Burnout

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What makes burnout different from exhaustion or fatigue? In episode 136 of Overthink, Ellie and David look at the history of the term burnout and its surprising connection to social justice. They also explore Byung-Chul Han’s reading of burnout as a natural consequence of “achievement culture.” How does our mindless scrolling on TikTok and Instagram reveal our inability to be bored and meditate? And how does this contribute to our personal and collective run-ins with burnout? Why do so many people, academics included, fail to recognize their own burnout? And is it even possible to escape burnout in a capitalist society? In the bonus, your hosts talk about the shame surrounding burnout, errand paralysis, and the relationship between burnout and compulsive buying.

Works Discussed:
Herbert J. Freudenberger, “Staff Burn-Out”
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout, the Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
David M. Peña-Guzmán and Rebekah Spera, Professional Philosophy and Its Myths
Anne Helen Peterson, Can’t Even: How Millennials became the Burnout Generation
Hannah Proctor, Burnout

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:19.6	The podcast where two philosophers burn the candle at both ends, bringing big ideas into dialogue with everyday life.
0:28.5	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:30.0	And I'm David Peña Guzman.
0:31.9	There's a very popular self-test for burnout, known as the Maslack burnout inventory. It comes from Christina Masluck, who
0:41.1	popularized the term burnout, and it's based on her research with mental health workers and other
0:46.6	helping professionals in the 1970s. The full Maslack burnout self-test is something that you have to
0:52.7	purchase, but I found a bootleg pseudo version online. So I'm going to read you a few of these things, David, and you tell me how they resonate with you. Oh, are you going to test me live on Overthink? So I'm not going to test you live because there's too many questions. But there's a few sections. Okay. So let's do a mini test.
1:11.7	We'll do a mini test.
1:13.2	Yeah.
1:14.2	We'll do a mini bootleg test.
1:15.7	Okay.
1:16.1	Spoiler alert, I'm at the end of my rope.
1:19.0	Well, so also, I mean, a key part of it is how frequently you feel this.
1:23.5	So that already tells you a bit about what we're testing here, right? It's going to have to do with the
1:28.8	frequency, right? Because the total will count up your score and every day receives a score of six and
1:35.9	never receives a score of zero. So burnout has to do more with the pervasiveness of the experiences
1:43.1	that it's testing rather than with the sheer
1:45.2	presence of them, right? So number one, I feel emotionally drained by my work.
1:50.8	Okay, I would say...
1:52.0	How frequently?
1:52.9	Like, once per month.
	...

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