[WSSP]

I suspect many resignations due to burnout would be better attributed to the company's poor management, culture, lack of opportunities/compensation, etc.

not that I think burnout isn't real; I think the test is if the person can easily move on to their next thing or not

[bradlys]

> I think the test is if the person can easily move on to their next thing or not

I think this perspective is one that is a bit too privileged. Even in tech - many of us don’t have the ability to take 6+ month breaks between jobs, find ourselves again, and figure out a way to align the work/life balance. I spent a few months between my last job and my current.

You know what I did during that time almost completely? Interview. It’s why I left the other job - I didn’t have enough time to study and interview. 20+ interviews a week. Studying. Applying. Etc. Doing 3-4 onsites/week for a month at a time. Using my “off” days to study more. I took about a month off between accepting the final offer and starting the new job. It wasn’t enough but I had burned through a lot of my savings because of having to exercise options at my last company, pay AMT on exercising said options, and having to pay for another person who lived with me while living in one of the most expensive parts of the world cause all the jobs are here. (ex-wife who was in college and not working)

Again - feel like this is a very privileged attitude to take about being able to move onto the next thing. Most of us don’t really get an option. You just have to.

Getting to choose your job and when you move onto it seems like something only multi-millionaires I know do. The rest of us just slog through it because we have no other choice.

[emeraldunicorn9]

I agree that this is a problem that prevents people at all income levels from pursuing other options. Partly there is the real issue that you present, which is that you can't afford to take 6+ months off between jobs. But you clearly did a tremendous amount of work to find your next opportunity and that might have been virtually impossible to accomplish if you still had to perform your previous job.

But then there is the issue with taking a break. Maybe this is more a problem that women experience, but I'd be interested if men feel like they experience it, too. However, when you have gaps in your employment, I have felt that people didn't respond very positively to that and wanted to know why you had a break and what you were doing it. Because god forbid you weren't doing something "productive" during that time.

The way our work style is makes it feel like burnout begets more burnout because the options to escape burnout might not actually be feasible for every individual.

[WSSP]

to be clear I meant emotionally able to move on. burnout is often characterized as being unable to do that, even if the person wants/needs to

but yes I agree anyone who can takes months off work without financial stress should consider themselves fortunate. I know (non-parent) people who did that who were far from multi-millionaires though

[derbOac]

This article really resonated with me for a lot of reasons and I think you're right, at least in many cases.

There was another piece recently (at The Atlantic?) that was talking about how many cases of burnout are really better thought of as moral injury.

This perspective seemed closer to home for me. It's not the work per se, not the hours (although I think it can be that) -- it's this increasing gap between what your job is on paper, and what it actually is, and no acknowledgment of it from institutions or society, no recognition of it being a problem in your career or workplace, or the dysfunction and pain it causes.

In my case, I think initially some saw it as burnout or needing a break. I had friends talk to me about their own resistance to it in terms of their work ethic or some nonsense like that. But they worked in places with functional departments, where nothing remotely similar would happen to them, where there were support structures in place for things that needed to happen, and so forth and so on. Every job has some stuff that you let slide, that's less than optimal or ideal from a moral or ethical perspective, that you do for practical reasons, or whatever, but there's a point where the gap just gets to be too much, and when your workplace or even field isn't acknowledging the stuff going on, or minimizing it, it starts to feel hopeless.

The Atlantic piece was talking about this all in terms of nursing and all the issues involved, how it wasn't the workload that caused people to resign, it was, to paraphrase, this moral crisis, or crisis of dignity or something. Stuff having to do with healthcare system collapse, the culture in healthcare and in the US and so forth.

I think from what I've seen with myself and colleagues, "moral dissonance" or something might be closer to the right word than "moral injury", although neither are quite right. I'm not sure there's a term I've heard that gets it right. It's like the train has run off the track, and you either stay on board because on paper it's still on the track and you get benefits from it (material and otherwise), or you jump off the train and hit the ground but at least don't let the train carry you away.

I do think in some cases it's about the hours. But in many cases it really isn't about the hours, it's that there's enormous problems that everyone is ignoring or minimizing one way or another.

[kritiko]

Moral Mazes is an early 1980s ethnography of corporate managers and delves heavily into the situational morality of the workplace.