June 2025, 8 minutes

The Gospel of Burnout

When the Engine Overheats

Lionel Messi might be the greatest footballer of all time. The debate is hot, contemporarily with Cristiano Ronaldo, and also through time with chiefly Pele, Johan Cruyff and Messi’s fellow countryman, Diego Maradona (my preference, along with Paolo Maldini, but who cares about defence, right?). It’s hard to compare players across generations - there are just too many variables and unknowns - and I suspect Messi may have the edge on Ronaldo, if only for the connoisseurs, but this is not actually about Messi, it’s about a Barcelona teammate of his, a man who Messi himself claimed made him the great player he turned out to be, allowed him the freedom and ball on the pitch to do what he ended up doing.

Andres Iniesta won’t be a strange name to those in the know. As short as Messi and even more slight, pale, almost translucently so under floodlights, and boyish even now in his forties. His playing style was conductor, not soloist. Running with a forward tilt, head up, taking in space and flow, always looking for the pass. An obvious example of a tactile learner if there ever was one, he entered and later graduated Barcelona’s astonishingly successful La Masia academy, going on to play nearly 1,000 professional games.

He was good. Very good. And he won pretty much everything he could have won in the Beautiful Game, in clubland and with Spain.

But something was up with him.

After scoring the winning goal in the 2010 World Cup final against the Dutch, Iniesta’s teammates were on top of the world (one could argue, literally) but the man himself wasn’t even in the basecamp – he was wandering aimlessly in the foothills, looking up at the snowy peaks hidden by cloud, from where cheers of celebration drifted down.

Telling the Guardian in 2018, “After winning the World Cup in 2010, I was in one of the worst moments of my life. I was struggling with depression, and football was my escape, not my passion.” He had felt the same way after Barcelona won the treble the year previously, and the onset of symptoms appeared to have coincided with the death of a close friend. His therapist, Inma Puig, observed that the slumps Iniesta felt after the professional successes were a kind of post-intensity depression, noting the feelings of emptiness that can abound following high achievement.

In the end, Iniesta was alright. Acknowledging the problem, access to the best resources, a loving, understanding support network, and never giving up on himself all got him there in the end. And he’s still in therapy today, to avoid a remission to the dark days.

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Burnout as a Feature, Not a Bug

The DSM-5 doesn’t have a diagnostic category for “burnout”, but the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 does, classifying it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It has three core dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal efficacy. Burnout should not be understood to just mean being extremely tired in a physical way. Rather, it is a full-scale dysregulation of motivation and identity. One could go so far as to say that “burnout” is the corporate word for an existential crisis.

Of course, as with most mental health conditions, there is no clear agreement on its aetiology, or even epidemiology. Some would have it as pure HPA axis dysregulation (basically, physical stress), leading to a cacophony of mood, sleep and digestive problems; general amygdala drama. Then there are the psychological models, such as the Job Demands-Resources Model, which suggest that burnout occurs when job demands outweigh the available resources and therefore the ability to cope. Deci and Ryan proposed a “psychological nutrients” model, whereby if any of autonomy, competence, or relatedness are compromised, burnout will occur. This is Self-Determination Theory and has become one of the more influential theories of human-motivation going today. Last up there’s Maslach’s 1981 theory of burnout, which centres general mental exhaustion and created a still-widely-used scale for measuring the phenomenon. According to Maslach, burnout is not an event, but a process, and the earlier in the process one recognises and intervenes, the better the outcome - the best chance has to avoid the onset of chronic depression or anxiety disorders.

To better understand the topic, we made need a bit more framing - shall we treat ourselves to a bit of history?

Go on, then…

In 1905, the German sociologist and political theorist, Max Weber, coined the phrase “the Protestant work ethic”, linking it in congratulatory tones as a necessary basis of capitalism. The variation of Protestantism Weber was referring to here was of course Calvinism. Weber noticed the intimate connection between hard work and a sense of spiritual alignment - work as service to God. This came with the three neo virtues of discipline, thriftiness and frugality. Naturally, its converse of idleness and pleasure were taken for granted as negatively polarised, fundamentally incompatible with beruf, or the “calling” – the idea that work itself is a sacred duty, a compact between mortal and creator. Calvinism, being a doctrine of predestination, lead to much uncertainty among its adherents as to who in fact is actually predestined to go where exactly. So, being pattern seeking/seeing creatures, believers sought worldly signs to confirm they were among the elect. Thus, economic success became a sort-of proxy for divine favour, resulting in harder work, more reinvestment, and a simpler life.

Pennsylvania native Fredrick Winslow Taylor was born into a Quaker family in 1856, the perfect time to take advantage of economic and industrial modernisation.

A quick aside: in my opinion, the best way to see a Quaker is as a hippie Calvinist – they arrive at the same conclusion, just using different rhetorical mechanics to make the journey. Where the Calvinist is dour and stern, the Quaker is wholesome and pleasant; where the Calvinist speaks of darkness and hot brimstone, the Quaker speaks of light and hope. But, in the end, it’s all much of a muchness and, mutatis mutandis, they both believe that work will set you free, and that there is no greater lived virtue than hording wealth.

