Stop Calling it Burnout
If you want 90s summer…turn it up
I'm an "elder-millennial." I graduated high school in the year 2000, with a lot of talk about the hope for the new millennium and the promise of the power of human ingenuity. One of the many anthems of that year was Blink-182's All the Small Things — an upbeat 3-chord song Tom DeLonge wrote about his girlfriend at the time, leaving him small gifts when he came home exhausted from the early days of touring. Everybody wrote "Work Sucks, I know," in each other's yearbooks, passed it in notes through lockers, latching onto the simple but accurate catchphrase. The year before, the endlessly quotable dark comedy Office Space dropped, and my own work-sucks job was at the local movie theater — and you bet I saw Office Space a lot. People gave each other Swingline staplers as gag gifts (IYKYK). The theme was that almost all jobs will extract a piece of your soul and convince you it's real work, and that’s the world where I entered adulthood.
“I could set this building on fire,” Milton, Office Space. Can you spoil at 28 year old film? Anyway, he does.
Fast forward to 2026 and you're sitting across from someone — a doctor, a therapist, a well-meaning friend — and you've just finished explaining the thing that has been happening to you. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. The flatness. The way you've started to feel like a vending machine with an out-of-order sign on it. And the word that comes back to you is: burnout.
And something in you exhales. Finally, a name.
But here's what I want to sit with today: what if that name is part of the problem. And it's not funny or cute or pop culture meme bait. It's dark and historical, and it's time to say so.
Words are not neutral. This is not a new observation — bell hooks spent decades arguing that the language offered to us by dominant culture almost always serves dominant culture.
The terms we're handed to describe our suffering tend to be terms that locate the suffering inside us, protect the systems that produced it, and redirect our energy toward individual recovery rather than collective accountability.
Burnout is exactly this kind of word.
It's a metaphor of depletion. A battery that ran down. A candle that burned through. The imagery is of something that consumed itself — which means the implicit question becomes: how do I refuel? Ten-day retreat. Nervous system reset. A new morning routine. The word generates an entire industry of answers, and every single one of those answers points inward.
But what if what happened to you wasn't depletion? What if it was injury?
I want to be clear that I'm not the first person to make this argument, and I think it matters to say so.
Pooja Lakshmin has written compellingly about how the wellness industry sells self-care as a solution to what are fundamentally structural failures — what she calls betrayal, not burnout. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot reframed clinician distress as moral injury back in 2019, explicitly arguing that burnout language locates the problem in a broken individual when the problem is a broken system. And if you go back further, nursing ethicist Andrew Jameton was making a version of this argument in 1984 — he coined "moral distress" specifically because he wanted language that named institutional culpability, not personal overwhelm. He wrote that the language of "dilemmas" had a softening effect, redirecting criticism away from the institutions responsible. He wanted nurses to be able to say: what happened here was morally reprehensible, and it was done to me.
That was forty years ago. The argument keeps getting made and keeps getting buried. Which should itself tell us something.
Injury is a different word than burnout. It does different work.
Injury implies an external force. It implies a wound that happened to you rather than in you. It implies, if we're being honest, a perpetrator — or at minimum a system with some accountability for what it produced. When someone is injured, we ask: what caused this? When someone burns out, we ask: how do we get them back to functioning? And that's it right there — the goal of burnout treatment is to return to functioning so someone can work again.
As a clinician, I see this distinction play out in treatment all the time. Recovery from injury and recovery from depletion look different. They require different things. Calling it the wrong name doesn't just feel inaccurate; it actively misdirects care.
Burnout also, quietly, carries a suggestion of complicity. You burned. You were the fire. There's an implication that you participated in your own undoing — that if you had just managed your energy better, paced yourself, known your limits, you wouldn't be here. This is where the language becomes something closer to gaslighting. And I see this in treatment too — clients are awash in shame and self-blame about what they could have done better, faster, stronger to manage the objectively impossible onslaught of demands.
Here's the part nobody wants to say.
The reason burnout language wins — the reason it keeps winning, despite forty years of better frameworks — is that it exists inside a culture that has never recognized rest as a right. And not metaphorically. Literally.
Tricia Hersey's work at The Nap Ministry is essential here. In Rest Is Resistance, she traces grind culture as a direct inheritance of chattel slavery — the devaluation of Black rest, the compulsion to produce without ceasing, is not a cultural accident, it is a designed feature. Rest was not incidentally made unavailable to Black people in America. It was deliberately, legally denied.
