On Monday, I’ll be opening registration for my new course, Everyday Energy [1]. The course is a three-month program designed to help you build practices into your life that promote greater vitality—and productivity.
In case you missed it, I’ve written a brief essay series discussing our human energy crisis [2], the biological roots of our exhaustion [3] and the need to return to natural rhythms of effort and rest [4]. Today, I’m going to examine the meanings we ascribe to work, and why our society’s dominant paradigm so often leads to burnout.
Burnout is not just being tired. If it was, a good night’s sleep would be enough to fix our energy. Instead, burnout is what happens when exhaustion becomes entrenched.
The research into the causes of burnout is complex and fascinating. To put it simply, burnout happens when:
- First, we’re overworked. Demands exceed our ability to cope or recover. Fatigue results.
- This leads to feeling a lack of control and an inability to keep up, which results in our feeling less competent. We feel helpless and impotent.
- Finally, our feelings of exhaustion and helplessness give way to increased cynicism about the work itself. Work is not simply too much and too hard, it feels ultimately meaningless.
These three components of burnout—exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy—explain why going on vacation doesn’t fix burnout. We may be able to fix momentary fatigue, but by the time burnout has set in, our beliefs about the work itself and our ability to cope with it have soured.
Fixing burnout isn’t easy. The hardened feelings of cynicism and inefficacy need to be replaced with renewed feelings of competence and meaningfulness of our striving. Sometimes that can be fixed within an existing role, but often it requires finding a new workplace, job or even career path.
The persistence of burnout explains why energy management is so important. We want to stop the vicious cycle of exhaustion before it settles into hard-to-adjust beliefs of inefficacy or cynicism.
Avoiding burnout isn’t the only reason to care about energy management. There’s a state opposite to burnout that’s worth cultivating: flourishing. Just as burnout can become entrenched, flourishing can create enduring resilience and offer a wellspring of energy.
Flourishing: The Opposite of Burnout
If burnout is caused by a combination of fatigue without recovery, feelings of inefficacy, and increased cynicism about the meaning of work, flourishing is the opposite. When you’re flourishing at work, you:
- Have a healthy balance between effort and recovery.
- Feel confident about your abilities.
- Feel stable and secure about the meaning of your work.
When these three conditions are met, the effect is resilience. You have more capacity to dig deep in moments of crisis, and you can take on much bigger efforts without feeling overwhelmed.
Flourishing also neatly illustrates that the opposite of burnout isn’t being relaxed, sprawled out on a beach somewhere. While fixing the state of physical exhaustion is often a priority when we’re overwhelmed, the fantasy of fleeing from all work—whether that’s counting the days until retirement, buying lottery tickets or escaping in video games—is a means of coping, not thriving.
Flourishing isn’t a compromise. It’s not a protective stance to prevent us becoming burned out, but one that embraces challenges and strivings in a way that brings more vitality to our lives.
A Flattening of Meaning
I’ve previously explored the biological roots of fatigue and how our culture of work helps to promote burnout. When we undermine our sleep, diet and exercise, fail to manage stress and work outside of natural rhythms, we create conditions ripe for exhaustion to creep in.
But our philosophy of work exacerbates these problems. Our culture sends us conflicting messages on the meaning we’re supposed to derive from work.
On the one hand, we’re supposed to follow our passions, find our voice and have an impact. Work, in this light, isn’t simply things that need to be done, rather it becomes a transcendent mission. That’s a noble vision, but it often conflicts with the mundane reality of our actual jobs. By requiring meaning in our work to reach some ecstatic ideal, we often pass over the actually existing meaning in our everyday tasks.
On the other hand, we’re taught to maximize economic value, to see work as a means to an end—namely leisure. In this view, work is the price you pay to do the things that really make life valuable.
In an interesting essay [5], the philosopher Agnes Callard writes about teaching a class on Aristotle’s views on work and leisure. She comments that what the students are doing now, pursuing the life of the mind, was true leisure in Aristotle’s sense. But, for most of the students in her class, attendance is more like “work”—a thing they need to do to get good jobs and live in society.
Both of these visions make it harder for us to find genuine meaning in our work. The transcendent calling ignores the mundane and leaves us longing for a kind of work that doesn’t exist. The transactionalist attitude negates the possibility of meaning in work, with everybody working for the weekend.
What’s needed is a philosophy of work that grounds work in a stable appreciation of its value. Ultimately, the value of our work, and the meanings that will sustain a life of flourishing, are not limited to a few rare professions. It is something available to us all, provided we are able to see it.
If you’ve enjoyed this lesson series and would like to go deeper, I’m opening registration for Everyday Energy [1] on Monday. The course will dive deeper into the biology, psychology and philosophy of energy, and help you cultivate enduring practices for a flourishing life. I hope to see you there!