"All the time. I'm so burnt out. I'm so tired."

A Millennial leader said this to me not as a confession of crisis, but as a description of daily life.

Burnout is no longer the exception—it has become the baseline. In the U.S., nearly 44% of employees say they feel burned out[1], and globally around 4 in 10 workers report high daily stress[2]. Among younger generations, the picture is even more striking: recent national surveys show that roughly two-thirds of Gen Z and more than 60% of Millennials say they are experiencing burnout symptoms ranging from persistent exhaustion to anxiety to feeling “done” with work[3]. For early- and mid-career professionals, burnout is increasingly not a temporary season—it’s the atmosphere in which work happens.

In 2019, the World Health Organization officially classified burnout as an occupational syndrome marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. (While burnout is not limited to paid occupation—informal caregiving and emotional work within families can also cause burnout—this essay focuses on the workplace, where most research concentrates.)

When a condition becomes this widespread, it ceases to be personal. Burnout is a systems failure, signaling that something fundamental has broken in how we organize work, measure value, and sustain human performance.

From Disenchantment to Burnout

Burnout's roots stretch back to the early industrial era, when work was first severed from land, craft, community, and natural rhythms. Max Weber in 1904 captured this most incisively: modernity had created an iron cage of rationality—a world ruled by efficiency, calculation, and control[4]. He described its human product as "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

This is disenchantment—the draining of vitality from human life in the name of progress.

Over generations, this cage seeped inward. External pressures became internal expectations: be productive, be efficient, be better—always. We became both the overseer and the laborer. Burnout is what it feels like to live inside the iron cage after it has been relocated into the nervous system.

The phenomenon drew scholarly attention in the 1970s—the very decade neoliberalism began its ascent. As market deregulation, privatization, and intensified competition reshaped work, the ideology of self-responsibility took hold. Workers became “self-enterprises,” individually accountable in a labor market that withheld stability and support. In the 2020s, burnout was no longer a clinical term but a household word—especially among Millennials, whom Anne Helen Petersen famously named "the Burnout Generation.[5]"

Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls this the “achievement society,” where domination is internalized as self-exploitation[6]. Hyperconnectivity—email, Slack, smartphones—colonized attention and dissolved boundaries. The internet didn't cause burnout, but it poured gasoline on it.

Burnout is disenchantment made physiological. It is the nervous system's protest against a world that demands it function like a machine.

The Asymmetric Relationship Between Person and Job

Burnout is felt first in the body—through exhaustion, anxiety, insomnia, cognitive fog, or physical collapse. The nervous system becomes "tired and wired," locked in survival mode[7]. I lived this reality myself: during one episode of burnout, I endured months of debilitating headaches that made sleep nearly impossible. I've known leaders who could not get out of bed—not because they lacked willpower, but because their nervous systems shut down.

While individual recovery strategies can help, they cannot address the underlying problem. Burnout is evidence of a broken relationship between humans and the structures of work.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter's research reveals that burnout emerges from mismatches across six factors: workload that exceeds capacity, insufficient control over how work gets done, absence of community and psychological safety, lack of recognition in and beyond compensation, opaque or inequitable decision-making, and misalignment between personal purpose and organizational reality. When these mismatches compound, chronic stress becomes burnout[8].

Modern workplaces have been extraordinarily effective at molding individuals to fit organizational needs—productivity, efficiency, performance. But they've been far less effective at responding to human needs: trust, competence, connection, choice, and meaning. We absorb the language, pace, and expectations of work. We reshape ourselves to meet professional demands. But the workplace has not, in turn, reshaped itself to support our humanity.

It takes two to make a relationship work. In this one, only one side has been doing the adapting.

Re-Enchanting Work Through Systemic Care

If burnout is fundamentally a systems issue, then healing cannot fall on individuals alone. No amount of resilience training or self-care advice can compensate for a workplace that continually violates human limits. When the problem is structural, the solution must be structural.

For leaders, burnout is not evidence of individual inadequacy but of organizational design that has stopped working. The path forward begins with re-enchanting work through care—not as an add-on or HR initiative, but as the organizing principle of how work itself is structured, distributed, and led.

Three common responses to burnout prove insufficient. Apathy denies burnout entirely, treating people as replaceable cogs. Instrumental care installs wellness programs only to restore workers to output—"carewashing" that serves metrics, not people. Unanchored care is heartfelt but reactive, providing emotional support while leaving intact the systems that create chronic stress.

