The word “burnout” has taken on so many meanings, become a kind of casual and generic refrain that seems to apply to everyone all the time, a condition of malaise and overwork that afflicts whole generations. But when first conceived the term had a more specific connotation.

Burnout in Freudenberger’s articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger’s concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the “loss of an ideal.” Burnout in the context of social justice projects thus often involves a process of mourning, according to Freudenberger. Returning to his earlier writings on burnout makes it clear that when understood as a malaise arising from politically committed activities, burnout cannot be equated with tiredness or stress.

Proctor, Burnout, page 92

In other words, burnout was defined more in the context of what Hannah Proctor terms the emotional experience of political defeat. Exhaustion was a component of that experience, marked also by the grief, anger, resentment, and despair that arises when an effort to create meaningful change is frustrated. Herbert J. Freudenberger, one of the early theorists of burnout, drew from his own observations working with patients at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic in New York City in the 70s and 80s. But as he and others worked with the term, it transformed into something else:

While in 1974 Freudenberger claimed that those most at risk of burning out were “the dedicated and the committed,” by 1989 he linked burnout to “the externally imposed societal values of achievement, acquisition of goods, power, monetary compensation and competition.” Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it.

Proctor, Burnout, page 94

This shift also shows up in Byung-Chul Han’s writing about burnout, in which the source of burnout is an “achievement society” that drives people towards a reflexive and all-consuming self-exploitation. But notice how that shift works: where before the notion of burnout was located within a communal and political project, now it becomes something we’re doing to ourselves, absent the still unchanged political and material conditions which gave rise to the original term. There’s a kind of commodification of burnout here, transferring the subject of burnout (and so of sympathy and potential support) from activists to executives, and the source from intolerable inequities to personal psychologies. Which is not to say that burned-out executives don’t exist, but that the use of the same word for two entirely different circumstances serves to undermine the political critique inherent in the word.

The move is akin to the one made when imposter phenomena became imposter syndrome: where the former concerns an experience in the world (“phenomenon” meaning a thing which can be seen or observed), the latter is an invisible pathology, something that only occurs within someone’s psyche and is, to a large extent, their own problem to solve. The disparities of the system become internalized, the therapeutics personalized, the victims pathologized. And the system keeps doing what the system does.

Bench Ansfield writes that Freudenberger borrowed the word burnout from his patients, who used it to describe someone suffering the long term effects of chronic drug use. But Freudenberger turned the word around, associating it not with drug use but with the burned out buildings that then peppered the Lower East Side, a neighborhood terrorized by landlords setting fire to their own buildings, eager for an insurance payout and happy to let their Black and brown tenants pay the price. “But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings,” Ansfield writes. “Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed.”