We're burned out. Here's why.

burnout is on the rise in one survey 77% of respondents said that they had felt burned out at work people are quiet quitting or they're just quitting their jobs or they wish they could just drop out of it all stop working and do something that mattered instead we're stressed we're anxious and we feel like we just can't do this anymore so what is burnout and why is it increasing well if we want to answer that question we should go and actually look at the history of the word [Music] take a look at this chart the

word burnout doesn't really start appearing in books until the 1950s and it doesn't really take off in popularity until the 1980s that's when the psychologist freudenberger published his book burnout the high cost of high achievement fredburger actually came up with this concept by analyzing himself he was so overcome with Stress and Anxiety that he wasn't even able to get out of bed or move at times he said that he couldn't even feel Joy in one interview freudenberger described burnout like this burnout really is a response to stress it's a response to frustration it's a response

to a demand that an individual may make upon thems in terms of a requirement for perfectionism or drive now after freudenberg's work psychologists started to get a bit more rigorous in how they described burnout the Yale psychologist Lori Santos breaks it down into three parts you're burned out when you feel emotionally exhausted so you can't handle any more burdens the metaphor that Santos uses is a house of cards if there's even one more more burden or one more piece of stress added to your life the whole thing is going to collapse the second sign is

depersonalization this is when you start to be cynical you start to question people's intentions and depersonalization also gets in the way of forming authentic human connections and the third sign of burnout Santos says is a sense of personal ineffectiveness no matter what you do it isn't going to matter you can't change anything that last part I think is really at the heart of the issue there's a reason so many of us feel burned out especially about work and it's because we think we're working jobs that don't matter that's an idea that was popularized by the

Anthropologist David Graber Graber came up with a term for these sorts of jobs which he calls jobs and he defines a job as a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though as part of the conditions of employment the employee feels obliged to pretend this is not the case and this idea of Graber it really resonated with people Graber put this idea out there in a really small online magazine called strike and when it was released it went viral I think something

like a million people read the article and actually the Magazine's website couldn't keep up and ended up crashing when Graber was describing these pointless jobs well people thought that reflected their experiences in one ugv poll 37% of people said that their jobs were meaningless or specifically they said their jobs weren't contributing meaning mean f to society so we don't lose sight of the plot here let me break out how a job might be related to burnout burnout seems to partly stem from a sense of futility like nothing that you do matters or can change anything

well if you spend 8 hours a day which is a huge part of your waking hours working a job that you think doesn't accomplish anything then it's not hard to see how you would think that in general your life is futile no matter what you do nothing's going to change and nothing's going to get better Graber is often criticized for some of the examples that he gives for jobs like actuaries turns out actually an actuary is kind of a useful job and it might even be the case that actuaries think that their jobs are quite

useful so they don't really meet the conditions of being a job like graper would say but some sociologists have tried to find empirical support for graber's thesis and they found something a lot of people do think their jobs are it's just not the jobs that Graber expected it's people often who work in things like Transportation or shipping these are jobs that are characterized by monotony no matter what you do you're going to basically do the same thing tomorrow you do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over I actually

once had a seasonal job working at UPS uh my whole job was to grab packages as they were coming down a conveyor belt and then put them onto trucks and there's something really strange about the fact that you'll do this for a few hours and you'll still see this endless flow of packages coming it's like as if you barely put a dent in it despite the fact that you're tired and you feel sore and later on when I went to work at some tech companies I actually often felt the same cuz it felt like we

were always bouncing from Project to project or we all had to pretend that we were excited about some big new corporate initiative even though like we all knew it wasn't going to make a difference oh great they've come up with like some brand new metric in order to measure our performance but it turns out everything's exactly the same it's just that the format of my quarterly evaluation has changed slightly and we all have to pretend like it matters everyone that I knew and talked to about this was very cynical even if management sort of wanted

us to pretend otherwise we were all like Copus but instead of pushing Boulders up a hill we were sitting behind laptops and going to meetings and kind of just getting by and at least a lot of people that I knew they felt burned out and they felt burned out because we felt like we weren't ever accomplishing something of course burnouts not just limited to our jobs it can actually in all of our lives and that's because as one philosopher puts it we live in a burnout Society that's the title of this book by the philosopher

B CH Han despite this being a really short book Han's ideas are quite dense and so I just feel compelled to pause the video and say hey you should go and read this book you could probably read it in an afternoon and get a sense of it and it'll do more for you than watching this YouTube video at the core of Hans analysis is this idea that we live in an achievement Society in this Society we are constantly striving to do more we want to achieve more we want to produce more and on top of

that we always feel like we have to think positively about it so Han says that the root of our problem isn't negativity it it's actually excess positivity now if you take a quick look at some management websites when they talk about burnout they always tell you to just change your mindset and try to be more optimistic about the future but if Han is right that is exactly wrong it's actually that kind of forced positivity that makes us feel more burned out in the long run and that's really similar to what freudenberger said at the top

of the video it's that drive towards perfectionism achievement and productivity we never let ourselves stop being productive we always want to do more in fact even when we do things for fun we often rationalize it or justify it because we say it's going to recharge our batteries so that then we can go back and do even better work the philosopher bertran Russell puts it this way the modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else and never for its own sake and Han and Russell following in a long line

of philosophers would say that if we want to counteract burnout and this sense of futility in the world we have to learn how to be idle again we like to use idleness as an insult we say things like Idle Hands are the devil's workshop but in the ancient world like say in the world of Aristotle Plato idleness was actually seen as important to a good life because when you're Idol that's when you have time to contemplate and contemplation is the best kind of Life at least According to Aristotle now for someone like Aristotle contemplation basically

meant being like a philosopher scientist for many people that's not their idea of the best sort of life but buron wrestle has a slightly broader view of what one could do in your idle time it's when you're free from the necessity of work where you don't have to work in order to meet your needs or to live a decent life and you also don't feel driven to do anything except for its own sake you just end up doing things that matter because they matter some people would just use all of their Idol time their Leisure

Time To Have Fun more to relax but Russell thought that for a lot of people they would use it to explore the universe or to produce great art or to perfect their craft because they cared about it they'd be able to look at what they were doing and they could see that it was good and thus they wouldn't really feel burnout it just wouldn't apply doesn't mean they couldn't get frustrated it's just that burnout wouldn't really apply but in our world that's hard to do you know B Johan says that we need to learn to

be bored and it turns out just sitting around and being bored is really hard when we're so used to a world of constant stimulation and a world of constant productivity but maybe learning how to be bored is that first step towards learning how to be Idol and actually using our time well for things that matter now this video has been sponsored by a really great organization called 80,000 hours and I want to tell you you about them today if you've made it this far it's probably because you're someone who wants what you do to matter

well 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that helps people make a positive impact with their career you have 80,000 hours in your career that's 40 hours a week or 50 weeks a year for 40 years and maybe with those 80,000 hours you want to make a difference in the world 80,000 hours have been researching and writing about how to have a good and fulfilling and impactful career for more than a decade now they make concrete suggestions for questions like what should I do if I want to make a positive difference in the world what are the

most pressing problems facing Humanity today and what can we do about them and what can I do today to start planning a successful career they have a website with collected research with job boards that could help you find a job like this and a podcast where they have conversations about this subject with experts and since they're a nonprofit everything they offer is free their only aim is to help people solve Global problems with their careers if you join their newsletter now you will get an in-depth career guide all you have to do is use my

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