Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

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One of the things I've spent time helping other engineering managers understand is that burnout doesn't relate only to exhaustion.

Instead, as the Maslach Burnout Inventory points out, it tends to be a three-factored issue. The MBI is a tool widely used in research studies to assess burnout, and it measures three scales:

1) *Exhaustion* measures feelings of being overextended and exhausted by one's work.

2) *Cynicism* measures an indifference or a distant attitude towards your work.

3) *Professional Efficacy* measures satisfaction with past and present accomplishments, and it explicitly assesses an individual's expectations of continued effectiveness at work.

So you can absolutely be experiencing burnout even if you're not experiencing exhaustion, if the other two scales are tipped hard enough.

Among the questions that help measure Cynicism and Professional Efficacy:

* I really don't care what happens to some of my colleagues/clients.

* I have the impression that some of my colleagues/clients make me responsible for their problems.

* I have achieved many rewarding objectives in my work

For more details about the MBI, check out https://hbr.org/2021/03/how-to-measure-burnout-accurately-an...

In the workplace, I've seen a few people crash into a burnout and it was always your list in reverse order.

It starts with work being rather meaningless or just spinning wheels. It takes an enormous amount of effort to achieve little progress and even then the outcome doesn't bring about a great satisfaction, it is rather vague.

Which is then followed by cynicism. Which self-sabotages a way out, because with cynicism you'll be sure everything feels meaningless, even if it isn't.

Next, people grind through this perpetual state of deep unhappiness for the longest time possible, because showing vulnerability is taboo, plus bills have to get paid. Until the mind snaps, and subsequently the body.

Literally a countdown of your list: 3, 2, 1. Game over.

In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.

>In the case of millennials, the link to work seems weaker. They seem to have a generic existential dread to them.

That's provoked me into thinking why. Assuming it's true and not a trope, some possibilities:

- They're more plugged into social media and online communities which provide validation of some of the items we're discussing here.

- They're more skeptical and cynical broadly-speaking, maybe due to some political or some Zeitgeist unique to the moment.

Again this assumes it is true that they're really more cynical about work, and we've controlled for the weird economic circumstances of the last few years. Anyone without a high salary or who's tried and failed to purchase a property is probably somewhat skeeved at the moment.

I think it's Zeitgeist.

The narrative of their lifetime is 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, Trump and deep polarization, COVID, another war, cost of living crisis, and a middle class existence increasingly out of reach.

The future: climate crisis, multi-polar world (China, Russia), more job instability, AI wrecking everything.

Western civilization peaked in the 90s, it's all downhill since then. The millennial generation has only known downhill.

But the 70's and 80's were marred with inflation, booms and bust cycles, Soviet-US rivalry dominating the headlines, and proxy wars in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Inner cities were grim and it isn't obvious if Americans could be described as optimistic then.

The 50's and 60's may have been a uniquely optimistic time for Americans (less so for Europeans after WWII). The country came out ahead, growing, rich and dominant. The 1960's was a unique decade seemingly of optimism and change. However there were certainly massive challenges, you can find enough evidence of terrible injustices being committed against minority groups standing up for themselves.

We work backwards and find tragedies in all of them.

Fast-forward again, we have incredible technology - we have maps, video conferencing and infinity encyclopedias in our pockets; people are getting bodypart transplants and plasma injections; we have consumer devices that monitor our health. None of us have fear of draft. There's no rational fear of rockets raining on us. We're incredibly lucky.

I can see the downhill feeling though. There's a deep pessimism.

There's reason to be pessimistic, mind you - but the pessimism is very monetizable, making it difficult to tell how much of it is being fed to us for profit.

Soul crushed by work millennial here, and this is exactly how it went for me, twice already.

I had never heard of the MBI before, thanks for that. Maybe using the word "burnout" is doing us a disservice and distracting from deeper causes.

I’m increasingly noticing that the word ‘burnout’ has very different meanings in the US and in Europe (or at least the Netherlands).

Where I’m from a burnout is a disruption of the stress system leading to feelings of fatigue, brain fog, lack of concentration, etc. It’s caused by stretching yourself too thin for too long, but not necessarily caused by work. I know of stay-at-home moms suffering from what we here call burn-out.

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