While the regular motions of the heavenly bodies commanded the patterns of rest and activity in the premodern era via the seasons and the circadian rhythm, in the industrial age the pace, frequency, and duration of work were increasingly imposed from the outside, dictated by the demands for measurable productivity and the rigid temporality of machine-determined processes. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century factory workers had to submit to the rhythm of the machines they were servicing. The soul-destroying impact of assembly lines, first introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford, is famously represented by Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times (1936), in which his alter ego fails tragically in his desperate struggle to complete an endless succession of monotone, one-movement tasks presented relentlessly by a conveyor belt. It was precisely this loss of control over the speed and the rhythm of their work that many workers experienced as particularly stressful and exhausting.
1As the historian Anson Rabinbach has shown, modern modes of mass production and the emergence of Taylorist—that is, scientifically enhanced—work-optimization programs stimulated a physiological “science of fatigue” that blossomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many owners of the means of production became increasingly concerned about their chronically exhausted workforce, or, more specifically, the potential losses of earnings resulting from its diminished productivity. Fatigue scientists such as the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), who wrote the study
Fatigue in 1891, measured the impact of repetitive movements on muscles and the pulse under laboratory conditions. Other scientists also turned their attention to the conditions of physical labor in order to establish the optimal number of hours of the workday, as well as the ideal length of breaks, the most efficient tempo of work activities, and the impact of wage incentives. Time-motion experts assessed repetitive movements to identify the most efficient working behaviors. Many of these studies were conducted with a view to optimizing to its utmost capacity the productivity of the workforce, as well as to avoid industrial accidents and demands for compensation, which began to pose a serious problem for factory owners. It became apparent that accidents in the workplace were directly related to fatigue and that they were much more likely to occur toward the end of a workday, when laborers were exhausted.
Just as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the present cultural preoccupation with stress and burnout—the two related concepts that are the focus of the final chapter of this study—is driven not just by a concern for the well-being of the post-Fordist twenty-first-century workforce but also by economic considerations, particularly the desire to maintain and optimize said workforce’s continuing productivity and efficiency. The WHO estimates that loss of productivity resulting from sick leave related to mental diseases such as depression and stress-related disorders costs Western economies billions each year.
2 And just as nineteenth-century theorists of neurasthenia blamed the epidemic of nervous exhaustion they were witnessing on a faster pace of life, too many stimuli in the urban environment, and the specific stresses of “brain work,” late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century discourses on stress and burnout are also frequently characterized by a culturally critical agenda that raises concerns about the psychosocial consequences of postindustrial capitalism, technological acceleration, the specific stresses of globalization and neoliberal market policies, the transition from a manufacturing to a service industry, and the subjectivization of work. Like other exhaustion theorists before them, many commentators on stress and burnout assert that the specific stressors with which we are currently battling are unparalleled regarding their energy-draining nature, intensity, and damaging long- term effects.
Stress and burnout are distinct but interrelated concepts. At the most basic level, burnout is often considered the result of chronic stress in the workplace, manifest in a set of specific mental and physical symptoms.
3 The most influential physiological and endocrinological stress model was developed by the Austrian- Hungarian-Canadian biochemical and medical researcher Hans Selye (1907–1982), and it is largely due to him that “stress” became as ubiquitous a concept as it is today. Indeed, as the historian Patrick Kury points out, shorthand and coping strategy at the same time, the word “stress” has become cultural code for a whole range of diffuse modern discontents and allows for the thematization of diverse ailments encompassing subjective as well as broader sociopolitical complaints.
4A researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Selye first theorized a physiological response mechanism to a sudden increase in demands on the organism under the label “general adaptation syndrome” (GAS) in the 1930s. After the war, he merged his own ideas on the mechanisms of adaptation with the stress concepts developed by the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon (1871–1945) and by military medical researchers who investigated the resilience of fighter pilots.
5 It was Cannon who first used the word “stress” in a medical context, and who associated stress with the concept of homeostasis—that is, the organism’s perpetual attempts to self-regulate autonomic processes in order to maintain a state of inner equilibrium by counterbalancing all disturbances to body temperature, the fluid economy, the metabolic rate, and the respiratory system. Cannon argues that the body strives, above all, for constancy and seeks to reestablish a state of normalcy after either external or internal disturbances upset its fragile equilibrium—an argument that has, of course, already been presented, in slightly different form, by physicians working in the Galenic tradition, who also emphasize the significance of balance, harmony, and constancy among the four bodily fluids.
6 Previously, the word “stress” had been deployed in physics and the metal industry to describe the interaction between a force and resistance against this force. Derived from the Latin word
stringere (to press together), the term was used to designate the act of stretching, straining, and putting material under pressure.
Differentiating between stressor (the agent that causes stress) and stress (the body’s biochemical adaptive reaction), Selye defines stress as “
the non-specific response of the body to any demand made upon it.” Confronted with an external threat, for example, the organism’s natural reaction is fight or flight, actively to attack the aggressor or passively to submit to it or to flee. Yet regardless of whether the stress-producing factor or activity is pleasant or unpleasant, the body’s reaction is always exactly the same. According to Selye, “all that counts is the intensity of the demand for readjustment or adaptation.” Whether stressors are excessive cold or heat, danger, drugs, nervous irritation, sorrow, or joy, they all produce the same adaptive biochemical response. Therefore, Selye specifies the “nonspecific demand for activity as such” as the very essence of stress.
7He proposes that the organism’s general response to all kinds of stressors is characterized by three stages: “(1) the alarm reaction; (2) the stage of resistance; and (3) the stage of exhaustion.” During the alarm reaction, the organism releases adrenalin and other hormones and increases the blood flow and respiration, such that additional physical and mental energy is made available to enable the organism adequately to deal with the sudden intense challenge. During the phase of resistance, the body adapts to the stressor but is unable to uphold the heightened state of alert for a longer duration—hence, “eventually, exhaustion ensues.”
8Crucially, the triphasic model suggests that the “body’s adaptability, or adaptation energy, is finite.” Recognizing the importance of this observation, Selye reflects on its repercussions in various studies. In Stress Without Distress (1974), for example, he admits that he, too (just like Sigmund Freud and many others before him), is unable further to define “adaptation energy” and resorts to the deployment of metaphors instead:
We still do not know precisely just what is lost, except that it is not merely caloric energy, since food intake is normal during the stage of resistance. Hence, one would think that once adaptation has occurred, and energy is amply available, resistance should go on indefinitely. But just as any inanimate machine gradually wears out, even if it has enough fuel, so does the human machine sooner or later become the victim of constant wear and tear. These three stages are analogous to the three stages of man’s life: childhood (with its characteristic low resistance and excessive responses to any kind of stimulus), adulthood (during which adaptation to most commonly encountered agents has occurred and resistance is increased) and finally, senility (characterized by irreversible loss of adaptability and eventual exhaustion) ending with death.
