HOW TO AVOID BURN-OUT IF YOU DON'T WORK AT BUMBLE

This week, the dating app Bumble hit headlines after giving its employees a week off to recover from ‘burn-out’ at work. The decision to give 700 staff members ‘a paid, fully offline one-week vacation’ was announced via Twitter back in April, linked to a New York Times article arguing ‘The Case for a National One-Week Vacation’. But the move was back in the news yesterday when Bumble’s Head of Editorial Content, Clare O’Connor, praised founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd in a now-deleted tweet for having ‘correctly intuited our collective burnout’. It’s an enviable move. But before we all fire off a CV to Bumble (they’re OOO anyway), there are some questions to consider. Firstly, what actually is burnout? How do we spot the early signs and stop it escalating? Is it a lazy catch-all for a systemic wrong, or a genuinely useful term? Are we all burnt-out?

WHAT ARE THE KEY BURNOUT CAUSES?

Burnout feels like a modern affliction, but traces of it have been found as far back as the Old Testament (in 2013, a Swiss psychotherapist argued that Moses was burnt-out). Though, the term was coined in the 1970s by the American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who used it to describe the severe stress that arises in ‘helping’ vocations, such as medicine, social work, or teaching.

But over the decades, burnout spread like wildfire, crossing professional industries and levels, permeating through the fashion intern to the tech CEO. In a society that glamourises overwork and digital devotion, everyone is burnt-out; the cause is not just infinite to-do lists, but a sense that the only cure is the cause – more work. ‘Burnout is when you hit the wall – but instead of collapsing, or taking a rest, you scale the wall, and just keep going,’ wrote Anne Helen Petersen in her 2020 book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. ‘Burnout arrives when every corner of our lives feels unstable, and we convince ourselves that working all the time is what will fix it,’ she writes. 

The economic and societal instability of the pandemic have made Petersen’s words more relevant than ever. With the world in flux, work has provided a constant that is, paradoxically, in peril, leaving us clinging to structure and meaning from a source that could very well disappear. And investing too much of ourselves in a job is a surefire route to burnout. In The Cut’s podcast, psychotherapist Esther Perel discussed this issue, explaining: ‘When work is the place where you outdo yourself, where you search for self-worth, it becomes unrelenting. If work structures your life to that extent, then the inability to meet the demands will translate into burnout.’