When Your Profession is On Fire

People are happy enough rich, and people are happy enough poor. But it’s hard to imagine anyone happy without a feeling that their actions have some impact, however small. Even if you’re not going to be remembered by history, you want to be remembered by your barista. The prisoner, though largely robbed of power, is probably happier if he can vex h... See more

Burnout

This X post by Emmett Shear (most famous for being CEO of Twitch) had a huge impact on how I think about burnout.

Emmett describes 3 main causes of burnout (paraphrased):

• Permanent On-call: Never having true time off, because work can always reach you (or in the case of very intense jobs, because the work never actually ends). I had always co

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Malesic, however, is interested in more than tracing burnout’s clinical history. A scholar of religion, he diagnoses burnout as an ailment of the soul. It arises, he contends, from a gap between our ideals about work and our reality of work. Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The r... See more