9Interestingly, Selye uses two distinct metaphors here: the first is the popular nineteenth-century trope of the body as a machine, which suggests a mechanical view of the body as something that can wear out through continuous use. The second image, in which he draws an analogy to the stages of life, comparing the stage of exhaustion with old age and physiological senility, is equally based on the “wear-and-tear” principle, although one of a natural, organic nature.
10 Selye also uses financial similes to illustrate the finite nature of our adaptation energy that are strikingly similar to those deployed by the nineteenth-century physician George M. Beard, who invented the neurasthenia diagnosis:
Our reserves of adaptation energy could be compared to an inherited fortune from which we can make withdrawals; but there is no proof that we can also make additional deposits. We can squander our adaptability recklessly, “burning the candle at both ends,” or we can learn to make this valuable resource last long, by using it wisely and sparingly, only for things that are worthwhile and cause least distress.
11Again, this simile suggests that appropriate stress management is ultimately the individual’s responsibility: just as it is in our power to make financially prudent decisions, it is also our personal duty to manage our energy resources wisely. However, the amount of adaptation energy an individual has at his or her disposal varies and depends largely on hereditary and genetic factors.
Like Freud, Selye openly admits his frustration about the fact that he is unable further to define adaptation energy: “No doubt, inestimable advantages would accrue to the practice of medicine if we succeeded in identifying ‘adaptation energy.’—So far we can report no progress along these lines.”
12 Rest and vacations “can restore our resistance and adaptability very close to what it was before.” Yet Selye cautions: “I said ‘very close to,’ because complete restoration is probably impossible, since every biological activity leaves some irreversible ‘chemical scars.’”
13 These “chemical scars” are again mainly related to the natural loss of energy that occurs during the process of aging.
Selye also distinguishes between “superficial” and “deep” adaptation energy, once again deploying economic metaphors to illustrate his claims:
Superficial adaptation energy is immediately available upon demand, like money in a bank account that is readily accessible by writing out a check. On the other hand, deep adaptation energy is stored away safely as a reserve, just as part of our inherited fortune may be invested in stocks and bonds, which must first be sold to replenish our checking account, thus furnishing another supply of immediately usable cash. Still, after a lifetime of constant expenditure, even our last investments will be eventually exhausted if we only spend and never earn. I look upon the irreversible process of aging as something very similar. The stage of exhaustion, after a temporary demand upon the body, is reversible, but the complete exhaustion of all stores of deep adaptation energy is not; as the reserves are depleted, senility and, finally, death ensue.
14Selye was able to draw on groundbreaking new insights in the fields of endocrinology: the British physiologist Ernest H. Starling discovered hormones in 1905, and much research has been conducted regarding the precise function of these chemical messengers since. Yet it is striking to observe that, in spite of the new medical concepts and information available to him, Selye developed theories about energy and exhaustion, and chose metaphors to describe them, that are almost identical to those proposed by nineteenth-century physicians. As the quotations demonstrate, the progression from the neurological to the endocrinological paradigm has not resulted in a radically new conception of the exhaustion of human energy. In fact, there seems to be a persistent tendency in modern Western medicine to think of the body as a vessel filled with a finite amount of energy that can be terminally exhausted. In Eastern medical models, in contrast, life energy (such as the qi and the prana) is conceived as something that can be temporarily blocked, but the free flow of which can be reestablished.
In The Stress of Life (1956), Selye admits that, paradoxically, the holy grail of stress research also remains its dark continent—the concept of energy. He speculates about the exciting new avenues for future research that would open up if only it were possible to extract and even transmit vital energy:
By learning more about the body’s adaptation energy, the life-span could probably be greatly improved. The diseases of old age become constantly more important as more and more people live to be old, thanks to medical progress…. Still, we have not fully excluded the possibility that adaptation energy could be regenerated to some extent, and perhaps even transmitted from one living being to another, somewhat like a serum. If its amount is unchangeable, we may learn more about how to conserve it. If it can be transmitted, we may explore means of extracting the carrier of this vital energy—for instance, from the tissues of young animals—and transmitting it to the old and aging.
15The fantasy about the extraction and transmission of vital energy from young animals in order to renew and prolong the natural life span of the aging is reminiscent of the habits of a much older figure, who has haunted the cultural and literary imagination for centuries: the vampire. It also demonstrates why vampire literature and films, which hook into the age-old human dream of eternal life, perpetual youth, and constantly renewable energy, hold such a long-lasting appeal over our culture at large.
Finally, Selye, too, is unable to resist the temptation of presenting his medical research on stress and the exhaustion of life energy without cultural commentary. In Stress Without Distress and other writings, he even presents a “code of conduct” based on “natural laws.” Again, he sounds suspiciously like his nineteenth-century predecessors in his lament against the evils of his present times and his nostalgic longing for a past in which religion, the state, and social hierarchies were still respected:
For the greatest problem of our time is not atmospheric pollution, nor overpopulation, nor even the atomic bomb, but the lack of motivation by generally acceptable and respected ideals. Science has shaken our blind faith in virtually every traditional value and “infallible authority.” Our young are no longer willing to believe blindly in the sanctity of purity in soul or body, of the family structure and responsibilities, the fatherland, the security offered by capital, social status, or the loyal submission to the will of our prophets and rulers, whether the divine rulers of the east or our Western kings and presidents. The authority of the clergy, and indeed the existence of God, have been called into question. An attitude of pessimism and doubt seems to have settled upon mankind; violence, drug abuse, and aimless destructive aggression appear more and more to replace constructive behaviour as an outlet for our need of self-expression and creation. Virtually every code of law inspired by human logic or divine inspiration has been flaunted with contempt, and often impunity, at some time, by some people, except one: the code of the eternal laws of Nature. To develop and disseminate this code strikes me as the greatest contribution that research on the stress of life could make to humanity.
