The Math of Burnout

Undeniable facts about a toxic but dominant work culture

In 2023, its estimated that over 60 million Americans reached their wits end.

Most experienced adverse health consequences, most suffered in their relationships, and nearly all found themselves in professional crisis.

Not because they engaged in self-abuse, got diagnosed with terminal illness, or experienced violent trauma.

But simply because they went to work.

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Burnout is normalized in the contemporary work environment.

People are dropping like flies. They’re taking sick days 2.5 times more often. They’re looking for work when they’re already employed.

These things are happening at historically unprecedented rates. And it’s getting worse.

And that’s because organizations are doing nothing about it.

Because at this moment in time, greed and myopia are more powerful than humanity or even common sense.

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I know about burnout.

I’ve experienced it, and learned first-hand what people mean when they use the term.

I learned what a complete loss of joy, fulfillment, or even mild interest in work feels like.

I learned how meaningless work can become, no matter how important it seemed before.

I realized that when nothing matters, generating a solitary joule of professional energy feels like organizing a moonshot or a UN operation.

I learned that actors deserve their salaries. Because acting like you give a shit when you couldn’t possibly care less is hard work.

I learned that when you’re burned out, the morning alarm is accompanied by the feeling of being pinned to your bed by the force of 9g. You are paralyzed. There is an anvil on your chest.

I learned that my once strong feelings of connection, concern, and achievement with work could be totally destroyed, replaced by an aching hollowness which grew into a throb with each hour of work endured once in burnout mode.

I learned that giving the best of myself to people who didn’t appreciate or value my contribution could send a shuddering jolt of sobriety along my spine, extinguishing the candles that had lit my heart and soul.

I learned to persist through a hundred days of lukewarm lethargy, followed by a hundred more.

I learned the pain of going too far. Looking around my life, realizing I’d given work too much at the expense of things which mattered more but got pushed into the margins too often and for too long.

I learned for the first time what a physical breakdown feels like. Looking in the mirror, I had cause to worry that I’d gone through a medical one-way door. Inflicted damage I couldn’t undo. Shaved years off my life in exchange for fleeting glory and silly material advantage which mattered not a whit.

I learned what it feels like to arrive at Sunday night filled with dread. A once mirthful professional mind had been hounded into exhausted ennui by relentless obligation.

I learned to numb my mind in order to feel a fleeting sense of peace, accentuating the weary gnaw of a hangover that never passes.

I learned that while it takes a long time to reach the point of the burnout, its final onset is swift and merciless, washing over life like a paradigm change. It took years of reluctantly accumulating toxicity before it finally got the upper hand. But once it did, there was no coming back. No re-lighting the spark.

And this is when I learned the final lesson, which is what sets burnout apart from a case of the Mondays.

It doesn’t go away on Tuesday. It doesn’t go away at all.

And thus, I learned that the only way to stop feeling worse day over day was a complete break from the environment. Stepping back wasn’t enough. I had to step away.

Upon reflection, I’ve learned to be horrified at the reality of this level of misery afflicting entire generations of American employees.

Where once we cultivated legions of smiling vitality and can-do spirit, fanning the flames of the free market into a roaring turbine of optimism, there is now only an epidemic of usury and sadness. Horizons are declining.

Burnout is becoming the norm, but people without the luxury of quitting are working through it, killing off their minds, souls, and bodies with every hour of toxicity.

And it continues because companies won’t even get real about burnout, much less do anything to address it.

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Before I tell you what causes burnout, let me list a few of the things which do not cause burnout.

The reason I need to mention these is to proactively exclude from serious conversation certain specious bullshit generated by researchers who are funded by corporations.

Such corporations are interested in research conclusions which allow them to do what is in their immediate financial interest, but with an additional veneer of credibility to obscure the rampant fuckery of grinding employees into a fine powder.

Such conclusions can be spotted by their lack of complexity. They resemble something pulled from an easy bake oven.

Burnout is not a result of:

1. Loneliness. Forcing people to be in the office more is not an antidote to burnout. Companies making this argument to override flexible working sentiment are cynical in the extreme, as their actions create more burnout while pretending to create less.

2. Lack of Exercise. While physical activity is an important part of any healthy life plan, installing a gym in the workplace is not a way to prevent burnout. It is, however, a great ploy to get people to spend even more time at work.

3. Lack of Team Building. Forced team events will not break the skid toward burnout for anyone involved. They will, however, impose an additional time tax on employees.

