Burned Out: How Modern Life is Killing You
By: Joel Nihlean
Tags: Work Life Balance, Politics, Burnout, Capitalism, Neoliberalism

We’re all burning out. And it’s not just our jobs, our side hustles, the perpetual multitasking, and the always-on nature of modern life that’s driving us crazy.

According to a 2021 study, more than half of U.S workers are feeling burned out. Fifty-three percent of Millennials were already burned out before the pandemic. Sixty-seven percent say burnout has worsened during the pandemic. A pre-COVID 2018 Gallup poll reported that about one in four U.S. workers felt burnt out often or always. And by all accounts, burnout has only gotten worse since the pandemic started. Even the World Health Organization has taken notice. They say burnout is an occupational phenomenon that deserves serious attention.

What these social scientists and other theorists call burnout is not an individual failing or even a merely personal experience. The stress and exhaustion we feel is a near-ubiquitous feature of our modern world — a symptom of the modern world.

Chasing happiness has become the primary goal of life. It shows up in pop psychology with things like the science of happiness — a term that will get you hundreds of millions of results on Google. There’s also the emergence of chief happiness officers within the corporate world, it’s now an economic metric — the Gross National Happiness Index — and it’s even seeped into culture more generally in the form of social media graphics of inspirational quotes to share online and the phenomenon of life coaches.

There is a constant pressure to be happy all the time. Ironically, it may be the source of a lot of unhappiness in the world

Philosopher Byung Chul Han has been exploring this idea for more than a decade. In his spring 2021 article in The Nation, The Tiredness Virus, he grounds his theories in the very concrete reality of life in the time of coronavirus. In it, he explores how the fallout of COVID-19 has only intensified our preexisting burnout, reflecting back and heightening the emptiness of the modern world.

According to Han, coronavirus acts as a mirror. It shows us the pathological tendencies of society. The number one feature of our modern life is a peculiar tiredness or burnout. It’s a ceaseless exhaustion that for Han is symptomatic of life lived under late neoliberal capitalism.

It’s not just that work is tiring, because when your work is done, you should be able to rest. What’s different about the neoliberal world is that it doesn’t really allow for rest. Everything has, in a sense, become work. Leisure time is another opportunity to produce.

It never ends — not even when we’re sleeping. We’re shaped by the modern world to desire more. Desiring itself has become work. And whatever the object of our desire is, it is always just out of reach.

Objet petit a: Or the satisfaction we’ll never find

Capitalism produces in us a desire for desire. To understand the rationality of capitalism and its implicit logic, we can borrow a term from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and an example of it working in capitalism from Slavoj Žižek. The logic of capitalism operates according to the logic of objet petit a — the unattainable object of desire.

Imagine an object that gives satisfaction, like a bottle or can of Coca-Cola.

From the documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek.

An ice-cold Coke is the desired object. It tastes good. The sound as you open a bottle is pleasing. It makes us feel good. When we share it with a friend, we’re part of a relationship or a community. You can see and hear the actor in a commercial now, in your head, as they take a big swig and say “Aaaahhhh…”

But consider the can or bottle it came in — that is the limit. The limit is the thing that stops us from endlessly consuming. Without the container — the bottle or the can —limiting us, we’d theoretically have an infinite supply of soda. With an infinite supply, we’d no longer be able to desire it. There’d be no gap formed by the lack of Coke that would cause us to desire.

A real Coca-Cola advertisement

The container is what limits what we have. It provides the absence that allows us to desire more. When we reach the limit — the “no more” of an empty bottle — we can again experience desire. We want more Coke, or whatever it is that we believe will satisfy us.

Capitalism works as a vast and complicated network of producing and exchanging objects that cause desire. But these objects don’t ever really hit the mark. We never truly reach satisfaction or contentment or whatever happiness is.

Instead, these objects of desire ultimately only produce more desire. That desire kicks off a new cycle of production and consumption of objects that, like before, produce more desire. And around it goes.

It’s a pathological system — a feedback loop of objects that cause desire and require more objects to be produced and consumed that cause more desire. In short, capitalism is a system of desire to produce desire. And, of course, these desires are never truly fulfilled.