16
Stress research took a psychosocial turn in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus gradually shifting from biochemical-physiological adaptive mechanisms to the role of sociocultural, environmental, and psychological stressors and their draining effect on our energy resources. This phase also coincided with the wider popularization of the stress concept. Stress research of that period was often combined with a reformist ethos and went hand in hand with reflections on work–life balance, occupational health, quality of life, debates about the role of the state in ensuring the mental and physical well-being of its workforce, ecological anxieties, and a new conception of the relationship between the individual and the environment.
17Researchers Harold G. Wolff, Richard S. Lazarus, and the Swedish doctor of medicine Lennart Levi wrote extensively on the psychosocial conception of stress. Levi became Sweden’s first professor of psychosocial medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1978. In 1959, he had founded the Karolinska’s Department of Stress Research, which in 1973 became the first World Health Organization center in this field. Although inspired by Selye’s work, Levi was particularly interested in the role of the sociocultural environment as a stress-response trigger. His research concentrated on the subjective judgment of what constitutes a stressor. Levi argues that in many cases, stress reactions are purposeful and adequate. But in some cases, people react not just to the actual experience of physical danger but also to threats and symbols of danger experienced in the past, to maintain a certain degree of “preparedness.” Moreover, this preparedness can also be elicited “by the many socio-economic pressures and emotional conflicts in to-day’s life. In such cases of ‘emotional stress,’ the stereotyped reactions of the body often are clearly inadequate and may even be actually harmful.” At least one-third of sick leave in Western culture, Levi estimates, is due to stress reactions of that kind, which creates “a situation characterized by a great deal of human suffering, not to mention the enormous losses in production and efficiency sustained by society in general.”
18Levi problematizes repeatedly the perceived malignancy of “modern man’s rapidly changing psychosocial environment.”
19 He counts mechanization and automation, the fragmentation of production processes, shift work, and low wages among the primary new psychosocial energy-draining stressors:
People are asking whether some work processes, although economically and technically justifiable at first sight, do not constitute an insult to man’s intellectual capacity. Similarly, it is conceivable that a great deal of our urbanized, industrialized environment constitutes an insult—and a trauma—to man’s neuroendocrine system, giving rise to mental and/or psychosomatic disease…. Modern society functions on the principle that steady economic growth must be maintained
ad infinitum. We seldom ask what mental and physical price we pay for this economic evolution. Should not physicians combat such a one-sided ideology of
wealth with an ideology of
welfare?
20The state, Levi argues, has to ensure that all conditions of life are optimal, not just economic ones, and politicians must find an appropriate balance between fostering trade and gross national product, on the one hand, and their citizens’ psychological well-being, on the other.
While Levi subscribes to the basic principles of Selye’s endocrinological stress model, he puts a reformist political spin on it, calling for the implementation of specific occupational health policies, such as the avoidance of quantitative over- or understimulation. Much in harmony with the 1968 ethos and the general principles of the social-democratic Swedish welfare state, he presents traditional Marxist arguments on the specific stressors of the postwar period, such as the alienation of the workers from the mass-produced end-product of their labor, owing to the breakdown of the production process into “narrow and highly specified sub-units.” Automated production systems result not just in the fragmentation of the work process but also in a decrease in workers’ control over it, all of which “usually results in monotony, social isolation, lack of freedom, and time pressure, with possible long-term effects on health and well-being.” The long-term effects of such chronic occupational stress are a host of mental and physical symptoms caused by the gradual depletion of the workforce’s energy. Levi gloomily predicts: “With the striving toward maximum automation, man may again become the tool—of his own tools!”
21Unlike Beard and Selye, then, Levi shifts the burden of responsibility for stress-related exhaustion from the individual to the state. He cautions, above all, about an increasingly problematic gulf between humans’ “psychobiological programme,” which has remained essentially unchanged for the past ten thousand years, and environmental demands on this program, which have changed dramatically.
22 Epidemiological, psychophysiological, and psychoendocrinological studies, he claims, have all proved that “man’s phylogenetically old adaptation patterns, preparing the organism for fight and flight, have become inadequate, and even harmful, in response to the predominantly psychological or socioeconomic stressors prevalent in modern society.”
23 Levi thus calls not for the optimization of an individual’s adaptation responses to external stressors but for a reform of the increasingly malign and energy-draining occupational and wider political environment.
The critical and popular burnout debates, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and some Scandinavian countries, have much in common with Levi’s principal arguments on the adverse health effects of new, predominantly socioeconomic stressors, which are the result of a radical restructuring of the world of work associated with the transition from an industrial to a service industry. In these discourses, however, Levi’s classical 1960s Marxist vocabulary is replaced with new critical theory–inspired catchwords, which include, above all, acceleration, the subjectivization of work, the achievement principle, the dissolution of work–life boundaries, self-optimization, self-exploitation, self-realization, and flexibilization.
24 Two paradoxical scenarios are repeatedly flagged as the root causes of the twenty-first-century workforce’s chronic exhaustion: first, we live in a techno-capitalist age dominated by technological inventions, in particular in the communication sector, which, theoretically speaking, should allow us to save great amounts of time and energy by rendering various processes faster, easier, and more efficient. However, these time-saving technologies have introduced a host of new psychosocial pressures and a more insidiously controlling temporal regime, which means that our time and rhythms are more externally regulated than ever. Technology and its associated new patterns of interaction thus drain more of our energy than they save.
25 Second, while many of the reformist demands of the 1960s and 1970s regarding flexible working hours, employee initiative, and more autonomy in the workplace appear to have been implemented, precisely that new flexibility and its associated responsibilities have turned into a curse in their own right: a terrible kind of freedom manifest in the permanent pressure to optimize the self and to monitor one’s own performance, resulting in chronic feelings of inadequacy.
26 Moreover, workers are increasingly expected to commit to their jobs in a way that draws explicitly on their subjective resources and responses, such as their initiative, creativity, emotions, ability to empathize, and ability to be self-motivating.
27The term “burnout” emerged in the 1970s in the United States as a popular metaphor for mental exhaustion among social- sector workers. It was first used in a mental health context by the New York–based (and German-born) psychotherapist Herbert J. Freudenberger in an article entitled “Staff Burn-Out,” in which he describes his own experiences with the phenomenon.
28 Burnout originally surfaced in the context of human services, or “helper,” jobs (such as street workers, teachers, psychotherapists, hospital counselors, and probation officers)—professions that are often chosen by people who are driven primarily by idealistic rather than materialistic motives.