4. Lack of Socializing at Work. You will seldom hear me claim that less partying is a good thing. But forced or nudged work parties won’t arrest burnout. To the extent they obligate people, they might make things worse.

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So, what does cause burnout?

Many things can accelerate burnout, including lack of autonomy, lack of recognition, and mismatch between individual and organizational values.

But the root cause is always the same: workload.

We’re not talking garden variety overwork, here. Late nights here and there, extra demands that add an hour or two every so often, or even difficulty detaching from work during downtime are not enough to burn someone out.

Burnout happens because of severe, persistent task saturation placing an individual in an irrecoverable excess workload position. They are constantly behind, and every task waiting for their action is non-negotiable.

This creates a reality where an individual must occupy every minute of every day with work effort in the vain attempt to catch up. They pause only when exhaustion or competing obligation forces them to do so. And even as they grind themselves into dust, they fall further behind.

It’s that psychology of falling further behind even as your entire life is occupied by work that eventually breaks people. For a while, they will convince themselves it’s temporary, or that they just need a vacation.

But as temporary wanders into permanent and the vacation time only puts them further behind the 8-ball, they will eventually succumb to the pressure.

And at that moment, they will once and for all throw everything aside and utterly cease to give a shit.

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The road to this moment is paved with simple math.

On one side of a minus sign is the total time available across a work week. On the other side is the time required to complete non-negotiables. After the equals sign is the result.

When that result is positive, an individual can get ahead or take extra recovery time. This is a light week.

When it is zero, work expectations are balanced with time. Normal week.

When the result is negative, there is a time deficit which individuals will try to make up by working faster or carving more hours out of their personal lives. This heavy week is a common work reality these days. Ever notice how everyone seems to watch TV with a laptop? It’s not purely for watching cat videos and doom-scrolling.

When the number is substantially negative, the individual will not be able to carve enough time out of their personal life to make up the delta. They will end the week having had no life but also not having caught up.

And then it will happen again. The deficit will carry over to the next week. The things that didn’t get done will still need done, plus a new load of things. This robs the individual of any hope at a personal life before they’re even out of the gate. These are crush weeks, so named because after a while, the individual is far enough underwater to be at crush depth.

Most people in burnout-susceptible roles are already budgeting more time for work every week than others. They’ve already adapted to squeezing life into a smaller space.

But the reality when things are this out of whack is that expectation stretches to infinity. The faster a person works, the more work will be generated to keep them fed, like a chain gun that never stops firing until it eventually seizes up.

Most people have a blend of different weeks. Some heavy, a few light, many in between. Maybe a few crush weeks across the course of a year.

But for many, every week is a crush week. And the unfulfilled obligation which carries over from one week to another compounds week after week, across months and years.

There is no time for life. No time for anything.

Dreams of drowning become commonplace.

The individual tries various techniques to break the cycle.

Heeds the dispensed wisdom. Reads the self-improvement guide from the airport book store. Takes advice on finding a better balance from the same supervisor imposing the overwork.

Heeds the urging of a line manager to schedule more vacation, only to have that manager make the vacation seem like an inadvisable frill when it draws near.

People try delegating more. They become more productive and less wasteful of time. They become more transactional, less conversational, less accessible. They fast-forward through banality more often.

But in the end, they burn out. Because math has no feelings.

Math doesn’t care about milquetoast attempts to solve its equations. Math is ruthless. It can’t be bargained with.

In the end, carried over and compounded obligations will accrue until they smother the flame of vitality no matter how hard it is fanned by half-measures. Because rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic wreck of time deficiency will not stop it sinking.

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You know who doesn’t like the math of burnout? Executives.

Because if ever they were to honestly tally up what they ask of people and then subtract it from the time people should be committing to work in order to have a decent life, the resulting deficit would expose an annualized labor shortage measurable in the trillions.

You won’t get an executive to touch the subject of burnout with a barge pole. They are interested in sweating their assets, including the humans who work for them. They are not interested in concepts like humanity, responsibility, or sustainable workload.

In fact, executives understand that if they cross their arms and do nothing, the problem of people being unhappy with excess workload will take care of itself.

We can understand this by thinking about the three basic ways people respond to excessive workload.

Worker A is a hyper-ambitious sociopath with no life. Driven by money and craven pragmatism, Worker A embraces abuse as a life choice. A rational means to an end. When you see someone prematurely gray, soaked in whiskey, overweight, alone, and tip-toeing around their grave, this is probably Worker A.

Before slinking pathetically into an expensive coffin, Worker A will spend years propagating an unrealistic and unhealthy standard. S/he will always be willing to prioritize work over everything else, and will ply this single-mindedness into competitive advantage over those with broader views of what life should be about.

