Going beyond the how and why of burnout, a former tenured professor combines academic methods and first-person experience to propose new ways for resisting our cultural obsession with work and transforming our vision of human flourishing.
Burnout has become our go-to term for talking about the pressure and dissatisfaction we experience at work. But in the absence of understanding what burnout means, the discourse often does little to help workers who suffer from exhaustion and despair. Jonathan Malesic was a burned out worker who escaped by quitting his job as a tenured professor. In The End of Burnout, he dives into the history and psychology of burnout, traces the origin of the high ideals we bring to our jobs, and profiles the individuals and communities who are already resisting our cultural commitment to constant work.
In The End of Burnout, Malesic traces his own history as someone who burned out of a tenured job to frame this rigorous investigation of how and why so many of us feel worn out, alienated, and useless in our work. Through research on the science, culture, and philosophy of burnout, Malesic explores the gap between our vocation and our jobs, and between the ideals we have for work and the reality of what we have to do. He eschews the usual prevailing wisdom in confronting burnout (“Learn to say no!” “Practice mindfulness!”) to examine how our jobs have been constructed as a symbol of our value and our total identity. Beyond looking at what drives burnout—unfairness, a lack of autonomy, a breakdown of community, mismatches of values—this book spotlights groups that are addressing these failures of ethics. We can look to communities of monks, employees of a Dallas nonprofit, intense hobbyists, and artists with disabilities to see the possibilities for resisting a “total work” environment and the paths to recognizing the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike. In this critical yet deeply humane book, Malesic offers the vocabulary we need to recognize burnout, overcome burnout culture, and acknowledge the dignity of workers and nonworkers alike.
Jonathan Malesic is a Dallas-based writer and a former academic, sushi chef, and parking lot attendant who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, America, Commonweal, and elsewhere.
"In this profound, humane, and timely book, Jonathan Malesic diagnoses our burned-out condition with more clarity than anyone before him. But just as importantly, he shows us a path through and out of the crisis—toward a thrilling yet achievable vision of life with our jobs no longer at the center."—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
"The End of Burnout is compassionate and wry, addictive and propulsive. It doesn't just identify the causes of burnout; it offers us compelling examples of what the alternative offers and what it can look like. It's one thing to identify burnout in your own life. It's another to actively seek out the ways to embrace a posture that counters it. This book, one of very few that offer you a graspable glimpse of a different way of a life, feels like a revelation."—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
"Jonathan Malesic has written a moving account of an under-acknowledged cultural and spiritual malady. He weaves psychology, theology, philosophy, and real-world experience into a convincing argument that we must attend to the prevalence of burnout if—for no other reason—it undermines our ability to seek the good life."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
"This book could not be more topical. It carefully unravels an assumption that is deeply embedded in our culture and psyches, namely, that our purpose and meaning in life is to work, and that we should give it our all, and more. With great lucidity and elegance and a hefty dose of compassion, Malesic sets out to dismantle this grand injurious narrative. I love this book."—Anna Katharina Schaffner, author of Exhaustion: A History
"The author has a smooth and appealing style of writing, successfully raising awareness about burnout as a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon."—Wilmar Schaufeli, Professor of Psychology, Utrecht University and KU Leuven
288 pp.5.5 x 8.25
9780520391529$24.95|£21.00Paper
Nov 2022