29 In the 1980s, self-report inventories appeared on the market, most importantly the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which allowed individuals to measure their personal susceptibility to the new syndrome. The description of burnout by the inventor of this inventory, the American social psychologist Christina Maslach, proved to become one of the standard definitions: “Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do ‘people work’ of some kind.”
30 “Depersonalisation” is evident, above all, in a cynical, callous, or indifferent attitude toward the people with whom one works, be they patients, students, clients, or customers.
Although burnout was originally thought to be specific to the human-services sector, it was soon diagnosed in other professions, too, and is now recognized as a serious occupational health problem in most sectors. Burnout was subsequently defined more broadly as “a state of exhaustion in which one is cynical about the value of one’s occupation and doubtful of one’s capacity to perform.”
31 In the 1990s, Maslach and Michael Leiter offered yet another definition of burnout. Rather than defining it as a negative state of mind, they viewed it as the erosion of a positive state of mind, as the waning of engagement. In other words, burnout was reconceived as the decline of commitment, a state in which “energy turns into exhaustion, involvement turns into cynicism, and efficacy turns into ineffectiveness.”
32An alternative behaviorist burnout theory drawing on positive psychology models also emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the conservation of resources (COR) theory, first proposed by the American psychologist Stevan E. Hobfoll. COR theory focuses on work engagement and vigor “as the positive counterparts of burnout and away from the deficit and pathology models.”
33 According to Hobfoll and Marjan J. Gorgievsky,
COR theory is a motivational theory that rests…on the basic tenet that individuals strive to obtain, retain, foster, and protect resources. Resources are entities that have intrinsic or instrumental value, including objects (e.g. car, house, but also luxurious objects), conditions (parental roles, being embedded in supportive social networks), personal resources (personal characteristics and skills), and energy resources. There is something quite central and primitive biologically in the acquisition and maintenance of resources.
34Within the COR framework, stress can occur under three conditions: “(1) when individuals’ key resources are threatened with loss, (2) when resources are lost, or (3) when individuals fail to gain resources following significant resource investment. Burnout is one such stress outcome and typically follows from a process of slow bleed out of resources without counterbalancing resource gain or replenishment.” Energy is a key resource that can be lost either directly or as the side effect of the depletion of other important resources. Once again, the concept of energy is central to this model but not defined any further. COR theorists consider burnout as an affective state that is marked by feelings of emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness, all of which “denote the depletion of energetic resources resulting from cumulative exposure to chronic work and life stresses.”
35Gorgievsky and Hobfoll argue that “exhaustion is generally accepted as the major component of burnout, with less agreement about the other elements of burnout.” They consider the process of “resource loss, gain, and protection as primary in explaining burnout and work engagement” and define burnout as “the end state of a long-term process of resource loss that gradually develops over time depleting energetic resources…, whereas engagement is the resultant of the inverted process of real or anticipated resource gain
enhancing energetic resources.” They also argue that the fear of resource loss is a stronger motivational force than expected resource gain, and that losses of any resources usually result in avoidance strategies as well as in loss of self-confidence. People have to invest resources in order to protect against resource loss, to recover from losses, and to gain resources. Yet many of the strategies they employ “to offset resource loss may lead to other, secondary losses. If the situation becomes chronic, the resources people employ may get depleted.”
36 Like Cannon and Selye, they maintain that people (as well as systems) generally seek stability and homeostasis and that, while adaptable in theory, they tend to be upset by most forms of change. This hard-core, highly schematic, and reductive behaviorist model makes human beings sound like little more than greedy and anxious squirrels, preoccupied with nothing but collecting and safeguarding an array of different types of nuts.
The WHO’s
ICD-10 classifies burnout as a “life management difficulty” problem. In Sweden and the Netherlands (two countries that benefit from highly developed social security systems), burnout is an established medical diagnosis. In most other countries, it is still mainly a nonmedically accepted but widely used term for a cluster of symptoms related to mental and physical exhaustion originating in the workplace. It tends to be viewed as carrying less stigma than depression, although it shares some of its symptoms. Unlike depression, burnout is thought to be caused strictly by external and, more specifically, work-related factors and is neither treated psychopharmacologically nor thought to have a genetic basis. Sebastian Beck, writing in the German newspaper
Die Süddeutsche, describes burnout as “socially accepted luxury-version of depression and despair, which leaves one’s self-image unharmed even during moments of failure,” and asserts: “Only losers become depressive. Burnout is a diagnosis for winners, or, more specifically: for former winners.”
37 But burnout can also be regarded as a social form of depression, a systemic dysfunction that is directly related to the work environment and one’s role and position in it. The individual is thus not responsible for falling prey to the condition but can be considered a victim of its alienating work environment and broader psychophysically damaging sociocultural developments, which are beyond his or her control.
Occupational health psychologists, health policy advisers, insurance companies, and management coaches tend to emphasize that burnout not only is of concern to the individual but also presents a serious economic problem. Among burned-out staff, there is an increased risk of absenteeism, diminished productivity and efficiency, poor qualitative performance, and dissatisfied patients, students, clients, or customers. All these can have severe financial repercussions for organizations, companies, and even national economies. The potentially damaging financial consequences of burnout are one of the reasons it is currently attracting so much attention, and it is notable that an explicit preoccupation with “staff well-being,” “work–life balance,” “workload,” “stress management,” “engagement,” “institutional values,” “corporate identity,” and even “mindfulness” is becoming ever more prevalent in companies and organizations across Europe and the United States. These concepts are all related to a wider cultural fear of burnout and its adverse economical consequences, and, having trickled down into managerial manuals and workshops, are shaping managerial practice and thus directly affect the everyday lives of employees.
38It is interesting to note that burnout is a highly topical issue in Germany, where it continues to attract much media attention, but is much less prominently debated in England and the United States, for example. Germany, in particular, has seen the publication of numerous popular self-help manuals, autobiographies by burnout victims, as well as academic studies, and important newspapers and journals continue to represent the syndrome as a highly worrying
Volkskrankheit, a national epidemic of terrifying proportions.
39 It is also noticeable that the German burnout discourse, especially of the academic-sociological variety, tends to be politicized and frequently combines psychomedical arguments with criticism of the damaging psychosocial repercussions of neoliberalism, globalization, and acceleration. In contrast, burnout self-help books in general, and English ones in particular, tend to follow a much less socioculturally oriented trajectory, redirecting responsibility for the management of energy resources to the individual and subscribing to a simple biochemical adrenal-exhaustion model.
