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Understanding Emotional Exhaustion At Work
Emotional exhaustion at work — i.e. work stress, burnout — is unfortunately fairly normative for a lot of white-collar, western-world workers. A lot of people have an unhealthy relationship to their work, see almost no work-life balance, and almost never take a vacation. If you threw a rock in the general direction of any website on the Internet, I bet you could find a story about this topic. These stories are usually entirely full of crap and take a few different forms:
- “How I Hacked My Job And Sailed Around The World For A Year”
- “The Ultimate Guide To Work-Life Balance”
- “Women Can Truly Have It All”
- “Beating Back Stress and Becoming Your Own Boss”
Some of these articles have good examples in them, yes. But by and large they are usually buzzword-laden bullshit that an average worker could never relate to. Remember a few years ago when Google’s CFO quit? People wrote articles about that for weeks. Here’s the problem: he was their CFO. One year his base was $22M, and don’t even get me going on what his bonus probably was. If you make a lot of money and are relatively wise about investing it, sure, you can take years off work. Nothing amazing about that. But is that possible for most people? No. And that’s where we need to begin on…
