Forcing Work To Have Some “Impact” For You Won’t Solve Burnout, No.

Liz Wiseman is a bit off-task here.

Sometime around 2014, I remember a lot of online debates about whether work needs to be “purposeful,” which is an utopian thing to claim. The short answer is: No, it does not. And in reality, most of the time it cannot. People need vodka sodas and Chick-Fil-A sandwiches. Are the jobs dispensing those “purposeful?” You can argue yes, but most of society also argues “no” on the regular. (That’s called a stigma.)

I know no one is supposed to ever reference The Bell Curve again, but it gets a few small things right: namely, in an economy with a bunch of people chasing convenience and comfort (which is what America inherently is), someone needs to be providing the base-level service, and we sadly tend to not respect them as much as we should, which is a mirror to broader empathy problems we have. But that’s not the point here.

Within all these “Should work have purpose?” discussions, you have a cousin of a discussion, which is about burnout. We’ve had increasing discourse in the last half-decade about burnout and its various causes and how it can be fixed and all that. The short answer there is: burnout can’t really be fixed, because it occurs at a perfect intersection of individual goals and corporate culture, and most guys…