Corporations love, celebrate, and promote Worker A. They hold Worker A out as their shining example, and use this example to create the contrast necessary to marginalize those unwilling to hoist themselves onto the corporate cross.

Worker B answers to a powerful inner voice, refusing to be spent for organizational ends. They refuse to burn themselves out. It costs them financially. They don’t progress. Their careers are capped off as their integrity and commitment to relationships and life beyond work get interpreted as a lack of ambition or commitment.

We never see the professional potential of Worker B realized, but they tend to live happier lives. They also provide corporations with a convenient pool of reputed under-achievers who can be performance managed under the guise of “raising the bar.”

Amazon actively seeks to fire thousands of people every year not because of actual under-performance, but to satisfy the irrational corporate vagary that it is endemically infested with legions of lazy losers who need to be pushed harder.

If there aren’t enough actual under-performers, directors will be pushed to find some, lest they themselves be nominated.

This is all, of course, nonsensical, and a deep insult to the hiring process.

But the moral courage of Worker B, by triggering turnover, allows the abuse to continue for everyone else. This contributes to the toxic stasis of a work culture teeming with dysfunction.

Worker C represents most people. Worker C gets caught in the crossfire of trying to be responsible in life, please their employer, and somehow fight for a balance.

So when Worker C encounters chronic overload, they knuckle up and take the abuse, not seeing a better option. They rationalize, satis-fice, and tell themselves whatever they must in order to gut it out.

They do so for as long as they can before buckling, at which point they burn out.

For some, this is a tragically lethal gambit. For others, it is a slow march into premature curmudgeonhood. For still others, it is something in between. Most endure a torturous epilogue of going through joyless motions in order to meet obligations in an often narrowed and damaged life.

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Companies have enough As and Cs to shrug off B’s complaints and keep chugging. It’s one factor allowing them to avert their gaze from a problem and convincingly pretend ignorance to it.

They do so out of pure commercial cynicism.

Fixing burnout means fixing overwork. Fixing overwork means hiring more people. Hiring more people costs money. Any money spent on costs can’t be labelled profit. Less profit means a lower share price. A lower share price means less money for everyone to stuff in their pockets.

So, from an executive or shareholder perspective, fixing burnout means more for thee and less for me.

Fixing burnout is therefore deeply contrary to corporate interests as currently perceived in our work culture.

And that is what it is. But don’t be taken in by PR-trained jackals who downplay burnout or lump it in with marginal overwork.

Burnout is about something different: serial abuse masquerading as a legitimate work culture. It hijacks the “work hard” ethos, taking advantage of the earnest nature of diligent and selfless employees to stretch them on the rack until they break. At which point they are replaced like an old timing belt.

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Two anticipated counter-arguments I will quickly decry before closing.

1. “Boundaries.” It’s not just that telling people to set boundaries individualizes a problem that the organization should address. It’s that boundaries don't work. The only environments where boundaries are necessary are the same environments where they won't have any lasting effect. Because if you have to set them, expectations are already unreasonable. Reducing your workload unilaterally will make you stand out like a sore thumb (compared to Worker B above). Your colleagues who don't will be rewarded, you will be managed and exited.

2. “Beating burnout with success.” There are people who actually believe you can power through burnout by doubling down and earning more "success" … as defined by an extra pat on the head from the boss or marginal monetary reward at bonus time. This is a dumb idea. It's like throwing kerosene on a fire. You'll burn out and melt down faster. No gesture you make will ever be enough to convince your boss to sweat you less. In fact, the more you give, the more work you’ll be given.

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You can't fix burnout with bake sales, happy hours, encouraging boundaries, or hiring people who “power through.”

You can only fix it by proactively controlling individual worker investment of time and effort.

By controlling workload.

Which means measuring what you expect of people and ensuring it fits within the time they have available.

Do I expect that will happen?

No. Because everyone in an executive role already gets this and is doing nothing to address it, for reasons already explained.

But here’s the thing. It is a latent competitive advantage for organizations wise enough to wield it. Retention, stability, and loyalty are just a few of the high-gain benefits of designing sustainable work into an organization.

At some point, the world will turn and burnout will go out of style. Those visionaries who got front-footed ahead of time will attract the talent to capitalize on this change.

Or, we could, and I’m just spit-balling here … actually choose to address burnout simply because it’s the right thing to do.

TC is an independent writer, coach, speaker, and consultant who specializes in organizational leadership.