40 In
The Essential Guide to Burnout: Overcoming Excess Stress, Andrew and Elizabeth Procter, for example, write that if we live in a state of ongoing arousal, our constantly raised cortisol levels “eventually cause a depletion of the circulating steroids in the blood. These steroids maintain our energy levels and our ability to resist stress. When stress is constant and chronic, even the body’s store of cortisol becomes empty. Then our energy and immunity reduce and we become very susceptible to viruses and feel fatigued. If nothing is done, this ultimately leads to complete exhaustion.”
41Their suggestions for curing the condition are equally down-to-earth: they propose that sufferers “take a breather,” visit wildlife centers, do something creative or cultural, and work on deepening their relationships. As did Beard, they also reassure burnout victims that they are part of a select and, ultimately, elect few, as people affected by burnout are traditionally “conscientious, hard-working, and highly motivated with drive and commitment,” or else “people with high levels of compassion and concern for others, who have high ideals and are willing to sacrifice the self in order to help others.”
42The metaphors that burnout victims use to describe their condition attest to the broader technical and medical discourses by which they are influenced: while melancholics complained about the adverse effects of black bile in their systems and referred to clouded vision and adustion, and neurasthenics bemoaned the state of their overstrained nerves, the burned-out use predominantly endocrinological imagery that relates to the idea of high levels of stress hormones being pumped around in their bloodstream that are doing long-term organic damage. Furthermore, they bemoan the lack of an “off-switch” and talk about “running out of steam” and “running on past empty.” They feel “overloaded” and “unable to switch off” and to “unwind,” or they report feeling dead inside like “zombies” or “robots.”
43The Australian pastor Steve Bagi, author of Pastorpain: My Journey in Burnout, admits to being “tired of being tired” as well as to “struggles with the boss.” He writes:
Physical, mental and emotional exhaustion can creep up on anyone. Burnout goes beyond tiredness—it’s one step up. Tiredness is the battery wearing out. Burnout is the battery that has worn out and gives no light. This is not the tiredness that will fade with a good night’s sleep or a holiday. It’s a deep fatigue in which I feel that the last of my reserves have been sapped out. I guess that it’s natural to feel tired in a job where you are giving out all the time. If the transfer of energy is always in output then of course, the batteries will die. I know I should have attached myself to the Ultimate Recharger more and not revved the engine all the time.
44The empty-battery image is a popular evergreen in modern exhaustion discourses, already frequently used by nineteenth-century theorists, although the idea of rechargeable ones is more recent. Bagi, too, seems to subscribe to the idea of the human body as a kind of machine that can, quite simply, run out of fuel.
Donna Andronicus, self-help author and life coach, deploys another popular image of depleting and parasitical energy transfers: that of the psychological “energy vampire.” She warns that these, “unlike traditional vampires with their distinctive fangs, anaemic complexion, bloodshot eyes and funky hair,” can be hard to spot. “They come in various forms and can be very cunning in their ability to exist in your life without you even realizing that they’re there, bleeding you of our precious energy reserve.” They tend to be people with a victim mentality who indulge in self- sabotaging behavior:
As your energy vampire recounts his or her latest drama, you start to feel listless, your brain begins to ache, and a creeping numbness paralyses you to the spot (much the way a spider will stun its intended victim before immobilizing and eating it). The energy extraction has begun with a schlucking sound that’s inaudible to the human ear, and you feel powerless to stop it…. Before you know it, it’s all over. Having gained their emotional pay-off sympathy, understanding and attention from you, and with their energy levels replenished, they leave you in a sluggish and bewildered state as you wonder what on earth hit you. All you can do is watch them skip off into the sunset as they seek out their next unsuspecting victim.
45Yet perhaps the most dominant mind–body metaphor of our times is that which conceives of the brain as a computer and the body as its hardware. The German professor of communication studies Miriam Meckel uses it repeatedly in her autobiographical account of her burnout-related breakdown. While recovering from chronic exhaustion in a sanatorium in the Allgäuer Alps, at which patients are subjected to treatments including a modern version of the rest cure, yoga, and hypnotherapy, she reflects on her life and on the causes that led to her burnout. What is most noticeable about her account is that Meckel, like many patients who embrace the burnout diagnosis rather than depression, remains curiously antipsychological in her analysis, in spite of the fact that it is presented as a confessionary, illness-as-opportunity-to-begin-anew narrative. Her story is strangely devoid of proper soul-searching (apart from a short reflection on the impact of her mother’s death), and instead Meckel blames her breakdown on chronic communication overload and on wider structural changes in the world of work. In the increasingly regulated, measured, and preprogrammed “functional achievement-oriented society,” she claims, people live to work, rather than work to live. A problem at work thus affects the person as a whole, not just his or her professional life. She calls this phenomenon “alienation 2.0” and presents arguments reminiscent of those of Alain Ehrenberg and of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello: “We currently witness the most extreme forms of individualization and flexibilization of the subject as a result of technological developments and the multioption society, while at the same time experiencing a maximum amount of external control through all-encompassing and continuous demands and constraints. Our freedom is only an illusion.”
46It appears to be a characteristic trait of the academic and even some of the popular burnout debates in Germany that the burden of responsibility is frequently shifted away from the individual toward more general sociopolitical developments and wider structural issues. The German sociologist Greta Wagner suggests that this tendency (which can also be observed in some Scandinavian countries) is related to the type of welfare state from which these discourses emerge. It is predominantly in the conservative and the social-democratic welfare states that citizens expect the state to play a more active, reformist, and interventionist role in protecting them not just from physical but also from psychosocial stressors (for example, by changing occupational health legislation).
47 Or, viewed differently, one could also consider this tendency as an attempt to undo the transfer of responsibility for one’s own psychophysical welfare from the state to the individual, which theorists like Michel Foucault, for example, consider a core characteristic of the neoliberal project.
Putting a digital communication–age spin on the old strained-nerves tale, Meckel writes: “I suffer from too much information input. ‘You are completely overstimulated,’ my doctor told me. Stimuli are the impulses that render possible the transfer of information…. My brain’s memory software and its processors are overloaded. Often I find myself wishing that I could use the option ‘filter messages’ or ‘cancel conversation’ for my thoughts, just as for a computer program.” She further develops the analogy between the brain as computer, relationships as exchanges of information, and burnout as a functional disturbance that is essentially communication-based in nature, in various other passages:
It is the messenger hormones serotonin, adrenalin, dopamine, and endorphins that are responsible for the transportation of information between nerve cells. They are the media of chemical communication in the human brain. In the case of burnout or in other forms of depression it is, then, the brain’s communication mechanism that is disturbed. For me, that is a particularly exciting insight. I suffer from a disturbance of my key professional competency: communication. Mind and body know rather well how to raise the alarm such that their message is heard.
