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BURNOUT
As burnt-out employees abandon the hustle culture, they're adopting this new TikTok trend
In mapping their careers, my graduate students and workshop participants drew lines resembling an EKG registering a heart attack. Significant points of change, they revealed, included burnout-the result of overcommitment to work that threatened their well-being and family relationships.
When we overwork, we exceed our capacity to perform without personal damage. At the same time, we lack enough time to recover from workplace demands. The dangers of work addiction were exposed in the title of Diane Fassel's popular 1990 book, Working Ourselves to Death: The High Cost of Workaholism, the Rewards of Recovery.1 Her message was lost on corporate cultures in U.S. firms, however, which continued to glorify overwork as a path to success.
By 1997, University of California, Berkeley researcher Christina Maslach identified a burnout crisis in a workplace that was a "cold, hostile, demanding environment, both economically and psychologically."2 Those affected suffered from stress-induced physical and mental exhaustion, alienation from coworkers and achievement drained of joy. She found organizations designed as "efficient machine[s]"...