The End of Burnout

Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives

By: Jonathan Malesic

Narrated by: David Booth

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, and 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. Beyond looking at what drives burnout - unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values - this book spotlights 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.

©2022 Jonathan Malesic (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Overwhelmed person writes a fantasy

the answer to burnout from is not, not working. In order for a society to move beyond "work" they have to work in order to accomplish it. Circular reasoning, improper use of social science, and a socialistic ideal makes me wonder if the author really had any interest in understanding work in it's possible forms before calling for an irrational and fantastic end to work. Most accurate thing the author describes is misaligned ideals being leveraged against employees, but the context and history, are wrong and supposed solutions are only possible if someone else works, so the answer is to shift the blame and responsibility to someone else....

thanks, but no thanks

Some useful insights into why we burn out

The author’s own story about how he burned out in a job he thought was his dream job resonated with me. Anyone whose job is a vocation and an identity, rather than just a way to pay the bills is likely to find themselves in some of his stories. He notes that most books on burn out offer advice on how to mitigate it, and fail to tackle the sources of our burnout culture. He promises solutions in his final chapters. His solutions however, fall short. His final advice—that we solve the burnout crisis by letting the machines do the work so we don’t have to—could not be more misguided, as this fails to recognize the role automation and now AI are playing in our increasingly cynical and burned out culture.

Helpful conceptual parsing of burnout

The author offers a clear and deeply thought-through definition of burnout, anchored in his experience, social science, and anecdotes from others. The diagnosis was more convincing to me than some of his model solutions, but a good diagnosis or analysis is hard to come by with something as amorphous as burnout. Not a self-help book per se, but I nevertheless found it helpful!

An Interesting Book

The first half of the book, where he describes the various aspects of burnout and what they come from in our corporate, profits driven economy, had me riveted. He puts his finger on the problems much more adeptly than any recent articles I’ve read about it. He’s correct that we have no measurement for it or an accurate definition and that leaves burnout open to a vast array of uses. He’s also correct that burnout doesn’t just come to those who work more than 8 hours or who experience race discrimination at work. He goes into a lot of detail and it’s quite valuable. I took the short MBI test as a result of this book.

The second half of the book was a bit more idealistic and I stumbled through it. The arrangement that monks and nuns have is largely communal. My assumption is also that they are heavily subsidized by the Catholic Church. Still, there were some lessons that could be taken back by Corporate. If you’re looking to minimize burnout in a workplace, you should go through this section for suggestions. It’s vital for workers to be able to unload their frustrations and discuss them with colleagues in an unsupervised setting. That was maybe the biggest takeaway for me. There were others.

I don’t buy into the closing theory of this book, which seems to be that we should all just work as much as(or if) we feel like and still get paid enough to live comfortably. Maybe when AI takes over most of our jobs that will be possible. Not now.

Relatable…but…

Some moments were so relatable I could barely contain myself. However, I wish he had started with the line about it only being possible because of his wife’s income. Precisely the problem.

Very Good Book on Work

Helped me to adjust my expectations for work! Helped me to think the real purpose of life is beyond my work. I believe it’s about loving God and loving others!

Unfocused and not that useful

The first part of the book focused a lot more on the author’s personal experience than I expected. The analysis felt a little too light here. The stilts analogy was helpful, but that was my biggest takeaway.

The second part of the book was more interesting when he focused on how certain religious communities set boundaries to avoid burnout. He actually quite light on suggestions of how to - at the personal level - get out of burnout. He has several examples of people who quit their jobs, but it seemed like none of the people he examined had children or livelihoods where others depended on them. It would have been helpful to have perhaps some practical thoughts on how to adjust one’s finances to prepare for an income hit. (Elizabeth Warren’s the Two Income Trap would be much more helpful reading in that regard.) He tried to be inclusive by having a transgender example but this individual actually pretty closely resembled himself in going into a creative profession and having no dependents. His hope is that there will be societal level changes to reduce burnout, but that is years away and little consolation to the currently burned out person who feels they can’t quit because their family depends on them (either as a breadwinner or caregiver).

I would have enjoyed this more as 1-2 long articles instead of a full book.

slow start, better 2nd half

it was a bit slow at first covering the history and science, but it's worth pushing through for the second half which discusses intriguing ideas of new social constructs and considerations

Deconstruction of the idea of work

This is a great book that is much broader than simply burnout. This book looks at the idea of work and how it has become something that is wrongly at the center of our lives, where we derive our meaning, purpose, and value. We do not gain our dignity through work, though this is the message often of our culture. Instead, we all have an innate dignity. Community, family, religion, leisure should be more at the center of our lives, where work only exists to support these other more important things. Incredible book that really deconstructs our understanding of work and argues for us to try to redefine work where the dignity of the individual is the core.