Taylor founded (appropriately) Taylorism, aka Scientific Management (I know…). This was a system of industrial management that aimed to break down every facet and aspect of work, reconstituting it into precise and measurable tasks. The goal was to maximise efficiency. In furtherance of this objective, Taylor developed five core principles:

Task fragmentation – break jobs into small, repeatable steps

Time and motion studies – find the fastest, most efficient method

Managerial control – managers think; workers execute

Performance-based pay – reward output, not effort

Worker as machine – optimize the human like a tool

Regrettably, and inevitably, in this system the human being becomes the famous “cog”- agency and autonomy are limited or abolished outright. For some, per Maslach, this lack of locus of control will eventually lead to symptoms of burnout, if not full breakdown. Indeed, the lacuna of data on the topic of burnout in previous eras makes it very difficult (and possibly intellectually unethical) to try to project the phenomena backwards. However, previous ages had terms such as “melancholia”, “neurasthenia”, “nervous exhaustion”, and even going back to the medieval period, “acedia, or “spiritual weakness”. Whether or not these conditions affected workers suffering under the yoke, I cannot be certain at scale, but I write this piece only to comment on our world today, not on what our world once was.

Taylorism has not left us. It lives on, a plastic demon of our time. Neotaylorism we may now call it (“neo” being the universal signifier of a Big Bad). For the modern brain, think: KPIs, quotas, productivity trackers. Additionally, think of digital surveillance as a means to ensure the efficiency is in fact being maximised. Let’s get into the weeds of some examples, shall we?

First, warehouses - let’s be real, we’re talking in the main about Amazon here, but not exclusively: scanned items per hour, AI-assigned routes, every second of the workers time-on-the-clock being accounted for, micromanaged, broken down and broken down some more. This algorithmic management dictates pace and workflow, and excludes worker discretion.

Similar to warehouses, constant monitoring is a feature of call centre work (we’ve all encountered a variation of “this call may be recorded for training purposes…”) The interactions are largely scripted, the calls timed. Quantitative measurables are God, and too much familiarity or casualness on the phone will lead to instant termination.

Gig work is a neologism trying to veil its true nature through a cool facade. Uber, Deliveroo – as with the above, algorithmic oversight reigns, but these industries have the additional joy of offering no or extremely limited job security. Everybody be hustlin’. Free-radical cogs, I suppose one could call them. The aesthetics of freedom combined with the chains of substance.

Most worryingly, healthcare is not spared. For doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers, task-time so often takes priority of quality of care. Documentation, rounds, and procedures are timed and monitored, prioritising quantifiable (there’s that word again) outputs over patient-centred care, which, I don’t think it’s controversial to say, should be the primary measure, despite its difficulty to input into an Excel spreadsheet. There are second order consequences to this approach, too. The shift towards efficiency metrics can undermine professional judgment, a key ability to possess when diagnosing and prescribing.

Undoubtably, I fear, Frederik Taylor would approve.

Of course, I don’t want to just pick on Protestants, as there are plenty of example of the same or similar practised in lands far removed from the multifaceted Christian traditions. It’s a tendency to be found across time and borders, and every civilisation has had a “merchant” caste who indulge in these thoughts and practices.

For example, the more well-travelled, well-read, or perhaps just extremely-online, among the readers may be aware of Japan’s inemuri – sleeping while present – culture. It’s primarily an urban custom, and is normally to be observed in the man-made tunnels deep below the concrete neon noise of the cities where the trains shuttle millions of commuters daily from A to Z; or, in this case, A to zzzz’s. The office workers of Japan will catch power naps when ever they can, even when standing in packed carriages, pressed up against the surrounding biomass. It’s common and socially acceptable, often being seen as a sign of virtue – here sleeps a hard-worker, a diligent company man or woman. To some extent, one could argue that the metro systems of Japan serve a mobile recovery units.

As with all smaller cultures that develop within the whole, sematic labelling soon follows. In this case, karoshi – meaning “death by overwork” – is the thing that is trying to be avoided. But not necessarily by a cultural or economic shift, but rather by the introduction of a competing curiosity, in this instance, inemuri.

I’ve read that the practice is spreading its somnolent tentacles across North-East Asia, growing in popularity in South Korea and China. I don’t suspect it will make it much further in any direction (it’s still rare in Europe and North America, generally frowned upon, and the only times I have ever fallen asleep on public transport were when alcohol was involved), as I feel that we are on the precipice of a great contraction when it comes to workload and the priorities people hold in their limited time on this planet. This alteration of course comes much to the lament and teeth-gnashing of the mode Boomer, the last of the species to get out of the system what they put in.

…

This piece began with the story of an athlete, and so shall it end.

Arguably the first example of burnout in the Western cannon was the mythopoetic figure of Pheidippides who, Herodotus tell us, ran from Athens to Sparta, requesting military aid for the former, from the latter. That’s a hefty 240 kilometres, over rough terrain, in sandals - or barefoot - under the still-hot September sun which bakes the Hellenic lands. According to the chronicler, this journey took him a mere two days. In a time before sports science or water-soluble fruit-flavoured electrolyte tablets, the hero of this story, in an era of many such heroes, collapsed and died not long after delivering the crucial message. Later renditions told by other Greeks and some Romans gave use the updated take of a dash to deliver the message of victory, greatly shortening the distance Pheidippides ran by 82% (poor dude done dirty. Not just for the discrepancy of distance, but also the purpose of the run itself: a call for aid in the face of overwhelming odds, a thing which helped assure victory; not the victorious – one could argue vainglorious – dash to deliver the good news. Still a literal legend, but less so…).

Pheidippides burnt himself out to the point of extinction for his state, his nation, his people. I’m sure if he could be resurrected for a brief chat he would say he was proud to have done so, and would, despite having none left, do so again in a heartbeat.

So, I suppose, as with so much of life, it all becomes a question of is it worth it.

And only you can answer that.