what happened to him, and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: a person lives through burnout, but the culture of work causes it. You will learn how to tell burnout from tiredness, why saying no and taking time off do not save you, and how monks, one organisation in Dallas and the author himself put a limit on work.
Who it is for
For anyone who once loved their work and now has to force themselves to go. And for anyone who suspects the problem is not their own weakness but the way our culture has built work itself.
Each of us has human dignity before we ever start working for pay. And even if we never do.
A dream job you don't want to go to
It happens like this: the job is exactly the one you dreamed of for years. A good position, respect, a clear future. But every month it gets harder to get up in the morning and go there, and weekends, even holidays, change almost nothing. You want to ask yourself: what is wrong with me?
Jonathan Malesic asked himself that question for many years. He taught theology at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania and had tenure, a position that is almost impossible to lose. A dream job, a good salary, and still every day was a struggle. He quit, and then wrote a book about what had happened to him.
His conclusion runs against the usual advice. Malesic believes that an individual lives through burnout, but workplaces cause it, together with a culture in which work promises us dignity, character and the meaning of life. He calls his book a self-help book not for one person but for a whole culture.
Next you will see how to tell burnout from ordinary tiredness, why we are proud of what is destroying us, why saying no and taking time off help only for a while, and what you can learn from people who long ago put a limit on work: monks who drop their task when the bell rings, the staff of one organisation in Dallas, and Malesic himself in a parking booth.
Stretched between the dream and the daily grind
How do you know what is happening to you: tiredness after a hard quarter, or something else? Malesic starts with his own story, because for a long time he could not answer that question himself.
At King's College he worked for years to reach his position. And then he found that he could barely get out of bed, could hardly prepare for his classes, and spent more and more time on paperwork instead of the reading and thinking he had entered the profession for. He took unpaid leave. As soon as he came back, it all started again: nothing about the job had changed. When his wife was offered a teaching job in Dallas, he quit.
What does this story show? After the move to Texas, the condition passed. Malesic points out the difference from depression: you cannot simply move away from depression, but he moved away from burnout by changing jobs. So the problem was not only in him but also in his relationship with one particular job.
Hence his definition. He calls burnout a chronic stretch between the ideals and the reality of work. Picture a rubber band stretched between what you expect work to be and what it actually is. While the gap is small, the band holds. As it grows, the band loses its spring and one day snaps. The key word here is “chronic”: one hard month is not yet burnout.
Malesic draws on the research of Christina Maslach, which finds three sides to burnout. They combine in different ways, so burnout looks different in different people.
• Exhaustion. You lack the strength even for what used to come easily.
• Cynicism. You grow cold and irritated towards the people you work for.
• Ineffectiveness. It feels as if your work no longer changes anything.
A common mistake: calling any tiredness burnout. Malesic shows that even researchers often cannot agree on a definition, and then it seems that everyone is burned out. If everyone is burned out, nobody can see who is really struggling and what needs to change.
About the author
American writer Jonathan Malesic holds a PhD in religious studies. For many years he taught theology at a college in Pennsylvania, worked as a sushi chef and a parking lot attendant, and now teaches writing in Dallas.
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