Post-Reconstruction vagrancy laws criminalized idleness for Black Americans specifically — being unoccupied, ungoverned by an employer, not visibly productive could get you arrested and re-funneled directly back into forced labor. Loitering laws, which persist in various forms today, are a downstream artifact of this. The regulation of who is allowed to occupy space without a legible economic purpose was never racially neutral. It was a legal infrastructure for enforcing the idea that certain bodies exist to produce, and that stopping is a violation of the rule of law.
This is the soil burnout culture grows in. When we say someone burned out, we are using the language of a culture built on the premise that humans — particularly Black humans, particularly women, particularly caregivers — are labor units whose value is output and output alone. The language of depletion fits perfectly inside that framework. It asks: how do we restore function? It never asks: who decided you had to function like that in the first place?
hooks, in All About Love, makes an argument I keep returning to in my clinical work: that a genuine ethic of care would require institutions to bear real responsibility for the wellbeing of the people inside them. Work that is structured to extract without reciprocating is not just inefficient or unkind — it is, in her framing, a form of lovelessness. Not as metaphor, but as ethical claim. That's a moral failure. And no amount of HR policy changes that.
This is the move that most burnout writing doesn't make, and I think it's the necessary one. We're not just dealing with a naming problem. We're dealing with a system that was designed around a refusal of care — and that then, extraordinarily, monetized the damage it caused. The wellness industry selling resilience tools to exhausted workers is not a coincidence. It is the system completing its own logic: extract the labor, then extract the recovery.
More than 60% of Black women report experiencing racial trauma in the workplace in the past year. The same population whose rest was criminalized for centuries is now being sold meditation apps. I don't have a neat and tidy way to say that. It's just that. That's the take.
So what do we do with this?
I want to resist the pivot here, because I think the pivot is part of the problem. The listicle version of this essay ends with five things you can do to reclaim rest as resistance. I don't want to write that. The impulse to immediately convert structural critique into individual action steps is itself a symptom of the thing we're describing.
What I will say is this: the work of recovery changes when you change the name. If what happened to you was injury, then you are owed something. Not from yourself — from the system that injured you. That's not a radical claim, it's just logic. And sitting with that — really sitting with it, letting yourself feel the anger that comes when you stop calling harm depletion and start calling it what it is — that is not a small thing. For a lot of people I work with, it is the beginning of actually getting better.
New frameworks are like new shoes. Try them on. Break them in.
Downshifting Journal Prompt for this week is brief:
What does it feel like to reframe burnout as injury rather than illness? Note: the question is how does it feel, not “what do you think” ;)
Naming matters. It determines what you think you deserve. It determines what you're willing to ask for. And it determines, quietly but consequentially, whether you keep directing your energy toward refueling for the machine, or toward questioning whether the machine has any right to run on you at all.
do not annihilate yourself while glamorizing exhaustion.
As always, please share your thoughts and reactions. I read them, and I love them.
Till next time,
S
Misc. Musings
Can we talk about Yesteryear? I have thoughts. Hit me up.
A friend of mine said, “you write very critically about the world of work, do you ever wonder if your patients or potential patients will read this and think you mean you hate YOUR job?”. Well, I didn’t until you said it, thanks LINDA (her name is not Linda and she’s awesome). Anyway, let me be clear—I’m interested in expanding the ways we think about work in our world, permitting ourselves through compassion and knowledge to live in alignment with our values, to slow down and unwind hustle culture. Also, I am SO grateful that in my work every day I get to sit with people in their real experiences and have real feelings. I will never, ever, write a TPS report. No, I don’t mean you guys.
I’m really loving the witty, political and mental health commentary by @jessbritvich and @nikitadumptruck. You’ll know immediately if you like them, but they are performing and satirizing a certain kind of woman while dropping thoughtful and important takes and I just want to say yet again, I love you Gen Z.
I saw a great quote that read “no one is more annoyed by the AI revolution than people who can actually write a sentence. Basically, having any ability to write now is suspect—you will get accused of being AI at some point. It feels like you are being accused of being a witch, of holding a type of rare magic that only the machines are now allowed to have.” I’m really curious and interested in knowing how AI interfaces with our world, but this hit on something so important to me—the ongoing degradation of humanity. Maybe my Gen Z content ladies can explain it to me, but it would be a lot of work. Work sucks. I know.