Systemic care, by contrast, asks: How do we design work so that harm is not inevitable? It embeds care into the structures that shape daily experience—into the "how" of work, not just the "how-are-you?" This approach requires collaboration (all stakeholders participate), customization (solutions tailored to each context), and commitment (long-term dedication, not quick fixes).

The process unfolds in three stages: identify where relationships between people and work have broken down, define what conditions would allow people to thrive rather than just endure, and start with manageable shifts that demonstrate what care in action looks like.

To lead through burnout is to redesign the systems that shape people's days, decisions, and sense of worth. Workload, autonomy, recognition, fairness, boundaries, and culture are all design choices that either sustain people or deplete them. Care is not what you do after productivity. Care is how you create sustainable productivity.

Developing Care Intelligence

If systemic care is the architecture of a healthier workplace, Care Intelligence is the leadership capacity that animates it. Systems transform because the people designing and stewarding them shift how they see power, responsibility, and human need.

Care Intelligence balances two forms of awareness. Power awareness is the ability to recognize one's rank and authority and use it responsibly—to set boundaries, make decisions, and challenge harmful structures without collapsing into guilt or avoidance. Unity awareness is the capacity to tend to the relational field—to cultivate spaces where people can speak truth without fear and feel valued for who they are, not just what they produce.

When leaders integrate these, care becomes anchored—clear-eyed, consistent, and structurally supported.

This requires four strands of inner work: 

• servant purpose (surrendering to something larger than ego)

• self-leadership(examining one's conditioning around productivity and worth)

• psychological insight (recognizing how stress and safety operate in nervous systems)

• sociological imagination (understanding how individual experience is shaped by social, cultural, and organizational forces).

Care Intelligence cannot be built through a workshop. It requires cultivation—sustained reflection, feedback, coaching, and practice. Without this developmental work, leaders default to inadequate care. With it, they gain the capacity to make decisions that honor both people and outcomes, treat psychological needs as structural priorities, and create environments where people can rest, grow, and contribute meaningfully.

Beyond Burnout in the Age of AI

Burnout has reached epidemic scale at the moment AI threatens to automate work on an unprecedented scale. This convergence is an invitation. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted we'd work fifteen hours a week, liberated by technology. He was right about the technology but wrong about the outcome. We filled the void with more work—including what Anthropologist David Graeber called bullshit jobs, roles so bereft of meaning that even their occupants struggle to explain why they exist[9]. Meanwhile, work that sustains society—teaching, caring, healing, community building—remains chronically undervalued.

Those in care work burn out from exhaustion, from being undervalued, from being stretched impossibly thin. Those in bullshit jobs burn out from hollowness, from spending finite life energy on work that neither nourishes nor contributes. And everyone in between faces their own danger.

Now, as AI prepares to automate another wave of jobs, we face a generational inflection point. We can repeat the pattern—replacing old work with more busywork and bullshit jobs—or we can finally ask: What work actually needs doing? What makes work meaningful? How do we design organizations that meet human needs and cultivate flourishing?

At this historical juncture, we can choose to let technology carry the burden of efficiency while we reclaim the human work of care, creativity, restoration, and relationship. As world historian Yvual Noah Harari argues, every investment in technology must be matched by investment in humanity[10]. We can build systems where rest is not a luxury, purpose is not peripheral, and dignity is not negotiable.

This is the work of our generation of leaders: to cultivate Care Intelligence, to harness the power of AI, to understand deeply what humans need to thrive, and to re-enchant work through care.

If burnout is the body's protest against a world that treats humans like machines, then this moment—the AI transition—is our opportunity to finally stop designing work as if humans were machines at all.

[1] SHRM’s 2024 Workplace Wellbeing Report

[2] Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024

[3] 2024 iSolved/Talker Research

[4] Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904–1905. Translated by Talcott Parsons.

[5] Petersen, Anne Helen. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

[6] Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.
(Original German edition: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010.)

[7] Plumbly, Claire. The Trauma of Burnout: How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. Hachette Books, 2025.

[8] Maslach, Christina, and Michael P. Leiter. The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs. Harvard University Press, 2022.

[9] Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster, 2018.

[10] Harari, Yuval Noah. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. HarperCollins, 2025.