Burnout as Survival Without Stress

Burnout is a curious affliction of modern times. The onset of revulsion towards work, the source of your income? How strange! How could you develop an apathy towards that which supports your living space and keeps you fed? Explanations have piled on as the condition has become more common. Some explain it as a mixture of stress, a lack of gratification, and one's unconscious slipping under a burden of meaningless work. I feel each one is a part correct, but none capture the whole.

Why should too much stress prevent you from working? Shouldn't it do the reverse, and propel you to push harder? Why wouldn't meaningless work cause you to quit or seek out a new job? What causes this supposed inability to move forward? How could a lack of gratification develop into a source of such revulsion?

The explanation that the burned-out are overstressed bugs me especially. Stress is such a universal catalyst of effort in not just humans but all animals. Even plants will fight gravity to reach light if they aren't provided enough. For too much stress to cause you to fumble an office job in conditions of resource abundance defies the momentum of a billion and change years of the evolution of the nervous system. Burnout is perhaps better explained as a lack of stress.

The feeling of anxiety in the modern workplace is a pathetic substitute for stress of the kind that powers starving predators in nature. Stress of that kind is itself satisfying – the gratification of resolving it is almost a bonus to the richness of a visceral threat. If you've ever found yourself lost in a forest, the feeling of your heart squeezing in fear as the sun dips beneath the horizon is a rush of excitement, and within there even a sense of pleasure. Your body reacts to the predicament by soaking you in motivation, drawing your entire attention to a single point, a single problem, and a single course of resolution.

That's a rather extreme example. You do not require the threat of freezing to death in the night to work, but the thing distinctly misssing in quotidian office jobs is that the problems don't provoke your instinctive motivation at all. Consider what we do in most jobs – packing boxes or responding to emails in cages deprived of sunlight, celebrating non-physical milestones of revenue or user numbers.

Imagine how trapped an ancient human would feel if driving up KPIs replaced the thrill of their hunts. It's a clear goal, and they could imagine the consequences of failure. They'd have some wind on their back to hit whatever sales targets or deadlines you give them, but after they've gone on long enough without plunging their spear into a wild beast or racing the sun to get home in a wintry forest, they'd be ripping their hair out. In order to motivate workers to do things with no obvious connection to survival, we've inadvertently designed workplaces to make things get done but little attention is devoted to making them feel worth doing.

Sympathetic Opposition writes on a similar difference between cravings and pleasure:

The discourse around hyperstimuli is usually about extreme pleasure. Porn, junk food, video games, etc etc etc are talked about as if they offer surreal, ahistorical amounts of enjoyment. I don’t think this is true at all.

Of course, it’s always easier to notice what’s acually present in any experience than what isn’t present in it. But I feel like the stuff that gets called a hyperstimulus is at least equally characterized by missing something as it is by having too much of something.

[...]

There are certainly aspects of porn that are more stimulating than what people are likely to encounter in their actual sex lives: easy access to a wider variety of acts & people, often people who might be hotter than the people one has sexual access to in real life. But these hyperstimulatory aspects seem….not luxurious, not just sheerly directly enjoyable, but compensatory. Porn lacks the most basic satisfying things about sex. No one would consume it if these extras weren’t there.

[...]

[You] can compare your own experience of eating a steak to eating doritos. They are in the same flavor family, both savory. But it’s much harder to get carried away eating steak than it is to get carried away eating chips. With steak, you don’t have that “bottom of the family-sized bag” experience. I think this happens specifically because steak is more enjoyable than chips. Pleasure is satisfying, and satisfaction makes you stop.

Hyperstimuli are not simply “more stimulating.” They are more stimulating of craving, and less stimulating of pleasure.

Just like separating craving and satisfaction can explain why people report a steak tastes better than chips but eat more doritos than steaks, separating stress (physical threat) from anxiety (artifical social pressure) adresses the odd features of burnout. Doritos can push us just enough to eat, but if all you had to eat were doritos and a multivitamin to make sure you wouldn't acquire scurvy, you'd soon develop a revulsion and perhaps even decide to go as close as you could to starving without actually dying. Go on long enough without satisfaction, and the craving doritos are engineered to stimulate will be inverted into apathy as an ancient protection mechanism against worthless activity kicks in. Maybe onlookers would puzzle at why you'd quit eating – after all, don't doritos taste good enough? Hasn't evolution designed us to eat? What could cause such a defiance of our most base instinct? Yet swap dorritos for steak and run the scenario again: you would not achieve the same nausea towards your rations.

I don't mean to suggest this implies a cure. You could find a rewarding hobby and bring yourself to eat your alloted portion of doritos, but that doesn't look much like health. Don't go trying to get yourself lost in a cold forest. I can't even advise seeking tamer visceral experiences. Sports or fast-paced physical activity work for many, but if you're deprived enough of true stress, this can push you to pursuing dangerous extremes or develop into an addiction to danger. There is no "stress vitamin" that suffices any more than a vitamin supplies you with health if your diet is doritos. You could find a more visceral job or livelihood, but you know the consequences of failure in those are "fake". Those will still rely on anxiety to push you.

Yet I don't want my distate of advice to make you leave this post feeling trapped if you suffer from burnout. I can offer something else, a note of hope. Our modern civilization has not replaced nature, it is built as slight rennovation on the ancient temple that earth is to all creation, and when we roam the coldest concrete jungles, we are still walking in its halls. For a physical sensation to move you in concert with the heartbeat of nature does not require the acute threat of death. Even raw sunlight and physical effort can revive the chambers of your heart that reason fails to reach. To approach your physical training with pain as a teacher will let you relieve anxiety's ties. Nature exists in a fever, the thrill of true stress amplified beyond the human capacity to feel, in constant exaltation of its own power. Feeling a glimpse of what it feels all the time is always available if you allow it to send you into its delerium, easiest to access through the heat of the sun and the strain of effort.