48Meckel complains about feeling isolated and unable to communicate with others, again using communication-age imagery by referring to incompatible “transmission protocols.” Blaming her burnout on information overload and too much traveling, and particularly on the “energy-robber” e-mail, she admits to a significant flaw in her strategy to combat her growing exhaustion: by trying to counter the strain quantitatively, by working harder and longer and sleeping less, she found that she became slower, less productive, increasingly unable to concentrate, and emotionally more volatile. In addition, she found herself suffering from bouts of causeless sadness and loss of faith in her work. “I have become a victim of my existential categorical error. By trying to combat the negative consequences of quantitative over-strain via a quantitative performance increase, I was programmed to fail.” In the final chapter of her book, she addresses her life directly in a letter and writes:
I have texted my life story, sent chapters of my life into the world as attachments, planned my days and years in Outlook, and surfed around in myself—all too rarely without strategy and aim…. Without pause, you blinked and hummed and jingled inside me. You wanted attention, true attention…. But I only ever touched your user interface, behind which you remained hidden. I know your sounds, your smells, your colors and forms, the warmth of your bustling activities, your small messages and streams of information. I understood your user interface, but not your operating system. I never asked what really drives you.
49What are the implications of perceiving the mind as a computer and the body as its hardware, as Meckel and many others do? Mind–body metaphors such as this one are not just ornamental figurative illustrations that can be translated into clear-cut factual language, or that point to a definitive “reality” of mind–body interactions hidden behind the layers of discourse. In the arena of mind–body debates, metaphors and their associated narratives are not just all we have, as the interaction between the two entities cannot yet properly be studied and measured empirically, but they are also reality-generating. Metaphors do not just influence the way in which patients might experience and make sense of their symptoms but, as the historian James J. Bono points out, even have the ability to influence the shape of future research. Bono cites the example of the seventeenth-century physician William Harvey, who in 1628 for the first time compared the heart to a machine. Harvey, Bono argues, ushered in a paradigm shift that transformed the religious, social, cultural, and psychological meanings associated with the heart, primarily by facilitating conceptual exchanges between different discourses (in this case, the technical and the medical), and thereby opening up highly fruitful avenues for new research.
50One of the many repercussions of the “brain is a computer” metaphor is no doubt the present popularity of cognitive behavioral therapy and other therapeutic schools of thought, such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), that are essentially based on the idea of “reprogramming” the mind, just as one would reprogram a dysfunctional information technology system. In Britain, for example, CBT is now the only psychotherapy regime offered through the National Health Service. Yet to think about ourselves with recourse to concepts such as information overload, input–output imbalances, program error, memory defects, and dysfunctional feedback loops not just reduces the complexity of interpersonal interactions to mere data exchanges but also stifles any potential for explorations and conceptualizations of deeper, more irrational or emotional human responses and reactions. In other words, these metaphors dehumanize us, turning us into little more than substandard and dysfunctional robots. It is time to turn to some literary works that engage with burnout-like states, as they engage precisely with the flawed, unique, and irrational human responses to work-induced exhaustion that are eliminated in the brain-as-computer-based accounts.
As in many of Graham Greene’s novels, a lapsed Catholic features as the main protagonist in
A Burnt-Out Case (1960): in his late fifties and at the height of his fame, the celebrated ecclesiastical architect M. Querry loses faith in both his religion and the merit of his buildings. Although written in 1960 (that is, fourteen years before the burnout diagnosis was born), Greene’s book describes some of the phenomenon’s core symptoms. Querry feels as though he has come “to the end of everything,” a mental state that he seeks to express physically and spatially by traveling to the remotest place he can find on the map—a leper colony in the Congo, chosen simply because the boat that took him down the khaki-colored African river would go no farther. Querry is exhausted and no longer able to feel anything at all, including pain; he has ceased to desire anything, including women; he is alienated, disconnected, and unable to empathize; and he is cynical and disenchanted about the value of his work. Having lived exclusively for his profession most of his life, he informs Dr. Colin, the atheist doctor who runs the leprosery and who becomes Querry’s friend and confidant, that he has now abandoned it for good: “A vocation is an act of love: it is not a professional career. When desire is dead one cannot continue to make love. I’ve come to the end of desire and to the end of my vocation.”
51Although showered with accolades and awards, Querry feels that the real significance of his architectural work has always remained unappreciated, and that it was even regularly ruined and destroyed: “And in a year they had cluttered [the churches] up with their cheap plaster saints; they took out my plain windows and put in stained glass dedicated to dead pork-packers who had contributed to diocesan funds, and when they had destroyed my space and my light, they were able to pray again, and they even became proud of what they had spoilt.”
52As a cynical reaction to the vacuity of the praise he received for the buildings about which he genuinely cared, Querry built more frivolous, deliberately lackluster buildings in his later years—but even these were venerated by the critics, leaving him feeling empty and disgusted. The stakes for those who expect to derive some kind of existential justification and meaning from their work are, of course, particularly high, as Querry explains: “Men with vocations are different from the others. They have more to lose. Behind all of us in various ways lies a spoilt priest.” And thus he felt increasingly ashamed and hypocritical about building churches:
To build a church when you don’t believe in a god seems a little indecent, doesn’t it? When I discovered I was doing that, I accepted a commission for a city hall, but I didn’t believe in politics either. You never saw such an absurd box of concrete and glass as I landed on the poor city square. You see I discovered what seemed only to be a loose threat in my jacket—I pulled it and all the jacket began to unwind.
53Formerly a compulsive womanizer, Querry also realizes that he never really loved anyone, and, following the death of his passion for his vocation, soon everything else dies in him, too. “I want nothing,” he explains to the superior of the order with whom he lodges near the leprosery, silently adding: “That is my trouble.”