We all know what we see on social media isn’t real. That hasn’t stopped us from judging ourselves against it …

The more the system grows, the stronger it gets and the more pressure it exerts on us, dictating how society functions according to these unconscious structures of desire.

You can rest when you die

Our desire only leads us to desire more desire. It’s a vicious cycle with no end. Desiring for the purpose of desiring has no breaking point. Exhaustion should have a breaking point — a point of fatigue where you can take no more — but under late neoliberal capitalism, rest is an illusion. Even our leisure time is spent in this system of desire. We’re constantly desiring and producing desire — we’re always giving and giving to it. It’s exhausting.

Consider what Han writes in his article, The Tiredness Virus:

Psychological disorders such as depression or burnout are symptoms of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological signal, indicating that freedom today often turns into compulsion. We think we are free. But we actually exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse. We realize ourselves, optimize ourselves unto death. The insidious logic of achievement permanently forces us to get ahead of ourselves. Once we have achieved something, we want to achieve more, that is, we want to get ahead of ourselves yet again. But, of course, it is impossible to get ahead of oneself. This absurd logic ultimately leads to a breakdown. The achievement subject believes that it is free but it is actually a slave. It is an absolute slave insofar as it voluntarily exploits itself, even without a master being present.

Your smartphone is key to your auto-exploitation. With every swipe, it floods your brain with dopamine. Our phones are often essential tools for both work and play, and the apps on them act as substitutes for real downtime.

We all know what we see on social media isn’t real. That hasn’t stopped us from judging ourselves against it, from trying to do better, go faster, travel further, and look happier and be more fulfilled. When we’re not at work, or even when we are, we’re using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok, LinkedIn, and myriad sites to brand ourselves — to create our identity as a product for others to consume.

Using social media to curate a highlight reel of our lives, online shopping that chases the dragon of desire, and retreating into apps that boost productivity or make us more mindful — it’s all us gazing into the digital abyss, producing for it, giving to it, hoping it will give back.

There are solutions, but they require us to break out of these vicious cycles of desire that we mistakenly see as fundamental to the human experience.

The pandemic has also highlighted the downside to our always-on, digital-first work-life with its instant messaging and constant Zoom meetings — Zoom meetings about how to use Zoom, Zoom meetings about mental health and burnout during the pandemic, Zoom meetings about how we’re having too many Zoom meetings.

It’s enough to make you snap. But we never do. We just keep going, working, optimizing our selves — like zombies, we never drop.

The origins of the burnout diagnosis

The diagnosis of burnout has been around since 1974. Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger first identified it as a kind of stress associated with work — his own work. He saw it first in “helping” professions like the medical field, but eventually it was identified nearly everywhere. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen describes burnout as a state where you’ve “exhausted all your internal resources yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” Psychology professor Irvin Schonfeld calls it “a kind of depression that occurs in reaction to terrible working conditions.”

The concept of burnout was first identified around the same time as the neoliberal turn in capitalism began to emerge. That’s not a coincidence. That a new kind of work-related mental health issue began to crop up just as the nature of labor itself began to change isn’t really a surprise.

As the title of journalist Sarah Jaffe’s book on burnout suggests, Work Won’t Love You Back. This is true even when — probably especially when — you’re doing something you love. In fact, a labor of love likely exacerbates burnout.

In a weird way, doing work we truly love means we enjoy our exploitation. Loving your work leads you on a race, charging even harder and harder toward endlessly receding goalposts.

But no matter what job we do, no matter how we spend our free time, we’re giving more than we get back.

Is burnout inevitable?

So, how do we find rest? Jaffee suggests there can be relief in joining social unions, art collectives, even labor unions. Han proposes loftier things like unplugging or refusing the logic of the system entirely. It’s dubious if those solutions will ever work, but there’s still something we can learn from both Jaffe and Han.

What they’re both essentially saying is that the system — our modern life — won’t love you back. It’s an insidious arrangement that manipulates our very emotional state. It always takes more than it gives. There are solutions, but they require us to break out of these vicious cycles of desire that we mistakenly see as fundamental to the human experience. We need to question the totality of the happiness industry and the pressures it exerts on us.

The question is, is happiness a good thing, or is it a shallow goal that only serves the interests of capital and its expansion? Is there a middle path — one where happiness is still valuable but not quickly assimilated into an exploitative logic?