Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise. While the book rarely veers into polemic, it has a strong moral-religious bent. It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity. Malesic might seem like an improbable mouthpiece for burnout: to all appearances, he had the perfect job. He was a tenured professor teaching in fields he loved: religion, ethics, and theology. His colleagues were intelligent and friendly, and his salary and benefits more than satisfactory. Secretly, he was a shell of his former self. He would barely make it to class in the afternoons. Isolated in a long-distance marriage, he would spend the evenings eating ice cream and drinking malt beer. His sullen and indifferent students, prone to boredom and plagiarism, had broken his spirit. After quitting his job, Malesic resolved to figure out what happened to him. It wasn’t depression, not quite. Talk therapy and antidepressants didn’t help him. Leaving his job did. His ailment, he decided, was burnout. The legendary sociologist C. Wright Mills proposed that the “sociological imagination”—an understanding of how our own experiences reflect broader social and historical forces—could help us link our seemingly private troubles to public issues. Burnout, a personal malady that indexes a broken labor system, is a prime candidate for such reimagining. The emergence of burnout as a psychological concept roughly parallels the development of a distinct
MALESIC MIGHT SEEM LIKE AN IMPROBABLE MOUTHPIECE FOR BURNOUT: TO ALL APPEARANCES, HE HAD THE PERFECT JOB. HE WAS A TENURED PROFESSOR TEACHING IN FIELDS HE LOVED: RELIGION, ETHICS, AND THEOLOGY. phase in American economic history. In the 1970s, the postwar glow faded and inequality began to skyrocket. The rise of the temp industry two decades earlier was a harbinger of things to come. Corporations, advised by consultants, started shedding their direct employees. “[T]he temp,” Malesic notes, “became the ideal worker.” Workers came to be regarded as liabilities, not sources of productive power. Aided by deregulation and the decline of union power, businesses pulled off a massive risk shift from capital to labor. Meanwhile, the growing domination of the service sector put new emotional demands on workers. In service jobs, our personalities and emotions are “the chief means of production”—they are what employers rent and exert control over. In this context, a new moral code for work took hold: what the sociologist
Allison Pugh calls a “one-way honor system” between employers and employees. Employees must devote themselves wholeheartedly to their work if they expect to get (or keep) a job—all while knowing that their employers feel no obligation to reciprocate. These are prime background conditions for an epidemic of burnout. One fact bears repeating: since 1974, labor productivity has kept increasing, but real wages have stayed flat. We are working harder and getting nothing for it. Meanwhile, as if to compensate for an increasingly precarious economy, our fantasies about work have grown, if anything, more intense. Hard work is likely the most universally cherished American value. One recent Pew survey found that 80 percent of Americans describe themselves as “hardworking”— outstripping all other traits. Work has gotten worse, yet our work ideals remain elevated. If burnout stems, as Malesic says, from the discrepancy between the ideal and the real, then burnout is punishment for idealists. William Morris, in his famous essay “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” dreamed of a political transformation in which all work would be made pleasurable. Malesic thinks, instead, that work should not be the center of our lives at all. Since Max Weber’s study of the Protestant ethic, Christian thought has often been blamed for instilling poisonous work ideals. Malesic suggests, however, that the poison might yield the antidote. Religious worship, the Jewish Sabbath: these are leisure practices that affirm higher goods than work. He recruits religious thought and practice to show us communities in which work is marginal, or contained within strictly observed limits—a Benedictine monastery in the New Mexico desert; a Dallas nonprofit that seems like either a dream workplace or a charismatic cult. Such examples demonstrate how communities that subordinate work to higher ends can survive economically while promoting their members’ flourishing. Malesic’s fine book has one defect. For all the care with which he recovers burnout’s clinical history, indicts our work ideals, and suggests new ways of SEASONAL MAGAZINE