54Greene establishes an explicit parallel between Querry, the emotional/spiritual cripple, and the lepers, the physical ones, who are being treated for their disease at the hospital by Dr. Colin. Both Querry and the lepers are mutilated outcasts who are defined, above all, by a lack: in the case of the former, the lacuna is god-shaped and of a spiritual nature, while in the case of the latter, what is missing is physical: limbs, fingers, and toes. In both cases, the respective disease needs to burn itself out so that it is no longer contagious before the sufferers can begin to heal. Yet the doctor freely admits that healing the mind is a more challenging task than healing the body, and it is he who explicitly refers to Querry as a “burnt-out case.” In a conversation with the cynical and ruthless journalist Parkinson, who travels to the leprosery in search of a sensationalist story and sets in motion the process leading to Querry’s demise, Querry explains:
“You heard what the doctor called me just now—one of the burnt-out cases. They are the lepers who lose everything that can be eaten away before they are cured.”
“You are a whole man as far as one can see,” said Parkinson, looking at the fingers resting on the drawing-board.
“I’ve come to an end. This place, you might say, is the end. Neither the road nor the river go any further.”
55
Although technically it is the fathers who should be in charge of Querry’s spiritual care, it is in fact the friendship with the outspoken atheist Dr. Colin that gradually reawakens his interest in the world and initiates his healing process. Dr. Colin, in contrast to Querry, is at peace with living without faith, content with his materialist worldview. Querry, however, feels the loss of faith acutely, like a phantom limb. Yet gradually, he begins to register the first stirrings of engagement, interest, and empathy. One night, he ventures into the jungle in search of his (aptly named) leper servant Deo Gratias, who has gone missing, and saves the young man’s life—an experience that proves to be cathartic. Eventually he is able to work again, yet he has moved on from building conceptually extravagant cathedrals to designing cheap, functional, and much-needed hospitals. In spite of his refusal to be cast in this role, many people around him begin to consider him a kind of saint and role model. A young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage falls in love with him. Rumors spread, and things begin to go wrong.
Just when the doctor pronounces Querry cured, precisely at the moment when his spiritual disease has burned itself out and he starts feeling and caring for others and himself again, and even admits to being happy in his self-imposed exile, external disaster strikes. Enmeshed in a string of unfortunate circumstances, Querry is shot dead by a drunken and enraged husband, who believes that the burned-out man had an affair with his wife. Querry is buried in the local cemetery in the atheists’ corner, his grave provocatively devoid of a Christian cross.
The phrase “burnt-out” in Graham Greene’s novel, then, has two distinct meanings: on the one hand, it more or less corresponds to the state of mental exhaustion, spiritual disengagement, carelessness for the future, and cynicism about the value of one’s work that the theorists of clinical and occupational burnout were to define a few years later, although Greene’s interest is, of course, primarily centered on questions pertaining to faith rather than the world of work. On the other hand, there is a positive, even optimistic dimension to Greene’s deployment of the term: as in the case of the lepers, burnout can burn itself out if it is treated correctly by a professional carer. The disease of the mind, just as the diseases of the body, can run its course and ceases to be contagious and harmful once it has used up all its fuel, thus allowing its victims to get back to a state of normality—although, more often than not, not without leaving either physical or mental wounds that attest to the severity of the infection.
The German novelist Thomas Mann’s interest in neurasthenia, nervous exhaustion, and the link between illness and genius more generally has already been analyzed in numerous critical works, in particular in relation to his novel
Buddenbrooks (1901).
56 However, Mann’s engagement with exhaustion and what could be described as a case of burnout
avant la lettre in his novella
Death in Venice (1912) is even more interesting. Although Mann draws primarily on nerve imagery and was clearly inspired by contemporary debates of neurasthenia, one of the main themes of the novella is a burnout-like form of exhaustion, since it is caused, above all, by a specific attitude toward work and pleasure that is damaging to the individual. Mann describes the malign effects of a Protestant work ethic built on repression, which sociologists would now describe as “self-exploitation.” Furthermore, the novella illustrates some intriguing parallels between neurasthenia and burnout: although the organic explanations of the diagnoses differ, the former embracing neurological and the latter endocrinological models, both syndromes include a set of comparable symptoms and emphasize, above all, the exhausting effects of too much “brain work” as a core trigger.
Much like Querry in Greene’s text, Gustav von Aschenbach, the middle-aged writer who is the main character in
Death in Venice, is introduced at the beginning of the novella as a burned-out case. The very first adjective that Mann deploys to characterize him is “overstimulated” (
überreizt), and images of overstretching delicate organisms and overwrought nervous economies permeate the entire novella.
57 In the first paragraph, we learn that Aschenbach’s energies are on the wane, that he has overstrained his fragile nervous system with his demanding “brain work,” and that he is now unable to find respite on account of his ceaselessly pulsating “productive mechanism in his mind,” his
innere Triebwerk—a term that does, of course, evoke two distinct meanings, one mechanico-physical and the other alluding to the Freudian conception of the precarious psychological economies of repressed drives and desires.
58 Aschenbach’s personal ailments are further intensified by the grave threat that seemed to “hang over the peace of Europe” in the first sentence, which indicates an ominous political menace that both aggravates and externalizes the inner turmoil of the writer:
The morning’s writing had overstimulated him: his work had now reached a difficult and dangerous point which demanded the utmost care and circumspection, the most insistent and precise effort of will, and the productive mechanism in his mind—that
motus animi continuum which according to Cicero is the essence of eloquence—had so pursued its reverberating rhythm that he had been unable to halt it even after lunch, and he had been unable to find relief through his daily nap which was now so necessary for him as his energies were increasingly wearing out. And so, soon after taking tea, he had left the house hoping that fresh air and movement would restore him and enable him to spend a productive evening.
59Aschenbach is haunted by a roving restlessness, unable to relax, and we learn that he originally understands his sudden desire to travel abroad as nothing but a burdensome “necessary health precaution, to be taken from time to time however disinclined to it one might be,” a necessary measure to replenish his depleted bodily and spiritual energy reservoirs.
60 Mann makes it obvious that these ideas reflect Aschenbach’s limited perspective on the matter and subtly suggests an alternative interpretation of his character’s desire to travel. Through the abundance of death imagery early in the novella, as well as through Aschenbach’s telling name (it translates as “river of ashes”), Mann indicates that his actions may be driven by a powerful yet unconscious death wish, a desire not to replenish his energies but in fact to exhaust them once and for all in order to find eternal, not just temporary, respite from the vicissitudes of life.
