The End of Burnout

Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing.

Burnout has become our go-to term for talking about the pressure and dissatisfaction we experience at work. But because we don’t really understand what burnout means, the discourse does little to help workers who are suffering from exhaustion and despair. Jonathan Malesic was one of those workers, and to escape, he quit his job as a tenured professor. In The End of Burnout, he dives into the history and psychology of burnout, traces the origin of the high ideals we bring to our dismal jobs, and profiles the individuals and communities who are already resisting our cultural commitment to constant work.

In The End of Burnout, Malesic traces his own history as someone who burned out of a tenured job to frame this rigorous investigation of how and why so many of us feel worn out, alienated, and useless in our work. Through research on the science, culture, and philosophy of burnout, Malesic explores the gap between our vocation and our jobs, between the ideals we have for work and the reality of what we have to do.

He eschews the usual prevailing wisdom in confronting burnout (“Learn to say no!” “Practice mindfulness!”) to examine how our jobs have been constructed as a symbol of our value and our total identity. And beyond looking at what drives burnout—unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values—this book highlights groups that are addressing these failures of ethics.

We can look to communities of monks, employees of a Dallas nonprofit, intense hobbyists, and artists with disabilities to see the possibilities for resisting a “total work” environment and the paths to recognizing the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike. In this critical yet deeply humane book, Malesic offers the vocabulary we need to recognize burnout, overcome burnout culture, and find moral significance in our lives beyond work.