Aschenbach’s sense of identity rests, above all, on his achievement, his iron discipline, and his self-denial—his favorite word is “tenacity” (durchhalten). We learn that he is plagued by an ominously “growing weariness,” which he fears and conceals from others:
True, [serving his work] was a duty he loved, and by now he had almost even learned to love the enervating daily struggle between his proud, tenacious, tried and tested will and that growing weariness which no one must be allowed to suspect nor his finished work betray by any tell-tale sign of failure or lassitude. Nevertheless, it would be sensible, he decided, not to span the bow too far and willfully stifle a desire that had erupted in him with such vivid force.
61As a tribute to his lifelong service to
Geist, “he had curbed and cooled his feelings; for he knew that feeling is apt to be content with high-spirited approximations and with work that falls short of supreme excellence.”
62 However, his twin strategy of repression and intellectualization, which has served Aschenbach well until his fiftieth year, finally demands its levy and results in a mental and physical state of being that is reminiscent of contemporary descriptions of burnout. Not only does he suffer from a deep and chronic form of exhaustion, but he loses his ability to work, becomes disengaged, and even grows cynical about the merit of his works.
Aschenbach’s uncompromising subscription to the achievement principle and the sacrifice of feelings, pleasure, and leisure for his profession is not just a recent development; it has defined him all his life. We learn that he has always done violence to his natural inclinations and physical constitution and has lived a life that he was not built to endure, which he could maintain only by a “heroic” act of discipline and repression. Famously, an observer tells us that he lived his life with his fist firmly closed:
Ever since his boyhood the duty to achieve—and to achieve exceptional things—had been imposed on him from all sides, and thus he had never known youth’s idleness, its carefree negligent ways. When in his thirty-fifth year he fell ill in Vienna, a subtle observer remarked of him on a social occasion: “You see, Aschenbach has always only lived like this”—and the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand tightly into a fist—and never like this”—and he let his open hand hang comfortably down along the back of the chair. It was a correct observation; and the morally courageous aspect of the matter was that Aschenbach’s native constitution was by no means robust, that the constant harnessing of his energies was something to which he had been called, but not really born.
The description of his self-discipline as a brave, honorable act shows that Aschenbach considers his work ethic and his sacrifices to be markers of moral superiority, even spiritual supremacy. It is significant in this context that he likens himself to Saint Sebastian. He thinks of the image of Saint Sebastian, “who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body,” as an apt emblem of the writer. His reflection on the saint culminates in a hymn to humans’ perpetual battle with weakness and exhaustion, and he wonders “if there is any other heroism at all but the heroism of weakness? In any case, what other heroism could be more in keeping with the times?”
63The following passages explain Aschenbach’s success as a writer and reveal why his literary works strike a chord with the experiences of so many of his contemporaries:
The public does not know why it grants the accolade of fame to a work of art…. [T]he real reason for their applause is something imponderable, a sense of sympathy. Hidden away among Aschenbach’s writings was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite; it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
64This passage, rendered like the rest of the novella in free indirect discourse punctuated by interventions that systematically blur the boundaries between Aschenbach’s and the narrator’s perspectives, can be read as a meta-comment that sums up insights that Aschenbach has not yet fully grasped and that offers a poetological key to the appeal of Mann’s novella as a whole: the reason that readers appreciate Aschenbach’s writings is that they not only can identify with but also sympathize with the experiences he describes. Significantly, the main experience shared by Aschenbach and his readers is not related to sexually deviant desires (another theme of the text) but is manifest in the perpetual battle to overcome weakness (both spiritual and physical in nature). In other words, he articulates a kind of burnout pride, the idea that his perpetual struggle with physical and emotional work-induced exhaustion renders him somehow morally superiority. Just like Beard and many contemporary theorists of burnout, he elevates work-related exhaustion and our battles with it to something heroic, even sublime—a praiseworthy act of willpower, the victory of mind over matter, the spirit over the flesh:
Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labour and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness. There are many such, they are the heroes of our age. And they all recognized themselves in his work, they found that it confirmed them and raised them on high and celebrated them; they were grateful for this, and they spread his name far and wide.
65It is those who fight on at the brink of exhaustion, who, in spite of everything, manage to keep going owing to the triarchy of discipline, willpower, and wise management of their limited energy capital—it is they, the men and women out of gas, who are the true “heroes of our age.”
And yet—and this is where Mann’s famous irony strikes—the overall structure and final development of the novella does, of course, radically undermine Aschenbach’s philosophy, his hymn to the Protestant work ethic, tenacity, and repression. In fact, it is precisely his attitude toward work that is the cause of Aschenbach’s undoing—the repressed returns with a cruel vengeance to undo his sustained efforts at
durchhalten with a single erotic blow. Mann’s novella can therefore be read as a
Zeitkritik, and one that still strikes a powerful chord with present anxieties about work–life balance, a warning against the veneration of the “moralists of achievement” and the kind of radically repressive work ethic with which Aschenbach identifies so strongly, and that also seems to resonate so powerfully with his contemporaries. The overvaluation of achievement and productivity, and his disregard for the demands of his body, lead not only to exhaustion but to
Lebensmüdigkeit. Aschenbach’s perceived heroic and morally superior self-discipline is harshly ridiculed in the end, when we see him reclining in a deck chair at the beach, succumbing unashamedly to his voyeuristic obsession, dressed up in too youthful clothes, his uncanny makeup and hair dye dripping down his sagging cheeks.
Mann appears to embrace the materialist idea of the dangers of depleting one’s limited energy resources, while also acknowledging more complex psychoanalytical ideas about the dangers of repression (and, of course, also the dangers of unrepressing, as all hell breaks loose when Aschenbach relaxes his fist). Yet he radically critiques the simplistic narrative that posits the cultural, social, and individual supremacy of the moralist of achievement, the idea that there is something honorable in burning out and working oneself, quite literally, to death.
Aschenbach’s exhaustion, just like burnout, functions as a bridge between individual suffering and wider sociocultural developments. Mann, too, deploys exhaustion as a tool for diagnosing deeper cultural ailments. Anticipating Sigmund Freud’s argument in Civilization and Its Discontents, he suggests that the price we pay not only for sublimating but also for exhausting our energies in the name of work, and also art, culture, and civilization, may be not only too high but ultimately not sustainable in the long run. Aschenbach’s tale is, above all, a cautionary one with which many burned-out cases may well be able to identify: by staking everything on work, and by subscribing to cultural assumptions that ultimately celebrate self-exploitation and work-induced exhaustion even while they appear to be warning against their adverse effects, we risk not just the waning of our engagement and our productivity but in fact our very desire to live.